The Séance Collection
Some evenings arrive with a story already attached. If yours has one, we can put it at the table.
The three finished séances are complete pieces and most hosts pick one of them. But a séance can be about almost anything, the same way a dinner party can. What goes on the table is up to you.
So: tell me the story you want in the room, and I'll build the evening around it. The research, the objects, the questions, the way it ends. It comes out as a piece that has never been performed before and won't be performed again.
A house with a history is the most common and the most effective — your guests are sitting inside the subject. A family with a mystery in its past. An anniversary: a hundred years since the mill closed, the fire, the founding, the disappearance.
A local legend works, and most have more documentation behind them than people assume. So does a book everyone in the room has read, which works far better than it sounds like it should.
And an institution's own past — a hotel, a theater, a college, a club, a company with a strange first decade.
The only bad subject is one with nothing documented behind it. I need something real to research or the evening has no spine, and your guests will feel the difference within ten minutes.
Most of what you're paying for happens before I arrive: finding what's actually documented, deciding what the evening can honestly claim, and building the objects that carry it.
It's the least glamorous part of this work and the only reason the finished thing holds up.
Half an hour on the phone. What the story is, who'll be in the room, what the occasion is, and how much your guests already know. I'll tell you honestly whether there's an evening in it.
Two to three weeks. I find what's actually documented — records, newspapers, whatever survives. This is the part that makes it hold up, and the part that takes the time.
The objects, the questions, the shape of the evening and the ending. Everything made or sourced for your event specifically.
You see the shape of the evening before your guests do — what happens, in what order, and where it lands. Not the methods. You'll want to be surprised too.
I arrive early, set the room, and you go be a host. Afterward you get the research file, because people always ask for it.
It isn't a reading, and it isn't contact with the dead. I'm a performer and I'll say so to your guests if anybody asks.
And if your date is inside six weeks, one of the three finished shows is the better answer — I'll tell you that too.
The details
It is not a séance for somebody your guests have actually lost. I don't do grief. That's a line I hold.
People ask, and I understand why — but I'd rather tell you now than in your living room.
Start with a phone call. Half an hour tells us both whether there's an evening in it — and I'll say so either way.
