STRANGE CARGO: THE DOOM OF THE DEMETER Promotional Photography with City Lit Theatre Company

This week, I’d like to share a promotional image Distant Era made for City Lit Theatre’s upcoming production of Strange Cargo: The Doom of the Demeter (co-produced with Black Button Eyes Productions). Written by Tim Griffin and directed by Ed Rutherford, the play opens October 10 at City Lit in Chicago and runs through November 23. Here’s a summary of the play’s content from the City Lit website (which also includes ticketing information):

Based on Chapter Seven of Bram Stoker’s DRACULA, this gothic horror high seas adventure tells the shocking events aboard the cargo ship transporting Count Dracula’s belongings from Transylvania to England. Suspicion, paranoia, and madness infect the crew as the harried sailors disappear one by one. Full of creeping mystery, vibrant language, rich characters, sinister vanishings, violent sea storms, swashbuckling action, monstrous puppetry, and, of course, a boatload of terrors, this is the Dracula tale you’ve never seen.

Photography

We photographed this image in the City Lit rehearsal space with actor Brian Parry (as the captain) and director Ed Rutherford (as the hand). Our mission was to show an encounter between the ship’s captain and the mysterious terror aboard the ship. We accomplished this with two lights and a prop lantern. The prop lantern had only very dim illumination, so we filled the area with a light gelled the color of the lantern’s light. Since we were photographing the captain on a black tarp, we used a second light to separate him from the background. We restricted this light with barndoors and a grid in different shots. There was no gel on this light; ultimately we wanted to give the impression of rays of moonlight streaming into the ship’s hold or through the fog on deck.

We tried a few different setups—one where the gnarled vampire hand emerges from a crate and another where the hand reaches out to grasp the captain’s shoulder while he’s looking in the opposite direction. The latter is the one shown here. Thanks also to costume designer Beth Laske-Miller and stage manager Hazel Marie Flowers-McCabe for their assistance with the session.

I’m excited to see Strange Cargo: The Doom of the Demeter at City Lit during Halloween season. Those who follow Distant Era’s work and The All Worlds Traveller may recognize Andrew Bosworth, Cameron Austin Brown, and Ross Compton, three cast members from Idle Muse Theatre Company’s spring 2025 production of The School for Scandal. I wish City Lit and Black Button Eyes the greatest success on their opening and a successful run.

Cast

Jennifer Agather (Gusa)

Alex Albrecht (Basarab)

Andrew Bosworth (Abramoff)

Riles August Holiday (Olgaren)

Cameron Austin Brown (Munir)

Ross Compton (Bucatar)

Robert Howard (Post)

Nathaniel Kohlmeier (Petrofsky)

Herb Metzler (Yorga)

Brian Parry (Gorodetsky)

Crew

Jeremiah Barr (Props & Puppets)

Liz Cooper (Lighting Design)

DJ Douglass (Projection Design)

Hazel Marie Flowers-McCabe (Stage Manager)

Joe Griffin (Sound Design/Composition)

Timothy Griffin (Playwright)

Carrie Hardin (Dialect Coach)

Beth Laske-Miller (Costume Designer)

Victor Bayona and Rick Gilbert (Violence Design by R&D Choreography)

Ruby Lowe (Scenic Designer)

Ed Rutherford (Director)

Getting into the Halloween Spirit

While working on this image (and blog!) for City Lit’s Strange Cargo: The Doom of the Demeter, as well as Idle Muse’s The Blood Countess, I’ve been listening to one of my all-time favorite pieces of music: Dracula, by Philip Glass, performed by the Kronos Quartet. The music was commissioned by Universal as a score for the 1931 Dracula, starring Bella Lugosi. Kronos Quartet’s performance evokes the mood of the late nineteenth century in their work. Highly recommended.

I’m also a big fan of Wojciech Kilar’s score for Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), a very different but chillingly atmospheric score that ends, as great soundtracks do, with an Annie Lennox song.

I highly recommend these scores for active listening and background listening while working, storytelling, or just getting into the spirit of spooky season.

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Steven Townshend is a fine art/portrait photographer and writer with a background in theatre, written narrative, and award-winning game design. As a young artist, Steven toured the US and Canada performing in Shakespeare companies while journaling their moments on paper and film. In his transition from stage to page, Steven continued to work as a theatre photographer, capturing dramatic scenes while incorporating elements of costume, makeup, and theatrical lighting in his work. Drawn to stories set in other times and places, Steven creates works through which fellow dreamers and time travelers might examine their own humanity or find familiar comfort in the reflections of the people and places of a distant era.