A haunting tale at Theatre Albany: ‘The Ghost in the Meadow’ | PHOTOS

ALBANY — For a pair of weekends, Theatre Albany will join the ranks of America’s haunted places.

On Friday, the curtain will go up on an otherworldly thriller, “The Ghost in the Meadow.”

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Based on a Civil War-era tale from Pennsylvania, Staten Island playwright Joe Simonelli’s play involves two sisters, Kylie (portrayed by Leigh Ann Young) and Sheila (Kelly Mullins), who move from the city to an old farmhouse in the country.

Strange, unsettling events ensue. When Sheila’s old boyfriend, a police detective named Julian (played by Anthony Johnson) comes to the farmhouse, he puts them in touch with psychic Antoinette (Kathleen Stroup) as they try to figure out what’s what’s going on. Also in the cast are Vickie Lewis as Kathryne and Rebecca Young as Adam.

“The play is set in upstate New York, but our cast has Southern accents,” Theatre Albany Director Mark Costello said before a rehearsal last week. “So, I talked to the playwright and he gave us permission (to move the setting). We’ve got it somewhere outside Savannah, and he’s (Johnson’s Julian) a detective out of Atlanta.

What: A stage thriller by Joe Simonelli

Who: Theatre Albany

When: 8 p.m. Oct. 30-31 and Nov. 5-7; 2:30 p.m. Nov. 1 and 8

Where: Theatre Albany, 514 Pine Ave.

Tickets: $20, adult; $15, senior; $10, student or active military

Box office: (229) 439-7141

Website: www.theatrealbany.com

“There are references to places nearby like Brunswick. The play works just as well, especially with all the spooky stuff going on in Savannah.”

In a phone interview last week, Simonelli said he was happy to work with Costello on the change in location for the characters. His background is in community theater, experience that hasn’t been lost upon him as a professional playwright.

“It’s based on the Legend of the Blue Boy of Gettysburg,” he said, adding he researched the tale after hearing about it on a TV anthology series. “I took that (legend) and I just built a back story about it.

“And I took it out of Pennsylvania and moved it to upstate New York. I gave Mr. Costello permission to move it to the South. Normally, you can’t do that with a published play, but it’s up to the playwright’s discretion and I said, yes, if you can make it work, we’ll have a Southern version. I said, ‘Why not? Go for it.’”

Simonelli quipped that it might even lead him to adapt the play for other regions, such as out West. Amateur theaters, he noted, face some specific challenges when casting and producing plays.

“Sometimes, especially in amateur theater, you can’t cast enough men and sometimes they do gender switches,” he said. “You can’t monitor a zillion plays, but I like to be personal with mine. He asked permission and I said yeah. I think it’s a wonderful idea, as long as you don’t deviate too far from the dialogue. And if he needed any help, I told him to give me a call.”

The cast members said they’d gotten into the spirit of the play, so to speak, but haven’t been taking the spooky feelings home with them — at least for the most part.

Asked if they’d noticed any more things going bump in the night since rehearsals started, Stroup said one night did come to mind. Her husband was away overnight on a hunting trip.

“There were some strange sounds that made it feel a little creepy. The dogs were lying there,” she said. “I had the lights on all night.

“Of course, my house doesn’t look at all like this,” she said, motioning to the stage set representing the sisters’ dilapidated farmhouse. “But it does kind of give you the creeps.”

And Mullins allowed that there was one particularly foggy morning when she was out running and she had an uneasy feeling, though some of the experiences that have been known to make cast members jump have occurred at the Pine Avenue theater.

“Steve’s been known to scare us on set before,” Mullins said of set designer Steve Felmet.

Johnson said there was a simple reason why cast members haven’t had carryover goosebumps. “We have too much fun,” he said.

And fun sounds like what Simonelli’s having with his work, a vocation he said started pursuing when he went through his own significant change in life.

“I got into this game late, after a divorce,” the retired independent financial adviser said. “I was 40 years old and I got back into acting — I’d done some in high school — and writing. I was always a musician, so I’ve written a musical. I just backed into the art. It’s been about 17 years and I’ve done about a show a year. We’ve gotten nine of them published and we’re probably going self-publish the rest of the titles.”

Many of Simonelli’s works — such as “The Ghost in the Meadow” — have seasonal associations, which also was inspired by his experience with amateur theater.

“I’m big on seasonal plays because I came out of a background where I was a resident playwright in New Jersey for a theater that did 12 shows a year,” the father of three said. “I called it guerrilla theater, where you have to do a play and month and you had to cast it and get it up. There are a lot of theaters like that that do many plays and you always want to offer something seasonal.

“I tend to write seasonal plays because I know amateur theaters like to do them. I have two Valentine’s titles, these two thrillers and I have a comic ghost story, ‘Heaven Help Me,’ which works for that season. I have one Christmas play and I’m working on a second. And then mainly comedies and a few dramas.”

Simonelli said he was inspired to write the ghost story Theatre Albany will be performing because he felt stage thrillers had been lacking.

“The reason I wrote this is that after 10 seasons there, I saw adaptions of ghost stories that I really didn’t like,” he said. “You have your classics, like Dracula and Frankenstein, but a lot of the trend was to take classic ghost stories that were written for movies and try to transition them to the stage.

“One of my favorite movies is ‘The Haunting,’ based on ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ by Shirley Jackson. But when I saw the stage adaption — I actually acted in it — I was not impressed.”

The problem, he said, is one of expansion vs. contraction.

“You can go from stage to movie by expanding, but although the trend now on Broadway is to take anything and put it on stage, it’s tough to take a non-musical play that was a movie or maybe a book and adapt it for the stage because it wasn’t written for the stage,” Simonelli said. “I said, I really want to do a ghost story written for the stage that always could be expanded to other media, so that’s what I did. I’m on my second one now. It’s called ‘The Haunting of Billop House,’ my second thriller.”

Simonelli said that he would have liked to have come to Albany to see the local theater’s production of his play, but said he had just returned from seeing one in Florida.

Theatre Albany will perform “The Ghost in the Meadow” at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and Nov. 5-7. Sunday matinees are at 2:30 p.m. Nov. 1 and 8. The theater is located at 514 Pine Ave. The box office is (229) 439-7141, and tickets are $20, adults; $15, seniors, and $10, students and active military.

“I hope you guys enjoy it,” he said. “Come out and see an original thriller you haven’t seen before and support the arts down there.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: You can learn more about the playwright at his website here.