BONEYARDS City Paper Preview

BONEYARDS is back from the dead to rock your underworld.  Four new post-Fringe shows in October just in time for Halloween. 10/17/13, 10/20, 11/2 and 11/3. Only 20 seats per show, get ‘em before they’re gone.

Blood, guts and experimental theater

by Shaun Brady, 09/05/2013

“… Maybe it’s the darker sensibility of an audience primed for avant-garde theater, but Fringe is second only to Halloween in terms of people being ready to buckle down and open their minds to horrific subject matter … Jeffrey Stanley had little need to seek out horror films or literature as a child: He grew up next door to a funeral home in rural Virginia. ‘My bedroom window looked directly into their embalming room and they never closed the curtain,’ Stanley recalls. ‘So at night I’d go up there and watch, and I could see the body laid out on the slab. For whatever reason it never scared me; I thought it was fascinating.’

That’s one story Stanley will recount in Boneyards (Sept.8-17, Shivtei Yeshuron-Ezras Israel), the one-man semi-sequel to his 2011 Fringe hit Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead. The show takes place in the basement of a century-old storefront synagogue and, for its final performance, at Laurel Hill Cemetery … As in Beautiful Zion, Stanley will conclude with a Ouija board séance, a habit he began at a teenage New Year’s Eve party. ‘We were sitting around the kitchen table in the dark and crazy things started happening. We’re all convinced that by the end of the night we spoke to Jimi Hendrix, he possessed my friend’s kitten and made it pluck his guitar strings.’

Stanley insists that his obsession, like so much horror fiction, has a cathartic side. ‘As dark and macabre and creepy as it is, I hope it’s ultimately life-affirming. In the end it’s about loving life and taking away some of the fear of death that we have in our culture.'”  full story at citypaper.net>>

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Jeffrey Stanley, Boneyards rehearsal 9/3/13

And don’t forget to watch and listen to this historic first: a casting call for the dead.  The first round of open auditions for the spirit world was held in the 1895 coal cellar using the famed  P-SB7 AM/FM scanner for listening to EVPs.  Here are the results.  No tricks, no jokes. The transcript is also included along with a few afterthoughts but watch the video first.

An Historic First: Auditions for the Dead

The first round of open auditions for the spirit world were held earlier today on the BONEYARDS set using the famed P-SB7 AM/FM scanner for listening to EVPs. Here are the results. No tricks, no jokes, same as before. All EVPs have been slowed down to half speed and had the volume bumped up a notch to improve audibility. The raw video is 5 minutes. I’ve cut it down here to less than 4 minutes. Transcript also included below along with a few afterthoughts.

BONEYARDS is back from the dead to rock your underworld.  Four new post-Fringe shows in October just in time for Halloween. 10/17/13, 10/20, 11/2 and 11/3. Only 20 seats per show, get ‘em before they’re gone.

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The first round of open auditions for the spirit world was held earlier today on the BONEYARDS set using the famed  P-SB7 AM/FM scanner,aka Frank’s box or spirit box, for listening to EVPs.  I was all alone in the coal cellar of this 3-story 1895 building in South Philly that started out as a store before becoming an Orthodox synagogue in 1909.  Here are the results.  No tricks, no jokes, same as before.  All EVPs have been slowed down to half speed and had the volume bumped up a notch to improve audibility.  The raw video is 5 minutes. I’ve cut it down here to less than 4 minutes.  Transcript is also included below along with a few afterthoughts but watch the video first. Continue reading “An Historic First: Auditions for the Dead”