Speakeasy Dollhouse
| Speakeasy Dollhouse: The Bloody Beginning | |
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| Written by | Cynthia Von Buhler |
| Date premiered | October 2011 |
| Place premiered | New York City |
| Genre | Immersive Theater, Pulp Non-Fiction |
| Setting | Bakery, speakeasy club, bedroom, coroner's office, and street scene in New York City between 1925 and 1935. |
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| Speakeasy Dollhouse: The Brothers Booth | |
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| Written by | Cynthia Von Buhler with additional scenes by Mat Smart |
| Directed by | Wes Grantom |
| Date premiered | March 2014 |
| Place premiered | New York City |
| Genre | Immersive Theater, |
| Setting | Speakeasy club, parlor, seance room, Sargent room, bedroom, stairwell, gambling room, tap room, library, alley, Gramercy Park, and street scene in New York City, 1919. |
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| Speakeasy Dollhouse: Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic | |
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| Written by | Cynthia Von Buhler |
| Directed by | Cynthia von Buhler |
| Date premiered | April 2015 |
| Place premiered | New York City |
| Genre | Immersive Theater, |
| Setting | Broadway theater, Paris cabaret, Paris hotel room, office, art reception balcony, Times Square back door entrance, and an alley scene in Montmartre Paris, 1920. |
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Speakeasy Dollhouse is a series of immersive plays based on Cynthia von Buhler's investigations of mysterious deaths in site-specific, historic locations. Original funding for the project was obtained via Kickstarter in 2011. The plays are currently produced by Russell Farhang and Cynthia von Buhler's production company, Smoosh & Smoosh Inc. The Bloody Beginning has been running continuously in New York City since 2011. The Brothers Booth ran in 2014. Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic opens in Spring 2015.
Episode One, The Bloody Beginning, is based on von Buhler's investigation of the mysterious 1935 murder of her grandfather. The play was written and directed by von Buhler.
The play presents a series of vignettes which occur over the years 1925 to 1935 and were considered the playwright to be pivotal in the understanding of the climactic moment of Frank Spano's murder. The story extends beyond his death to encompass the hasty trial of Spano's confessed killer, but leaves to the audience the final conclusions about why and by whom the murders were committed.
Speakeasy Dollhouse is staged in Meyer Lansky's former Lower East Side hangout. Unlike plays presented in a traditional proscenium, the site-specific set design invites the audience to walk freely throughout various rooms of the venue. Designed to mimic the dollhouse-scale sets depicted in the graphic novel, there is a speakeasy bar, private alleyway, club cum living room, bakery, coroner's office and Pre-war bedroom. The audience is encouraged to dress in Roaring Twenties period attire. Upon arrival, each person receives a slip of paper assigning them a unique character to play and instructions to "ignore the advice your parents gave you as children, be nosy and talk to strangers." When not performing predefined scenes, the actors circulate throughout the space, ad libbing in character with everyone in attendance.
In 1936, as a means to better explore these cases and train investigators of sudden or violent deaths to assess visual evidence, Frances Glessner Lee created the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. These studies consisted of detailed, 1:12 scale dollhouse models that students could examine from every angle. Taking inspiration from the Nutshell Studies, von Buhler recreated the scenes from her grandfather's murder and the events leading up to it using her own handmade sets and dolls. Utilizing evidence gathered from autopsy reports, police records, court documents, and interviews in tandem with the dolls and sets, she has pieced together a variety of probable scenarios to explain the crime.
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