Courtesy Joewest.com
Musician Joe West scratches his theatrical itch this week with his Theater of Death show (8 pm Friday Oct. 26 and Saturday Oct. 27; 3 pm Saturday Oct. 27 and Sunday Oct. 28. $20. Engine House Theater, 2846 Hwy. 14, Madrid, 473-0743), an annual Madrid occurrence that taps into the proud and spooky history of the French Gran Guignol theater tradition. West, of course, is no stranger to stage antics from his many musical projects, but there's something extra fun and silly about his writing and direction for Theater of Death that just plain works. You might say we were dying to know a little more, so we took the call.
What year is this for Theater of Death, and did you imagine it would become what it's grown into back when you started?
Sixth year. My hopes when we started were that every year … more people would become interested and that we'd attract talented people with experience. This year seems to be a better evolution—we have a really great technical director, great costumes, great set designers; we have a master electrician, great actors—people who have a theater background. At first it was a little bit flaky or difficult, but every year it has evolved into more talent showing up. During the year we have people showing interest, and we'll have some Santa Fe talent, but more and more it's people from the Madrid-Cerrillos area.
What topic did you choose for this year? We're hearing rumors it might be aliens or an adaptation of Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space?
It's aliens this year. We changed our theme—we were going to do something else, but it ended up being a difficult choice: a freak show with a circus. But it got difficult with space and too many moving parts, but we may do that next year. We had a couple original scripts in hand that dealt with the alien theme, and it seems to have been a good choice, because we're having fun. It's not an adaptation of Plan 9, but it's maybe in the spirit of it. We do have an
unproduced Ed Wood screenplay, and we've flirted with the idea of that. There's a fellow in town whose father just passed away and who did music for Ed Wood, so he has these scripts with handwritten notes, so we have this un-produced screenplay that I've been adapting into a play, but that'll be down the line.
How did you land on aliens?
It seemed timely with all the talk about border walls and immigration; dealing with aliens coming in from other planets. It's from the headlines. There's a bit of a moral to it—a subversive, left-wing, communist moral.
