Dreadful Episodes
Collaboratively Devised by Happenstance Theater; Directed by Mark Jaster & Sabrina Mandell
59E59 Theaters | Theater B, 59 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022
October 8 - November 2
Photo Credit: Leah Huete
There are performances that strive to explain, and then there are those—rarer, infinitely more satisfying—that prefer to whisper. Dreadful Episodes, the latest spectral confection from Washington, D.C.’s ever-enchanting Happenstance Theater Company, belongs decidedly to the latter category. Here, everything proceeds by inference, suggestion, and the delicious half-glimpsed horror that lives in the space between gaslight and shadow.
The troupe, renowned for its dedication to bygone aesthetic sensibilities, offers not an adaptation of Edward Gorey so much as an invocation. One feels Gorey’s long, elegant fingers turning the pages of the evening, each tableau a little graveyard of manners and morbidity. While other companies have dutifully trotted out direct stage adaptations—sadly Gorey Stories, opened and closed on October 30, 1978, not surviving to see the holiday it was truly meant for—Happenstance takes the bolder, subtler path. Its creators have built, from the ground up, a cabinet of original curiosities firmly in the Gorey school: genteel, wry, and thoroughly unwholesome.
Edward Gorey, swathed in his signature raccoon coat padding the pavements of midcentury Manhattan, seemed less an artist than a spectral emissary from some boarding school of eternal twilight. His most enduring creation, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, remains a ghoulish nursery rhyme for adults—a rhymed procession of dead children, each dispatched with mordant grace: “A is for Amy who fell down the stairs. B is for Basil assaulted by bears.” One reads it and smiles uneasily, sensing the abyss winking back. If you ever hated any annoying aspect of children, you were his devoted fan base.
That same cultivated morbidity now finds its living counterpart in Dreadful Episodes. The troupe—veterans of the devised-theater tradition—has fashioned a kind of stage-bound séance in Gorey’s honor: a collection of vignettes that preen, pout, and perish under the flicker of Kris Thompson’s superbly shadowed lighting. It is less a play than a cabinet of amusements—part music hall, part mortuary—and one cannot deny the allure of its atmosphere. If your Halloween sympathies incline toward Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas rather than Linus and his pumpkin patch, you may find here precisely the sort of aesthetic melancholia you crave.
The mood is established at once by Mark Jaster, a diminutive, gleaming-pated imp with eyes like two startled deer. With the impeccable decorum of a Victorian undertaker, he opens proceedings by expressing mild regret that “Sindbad, the Self-Impaler” (and yes, Sindbad is frequently found in more scholarly or direct translations of One Thousand and One Nights than Sinbad) will not, owing to “last night’s unfortunate events,” appear this evening. The audience is comforted to know, however, that their seats have been “thoroughly cleaned.” It is a line that encapsulates the Happenstance ethos: menace delivered with a silk-gloved hand.
The evening’s standard for hilarity is established early and decisively with a moment of such elegant brevity that it borders on the sublime: a stage-length promenade by a delightfully inebriated actress, her expression alight with impish foreknowledge, who pauses just long enough to drop a single, catastrophic word—“Macbeth”—into the air before darting off like a guilty sprite. To the uninitiated, it may seem a curious non sequitur; but to those schooled in theatrical superstition, this fleeting episode is nothing short of priceless—a perfectly timed act of cheerful desecration, detonating decades of backstage taboo with a single, tipsy syllable.
Music director and arranger Stephanie Baird presides over the evening’s soundscape like a genteel necromancer at her instruments of enchantment. Stationed at either wing of the stage, she commands two contrasting contraptions: on one side, a modest upright piano of vaudevillian temperament, its tinny brightness recalling the faded gaiety of seaside amusements and penny arcades; on the other, a diminutive organ cunningly disguised as a child’s plaything, the sort of instrument one might imagine tucked into the nursery of a mildly haunted manor. From these twin sentinels of sound, Baird conjures a musical atmosphere both wistful and morbidly sprightly—equal parts parlor tune and funeral march. From time to time, Mark Jaster joins her, producing his ethereal accompaniment on the musical saw—a most improbable instrument, yet in his hands it sings with a spectral eloquence. Its wavering tone seems to issue not from the stage but from some adjoining afterlife, as though the ghosts of Gorey’s imagination had found a means to hum along.
The evening unfolds as a series of exquisitely dreadful diversions—vignettes that flirt, coyly, with catastrophe. A veiled widow, urn in hand, finds herself amid rivals for mourning rights, their competition ending in laughter far too bright to be comforting. Jay Owen’s sanguinary butcher belts out Brecht’s “What Keeps Mankind Alive?” with bloody conviction. In “This Spilsby Suitor,” an impeccably bred young lady dispatches her sister over a cliff without so much as ruffling a ribbon. And Sabrina Mandell’s “Colette’s Calamitous Conclusions” finds its titular ingénue performing party tricks that include impersonations of Ophelia, Marie Antoinette, and—nearly—Joan of Arc. (“Nearly,” because she is mercifully called away before the box of matchsticks do their work.) Gwen Grastorf’s stately maid crosses the stage like a reluctant apparition, her smile decaying, by degrees, into dread.
Each morsel is shaped with surgical precision—just enough narrative bone and connective tissue to allow our imaginations to supply the gore. Sarah Olmsted Thomas lends her haunting voice to Tom Waits’ “A Little Drop of Poison,” a musical interlude that feels less sung than exhumed. “The Curious Cousins,” featuring Mandell and Owen, wanders cheerfully through murders without comprehension, and “The Late Patron” turns arrivals to an opera house box into a farce of bad manners.
Yet it is Jaster who remains the troupe’s rarest treasure. His timing, his restraint, his mastery of the raised brow—these are instruments as finely tuned as any Stradivarius. In “Mannequins,” he transforms the act of posing into a duel with mortality itself, each stillness edged with absurdity. One marvels at the way he can draw laughter from a silence, or terror from a smirk. Jaster, in “The Erstwhile Siblings,” as a smilingly sinister uncle who encourages his nieces to ever more perilous diversions, achieves a level of gleeful menace that would make even Uncle Fester blanch. His eyes gleam with delight as the children’s playtime inches toward tragedy; it is a study in how wickedness can masquerade as propriety. Moments like these remind us that the company understands Gorey’s essential paradox: the horror of manners, the etiquette of decay.
Perhaps the apotheosis of Dreadful Episodes arrives in the form of a croquet match—an ostensibly genteel diversion that unravels, gloriously, into chaos. What commences as a picture of impeccable Victorian decorum, all parasols and polite applause, soon descends into a pageant of elegant brutality. The familiar click of mallet upon ball becomes, before our very eyes, a prelude to pandemonium. Choreographed in a hypnotic slow motion that renders every gesture both balletic and grotesque, the sequence achieves a kind of comic transcendence. Each movement—each lift of a mallet, each horrified glance—lands with split-second exactitude, an aria of annihilation conducted at a stately tempo. It is physical comedy elevated to an art of eerie precision, a dance of doom so meticulously arranged that one half expects the ghost of Edward Gorey to be seen applauding from the wings. And the laughter it provokes is not the nervous titter of irony but the full-bodied, involuntary outburst of an audience collectively undone. It is, without question, the evening’s most deliriously funny and perversely beautiful moment—a crescendo of carnage worthy of the adjective “dreadful.”
The text, devised collectively, is directed with the serene control of a watchmaker by Jaster and Mandell. When Happenstance hits its stride, the results are deliciously deranged. There is no set to speak of, yet Kris Thompson’s lighting conjures entire crypts and ballrooms from the void, bathing the performers in sepulchral glow. Mandell’s costumes—gleefully anachronistic, spanning the Edwardian, the Gothic, and the faintly insane—constitute a parade of exquisite Victorian haute couture. One waits, scene by scene, simply to see what she will dare next.
Dreadful Episodes is a finely distilled elixir of melancholy wit and sepulchral beauty. It is brief, but beautifully formed; a performance that allows the imagination to do the dirtiest work, while the actors glide serenely through the wreckage. One leaves the theatre feeling—how else to put it?—exquisitely haunted.
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Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on October 29, 2025. All rights reserved.