THE PIT

THE PIT. Arcadia University. 2021

When a children’s game goes too far, a legacy of paranoia and tragedy takes root in this immersive theatrical event sure to leave you haunted.

Arcadia University has its haunted places;  places where mirrors reflect futures and phantom footsteps race the hallways.  Those are the tales you’ve been told as a freshman or a guest of a campus ghost tour but there are other stories, one’s that have been intentionally kept out of the folklore, one’s that run deep, too near to the core of the community.

THE PIT was a piece that was devised at Arcadia University over the course of a year. Alisa had the initial idea and brought me on-board as co-creator in the Fall of 2020. Over the course of the Fall semester, we met weekly with a group of students who would go on to create the written/recorded content of the show as well as design some of the context of the world of the play. We started with a simple goal: Devise our own urban legend about “The Pit” at Arcadia University. The Pit is a lower-level parking lot that is just on the edge of campus. It’s often the one place students don’t want to park because it’s far away from everything, it’s very dimly lit, it’s surrounded by trees that are (quite frankly) creepy at night. This would be the setting for our production.

At the end of that Fall semester, we ended up with a handful of stories about creepy things folks witnessed in or near The Pit. While those stories were being written, we cast a group of actors to voice these characters. Several of those actors also doubled as singers and recorded some music that I wrote to help bridge everything together.
At the end of that process, we had a pretty complete radio play. The through-line was thin but definitely workable! We would then go on to make a lot of revisions and a few re-records once we started on the next phase of the process.

Almost exactly a year later, we finally had the opportunity to create a physical production. Audience members would arrive in their cars, or sit on a hill that overlooked the parking lot, and listen to the stories we crafted while the world around them came alive. The actors in the physical production had no lines; only movement. We used the text as a starting point in the rehearsal room but very quickly developed a whole new set of rules and world-building within the physical action. The pairing of the two created a rich story that, we hope, left the audience feeling uneasy and intrigued by the new urban legend of “The Pit.”

THE PIT. Arcadia University. 2021
Direction: Alisa Sickora-Kleckner and Damien Figueras
CHOREOGRAPHY: Jenn Rose
Costume Design: Alisa Sickora-Kleckner
Sound Design: Damien Figueras