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Shocktoberfest!

by the Thrillpeddlers
Night Crawler column by Silke Tudor in SF Weekly November 3, 1999

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The smell of fresh cut apples, mulled wine, and French onion soup fills the air of the Exit Theater. Candles flicker on every tabletop, adding to the amber cast of the stage, where oil paintings of Ruben-esque women hang over a fireplace. The audience is a sophisticated blend of arty ponytails and balding pates clucking over their brie and baguettes, but since the Thrillpeddlers are hosting tonight's fete, there is sure to be bloodshed before the evening's end.

 

In late 1800s, just after the abolishment of public executions and before the development of low-budget slasher films, there was Grand Guignol - French plays known for their violent content and graphic, often gruesome stage production (buckets of blood, animal innards, tools of torture). They enjoyed great popularity (despite frequent episodes of fainting in the audience) and illustrious patrons (Ho Chi Minh, the kings of Greece and Romania) until World War II, when real-life horrors seemed to overshadow make-believe ones. While the going was good, Le Theatre du Grand Guignol was the ideal Halloween destination, not entirely unlike the Exit Theater, a small playhouse in a dead-end passage of a derelict district in Paris, not entirely unlike the Tenderloin.

 

The Thrillpeddlers know a good thing when they see it.

 

After a restaging of the British-banned 1945 one-act The Celibate -- the stirring battle between a parish curate's overwhelming lust and his God-fearing crippled wife, which ends in a bloody gunshot to the head -- and the titillating 1888 masterpiece A Visit to Mrs. Birch and the Young Ladies of the Academy -- "stiff" admonishments from Joan Elman, and pert, bare bottoms from a cast of young, willing ladies in pinafores -- we get down to 1925's A Crime in the Madhouse, a Grand Guignol classic written by Andre de Lorde and Alfred Binet. We're talking sweet young girl locked away in an insane asylum with hunchbacks and child-killers. Screaming doesn't help. Nuns don't help. They want the young girl's eyes, blood, gore, and all.

 

"Lubrication for the holiday," says a man guffawing through his beard.

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