We hope...

Our feet are officially wet in preparation for our fall show, (un)afraid, to be performed at the Living Theater on the Lower East Side October 14-November 6. We are deep in writes and rewrites, the building of strange and scary implements (to use on each and every one of you), and we have trod through a puddle of holy shit. Our shirts are stained with freak-out sauce. Our sweaters smell like campfire.

The four of us (Jill Beckman, Cara Francis, Ricardo Gamboa and Daniel McCoy) travelled first to Staten Island on Friday, where we snuck into the grounds of Sea View Hospital, a former city poorhouse, or farm colony dating back to 1829, then a tuberculosis hospital through the 1940's, a women's ward, and finally a home for disturbed children. Much of the campus has been abandoned since 1975 (although a few of the main buildings are still a fully-operational home for the elderly) and nature has been reclaiming it, room by room, ever since.

We snuck through a hole in the chain link fence separating the grounds from a standard, middle class suburb and walked the paths between dark, vacant, overgrown buildings, looking for a good place to snap some pictures and try to communicate with the past. 

Upon entering this building (you can see us here in the doorway, pointing out at you like glowing ghosts),

we spotted a perfect circle drawn in the center of the floor with an old red towel spread out over the ground inside it. Word is, in the 35 years it has been abandoned, the place has been a favored spot for devil worshipers and groups conducting animal sacrifices and occult ceremonies. We were just there for the pictures...which we got...

This is one of the first pictures we took. Interesting because of the greenish lights surrounding Cara and Ricky. Also because we are holding funny/happy things. Theory behind this decision:

1. Funny/happy things look askew in scary setting

2. Funny/happy things will attract the ghosts of children.

Perhaps these mists and lights speak to some success at the second goal, perhaps they are just reflected/refracted sun. You be the judge as to the success of the first.

This was taken in a room on the back of the building, one of the smallest rooms we found (aside from the rooms without windows on the second floor which we theorized were used for solitary confinement.)

It is the room both Jill and Cara decided they would want were they committed to this facility because...despite its closet-like size (which we are fairly accustomed to as New Yorkers), it had a big window looking out over the trees and full, glorious sunlight. We decided to pose against the heavily-graffitied wall with a variety of implements, including knives, hardcore rubber gloves, strangulation rope, and a Bible...because perhaps the most violent thing of all is the good word...when horribly misappropriated...as we see here.  

As the sun set outside and our light began to dim, we prepared to end our expedition. On the way back through the entrance room on the main floor, we again spotted the red towel in the center of the perfect circle and decided this was the best possible place to attempt communication with the dead. 

We plopped our Ouija board down in the middle of the towel, sat in a circle around it, and tried to conjure up a conversation. We asked that any spirits in the place overcome the boundaries between the physical and spiritual world and get in touch. We placed our fingers on the planchette and waited. Then something happened. Dancing over the board for a few moments while we all swore aloud "I'm not moving it. Are you moving it...DAN?", something or someone or one of us or all of us together, living and spirit and in-between, spelled out "We hope..." 

"We hope.." was all we had time for. Our session with the dead came to a paranoid halt when a vigilante neighborhood dad poked his head into the room with his two kids waving like pesky, friendly otters and we got freaked out and he got freaked out enough to go get the cops and we jumped up without ever saying goodbye to whatever or whoever it was we had spoken with and started walking out.

Of course on the walk out there were the cops, listening to the guy and his kids, probably saying how we had no right to be there with adamant repetition. And of course the cops recognized Anton, our photographer, from his early exploratory mission the day before. And they were all like "What are you doing here again?" And he was all like, "Uh...I just lost something yesterday and I came back to get it." And then they said "Yeah right.", and then "What did you do with that popcorn?", referencing the now-empty popcorn bowl Ricky was carrying that we had used as a prop in some of our shots, and Anton said "We ate it.", even though that wasn't true...Ricky dumped it out by the bridge as an "offering". We wondered if they detected the lie, but played it cool, and the cops probably wondered who we really were and what we were really doing, because the truth was we were acting so cool we transcended ourselves. We hope...(d).

Then Cara walked by them and cast a dirty look at the dad (Because he doesn't really have any more right to be there than we do and besides, who brings kids to an abandoned hospital unless they're some freak who likes cleaning up nightmare pee in the middle of the night and taking them to the hospital for tetanus infection?) and said

"We're done anyway. We were just leaving."

And we were. Except Jill had to pee and she tried to sneak behind another building on our way out but that damn dad and his horror show children came running up to us with flashlights and we yelled that it wasn't safe for her to go right then and so she had to hold it until we got back to Brooklyn.

Moral(s) of story:

Ghost kids say nice things like "We hope..." and want to be your friend.

Live kids tell on you and shouldn't be given flashlights. 

Kids are better when they're dead. Kill your kids. 

And check back for our next blog on our camping trip to Mount Beacon, former mountaintop gambling, drinking, dancing, and debauchery station for the prohibition-era somewhat rich. We contacted the dead there, too.

And get ready to get your tickets to (un)afraid. We hope...to see you there.