By 7 p.m. on Tuesday, members of the University Players had transformed Cousins Studio Theatre in the Modlin Center for the Arts into an abandoned insane asylum.
For $3 on Tuesday and Wednesday night, students could wind their way through handmade corridors and find their peers struggling out of straitjackets, operating on each other and bursting around corners with drills and hatchets.
Alex Turner and Mary Clohan, both sophomore University Players, said the idea of creating a student-run haunted house on campus had been passed down from player to player for years.
"We have a pretty booked schedule for space and events in the Theatre Department," Turner said, "so it never actually was realized. But we said if it didn't happen last year, it was going to happen this year."
Turner and Clohan, the lead executives on the project, have been exchanging ideas since last fall, so this September, they assembled a team and began putting their plans in motion. They recruited other executives and cast members, created a floor plan for the set, designed the lighting plot and decided on the soundscape.
Originally, Clohan said they had decided on a fairytale theme, until they realized that they would have been spending the majority of their money on costumes, so they had settled on creating an abandoned insane asylum.
"We went for a theme where we could, if all else failed, clothe everybody in one thing: hospital gowns," Clohan said. "Insane asylum was, of course, still creepy, but we knew we could do it well."
Still, budgeting was a challenge, Clohan said, explaining that, instead of building walls, the Players had to create corridors inside Cousins by hanging cloth from a grid system of strings.
The University Players spent about $350 of their own funds on the project, Turner said, in the hopes that it would ultimately fund itself in the future. "This is the first annual," he said. "Definitely."
When asked what the most challenging part of the process was, Turner and Clohan looked at each other and smiled. "There are a lot of fire safety regulations that we had to meet," Turner said. "Making sure that the layout and the actual materials used in the house met those expectations was a very tedious process."
Even so, Turner and Clohan have already discussed the theme for next year. "We have to keep it under lock and key until it's ready to be announced," Turner said, "but it's gonna be big."
Contact reporter Katie Branca at katie.branca@richmond.edu
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