Seventy Scenes of Halloween
by Jeffrey Jones

Featuring:
Laurie Norton
Patrick White
Jered McLenigan
Michele Pauls
Stephen Patrick Smith

Music by POP 3

Jeff and Joan are a hip young couple living together in a state of mild antagonism and mutual boredom. They ritually talk, eat, watch T.V., flirt and constantly misunderstand each other - but mysterious forces are abroad and within.

On All Hallows Eve, as trick or treaters metamorphisize into real beasts and witches, and insinuate themselves into the tight emotional world Joan and Jeff have constructed, their shallow existence explodes into a primal reality of blood, bones, sex and raw, real emotion. Each searches for identity in a world where they are trapped by the expectations of others and their primal needs go unmet.

The play is a dark, funny and intense theatrical experience; a pagan twist on the world of Mamet's "Sexual Perversity in Chicago," with echoes of D.H. Lawrence. Strindberg and Sam Shepard.

Jeffrey Jones' play is an extremely personal look at the devestating effects of an affair on a relationship. Part confession, part purging of ghosts of the past, Jones' uses realism, symbolism and metaphor to delve into the world of the play's characters "Jeff" and "Joan" (loosely based on the playwright and his wife, also named Jeff and Joan). Set at Halloween, the play's structure is fragmented and sometimes repetitious, like the holiday itself - a never-ending series of trick or treaters, all the same, but all somehow very different.

Time in the play is out of joint, as fragmented as the never-ending series of televison programs the characters watch. The play doesn't seem to be taking place in time at all, but in space. Each of the 70 scenes is like a sketch traced onto translucent paper and then juxtaposed on top of one another to create a multilayered drawing in which the lines may be fuzzy, but the total image is deep and memorable.
The play's style, reality juxtaposed with symbols of the universality of mankind works to say two things, rather than saying one twice. Despite the play's echos of the larger universe of humanity, the play is about a man and woman sitting at home at night, and that's a world in itself. Seventy Scenes of Halloween, written in the early 80s deals with issues of personal truth and betrayal rising from deep human passion that come from the primitive times of man.
To see video clips of the Iron Age Theater production of Seventy Scenes of Halloween, visit the Iron Age Video Archives.

Reviews:

	The cast maintains remarkable focus throughout, jumping from amicable cheer to uneasy paranoia in the space of a blackout. White's bluntly inconsiderate Jeff and Norton's neurotic Jand fagile Joan ar together believable, unfortunate couple. Pauls and McLenigan are merciless and manipulative, leading characters into traps of their own devising. Randaly Wise (and John Doyle's) sturdy direction helps keep the play from veering into incomprehensible allegory of tit-for-tat symbolism. In short this is bold, imaginative theater, created by artists at the top of their game. Seventy Scenes. Go. Rob Staeger Arcade
Halloween is the time to acknowledge the strange and the unexplainable, and theatrically there's not a better play for the season than Seventy Scenes of Halloween. The dark comedy at Montgomery County Cultural Center is a bizarre slice of theater, but also highly original. Playwright Jeffrey Jones lets his hyperactive imagination run rampant through a series of often striking scenes that are just as strikingly presented in an edgy, well executed Iron Age Production. Director-designers Randall Wise and John Doyle present this complicated, difficult piece of theater effectively and evocatively. Their set, combining an ordinary house interior and a menacing world beyond the darkened windows, creatively uses the cultural center's bare-wall, technically unsophisticated playing space. The staging is vivid and inventive, and though some of the scenes Jones intends to be scary and more frenetic than frightening, the directors have a good feel for the troubled mindscape the play inhabits. Patrick Edward White and Laurie Norton pair well as the couple exchanging Jones' ton-perfect marital dialogue. They are also strong individually as they separately confront the menacing ghoulies and ghosties that Jeff's confession of adultery seems to unleash. In the physically demanding multiple roles of witch, werewolf, a couple of ghosts, friends of Joan and Jeff, and various other characters, Michelle Pauls and Jered McLenigan are chameleon-quick at changing both their positions and personas on the stage. Doug Keating Philadelphia Inquirer
	The partnership of directors and designers Randall Wise and John Doyle has reached its height to dat with Jeffrey Jones' Seventy Scenes of Hallowen. Laurie Norton and Patrick Edward White as Jeff and Jone are a frighteningly believable couple, and Michelle Pauls and Jered McLenigan are hilarious, sexy and scary as the Witch and the Beast. The production around them is Iron Age's finest yet: a spascious, white-floored living room domibated by a large couch and a constantly running television, surrounded by walls suggestined by thtrees. The theater becomes a forest of dark leaves and bones creating textured shadows behind the white door and window frames. Eerie, restrained music by Pop3 and television sound effects plus detailed lighting complete the effect. Secenty Scenes of Halloween has the frights and the laughs one would hope for this time of year but it also has a fascinating exploration of a relationship, and comments on how television warps our eternal connectionto primal passions, the play works to a happy ending, but not before thrilling us the way Halloween was supposed to before it became cute. Mark Cofta Main Line Times

Using his play Seventy Scenes of Halloween as an inkblot, it might be a fair reading for audiences to conclude that writer Jeffrey Jones is a modestly insane experimentalist who grew up in and was forever obsessed by a culture dominated by television.
The influence, skillfully abeted right down to the cleverly interspersed snippets of '60s TV theme songs like "I Dream of Jeannie" and "Hawaii Five O," is acute and at times provocatively harnessed in the Iron Age production of Jones' 70 Scenes of Halloween, now playing at the Montgomery County Cultural Center.
All four actors are a pleasure to watch as they skillfully navigate both the subtleties and the more transparent mechanisms of Jones' script. Each articulately exposes his or her character's angst about identity no matter what haywire event they happen to be navagating, with Pauls' and McLenigan's frequently playful performances being the catalysts for much of what we might consider to be the resolution of the plot.
Randy Wise and John Doyle's flawless direction, as always, keeps things from becoming too derailed, and their exquisitely eerie set design that merges forest and living room is a thing to behold, unobtrusive yet continually casting a watchful eye. It might be tempting to say something snide about Jones' pre-baked premise, but with Seventy Scenes he makes a strong case for the ghouls lurking at every window in every closet, and in our most inane sofa talk, coming out of the woodwork to haunt our deepest thoughts and longings on what is traditionally the most frightening night of the year.
Gary Puleo
The Times Herald

With the additional convention of ghosts, witches and werewolf costumes, donned at some point by each member of the ensemble, the haunting production recreates all of the little murders that couples endure throughout relationships. The entire ensemble offers a stellar performance, with particular kudos going to Jered McLenigan and Michelle Pauls for adding a particularly physical embodiment to the tortuous machinations of the marital struggle, and to a particularly macabre set, where bones on walls intermingle with a white floor upon which there is no doubt that blood will be spilled.
In The Limelight

It's a tribute to Wise and Doyle that they can attract the talent and inspire the work ethic among their players that can make a play a true success. Laurie Norton gives a beautiful performance. Her Joan has an energy that is balanced by the quiet infallible ennui registering on her face as she absorbs the impact of her husband's infidelity on her and her marriage. Her work in this piece is both memorable and remarkable. (Michelle Pauls) and McLenigan give the texture to the script that glues the play together. Patrick Edward White's rendition of the playwright who is a pompous, self-centered, ass seems dead on target." Jim McCaffrey Main Line Life