VPA offers a ghost story for Halloween

WASILLA — Don’t ever let it be said Valley Performing Arts doesn’t tailor its offerings to fit the season.

For Christmas the players do Christmas stories and now, seeing as how Halloween is right around the corner, the latest play is “The Woman in Black.”

“It’s definitely a ghost story,” said D.J. Rotach, one of two men who will be performing the play, which opens Oct. 14 and closes the day before Halloween.

Theater being what it is, Rotach said, he doesn’t expect children will be too afraid to come or teenagers will leave proclaiming it the scariest thing they’ve ever seen.

“It’s really hard to have anything scary on stage,” he said. But that doesn’t mean you won’t leave unsettled.

“It’s all that big moment at the very end,” Rotach said somewhat mysteriously.

The play is a relatively well-known one still being performed in various locales. It did a run on Broadway.

The action centers around a man, Arthur Kipps, a young solicitor in England sent to a small town to attend to the affairs of the recently deceased and formerly reclusive widow Mrs. Alice Drablow.

“He gets haunted by this woman in black and he thinks he’s rid of her, but he’s not,” said Ted Carney, the other actor in the two-man performance.

The staging is simple enough. The only thing on stage for the performance is a large chest. But over the course of the action, Carney and Rotach will be pulling props from it and using the chest as everything from a bed to a coffin to an open horse-drawn carriage of the type referred to as a “trap.”

Asked if he was ready for opening, Carney laughed.

“Of course not. We’ve got a week and a half worth of rehearsals left,” he said.

They’ve got their trunk, but not a stage set.

The way Carney describes the action is somewhat confusing. He begins the play as an actor Kipps has hired to try and turn his story into one he can perform for his friends and family.

But as the two start working together, Rotach said, the actor tells Kipps his work is all wrong and eventually jumps into the role of Kipps for the telling of the story, leaving Kipps to play all the other parts.

So, Carney said, he starts the play as the actor but winds up playing Kipps for most of the rest of the action.

Rotach said it’s kind of a tough part he’s got, since he has to inhabit five characters in addition to Kipps.

“We’re going to do it with different costumes,” he said, but they’re going to keep it simple. Maybe an apron for one character and a pair of glasses for another.

“I’m going to try and have a little bit different mannerisms,” Rotach said.

It’s proven kind of hard on him, though, since he’s stooping over to play older characters and emoting to play others.

“There’s times where my back starts to hurt,” he said. “Trying to change your voice — that takes a lot out of you.”

He said it’s also kind of a scary proposition to be on stage for a whole play with just one other guy. No one can leave the stage to regroup. There aren’t other players there to step in and save a scene.

It’s the sort of thing you have to do with someone you trust.

“We’re friends, so luckily we have that going for us,” Rotach said.

They’ve both been acting at VPA for more than a decade. Rotach started acting in high school. Carney’s first stage role was in the musical Paint Your Wagon.

And both have inhabited the stage together, like they did for VPA’s production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

For that play, Carney played the lead of Randle McMurphy. Rotach’s character is best described rather than named, though keep in mind that Cuckoo’s nest takes place at an insane asylum:

“I was the guy who ate Cheetos out of my shoe,” Rotach said.

IF YOU GO

What: The Woman in Black

Who: Valley Performing Arts

Where: Machetanz Theater, 251 W. Swanson Ave.

When: Oct. 14-30, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays

Cost: $15 for students and seniors, $17 for adults