FRI/SAT 10/25-26: All Hallows Eve at Belle Haven ESO

The ESO in Belle Haven will host a night of horror, plays, poetry and music as the Edge Theater brings All Hallows Eve to the Black Box Theater at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

The show is directed by our own Poet Laureate of the Eastern Shore, Robert Arthur, and features some of the Shore’s top talent, including Richard and Francis Williams, Laura Trala, Julia Floyd, Jerry Freund, and Wayne Creed.

The ESO is at 15293 King Street in Belle Haven. Tickets are $10, and reservations are strongly encouraged — call 757-442-3226.

The two original short plays in ALL HALLOWS EVE were written by long-time Shore residents, and our writers in residence, novelists Lenore Hart and David Poyer, who also perform in the plays.

Hart’s play, EPITAPH IN YELLOW, will be presented as a 1950’s radio play complete with sound effects. It’s set in a prison where a woman convicted of killing her overbearing, control-freak sister is being offered a final reprieve — but of a rather diabolical sort.

The play SHADOWLAND, by Poyer, asks questions about the proper uses of digital technology, and features a woman in therapy who suspects she may actually be dead, even though everyone keeps assuring her she’s alive and well, including Dr. Schadow (Jerry Frueud), whose Neural Network of computers may actually be keeping her alive.

Along the way, we meet a beautiful bat (Laura Trala) that explains why we fear her so, and a little ghost who haunts the garden of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Wayne Creed brings CEMETERY MAN to the stage, where we meet an aging gravedigger who is about to be replaced by a backhoe — and who does not accept the change gracefully. And as he recounts his experiences, it becomes abundantly clear that digging a proper grave is a human thing, which calls for care and concern if the departed are to go peacefully into eternity.

Julie Floyd has her hands full as a marriage counselor that must convince the husband (Richard Williams), that even though his wife is now a zombie (Francis Williams), he needs to be more accepting.

Guitarist Mark Jenkins accompanies the cast through a ghostly musical journey with haunting classics such as In the Pines, Idumea, Long Black Veil, and Go down Moses.