Spine Check

Spine Check, ERS’s take on film noir, features a grizzled 40’s detective who carries his office on his back and grumbles climate science and weather philosophy to himself. He is approached by Hedda Vaviche, the attractive widow of the legendary “ice-man” — a pre-historic hunter trapped and permanently preserved in an equally anachronistic ice age. Office in tow, the detective sets off to find the ice-man’s killer. Meanwhile, the duplicitous Vaviche and a gang of bumbling criminals kidnap an innocent weather forecaster (and our detective’s informant) as part of a plot to squelch the reporting of an imminent ice age. The detective, who narrowly escapes death by time bomb, eventually tracks down the nefarious gang with the help of a lab technician who speaks in the voice of the aging Canadian novelist W.O. Mitchell.

One of ERS’s first original pieces, Spine Check employs simple but stark lighting, an eerily slowed down soundtrack, disorienting lip-synching and slapstick comedy to produce a hilariously cracked noir thriller for the stage.