Mountain View Mausoleum is one of the oldest buildings in Altadena. By day, it is beautiful and serene. By night…well, it’s a great place to perform a ghost story.
Unbound Productions’ Wicked Lit takes full advantage of the gothic chapel to mount an adaptation of The Chimes, a goblin story by Charles Dickens that takes place over the New Year and which followed A Christmas Carol by a year.
On Monday, this reporter spoke with Jonathan Josephson, who adapted the story to play at Mountain View, using the chapel as a set. The Wicked Lit directors—Jonathan Josephson, Paul Millet, and Jeff G. Rack—take stories that inspire terror, whether psychological or good ol’ blood-and-gore, and script them as short plays that are set in venues that fit.
“We don’t do a play unless it has an absolutely perfect location,” Josephson said. “There are seven plays we haven’t produced because we haven’t found the perfect place. We don’t want to ‘shoehorn in’ to a location.”
Mountain View, with its trees, distinctive headstones, and gothic buildings works for the six plays Wicked Lit is performing this month. The crypt was a natural location for Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” because people can walk right into it.
For information on Wicked Lit’s series of plays that will be performed Oct. 21-Nov.5, read “Wicked Lit brings haunting tales to Mountain View Cemetery”
When Josephson saw the Mountain View chapel, he said, “I have to write a play and it has to be The Chimes.” Josephson minored in literation in college, and has a longtime interest in finding great authors such as Charles Dickens and Washington Irving and adapting them to the stage.
“I ran through a lot of short stories,” he said. “The Chimes was in the back of my head. I walked into the chapel at Mountain View and said, ‘This is where this play has to happen.’ We transform the church into all these locations. Sounds, lighting, costumes. It comes alive in a kind of amazing way.”
The Chimes is not a particularly scary story, so why would Josephson choose it for a Halloween presentation? His answer is straightforward: “I like it because, one, it’s good because people don’t usually think of it for Halloween, and two, it’s one most people don’t know.
“Each of the three of us has a different approach,” he continues. “It is an emotionally wrought story that has elements of darkness. Most of the story is not horror, it’s not scary.
“That’s what makes Wicked Lit such an amazing Halloween thing. Works of literature that have components of horror or darkness but don’t need Halloween to be horrible stories. It’s a nuanced, layered look. At the end of the day, we love these stories.”
The Wicked Lit plays “are all about people dealing with crises—supernatural, terrifying, dark, the underside of human nature,” Josephson says. In the case of The Chimes, the protagonist, Toby Veck, is led through a time-traveling vision of what life for his loved ones would be without him.
His guides are two goblins that inhabit the church bells that Toby has always felt spoke to him. Josephson remarks, “Are these ghosts going to destroy him? Ultimately they are helpful. Renewal is a factor of the play. What does that say about human nature.”
Asked if there are similarities to It’s a Wonderful Life, the Frank Capra movie, Josephson responded, “Right, right.”
Josephson adapted a story of some 90 pages to a 34-page play. To do so, he left out peripheral characters and focused on the three main characters, Toby, his daughter Meg, and her fiancé Richard. “And the goblins,” he adds.
“There’s a lot of socio-political stuff going on, some is still there, but that’s not that interesting to me—it’s about the people,” he comments. “All the futures he sees, events that would happen without him—he’s there.”
The other five plays being performed by Wicked Lit at Mountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum are The Unnamable by H.P. Lovecraft and The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe, in a trio with The Chimes; and a second set, The Body Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson; Casting the Runes by M.R. James; and A Ghost Story by Mark Twain.
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