With Halloween less than a week away, the Eastern Michigan University student organization Players at EMU are preparing for their biggest event of the year: the Dead Gallery.
Held each year the week before Halloween, the Dead Gallery is a chance for the group of theater students to take their performances off the stage and into the hallways of Quirk for one night of terror.
Wednesday, from 9 p.m. to midnight, the normally quiet theater building will be transformed into a gruesome freak show as students are taken on free haunted tours featuring all manners of creepy and disgusting creatures.
“It’s basically as screwed up and twisted a haunted theater as you could get from only theater people,” said vice president Luna Alexander.
While she couldn’t elaborate on what exactly students should expect from the Dead Gallery, Alexander did give a word of warning to the faint-of-heart and those who are easily scared: “Be ready for anything.”
Besides the Dead Gallery, Players at EMU are involved in many different aspects of EMU Theater. The group has been providing valuable experience to EMU theater students for the last several decades, and serves as a support network for theater productions by advertising for shows, working in the theater shop and helping out with the technical aspects of the main stage productions.
“We try to provide as many opportunities to people who want to work with any aspect of theater, from text to acting, directing, art management and those kinds of things, as well as to help support the main stage theater shows that go on every year,” said Alexander.
Another big event the group sponsors are the Brown Bag shows, a series of half-hour productions that take place throughout the year. For these performances the group invites anyone interested in creating their own theater production to come try their hand at developing a show.
“It’s kind of an opportunity for anybody who wants to practice or get some experience under their belt or wants to try out a new script or something that they might have read. Alexander explained. “Just for them to be able to try to do that where it doesn’t conflict with, say, the EMU main stage theater shows and some of the lab bill productions that they do too.”
Once ideas have been submitted, members of the group meet to choose which aspiring director should be given their moment in the spotlight.
But the group’s involvement doesn’t stop with the theater community.
“This year we’re trying something a little bit different,” said Alexander. “We’ve never really had the resources to do this, but we’re doing a lot more with community service. So, we’ve given a lot of help to the Hope clinic. We’ve made a few donations there, trying to spread our participation in the community.”
Though many of the members are theater majors or otherwise involved with the theater department, Players at EMU invites anyone interested in any aspect of theater to check them out on Facebook and come to one of their future meetings.
Additionally, anyone interested in participating in an upcoming Brown Bag show should visit the group at www.emustudentorgs.com and contact either Alexander or the group’s president, Matt Andersen.
