Descent into the Catacombs
As the play begins, desperate composer Gui (Emilie Modaff), candle in hand, leads the audience through a zigzagging hallway illuminated only by a flickering streetlight and into a sort of antechamber at the mouth of the Catacombs of Paris, ‘the Empire of the Dead.’ Although it is a walk of only some fifty paces, a sense of foreboding steadily grows.
All throughout, Kate Hardiman’s lighting employs shadow to great effect, cementing the feeling that one is descending despite the entire play taking place on one floor. In this twilight between the lands of the living and the dead, Chas Mathieu’s paper walls patterned with skulls become cavernous tunnels of bone and stone. The appearance of Jacques (Amanda Forman), the Catacombs’ cartographer and Gui’s earnest if spasmodic guide, confirms that you are not in Kansas anymore.
A Motley Chorus of Bygone Souls
Performing a necromantic ritual to summon their departed lover and muse Mathilde, Gui accidentally awakens seven souls from centuries past. Beautifully outfitted by Erika Clauson and strikingly made up by Kelly Schmidt, the ghosts of The Innocents regale the composer with the triumphs and tragedies of their lives and deaths.
Stories unwind. Songs are sung and played. Dances (choreographed by Mary O’Rourke and Berit Godo) are performed—and with a fluidity impressive for the living, let alone the dead. Punctuating these vignettes, Veronique (Andrew Lund), who deliberately followed her own paramour Beatrice into death, confronts the other shades demanding the reason for their death: love or loneliness?
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