Hell House
October 2006: St. Ann's Warehouse
Every Halloween, Evangelical churches across America stage haunted houses that replace the traditional ghosts and ghouls with real depictions of evil: high school cheerleaders getting abortions, gay men dying of AIDS, and secular humanists sipping lattes. Now, for the first time ever, this cultural phenomenon comes to New York City - with the Church's own script fully intact.
Part installation, part performance, part haunted house — Hell House culminates in a celebratory hoedown with bowls of punch, powdered donuts, and funky Christian rock jams. It’ll scare the Jesus into you.
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Alex Timbers
Aaron Lemon-Strauss
Garin Marschall
Tyler Micoleau
Sidney Shannon
Bart Fasbender
Stephanie Wiesner
David Withrow
Gabriel Kahane
Alaina Taylor
Erin Koster
Molly Eustis
Richard Kornberg and Associates
Watch a trailer for the show here.
New York Times| Feature Article
"And so Mr. Roberts and Mr. Lemon-Strauss were in complete agreement on the quality of the work, even if they had entirely different ideas about what the point of the work was."
Newsweek| Feature Article
"It was a grotesque and shocking imagining of contemporary secular culture, an extreme version of the way some very conservative Christians may think the unsaved live."
New York Observer| Feature Article
"Not since the Meese Commission Report on Pornography has so much stagy titillation been collected in one place."
Time Out New York| Feature Article
"Les Freres Corbusier, the experimental theater group behind such iconoclastic folly as Heddatron and A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant, hopes to scare the bejesus out of you"
New York Times
"Les Freres, whose approach to art lies somewhere between P. T. Barnum and Dada, have brought to New York an irony-free facsimile of the Halloween entertainment known as a Hell House."
New Yorker
"Ingenious!"
Time Out New York
"5 stars! Thrilling, sensational, devoutly insane... And on the eighth day of previews, God saw the Hell House, and He saw that it was good. Damned good."
New York Sun
"Strange and sinfully entertaining!"
nytheatre.com
"Pure genius... Praise and thanksgiving to the theatre gods for the collaboration between Les Freres Corbusier and Pastor Keenan Roberts. Never has the dilemma we're currently in been presented with such horrifying clarity."
New York Observer
"The edgiest entertainment in the city!"
New York Post
"A hilarious experience, although also scary for reasons the pastor probably didn't intend..."
Associated Press
"Hell House has a thrilling unexpectedness about it... The production values, too, are outstanding. The company has created a fluid theater experience in which one shocking tableau leads effortlessly into the next."
New York Daily News
"The three-year-old Les Freres Corbusier is one of the most original and challenging Off-Off-Broadway troupes"