Skid Roche

Photos: David Allen, courtesy of Thrillpeddlers (except where noted).

I first encountered the ecstatic brand of blood, guts and sexual dementia in evidence at Thrillpeddlers about a year ago with the San Francsico theater group’s 2008 program Flaming Sin, London’s Grand Guignol. Last year’s program of deliciously impolite plays featured “The Better Half,” a lost 1921 sex farce by Noel Coward, plus “The Old Women: Or, A Crime in a Madhouse,” a French classic of eye-popping fun just explicit enough to make Un Chen Andalou seem like an ocular pricktease. Merdre!

I was chomping at the bit for more weirdness from the Peddlers this year, and when I made the scene last weekend, I was not disappointed. The Peddlers’ new program, Audacious Artefacts: Parisian Grand Guignol, runs through May 2, 2009 at the Hypnodrome at 575 10th Street at Bryant. This smallish theatre is just about as cozy as I like for my evenings of blood, guts and improbable genitalia. The place drips with atmosphere, its walls graced with posters from trash horror and stage-magician freakshows; the “shock boxes” lining the back wall are said to offer opportunities for illicit trysts, but I’m told they also sport the kind of freakshow effects made famous by ’60s schlock director William B. “The Tingler is Loose in the Theater” Castle.

Appropriately enough, the Hypnodrome is a venue rumored to have once housed a 1970s Satanic biker cult that promised to haunt the building forever and paint its walls with the blood of innocents. And if you believe that I’ve got a bucket of slimy eyeballs to sell you!

Thrillpeddlers inject the oh-so-French tradition of the Grand Guignol with a wicked cocktail of San Francisco perversity, hilarity and camp, making for the best damn time I’ve had at the theater since infanticidal Hecuba ripped the peepers out of yowling Polymestor. To say that a demented evening at the Hypnodrome is not for the faint of heart is not quite true; the faint of heart are welcomed, since those of us with stronger stomachs so very much enjoy watching you squirm.

When I saw this program last Thursday, there was an unbilled “curtain-raiser” rendered by two plaid-skirted ingénues and a pair of ’50s jocks, planted saucily in a faux classroom for a hilarious dramatization of the 1946 Red Cross Manual’s instructions on building a crash-preparedness kit for your car. Something tells me if the hilariously dopey jocks in this piece avoid a steel-and-flesh-rending head-on playing chicken in the lot outside the sock hop, they’ll get snuffed at Chosin Reservoir, but alas! The Red Cross does not cover that eventuality, at least not in this mashup of morbid yet wholesome Americana. Will subsequent weekends feature this garish “found melodrama?” At press time, no promises could be made, but Thrillpeddlers are known for their impromptu additions and unexpected creative pirouettes, so look alive! One never quite knows what awaits one at Hypnodrome.

The program proper then begins its assault on the senses with “Private Room Number 6,” adapted from the 1907 play by Grand Guignol spookwranglers André de Lorde and Pierre Chaine. Russell Blackwood, also the evening’s M.C., plays murderous Russian General Gregorff on vacay at a Paris hotel. He’s earned the distaste of the hotel staff by periodically attempting to strangle them, as he’s a tendency to flip out and do violence when he drinks. But tonight he’s all smiles, owing to the imminent porking of barely-legal slut-for-hire Lea (Kara Emry), who just loves it when the Gregster shows how manly he is by consuming mass quantities of spirits — driven, seemingly, by a fixation on the old man’s savage nature. But once the General is liquored into horny ferocity? Merdre, it’s a banquet of violence!

The night’s second offering is “Tics, or Doing the Deed,” a sex farce adapted from René Berton’s 1908 French original. Docteur Martin (Eric Tyson Wertz), a country-dweller, suffers under the rank accusations of his wife, Madame Martin (Gina Seghi), who thinks he’s hot-to-trot for the Madame de Merliot (Kara Emry), visiting that very night with her husband Monsieur de Merliot (TJ Buswell). Au contraire! Would Doc Martin do that? Would he cheat on his wife, especially when he suffers from a bizarre sexual “tic” sure to expose his infidelities? You tell me, pervert.

Your return from intermission sees you transported to the latter-day version of Grand Guignol, 1958 to be exact, and to French Guiana, for “Headhunters.” Here ethnologist Philippe (Jonathan Ingbretson) finds himself lost in the jungle with his guide Stello (Wertz), who’s not so good at the guide part but is great at going slowly insane with each day in the wilderness, as the war-drumming headhunters close in on the pair. Back at home in France, Philippe’s fiancée Eveline commiserates with his father Paul (Lanny Baugniet), but holds out her hope that if she and Paul can get to French Guiana, she can locate the young ethnologist by employing occult means. Will she find him and save the day? Or will Eveline lose her clothes, her head, or some combination of both? Huzzah!

The evening’s closer is an “artefact” like none other, an adaptation of the anonymous 1788 French play “The Discipline,” created for pornographic live theater. This is an artifact from the pre-Revolution culture that spawned the Marquis de Sade. Lanny Baugniet narrates us through the tale of saucy Sister Agnes (Emry) and Sister Claire (Anna Vand), who are bitter that their Mother Superior has her sins expiated nightly with a scourge wielded by Blaise, the hunky gardner (Wertz). Are Agnes and Claire, with their young, supple bodies and unsullied flesh not even more sinful than Mother Superior? Do they not also wish for salvation? Are their sins not eminently and succulently expiatable? Do they not mewl fetchingly for castigation? Blaise sure thinks so! And so will you, once you and your honey thrill to this hilariously campy and bizarrely filthy tale of deflowerment and salvation, or what passed for it before the ministrations of Dr. Guilotin became de rigueur in gay Pa-ree.

In case all this talk about the “Grand” and the “Guignol” has been going over your head, lemme splain.

The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English says that Grand Guignol is “A particularly lurid and violent form of drama, in which the violence threatened but characteristically averted in melodrama is carried through into performance.” Polite way to put it, nest-ce-pas?

Derived from the witty French marionette character, Guignol, and the puppet show that bears his name, the term refers to a style of theater that emphasizes, sex, horror, blood, death and dismemberment in lurid, explicit detail. Founder Oscar Méténier, who invented the art form in 1890s paris, first saw the Grand Guignol theater as a venue for naturalism — the kind of entertainment where a drunk would play a drunk, a whore would play a whore and an axe-wielding lunatic would play… you get the idea. As the form developed, it became increasingly in-your-face, reflecting Méténier’s idea of a series of “hot and cold showers,” careening between sex farces (hot showers) and gory melodramas (cold ones).

The form reached its peak between the two World Wars, showed up in a London version in the early ’20s, and continued after World War II with waning popularity until the Paris theater closed its doors in 1962. Thrillpeddlers has been doing authentic Grand Guignol, “fetish vignettes,” and “lights-out spookshows” for 15 years now, offering a bloody new chapter in the form’s nefarious history. They’ve also added a wicked taste San Francisco camp and craziness.

What kind of person goes to a Thrillpeddlers’ Grand Guignol performance? As you might expect, it’s a cross-section of hipster twentynothings, collegiate dilettantes, Burning Man hippy-artist types and your average garden-variety Mission District weirdos, plus the occasional creepy dude you’re just goddamn sure has bodies in his basement. But the night I attended, half the theater seemed to have been purchased for an unruly troupe of drama nerds celebrating the achievement by their geeky friend of what appeared to be her majority. Lord have mercy! They’re letting barely-legal debutantes witness acts of degredation involving nuns and ethnologists? Sacre bleu! But hey, back when I was a kid we had late-night UHF television showing Chainsaw Camp and The North Boise Belt Sander Massacre. And, um, hey, I turned out all right. Didn’t I? Didn’t I?!?

The next time you feel the urge to fall in love with Paris, forget the transatlantic flight; head to the Hypnodrome and fall in love with the Paris that matters: the Paris that knows what you want, beeyatch!

Thrillpeddlers’ Audacious Artefacts: Parisian Gand Guignol plays at 8pm every Thursday, Friday and Saturday through May 2 at the Hypnodrome at 10th and Bryant in San Francisco. Get advance tickets at Brown Paper Tickets.

Photo at right: Grand Guignol poster, courtesy of Wikipedia.