Ghostbox

In his new one-act, Colburn spins a tale of mental illness and familial tragedy into a dread-heavy riff on the Orpheus myth. Gilbert, as a bereaved wife, first appears in a grainy, flickering video projection, turning a transistor radio into a ghostly communication device per her departed husband’s instructions. It’s a weirdly compelling sequence, but Gilbert on tape pales compared with the actor in the flesh. When she moves from the video to the stage—a near empty box with the feel of a sulfurous waiting room—the radiant, responsive performer melts into Colburn’s text, finding a naturalistic throughline in her character’s mannered soliloquies on loss and longing.

The story behind the broken marriage is evoked first in elusive onscreen flashes—of sunlit domesticity, interspliced with something darker—and in Gilbert’s riddling plaints to her missing husband (played by Crispin). But Colburn seems to lose his nerve: Perhaps out of a distrust of his own highly conceptual narrative, he allows its thematic aspects to become distractingly literal. The God-fearing husband’s sexual shame is externalized with projected text of particularly warped passages from Corinthians, and the demons haunting the couple are pointlessly personified by a shadowy figure that stalks them throughout the production. But Gilbert’s earthbound presence gives this supernatural tale a humanity that elevates it above a simple multimedia experiment.

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