The house · Mystic Movies

How the Mystic Theatre works

The Mystic Theatre is a paper toy theatre: a painted gold proscenium with MYSTIC MOVIES on the banner, red velvet curtains on a brass rod, and a row of shell footlights. Nothing on this stage just appears.

The Mystic Theatre with its red velvet curtains shut, the lamp lit beside the stage — The house, with the curtains in.

Every piece on the stage is a card on a mechanism, played by a stage engine. It is built to behave like a real toy theatre, the kind with a cardboard proscenium and figures pushed on from the wings, and it keeps to the rules a toy theatre has.

The mechanisms

Curtains: Two halves of red velvet on a brass rod. They gather as they travel, lean a little behind the travel, and settle. They go under the arch and the gathered drapes, and they close again when the film ends.
The flies: Backcloths come down from above on threads and sway until they settle. A forest at night, a Greek temple, a snowy valley, a boardroom with a vault door.
The grooves: Actors slide along grooves in the stage floor, pushed from the wings on a wire rod. Nobody walks on. They are pushed.
The footlights: A row of shell footlights on a dimmer. When the house comes up they warm with a stutter, the way old dimmers do.
The lamp: An oil lamp beside the stage, lit for every reading. It goes out on “blow out the lamp”.
The narrator: He sits beside the stage, reads the story, and sends you to bed at the end of it.

The Mystic Theatre stage: the founders of LEAVESNUTS hanging upside down from the rafters of the boardroom — The founders still sleep upside down in the rafters. The flies are useful for that.

The readings

Every play opens on the title over black, and the theatre fades up beneath it. Every reading ends the same way: “And that’s how it happened, or so it is said. Now blow out the lamp and go to bed.” In Villain Con 26 the theatre played Santa Origins and The Real Thing.

This year

By order of the Council, the Mystic Theatre was commandeered for the week, and a silver screen was flown in for the Silver Screen Seance. The owner was compensated with a lamp. Please blow it out when you’re done.

The front page of this site is the theatre itself, cut from the stage engine’s own pictures: raise the curtain and the film plays on the silver screen behind it. The narrator isn’t in tonight. His lamp is: tap it.