TinFish Productions, at Heartland Studio Theater.
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Horror is engendered primarily by Things Unseen, which makes it difficult to produce in an externalized medium like the stage. It comes as no surprise, then, that the stories in TinFish Productions’ second annual Halloween show, Storytellers, concerned with the characters’ behavior–Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The New Catacomb” and Bram Stoker’s “The Squaw”–fare better than those concerned with the characters’ sensitivities: Edgar Allan Poe’s case study “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Vampyre,” adapted from Dr. John Polidori’s tale of the same name and Byron’s “The Burial.” This narrative is also handicapped dramatically by its epistolary structure, as “The Squaw” is hampered by its reliance on long monologues (delivered by a stereotypically barely coherent Yankee frontiersman).