Spooky Play for Halloween: Free Space, a dark comedy/absurdist thriller by Tara Meddaugh
Even during a pandemic, Summer flies by. And in New York State, something seems to have happened in the last week as temperatures left the high 80s, brown leaves are on the ground, homegrown apples are everywhere, and there is more talk about…Halloween. And that means theater for Halloween. Which means, you can pull out those dark comedies, thrillers, weird, spooky, creepy pieces that might be engaging any time of year, but hold a special kind of place as we gear up toward October 31.
I have several spooky plays and monologues that fit this bill, but a great full-length play for this darker time of year is my absurdist thriller, Free Space. This is a play where a mother pretends she’s her daughter for a terrifying reason. A young woman tries to escape her trapped existence where loneliness and aspirations ache in her bones. It’s a story of a dominating bingo chip (yes, I said “bingo chip”) who becomes increasingly demanding—and jealous. It’s always cold, usually tense, oftentimes eerie. Desperation and stakes are high. Cruelty abounds. And yet—
There is a dark weird humor throughout. This play will make you laugh and cringe. There is a beautiful, simple friendship formed. There is love, forgiveness, strength, a new way forward, even without a wrapped-with-a-bow ending. It’s a play to generate conversation, deep breaths, with an absurdist suspenseful bent that makes you lean in.
Here are few more reasons why Free Space is a great choice for a production around Halloween:
“Both laugh-out-loud funny and filled with delicious menace.”
~ Playwright and podcast writer of The Two Princes, Kevin Snipes.
“Stephen King has nothing on Tara Meddaugh. When Theatre One produced a staged reading of Free Space you could hear a pin drop. The audience was so taken in by the words, chilling story, and characters from the mind of this very talented writer.”
~ Peg Helzemer, Artistic Director of Theatre One.
"The voice of Free Space… is suggestive and heartbreaking and full of whimsy and cruelty…To gently lay out a scenario in deceptively simple ways, and then go in for the dramatic kill with a stab of cruelty…Like a female Edward Albee, Tara posses a sharpened pen and a sharpened mind and has a cool way of deploying both."
~Ari Roth, Playwright, Artistic Director of Mosaic Theater
So what, exactly, is Free Space about?
Amelia spends her days under the watchful eye of her mother, doing the same nothing she has done for years. Yet when Bingo arrives at her local community center, a talking Bingo chip convinces Amelia that forming her own game is the way out of this life and away from her controlling mother. However, as her mother begins acting like her newly arrived sister, and the chip becomes increasingly dominating, Amelia discovers her new life is nothing as she imagined.
Weird, right?
But a thrill to engage in and experience.
This is a play with a running time of around 95-105 minutes, a cast of 3 females, 1 male (and 1 voice which could be pre-recorded, doubled, or played by an additional actor). It has a minimal set and is easy to produce on a technical scale, yet leaves so much room for creativity for directors, actors, and designers. This is a play that could even be produced outdoors, during this time of social distancing (an outdoor October bonfire production is already scheduled at up-and-coming theater, Possibilities Theatre Company).
Enjoy this unique dark comedy/absurdist thriller, Free Space.
If you’d like to read an excerpt from Free Space, click here.
To get a digital copy of the complete play, Free Space, click below:
To get a hard copy of Free Space, click below: