Vampires require invitation to cross a threshold into a home. There’s something both ironic and poetic about Theater in Quarantine‘s offerings, beamed out from the home of Joshua William Gelb. In the biz, we refer to the audience as “the house,” so there’s a way in which audiences are always granted access to artists’ intimate spaces, the places where art lives – the invitation implicit in the art form. If, during the pandemic, Gelb figured out a way to make this slightly more literal by repurposing his closet, the spirit of the invitation remains. Learn more.
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Get Into It
Theater in Quarantine is a born-digital company so there is a wealth of art to experience in their archives. Take a tour through some behind-the-scenes videos & check out the rest of their work.
Get Thee to the LIbrary
Recommended readings to get you in gear for the show.
Simon Bacon, Contagion and the Vampire: The Vampiric Body as Locus of Disease and Global Epidemics in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.
Simon Bacon, editor. Nosferatu in the 21st Century: A Critical Study. Liverpool University Press, 2022.
Freda Chapple & Chiel Kattenbelt, Intermediality in Theatre and Performance. Rodopi, 2006.
David Annwn Jones, Vampires on the Silent Screen: Cinema’s First Age of Vampires, 1897-1922. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.
Marie Mulvey Roberts, Dangerous Bodies: Historicizing the Gothic Corporeal. Manchester University Press, 2016.
Read All About It
New York Times | Aug 18, 2021
He Invited Us Into His Closet for Theater. And It Was Astonishing.
“I didn’t know where I was going, but I immediately knew there was room to play.”
ISDP | July 13, 2020
Interview with Joshua William Gelb
“It’s hard for me to imagine just going back to what I had considered traditional theater.”
Kristin Horton on Vampires in 3-D
What might two films premiering in 1922 and an eight-square-foot closet in the East Village today have in common?
Extra Credit
Another haunting piece of art, famously made in a bedroom – Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 Nebraska, recorded solo on a four-track in New Jersey and reflecting a dark, lo-fi depth to the Boss’s anthemic catalog. “Atlantic City” is perhaps the most famous track – with the spookiest line, “Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact… but maybe everything that dies someday comes back” – but “State Trooper” is an excellent choice for spooky Halloween listening.