Louisville Magazine

OCT 2014

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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146 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 10.14 Upcoming Show arts the bits One Question Behind The Scenes "I love Christmas too," says Jamie Stephenson, "but I really love Halloween." Stephenson, the creative director at the Baxter Avenue Morgue, is in the garage-turned-gift shop, a dim room with fickering candles in ornate sconces, a large skull hanging from the ceiling and old photos of people who seem to be watching you. Stephenson, 50, and his 21-year-old daughter Abigail, the Morgue's casting director, and his son Quentin, who is 16 and does set design, are at the Morgue on this late-summer day getting things ready, improving their sets. "We do a lot of welding, leather-ripping and stitching," Stephenson says. "Scrap lumber is my favorite material." "We get stuff from dumpsters," Abigail says. In the '70s Stephenson started running a haunted house out of his garage in the Edgewood neighborhood near the airport. Eventually, somebody reached out to him from the popular haunted attraction Industrial Nightmare. Stephenson started with the Baxter Avenue Morgue in 2001, the year it opened. Now the Morgue debuts four to six new rooms each year. This time around? An electric chair and the "body snatcher." "Which is like a grotesque autopsy room before you descend to where body bags are hanging from the ceiling," Stephenson says. — TC Baxter Avenue Morgue Photos by Lynn Hafele "I really wanted to go to the next level with the playwrights in this community," says Brian Walker, artistic director of the new Derby City Playwright Collective (Walker is the one in the photo standing in the back, wearing a tan jacket). "A lot of us have done ten-minute plays but haven't taken the next step." On Oct. 12, the Bard's Town (1801 Bardstown Road) will host a reading of Bananapocalypse, a dark comedy about a scientist who tries to save the world…and the global banana crisis that ensues. Bananapocalypse is the frst work by the twelve-person collective, which is planning to write twelve full-length plays by the end of its inaugural season. (Performances will happen at the Bard's Town in October, January, February and May. Check out A Bird to the Mountain on Oct. 19 and Broken Iris on Oct. 26.) The real fun in an event like this is that the audience will have a say in the fnal product, with feedback sessions following each reading. "We feel like we're at a good place with the scripts," Walker says, "but now we want to show them to an audience and get that last batch of feedback a play really needs." — Tyler Curth What's the scariest movie of all time? "You're making me choose? Evil! Takashi Miike's Audition (Japan, 1999). What I love about the flm — as students in one of my classes this semester will soon see — is that, SPOILER ALERT, the frst half plays like a melodrama, with just a few hints of the real horror to come. Then Miike pulls out a reversal that launches into surreal madness. It all dissolves into one of the most terrifying, but not very bloody, torture sequences on flm." — L. Andrew Cooper, director of flm and digital media studies at U of L and author of the recently released collection of horror short stories titled Leaping at Thorns

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