All In The Execution

The Indian Ink Theatre Company has gained American backing for a new play about the inventor of the electric chair.

- Francesca Horsley

In the windowless rehearsal space at the Westpoint Performing Arts Centre, in Western Springs, Auckland, an actor is enduring a variety of mock executions at the hands of his fellow cast members.

Dressed in grey-and-white-striped prison garb, they cheerfully practise their guillotining, garrotting and hanging, all the while belting out the sardonic lyrics of a band’s offbeat, jazzy songs. The Indian Ink Theatre Company is hard at work honing their latest show Welcome to the Murder House and it’s gruesome, dark, transgressive fun.

The actor being subjected to these methods of capital punishment is playing American dentist Alfred Southwick, the man who invented the electric chair.

In the storyline, it is 1895. Five years have passed since William Kemmler, who had murdered his de facto wife Matilda Ziegler with a hatchet, became the first person to be executed by electrocution. Five death-row prisoners are given a night to celebrate with their own play, telling Kemmler’s story.

The work has been commissioned by the prestigious South Coast Repertory, a professional company in Orange County, south-east of Los Angeles. It is premiering in Wellington’s newly opened Te Auaha New Zealand Institute of Creativity.

It is not the first time Indian Ink’s co-founders, writer Jacob Rajan and director Justin Lewis, have approached this grisly subject matter. The Dentist’s Chair in 2008 told the story of a dentist haunted by the ghost of Kemmler, but the pair felt some aspects missed the mark. The focus now is on Southwick, and Rajan says the convicts regard the inventive dentist as their hero.