A mother devours her children. Yet washing them thoroughly and boiling them in a large pot of water may not have been the very best cooking method. They tasted just like mud pies and gave the poor old dear indigestion.
Meanwhile an obsessive, alcoholic, and overly demanding husband axes his wife to death. Motive? She had the audacity to stay his hand as he was about to slay their beloved pet.
These disturbing tales, which make reality TV seem as innocent as Christian moral fables, unfolded on Chapel Street on a cold, rain-driven Wednesday night, but there will be no police report, investigation, arrest, or trial because, fortunately, they were all fictional.
Allan Appel Photo
Actors Pellegrino and Watson and their director, Steve Scarpa, put on Halloween faces.
Edgar Alan Poe’s “The Black Cat” and contemporary horror writer Nancy Holder’s “We Have Always Lived in the Forest” headlined the return of “Listen Here”, the short-story reading series that helped Halloween begin early, creepy, and gothic for an audience of 30 who gathered at the Institute Library.
A collaboration between the library, the New Haven Review (which is now a program of the library) and the New Haven Theater Company, which provides the actors as readers, the series began in 2009 but took a hiatus over the past two years.
That’s in part because the venues were often coffee shops, where readers competed with the sounds of espresso machines, said Bennett Lovett-Graff, one of the founders of the program and the story chooser.
No longer. Resuming an enjoyable but near all-volunteer effort was made more doable with the Institute Library, a quiet, perfect venue; it has the added advantage of being a block away from the English Market Building, the home of the New Haven Theater Company.
Two of the company’s actors — Mallory Pellegrino and John Watson — took a break from their rehearsal for an upcoming production of The Seafarer to take the podium in the library’s sedate book-lined back room.
Pellegrino (pictured) invested the incredibly unreliable narrator of Nancy Holder’s contemporary witchy tale with a creepy tremolo, but also a sincerity that kept you wondering: of course it’s not true, but, wait a second, is it?
The gravitas of Watson’s voice was just right for what amounts to a man’s guilty confession, detail by gory detail, of how he killed his wife and his pet, bricked them up inside a wall, and then was so riven by guilt, he invited the cops to come have a look at his home improvements.
Both actors said they prepared for the reading in a manner quite different from how you would if you were part of a staged reading of a play. “You think a lot more about pacing and variation because you can’t react to anything outside,” Watson said.
“It’s just you, you’re carrying the life of this whole world” in your voice, said Pellegrino.
She had to run back along Chapel Street immediately after her reading to wrangle actors rehearsing The Seafarer and could not stay for the lively post-reading discussion about fallible narrators, Poe’s sources in the English gothic novelistic traditions of Horace Walpole and Mary Shelley, and why folks in the mid-19th century were so obsessed with creaking doors, crypts, and getting buried alive.
For those who still had a stomach to eat after all the human mud pies and immurements, Lovett-Graff (pictured) provided a plate of snickerdoodle cookies; he said they were still warm from the oven.
Would you eat a Snicker doodle baked by this man?
The next installment is on Nov. 17, with stories by J.D. Salinger and Amy Hempel.