Strands: a gun, a woman, a house

The Winchester Repeating Rifle, famous as the Gun That Won The West, was also infamous for "killing more game, more Indians, and more U.S. soldiers than any other in the nation's history". It was America's first "Semi-Automatic Sweetheart", and is still the prime symbol of the United States, ongoing love-affair with guns. Mrs. Sarah Winchester became the sole heir to the vast fortune amassed by the manufacture and sale of this enormously popular weapon. The Winchester family legacy made Sarah rich. It also drove her mad. Tormented by the ghosts of Winchester-killed dead, grieving the unexpected demises of her husband and infant daughter, Sarah took her troubles to a medium who convinced her that material fortification would prove her spiritual salvation. On this advice, The Widow Winchester spent 38 years in the penitential, non-stop construction of a fabulous and nonsensical 161-room mansion, the Victorian fantasia now known to tourists as the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California.

Ring Around the Rosary

The Winchester Rosary is a haunting in-the-round with the audience seated séance-style. All the characters are ghosts and, with the exception of a video-taped Tour Guide, are played by a single actress. In the shadows, a lone musician provides a lone guitar, cello and sound effects accompaniment to the sung and spoken text. The wind-quartet orchestrations are recorded, but can be performed live.

Rosary Beads

As the Tour Guide leads the audience through the history of the Mystery House, Mrs. Winchester holds forth with her own version of events. Unable to shake free of the very house that was her fondest possession – lately vulgarized by modern conveniences and overrun with tourists – Mrs. W. makes the best of her situation, inviting the audience into her dark tea-party. She justifies, she boasts, weeps and otherwise inveigles her guests with an account of her experiences as a living woman, and as a ghost. Casting herself as a Medium, hoping to contact Annie, her dead child, The Widow is instead possessed by a series of spirits (the avaricious medium who started it all, a 19^th century Mexican soldier, a 20^th century condemned murderer, and a Civil War era sharp-shooting entertainer) each of whom reveal very different relationships to U.S. history, to guns, and to Sarah. Presiding over these visitations is Mrs. Winchester,s spirit-familiar, her Marley,s ghost: Chief Little Fawn. Little Fawn guides her through a series of three visions (the fugues) depicting the strange, wondrous and brutal events of her time, events which transpired far beyond the widening periphery of her sheltering manse. Through these fugues, he works to force Mrs. W. to drop the sentimentalization of her past, and the romanticization of her obsessions: the house building and the death of her little girl. When these tactics fail, Little Fawn seizes possession of the Widow himself: speaking through her, he exposes her self-aggrandizing obfuscations in his final monologue. Once released, Mrs. W. finds herself resonating with the experiences of these troubled shadows, shaken and grappling with a deepening sense of her own passive complicity in their fate.