The Parchment

by James Richter

On Monday afternoon I finished mixing Kristi Falls Behind, the final chapter of The Miller’s Ghost. Now it’s online, completing the story. I’ve been so consumed by this project over the past three months that I’m having a little trouble adjusting to life without having the piece to work on. It’s the sort of feeling I used to have at the end of each semester in college.

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the scale of this project. It began in the spring, when my friend John (Housemate #3) mailed me a CD of the recording his wife had made of Mr. Spreeman telling the story. Over the following eight months, there was an escalating quantity of work that went into it. There were 62 pages of script, including 22 speaking parts, 20 music cues and about 250 sound cues. We spent about 40 hours in the recording studio, and who knows how much time editing and mixing (I spent at least 35 hours on Kristi Falls Behind in the last week alone). Nor could I tell you exactly how much time the design team spent on the web site. It all culminated in five chapters that tell one 66-minute story.

I am grateful to MTC for green-lighting this project, and to Mr. Spreeman for giving it his blessing. Nearly every company member contributed something to the development, production and distribution of the piece. Without them, this would have been a very different piece, if I had finished it at all. That collaboration and cooperation in the service of new dramatic work is what we are about at MTC. LA people, if you liked TMG, come see our next show, Ditch, this coming February. For those of you who don’t live in LA, check back with us periodically – TMG is only the first of what we hope will be a diverse catalog of online works.

Fundamentally, TMG is about people sharing scary stories. With Halloween coming up, there’s no better time to do it. We’ve shared ours with you – now we’d love to hear yours. Were you ever in a situation where something happened that you couldn’t explain, that freaked you out? Did you ever make up a story to scare your friends around the campfire? Click on the Share Scary Stories link and send the chills our way. Who knows – your tale may become the inspiration for our next production.