Vintage Theatre Company’s Shakespearean troupe, The Rustic Mechanical, will present "TOIL & TROUBLE: A Supernatural Shakespearian Salon" tonight at Benedum Civic Center.

 

Directed by Jason Young and starring locals Celi Mackey Oliveto, Sasha Bohon, Trina Byard, Craig Snider, Michael Vozniak, James Matthews, Holly Wilson Blatt, M. Lanette Six and Julia Oliveto, the show starts at 8 p.m. and promises plenty of timely Halloween night entertainment.

 

TOIL & TROUBLE: A Supernatural Shakespearean Salon has been compiled and edited by Celi Oliveto.

 

Three witches meet on a moonless all hallows eve to summon a few of Shakespeare’s most notorious villains, ghosts, demons, and ghouls. Follow these three witches as they conjure the bone chilling and fantastic scenes of Hamlet encountering the ghost of his murdered father; the misshapen, hunchbacked Richard of Gloucester, the future King Richard III, wooing his future bride, Anne, over the corpse of her murdered father in law; Antigonus of Sicilia attempting to abandon a newborn princess in a wilderness filled with man-eating beasts; Joan of Arc summoning fiends in a desperate attempt to beat back the advancing English army; and finally, Shakespeare’s most notorious couple, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, carrying out the murder of their king. Watch and decide if the tragedies of these doomed characters lay in their own deeds and failed choices or if supernatural forces beyond their mortal control guided their unfortunate fates.

 

Tickets can be purchased at the door for $10 each.

 

The show will also be presented Saturday at The Historic Manos Theatre in downtown Grafton. Show times are 1 p.m. and 8 p.m.

 

Tickets are $5. For an additional $3, audience members can participate in a pre-show Walking Ghost Tour of Downtown Grafton.