The Ghost Project: haunting
22 Jan 2020

by Drew Rowsome -

Haunting.

While a not particularly inspired pun, "haunting" is also a succinct description of The Ghost Project. Harkening back to the time-honoured and delicious oral tradition of the ghost story, performer, playwright and producer Karie Richards relates several stories of encounters with ghosts. The encounters vary from the scary to the academic to the comforting, but all are puzzling and mysterious. And all of the tale-tellers are eager to be believed. And none of them have an explanation or clear understanding of their encounter.

Richards doesn't just tell each person's story, she becomes that person. The lights go down, Richards opens an antique mirrored cabinet and retrieves a simple prop, puts the item on, and a new narrator appears. The first sentence of the story is jarring - an abrupt change in posture, accent or vocal tone - but the grandstanding disappears and the audience accepts that we are dealing with another person. Dealing intimately and up-close, there is no room for the slightest second of disbelief. It is a seamless performance - I was startled to find that at one point Richards' eye colour appeared to have changed - grounded in a self-deprecating nervous laugh that may be Richards' personality shining through. Or may be a cleverly inserted throughline.

It would have been fascinating, and a tour de force, to see the characters interact and I have no doubts that Richards would be able to pull that off, but The Ghost Project is not that kind of show. Each story has an unresolved ending, finishing with a question. An acknowledgement that there are things that we as humans just don't understand. The Ghost Project as a whole, concludes with another question: are ghosts spirits who are lingering or do we create them? And the main concern is not their effect on us, but what is their existence like? It is impossible to not have great empathy for ghosts - are they in a lonely purgatory? are they happy? - even the scary ones with possibly evil intent.

There is also a fascinating sub-theme that is bolstered by Richards' extraordinary performance. Theatres are generally believed to be particularly haunted places. The text posits that actors have such a need for attention that it continues beyond the grave. Not a far-fetched theory . . . As one of the characters says of the preponderance of haunted theatres, "I don't think there are that many accounting firms that are haunted." Fortunately Richards herself undercuts that assessment of actor egos, by being respectful of the characters she plays. Never mocking them or taking an easy shortcut with their identifying idiosyncrasies. And appearing, though it may just be very good acting, to be totally in service of the text.

Because the space is so intimate (side note: it is a short run with very few tickets, book now), one is also aware of the audience around one. At one moment a story echoed an experience of mine and I started, filled with a flood of confusion and odd validation. I was not the only one. The audience was rapt but restless, as the unknown being recounted intersected with individual realities. A very rare and powerful connection, the kind one gets from a very well told ghost story.

Haunting.