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When the Stage Fright Festival began two Octobers ago, it was just founders Amica Hunter and Jeff Desautels putting on shows for their friends. Hunter and Desautels, who are professionally trained clowns, both happened to be touring in spooky-themed productions.
“We’re big fans of Halloween, so we just thought, ‘Oh, let’s put together a little show/bill/festival just for this season,” Hunter says. “It started as a one-off and it has kind of grown from there.”
This year’s Stage Fright Festival, a nearly two-week lineup of horror theater and macabre variety acts, is far more expansive. After staging it at 21ten Theatre and Curious Comedy Theater, Stage Fright has a new haunt: the Chapel Theatre, a converted 1930s church in Milwaukie.
Performances run daily Oct. 3–13 and will include a variety of productions and community events, including costumed speed dating, jump scare bingo, and a science lecture on creepy pets. There will be an ambulance-turned-puppet-museum parked outside the venue (it’s called the Jeanclaudevandambulance) and pretend “embalmings” happening in the lobby.
“We are fans of horror and Halloween and all that spooky stuff, but we also are mostly comedians,” Hunter says. “So it’s kind of a festival of funny people who like spooky stuff.”
Other big doings this year: performers had to apply for slots for the first time, so there are people on the bill the founders don’t already know personally, “which is a big deal,” Hunter says. The volunteers are more organized, meeting monthly (or more) all year long.
And Stage Fright even got itself a brand-new tax status as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. It helps that Desautels is in school for nonprofit management.
“He’s, like, figuring out how to do all that stuff, and I get to just come in and say, ‘What if I was a big bug?’”
Hunter is referring to their show My Wife the Grub, a five-to-10-minute sitcom-style episode running every day of the festival. Hunter describes it as “I Love Lucy if Lucy was a giant bug that couldn’t talk,” Hunter says. “It’s a very stupid concept.”
Hunter’s the bug and Desautels will be a drag character named Mysteria. Some of the comedy will rest on the idea that people discriminate against the couple because they’re lesbians, not because one of them is a beetle larva.
Hunter and Desautels, who both identify as queer, will continue to champion LGBTQ+ perspectives and themes in the work they present. The intersection between horror and queerness is well established; historically, characters such as vampires were often coded as queer because they were an “other.” Halloween has ties to the transgender community as the one day a year when everyone is allowed to dress how they want, with the typical social rules suspended, Hunter says.
“For a lot of us, the original queer-coded things we latched onto were villains,” Hunter says. “There’s this whole stereotype of Disney villains seeming very fucking gay—they’re fabulous people but they’re ‘evil’ and the villain. There’s an interesting thing of what it is to identify with the monster and actually see their motivation and if they are evil or not.”
(Examples of this abound in Disney Renaissance-era properties, including Ursula in The Little Mermaid, Jafar in Aladdin and Scar in The Lion King.)
The duo’s grand plans for the festival include someday owning and operating their own venue with year-round genre programming, such as sci-fi, fantasy, mystery and horror. While the intersection of horror and comedy is a natural one for Hunter, they recognize not everyone wants gore with their funnies. To help people find what they want, this year the festival’s ticketing website is divided by subgenre, including science fiction, gothic, gore fest/splatter and supernatural.
“There’s something really interesting about being scared and being tickled or entertained because they’re both these involuntary responses. If you jump or scream or laugh, those are things you can’t cover up. It’s not an intellectual process.”
SEE IT: Stage Fright Festival at The Chapel Theatre, 4107 SE Harrison St., Milwaukie. stagefrightfestival.com. Oct. 3–13. $5–$25.
