The audience sat in the auditorium, on edge as sounds sputtered, lights flickered, and they saw a faint glimpse of The Woman in Black. Then, darkness. The experience was enough to give some people nightmares.

The same theater company’s Sunday read-throughs offer a more quirky side of entertainment. The actors meet in an art gallery to fight with swords, shoot each other with Nerf guns and imitate the sound effects of explosions, gunfire and blood spatter.

Dwayne Blackaller, Kal Poole and Scott Wilson are the founders of Whistling in the Dark Theatre Company, the group responsible for this behavior.

“We’re kind of trying to make theater that’s as fun and exciting as it would be to do when you were 12 years old,” said Corbin Jones, a member of the group. “When you were playing in your backyard and dressing up and pretending. We want to remember what that’s like and invite the audience along for the ride.”

Blackaller, Poole and Wilson were Ohio State theater students who graduated in spring 2009 with master’s degrees in fine arts.

The company was created soon after its first staged production, a drama titled “The Woman in Black,” which ran in autumn 2007. The play was a ghost story about a specter haunting a small English town. It ran through Halloween weekend at Upper Arlington High School.

The production was simplistic. The backdrop consisted of multiple layers of curtains and one door in the background. The only other prop was a large trunk. The rest of the show depended on light, sounds and talent.

“When we had opening night … stupid little scary play in this little theater in a high school, and that first night, kids were screaming their bloody heads off,” Blackaller said. “Then intermission came, and Scott [Wilson] and I went offstage and he was just beaming. He was like, ‘Is this the most fun you’ve ever had in your life?’ And I was like ‘Yeah.'”

Blackaller appreciates simplicity. A radio drama enthusiast, Blackaller says modern audiences rely too much on special effects.

“The spectacle is really awesome, but it’s only as good as the audience’s imagination,” Blackaller said.

The only staged play the company has performed is “The Woman in Black.” Instead, the group has occupied its time with staged readings. Sundays@7 takes place on Sundays at 7 p.m. at the Shoebox, an art gallery in the South Campus Gateway. The cost is $3. Here, audiences can watch staged readings of classical plays, new works, movie scripts and more.

One reading was of a rough draft of the movie “Predator,” then titled “The Hunter.” The performance was complete with OSU student Ben Fox impersonating Arnold Schwarzenegger, Blackaller creating sound effects with a mic and amp, and many of the actors alternatively taking turns as The Predator, shooting fellow actors with a Nerf gun when it was their turn to die.

“Sometimes the script you get is not 100 percent accurate with the movie,” said Mahmoud Osman, an OSU theater student who has participated in two of the company’s staged readings. “It’s just really cool to hear different people and new ways of interpreting the characters of the script. Everyone brings their own thing to it.”
The staged readings began after an incident where an event fell through and the company needed to cover with something. The result was a staged reading of the movie “Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back.”

Whistling in the Dark Theatre Company has also performed more classical works in its staged readings, such as Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” John Ford’s “Tis Pity She’s a Whore” and a rendition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” But a string of 1980s movie scripts is perhaps the most quirky of the readings.

The Shoebox provides an intimate atmosphere for the staged readings. For the event, about 30 folding chairs are set up on half of the space, while the other half is open for the performers.

Sundays@7 also serves as a conduit for people to get involved with Whistling in the Dark Theatre Company.

“With this Sundays@7 series, we’re trying to provide an opportunity for our friends who might be interested in directing something, or friends who would be interested in reading something, or our friends who might be interested in having a piece of theirs read, to have a format or a venue for that kind of work,” Poole said.

One person benefiting from the company is Liam Cronin, 21, the founder of a local sketch comedy group called Sketch by Number. The Sketch group has been able to perform in the Shoebox through its connections with Whistling in the Dark, when it is not performing in other spaces such as the Black Box in the South Campus Gateway Film Center.
“Hopefully, eventually they can branch out, and maybe that’s what they’re trying to do with their partnership with us. And that’s what we’re trying to do with our partnership with them,” Cronin said. “I hope it’s mutually beneficial.”

Friday was the company’s first time holding an event it hopes to host on a monthly basis, a staged reading at Kafe Kerouac, a coffee shop on High Street. The performed piece was the 1984 film “Ghostbusters.” The price was $5 for a reading of an earlier draft performed by 11 actors. There were multiple times when music from the movie’s soundtrack was played and the audience was allowed to join the reading with their best sound effects. A drinking game was also involved. Kafe Kerouac served alcoholic drinks and the audience could play along and drink when a new ghost appeared, the character Louis was locked out of somewhere, the name “Zuul” was mentioned, or when Blackaller made a bad sound effect, among other factors.

Whistling in the Dark is preparing for its next play, written primarily by Wilson and Blackaller, called “The Science of Fiction.” It’s a three-character play about a young H.G. Wells, an acclaimed science fiction author who wrote works such as “The Time Machine” and “The Invisible Man.” The script had its first read-through on March 14 and the actual show will go on tour to theaters and schools.

Many performers helping the company, including Jones and many of the actors in the staged readings, are or have been affiliated with OSU’s theatre department. Many of these people are undergraduates.

Blackaller and Poole are still helping students as they did during their master’s program when they taught many OSU theatre classes. Their mission statement on Whistling in the Dark’s Web site says they want to help “…foster the next generation of theatre professionals.”

“One of the goals for the company is to be sort of a stepping stone into the professional world for recent graduates, to develop some credibility and some skills,” Poole said.
Columbus has a good amount of theaters, whether professional or not, but Blackaller is not worried about competing for an audience.

“As long as people are doing art that they love, there will always be an audience for it.”