GRINDHOUSE


Presented at Fertile Ground Festival 2024

Late at night, one house stands out from the others: its glowing door taunting you - like an enormous chewing mouth. "Come inside," it jeers - and you do. 

This is GRINDHOUSE, an original site-specific theatre piece produced for the 2024 Fertile Ground Festival by the creative minds of Basement Stair Collective, R.L. Routh, Kora Link, Becca Wirta, and Claire Elizabeth Aldridge. Tonight, within the bowels of a living monster home, societal archetypes are on the menu. Once inside you meet the residents of the belly of the beast: a doll-like family, trapped in a stomach-churning clockwork cycle of desperation marked by the ticking away of a measured soundscape building to a boiling point. Using a design forward process, heightened repetition, and grotesque movement at a dinner party setting, GRINDHOUSE exposes that the environment we live in may be consuming us while asking the question: Could we survive outside of it?

The poster for GRINDHOUSE. It reads "GRINDHOUSE. Rachel Lindsey Routh. Kora Link. Becca Wirta" in red text over vintage magazine-style illustrations of a family with their eyes crossed out, above a house with eyes and mouth in the windows and door.

Cast and Crew

R.L. Routh: Co-creator, performer

Becca Wirta: Co-creator, performer

Kora Link: Co-creator, performer, Sound Designer

Gwyneth Bushman: Set & Props Designer

Clifton Holznagel: Projections Designer

Photos by: Tamera Lyn
Poster Design by: Claire Elizabeth Aldridge

The crew for GRINDHOUSE. They are lit by harsh white light from a projector. Kora, Becca, and R.L. are in costume and makeup. Claire and Gwyneth, smiling, lean on the table to the left and right of them. Clifton lies on his back in the middle.