One evening, in September of 1922, legendary horror writer, H.P. Lovecraft, visited an old Brooklyn graveyard and took home a small souvenir: a chip from a tombstone dated 1747. Later, he mused in a letter: “What thing might not come out of the centuried earth to exact vengeance for his desecrated tomb? And should it come, who can say what it might not resemble?”
“The Hound,” Lovecraft’s short story about a pair of thrill-seeking aesthetes, and what happens to them when their macabre penchant for grave-robbing goes awry, was the product of these musings and published in 1924.
In the Lovecraft canon, “The Hound” lends itself more to the earlier, gothic horror of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe than better-known, seminal works such as The Call of Cthulhu, The Colour out of Space, and other stories of ‘cosmic horror’ which comprise the Cthulhu Mythos.
That said, I just fell in love with “The Hound” when I first read it, and my interest in adapting the story as a one-person play evolved from a need to format it in a way that would best showcase the story’s imagery, language and style.
-What story are you telling in the performance?
Since time immemorial, human beings have invented all kinds of ways to combat boredom, or what my character, (the narrator in Lovecraft’s story) describes as “a devastating ennui.”
At its heart, I’d say my play (like the original story) is a cautionary tale about what happens when we go too far in attempting to indulge the ‘darker appetites’ of our senses. In the case of Reed (the character I portray), it’s all ghoulish fun and games until he and his partner-in-crime, St. John, decide — very unwisely — to steal an ancient amulet from the grave of a neglected Holland churchyard. Suffice it to say, disastrous consequences ensue.
But in my show, there’s also a twist, and when I first adapted Lovecraft’s story, I not only wanted to celebrate the heightened language and baroque style of this very gothic, horror tale, but I also wanted to create a plausible scenario wherein the audience can believe that Reed might actually have a chance to escape from his predicament unscathed…(you’ll have to buy a ticket to see to if he perseveres!)
-When the performance is over, what do you want the audience feeling or thinking about?
Whether the audience leaves the theater thinking: “Well, the character certainly got what he deserved” or “Oh, I’m so relieved, I was really rooting for him!” — I would like them to come away feeling entertained, surprised…and who knows, maybe even good about themselves…you know, for that one time when they were kids and prudently opted to play Scrabble instead of messing around with that old Ouija Board up in the attic? But don’t call me superstitious!
Greg Oliver Bodine is an actor and writer dividing his time between New York City and Alexandria, VA. His plays include A Requiem for Sherlock Holmes, I, Carpenter (published by Playscripts, Inc.), The Fatw? of Corspman Johnny Jones (2012 Semi-Finalist, Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival), and adaptations of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Hound by H.P. Lovecraft, To Build a Fire by Jack London, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad, (Playscripts, Inc.) and Charles Dickens’ classic tale, A Christmas Carol — a solo, one-act play, (Playscripts, Inc.) Greg’s solo adaptation of two Edgar Allan Poe short stories, Poe, Times Two, was named “Best of The 2016 Capital Fringe” by DC Metro Theater Arts and “Pick of The Capital Fringe” by DC Theatre Scene.
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