NPX Weekly Round-Up: In the Temple of Light by arroyo monfiletto

A mocku-mentary style horror exploring "the existential dread at the heart of hedonism", plus three other plays I found this week.

Hello friends! Thank you for reading this week’s edition of “NPX Weekly Round-Up”. The trigger warnings for this play are as follows: discussions of drug use, sexual harassment, burrowing insects, paranoia, seizures, mental illness, being unhoused, suicide, self-harm, addiction, and death. Reader discretion is advised.

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I was never a partier as a kid. Or an adult, really. Never had a rebellious phase, or an urge to sneak out of the house. My mother jokes that she would’ve put out a ladder for me to do so, just so I could perhaps be a normal teenager, but all I wanted to do was be in plays and read books. I know, I was probably the most boring sixteen year old that ever lived.

But, being in the creative scenes of music and theater, I often found myself on the edges of these decadent parties, packed to the brim with young people on LSD or ecstasy who were always trying to draw connections between hallucinogens and their own capacity for creative output. I had a standing invitation but I never participated, content to listen to the stories that would emerge with the sun the day afterward. Honestly, I was afraid of what drugs such as LSD would do to my brain, already addled by anxiety and ADHD. It took me until the age of 27 to even try marijuana, and that was at the near insistence of my medical team (yay chronic pain).

So, when reading a play like In the Temple of Light by arroyo monfiletto that takes place in the underground rave/party scene, you can imagine how little I know about the culture the story takes place in. I approached this play hoping that my lack of knowledge would not impede me, and thankfully it didn’t.

Before we get too into it, here’s the summary of In the Temple of Light from NPX:

A nightlife legend has died. Five of Margot’s closest friends and colleagues have gathered at her favorite club, HAZMAT, to honor her life. As the reminiscences unfold, evidence emerges that Margot’s untimely passing may have been prompted by the influence of a designer club drug which reportedly causes hallucinations of a terrifying figure. A mocku-theater horror over a house beat, In The Temple of Light explores the existential dread at the heart of hedonism.

An important thing to know about this play when reading or seeing it is that none of the characters are ever talking to each other directly. They are all being interviewed— by whom or for what we don’t know— about Margot, a close friend and/or colleague that has recently passed. Therefore all of the characters are, in a way, speaking directly to the audience throughout the entire play. It’s important to keep this in mind to properly understand the dialogue and structure of In the Temple of Light.

We have a few important characters that we hear from throughout: X (the club owner), Shawn (the bouncer, X’s brother), Angel (the resident DJ), Kim (the “mom friend” of the club scene), Ruthie (Margot’s ex and a frequent club goer), and Margot herself, only heard in voice overs. Every person in this play has a different view on Margot not only as a person, but as a fixture in the HAZMAT community. While they all love her in their own, sometimes confusing way, it is gradually revealed that something more than addiction and/or drug use may be at the root of Margot’s death.

The first half of the play is all about setting the stage— introducing us to the culture of HAZMAT, the people that inhabit it, and who Margot was (at least, who these people think she was). Near the end of part one, it’s revealed that a new designer club drug called Morphe may have something to do with Margot’s death…and from here, the characters begin to come apart at the seams.

First, we are introduced to another unseen character called Spencer, who’s death the characters believe may have been connected to Morphe. They are different levels of reluctant to discuss this possibility with the interviewer, most saying that Spencer’s death was a combination of multiple things including a bad childhood, previous drug use, mental health, and being potentially unhoused. While, as the reader, this seems very plausible, there is something sinister about the nature of Spencer’s suicide. He not only was scratching deeply at his skin, as if trying to remove something from inside himself, but he eventually gouged out his own eyes.

At this point in the play, we’ve heard in passing that Margo seemed to have an itchiness problem, complete with a nightmare where bugs are living under her skin. While this doesn’t seem like anything but perhaps a bad trip, it begins to leave the reader with a feeling of dread as connections are drawn between Spencer’s experiences with Morphe before his death and Margot’s. While the hallucinogen seems to create a euphoric high at first, filled with minor hallucinations of bright lights, overuse seems to rot something within the user.

We eventually learn that Margot’s suicide is extremely similar to Spencer’s in that it seemed she was trying to dig something out of her stomach. This is really where the horror element of the story kicks in, and we begin to wonder if this idea of something growing and crawling within Margot is all that far-fetched. Shawn says that the last time he saw Margot, he touched her elbow and swore he felt something crawling under her skin. Now, that definitely got a small shudder out of me.

What I really appreciated was that we hear the results of post-mortem exams on Margot; that the part of her brain that receives stimulus (the occipital lobe) had grown at an alarming rate, that it looked like overgrown moss. The characters wonder allowed how much of reality she could even comprehend in her last days, and the thought is unsettling. At this point, however, it is hard to really tell if the nature of Margot’s death (and Spencer’s too) was due to awful side effects from the overuse of Morphe…or something more sinister.

And that’s the beautiful thing about this play— we don’t get an answer. If we did, it would completely destroy not only the eerie atmosphere, but the message of the play. When the summary of this work states that it explores the “existential dread at the heart of hedonism”, this uncertainty is what I think of. Margot, Spencer, and really all of the characters express that they feel out of place in “normal” society for various reasons, such as their race or queerness. While they like to party, and there’s nothing wrong with that, it is hinted at that there is a sense of nihilistic despair within all of them. That this place, these experiences, these other people, are tools to try and escape that.

Ruthie, Margot’s ex, shows us a voicemail from Margot at the very end of the play, one that it can be assumed was left the same night as her suicide. In it, she calls the city “a predator” and HAZMAT it’s “jaws closing”. It was at this point that I recalled X (the owner) stating that he “talked” to the building HAZMAT resided in, letting it tell him what it wanted to be. Perhaps it is not the drug of Morphe that kickstarts these dreadful deaths, but the building of HAZMAT itself.

We learn that Ruthie is now a Morphe addict, and is having some of the same dreams and thoughts as Margot and Spencer did. At the end, we are left with the question: does the very nature of our capitalistic and individualistic society grow demons within us? And what happens to those who cannot escape them?

I loved the format of this play. At first, I was unsure how the mocku-mentary style would be able to support the story being told, but now I don’t know if this story could have been told any other way! The very nature of a mocku-mentary is like a paper crane unfolding— we learn a little bit here, and a little bit there, meted out to us gently over time until the whole picture is revealed in one swift flourish. But even then, the nature of eye-witness accounts are unreliable, so the audience is left to consider who they believe and why. This sort of instability lends itself so well to the horrific nature of the play’s premise. Uncertainty is a key component of unease and fear.

I also really enjoyed how this set up allowed us to get to know the character of Margot so incredibly well without ever seeing her. She felt like such a vibrant, rich person by the end of the play— just as rich and vibrant as the characters witnessed throughout. I feel like this makes the ending voicemail from her hit even harder. By that point, regardless of how we feel about Margot and her actions, we know her. And we know how her story ends: horrifically. It’s like that saying, “It’s like watching a train wreck— it’s awful, but you can’t look away.”

I really want to try writing something in this meta-theatrical mocku-mentary style now, just to see how I could utilize it to craft a story in which I would like the audience to be on an “information diet” to better reveal a twist. It also would be incredibly effective for a story in which one wants to have an unreliable narrator(s), as it is also used in this play. Overall, it gave me a new form to chew on, which I adore.

Here is my official review on NPX:

This play is chilling in the best way possible, using uncertainty like a well crafted weapon. Queer as hell and expertly crafted using a style I feel is rarely used to its full potential (mocku-mentary/theater). I would absolutely love to see this on a stage, as I feel the sound and lighting design would add so much to the narrative and message of the piece. Well done indeed!

Have you read this play, or have a comment on my thoughts? Leave a comment down below! I’d love to discuss your thoughts.

Here are three more plays I discovered this week that I added to my NPX library:

• SOMETHING FOR THE FISH by Emily Krause

• The Place That Made You by Darcy Parker Bruce

• MLM is for Murder (or, Your Side Hustle is Killing Us) by John Bavoso

Have any suggestions or recommendations for me? Please let me know! I would love to read your favorite plays, your friends’ plays, your plays, your neighbor’s plays…any plays! Respond to this email, send me a DM, or leave a comment with the title, and I’ll add it to the list.

Happy playwriting (and reading)!

~Brynn