By Cheryl Eddy
Russell Blackwood as the Empress of Colma in Hypnodrome Head Trips
If you dare! Venture down a dark, spooky stretch of Tenth Street to the Hypnodrome, home of San Francisco’s Thrillpeddlers. Before the show even starts, you’ll notice one or two or ten wonderful oddities. Like, what’s that head doing in that box behind the bar? (It’s a “cephalic vivarium,” a prop from a past production, Hypnodrome Head Trips.) What’s the story with that old-timey player piano? (It’s a family heirloom belonging to Thrillpeddlers director Russell Blackwood.) And yikes — is that box seat on the far right decorated to look like a padded cell? (Yes.)
Of course, this instant intrigue is exactly what Blackwood — who founded the company in 1991 with childhood pal Daniel Zilber — wants his audiences to feel. Thrillpeddlers are America’s preeminent producer of plays from the Grand Guignol, the infamous Parisian theater that peddled thrills (if you will) from 1897-1962.
“To get to the Grand Guignol, you would take the Metro to Montemartre, and walk past brothels and the Moulin Rouge, and turn down this dead-end alley to the [theater] at the very end. Going there was a whole experience on its own,” Blackwood explains. “I knew that [the Hypnodrome is] not in the best neighborhood here. But that’s part of the unusual experience, just getting to our theater.”
The company has had the Hypnodrome, which seats 45, for five years. One defining characteristic is the array of “shock boxes” that line the theater’s last row. Blackwood’s father, who is the Thrillpeddler’s set designer, recently redesigned the boxes to incorporate a variety of themes (Egyptian tomb, heaven and hell, the above-mentioned padded cell, etc.) Each box is tricked out with devices designed to lend an extra-sensational experience, with “spandex panels, compressed air, all kinds of glow-in-the-dark things, vibrator pads, and several different buzzers,” Blackwood discloses with devilish joy.
Still from Thrillpeddlers’ Titus Andronicus, 2006
There’s history involved here, and it goes back further than William Castle. “The Grand Guignol and many other Parisian theaters had private boxes with grillwork fronts, so you could see out, but you had to really look in to see in. The Grand Guignol was the last Parisian theater to still have those in the 1960s,” Blackwood says. “The idea of there being a theater where a housewife could have a midday tryst with a lover was just too charming for me. So all of the boxes have curtains that close, and as long as it’s brighter onstage than it is in the box, we can’t see in, but they can see out. And we have had things go on!”