Temple Spirit
The play was given a workshop and public reading at the HOUSE THEATRE - Chicago, with members of the ensemble along with Cliff Chamberlain and Tracy Letts (who took time out of his schedule for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf at Steppenwolf to invest in new play development!)
The play was given a workshop and public reading at the HOUSE THEATRE - Chicago, with members of the ensemble along with Cliff Chamberlain and Tracy Letts (who took time out of his schedule for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf at Steppenwolf to invest in new play development!)
Temple Spirit is, at its core, a ghost story…
A mysterious priest must spend a single night in a haunted temple. All who've tried have been found dead by morning. Grappling with demons of his own, Jogen arrives to try and reclaim the place as night falls. The long, eerie hours of darkness ahead will change him
forever.
Temple Spirit is an original work inspired by ancient Japanese folk stories, as familiar to the Japanese culture as Cinderella is to ours. It weaves together the tales of demons, ghosts and lost souls with an original story line.
Each tale is told with a specific verse or prose style in order to evoke the musicality and mood of the ghostly story. Like all classic fairy tales, these eerie fables delve into our dreams and fears. Unfamiliar, yet strangely resonate, they peer into the darkness within all of us. Jogen wrestles with the impossible
question of human dichotomy through the darkest hours of the night. Is light possible without darkness? In a culture valuing heroes and warriors, which is greater: our desire for peace…or revenge? What do we do when our relationships with our enemies shake our very foundations?
I found it remarkable how familiar these unknown stories seemed. And like the priest, I found it incredibly redemptive that ghost stories, centuries old, from a strange and unfamiliar culture, somehow still echo and call to a familiar place deep within all of us.
“I am haunted, then you see, by that which is already in me.”
