Blood Theater

The Chainsaw Massacres - The Stage Show.

Yes. It can be done. You can depict chainsaw weilding flesh-flaying, gore-inducing action in a stage show, and look good in the process.

Recently I went to Cell-space, a kind of community-based theater/performance/gallery space, where everything from new-age hippie conferences to pyro-technic gore theater is put on. It 's a bare-bones kind of space with exposed girders and cement.

Whilst I had a little inkling of what was to take place there, the plastic-sheets covering every square inch onf the floor and walls should have given me conisderable fore-taste of what was to come.

The idea is redicuously simple. Construct a simple genre pliece that enables plenty of opportunities to dismember body parts in front of a live evidence, and use that as an excuse to spray the audience with as much fake blood as possible. The blood, really some kind of watermelon kool-aid had a sticky sweet consistency. And considerable ingenuity must have taken place to design the squirting equipment, because there was definitely method in the madness of gushing blood. No part of the audience was spared, as the blood was squirted to all corners of the room.

Of course, I had bought a plastic bag to be safe, but even then the bag couldn't keep the blood out. I walked out of the theater with streaks of red all down my eyes and splotches that looked like chicken pox covering my face.