Fever Dream Repertory presents Steve Yockey’s Mercury

Naturally, I was part of the former category. Somewhere between a bloodier, far queerer Twilight Zone and Hitchcock’s quirky comedies, director Bill Felty’s intimate, intense production has arrived just in time for the season of witches, demons, and the darkness lurking beneath every surface.

Horror, drama, and dark laughs

Taking place in front of a simple revolving set, the play focuses on two couples in flux: Patricia and Heather, and Nick (Christopher Castagna) and Brian (Brandon Tyler). The fifth wheel is Nick and Brian’s interfering neighbor, Olive (Nancy Segal). Patricia resents that Heather has ended things and wants to return to their heteronormative status quo, ultimately lashing out through a violent, impulsive act. Nick and Brian, meanwhile, are still together, but tension lingers over their recent move to a small town so Nick can care for his dying mother. Neighbor Olive assumes Brian’s cheating on Nick, and when she decides he needs to leave the picture, what links the pairs of same-sex lovers are two gift-wrapped, cursed notebooks from the same curio shop … each meant for one unlucky person.

Yockey has recently developed or worked on genre shows like The Flight Attendant, Dead Boy Detectives, and Supernatural, and it’s easy to see how his quick-witted writing style fits into a high-concept TV series. The plot turns on stage were mostly unpredictable, even disturbing, especially in one pivotal scene where the lights go out on a bloodcurdling scream. Mercury delivers a steady mix of horror, drama, and dark laughs, usually within the same scene—which the audience seemed game for, despite one reveal earning horrified gasps—yet the emotions and desires of the characters (almost) always feel authentic, even when they’re doing awful things.

Mercury, madness, and love

The play’s title refers to “Mercury in retrograde,” as explained by the violent, mysterious curio shop owner, Alicia (Eliza Waterman), to Olive. It’s a bit of a wink and a nudge. In astrology, when the planet Mercury turns away from the sun, things go missing, nothing happens as planned, and frustration ensues. This is a time of internal reflection and change when you can review your life instead of taking rash action. Mercury is also a substance that causes insanity if you’re exposed to it for too long—a decent description of romantic love.

The characters are almost all motivated by love, whether it’s the demonic Sam (Joshua Gold, stealing every scene and licking his chops) or Patricia’s heartbroken longing for Heather, and sometimes this leads to curses and macabre chaos, sometimes to tenderness. The story functions as an informal survey of different relationships and how they respectively function (or don’t function).

Of course, this is horror, which means there’s typically a price for the harm we do. The moral undercurrent to the writing recalls horror stories from EC Comics. Many of the characters are not just self-righteous but selfish, unable to see how their horrible actions affect the people they profess to love. The arc is in how they either see that mistake or end up … well, I’ll leave it for you to discover where. Credit to the Fever Dream production and Felty for committing to the verve and bloody nastiness of the play in such a small space. The cast, especially Castagna’s Nick and Myers’s visceral, devastated performance as Patricia, reaches the bloody heart of Mercury, grabs it, and doesn’t let go.

At top: (Image courtesy of Fever Dream Repertory.)