Image of Russell Blackwood and Kara Emry in “Private Room Number 6” from Thrillpeddlers’ “Audacious Artefacts: Parisian Grand Guignol” by David Allen Studio.
In this week’s SF Chron column, I get to sink my teeth into vintage-turned-modfetish porn shock theater in Truly Obscene Thrills: Local theater company The Thrillpeddlers delivers wonderfully pornographic Parisian Grand Guignol. I mean — who doesn’t love hot Goth nuns campily begging the convent gardener for lashings to cleanse them of their sins, clad in raunchy-sweet 1920s stylings? Live and onstage? And according to a friend of mine who saw it with their lover, this show makes for a pretty hot date. It gets really quite explicit: this is theater with no minors allowed. So cool! Here’s a snip from my article:
By the time the nuns have revealed their racy undergarments and begged for discipline from the convent gardener, after the butler uncontrollably barks like a dog after boinking the maid, and somewhere between the fluorescent pornographic, lights-out “spookshow” — you know that The Thrillpeddlers newest stage show “Audacious Artefacts: Parisian Grand Guignol” is not going to be like any theatre experience you’ve ever had in your life. Or may ever experience again. Or be able to forget about, no matter how hard you try.
Like any proper horror narrative where the innocent-eyed girl informs the audience that no, the terror has not been vanquished and the demons are about to return to the screen with twice the venom, The Thrillpeddlers are back. This time, not only has the modern Grand Guignol theater company returned to the stage with a bloody vengeance, but they’re doing it Parisian style — back to the roots of Grand Guignol. Their newest show is an over-18 only, delightfully obscene and pornographic staging where very little is left to the imagination. It’s like your brain just had a lot of unprotected sex and maybe some roofies and you woke up with your frontal lobe feeling really stretched out in a way that you’re too embarrassed to even tell your doctor about.
It’s that much fun.
Porno theater sounds like it’s either going to be a total turn-off, or a trip to see live acting onstage that just sort of leaves you feeling vaguely uncomfortable. But the intention of Grand Guignol is to make you feel extremely uncomfortable, and The Thrillpeddlers have it down to a delightfully campy (and sexy) art while following the rich tradition of the genre. The theater itself is custom-built to keep you closer to the action than necessary, and the vignettes performed, while direct translations from their original scripts, deal with the most impolite subject matter possible. Violence, madness, hysteria, disease, murder in every possible form and crazy, outrageous, and especially really gross-out sex is standard fare for Grand Guignol, whose origins date back to 1897. (…read more, sfgate.com)
