photo by Laura Barrón
“Screen Door is a startlingly original and wonderfully satisfying ride, at once haunting, moving, funny, and sublime.”
Richard Wolfe, Artistic Director, Pi Theatre
Screen Door
Written for actors and musicians, Screen Door chronicles two idiosyncratic ghost stories. In one, a woman receives a postcard originally delivered to her now-deceased father 36 years earlier. In the other, a man falls asleep at the movies and wakes to discover he’s been transformed in some manner beyond his reckoning. Structured as a series of variations on themes, these stories conjure the feeling of being haunted by some unresolved past, of repetition and doubling, of eternal return, of time folding in on itself.
Screen Door’s first iteration is as an audio recording by Applied Silence, a creative partnership between playwright José Teodoro and composer-musician Stephen Lyons. Shifting between modes that alternate between dreamy wonderment, bracing dissonance, and twilit suspense, Applied Silence’s Screen Door emerges as a spoken-word post-rock chamber opera that speaks to the strangeness of navigating our labyrinthine modern world in which memory, ardour, myth, family, magic and loss coalesce. Produced by Teodoro and Lyons, and working from themes composed by Lyons, the recording features performances by Lyons and his Fond of Tigers’ bandmate Shanto Acharia; actors Tasha Faye Evans, Steven Hill, and Marina Moreira; and Neko Case collaborator Paul Rigby. This ensemble, with Jessie Liang replacing Moreira, performed Screen Door live at Vancouver’s St. James Square as part of Pi Theatre’s Provocateur series in December 2021.
Screen Door is now available online and on vinyl via Offseason Records. We use many platforms, but our favourite, where you can purchase downloads and records in a manner that actually supports artists, is Bandcamp.