Original Theatre du Grand Guignol Program from 1952-53

From the listing:

ANOTHER FABULOUS FIFTIES FRENCH THEATRE PROGRAM- “DU PLOMB CES DEMOISELLES”. OF COURSE WE HAVE THE GREAT VINTAGE PHOTOS OF THE ACTORS/ACTRESSES AND MOST DVINE ADS ( PERRIER, CHAMPAGNE DE CASTELLANE). THERE IS A LITTLE HISTORY OF THE DU GRAND GUIGNOL…. IN FRENCH OF COURSE. YOU WILL ALSO FIND  PASTE OVER NAMES OF SOME ACTORS/ACTRESSES AFFIXED ON  THIS PARTICULAR PROGRAM.

CONDITION IS VERY GOOD: NO RIPS/TEARS, STAINS, WRITING OR CREASED PAGES. (20PP- B/W PHOTOS, AD ILUSTRATIONS/PHOTOS) MEASURES 4 3/4″ X 6″, NICE PAPER STOCK, VIVID RED COVER, BACK SIDE AD.

IF YOU LOVE FRENCH THEATRE… THIS IS THE REAL DEAL CIRCA FIFTIES !

1st Edition of Mel Gordon’s Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror – Out of Print

From the listing:

This entertaining and gruesome book covers the plays produced at the Grand Guignol theater, whose 60-year “reign of terror” began in 19th-century Paris. The contents include the scripts for two of these plays, so that you can act out your own blood-spurting, over-the-top productions. There’s also a listing with plot summaries for most of other Guignol productions. Lots of photographs throughout.

Condition: Top right corner of cover and first 20 or so pages are bent. Some wear on edges of cover. Interior pages are slightly yellowing at edges. No marks inside.

Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror by Hand/Wilson
(Not especially rare, but the starting bid is only 99 cents!)

From the listing:

Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror by Richard J. Hand & Michael Wilson. I paid stupid money for this book for a class I was in, and I ended up not even using it. That’s community college for you. Either way, it’s a nice softcover, but the real meat of the book lies in the ten authentic grand-guignol plays included in their entirity! I gave some thought to keeping it, but really I can’t be keeping everything these days. So whoever buys this: put on some of these plays so I can go see them, and I won’t feel as bad about getting rid of this book, haha! Condition is 8.5/10, some ultra-light wear on the corners, and a small yellow mark about 6 x 3 Centimeters on the right hand spine of pages.

As always, we don’t know these sellers and can’t personally vouch for them, but they all have 100% feedback ratings on Ebay, so we feel pretty comfortable recommending these auctions. Happy bidding.

The article features several photos of the theatre, performances, and audience. Three pages in all.

We don’t know the seller, nor can we personally vouch for him/her, but with 100% positive feedback and over 1300 transactions, well… that’s good enough for us to recommend this auction.

If you follow follow eBay, you know how rarely Grand Guignol-related items appear on the site. This looks like a good opportunity to grab something fun for the collection.

Click “view & bid” below for all the details, and happy bidding!

If you’re not in San Francisco, you can listen live via the KALW website (Windows Media and RealAudio only).

This is the book that inspired us to stop simply dreaming about the Grand Guignol and actually start producing Grand Guignol plays. It features a good history of the theatre, summaries of many plays produced there, tons of great photos, and English translations of two Grand Guignol Plays, including Andre de Lorde’s “The Laboratory of Hallucinations,” which did not appear in the second edition of the book.

Click through to the auction to see all the photos and read the seller’s description. Please note that we don’t know the seller and can’t personally vouch for him/her, but they have 100% positive feedback and 1,000+ transactions. They’re also selling a huge collection of rare magic books which look really interesting.

If you’re a Grand Guignol enthusiast, you’ll want to have this book in your collection. It doesn’t come up for sale too often. The auction ends on January 30th, so get your bid in early.

“The play, a theatre department Off-Center Production, features the two directors’ interpretation of the play. Messer and Snyder envelop the torture-heavy play with several profound layers of conceptual metaphor. For example, while the chief storyline revolves around a mad doctor’s Frankenstein-esque experiments (Igor-like deformed assistant included), the audience listens to a conversation between Alien Voices (David Kriebs and Catherine Schuler) as they discuss whether these examples of “thinking meat” deserve to be involved in the bigger galactic picture.

But if you’re not a narcissist, don’t be shocked by The Lab. Its pessimistic message – we’re all going to hell, and there’s nothing we can do about it – is the bottom line of the production.”

Read the full article.

One bone I’d like to pick with the paper is that the homepage of our GrandGuignol.com site is quoted twice in the article without any attribution given. The quoted text even appears in quotes, but isn’t followed by any source. I’m not sure how that slipped by the editors without raising a big red flag, but I have a suspicion that it may be time to ban beer bongs in the Diamondback newsroom.

Anyway, such an enthusiastic article should help ensure a full house at tonight’s final performance.

“I’m very thankful for this opportunity to explore such an obscure artform, one that is seldom done anymore. Grand Guignol is such a melodramatic, overly-exaggerated way of theatre. It definitely goes for shock value, using realistic scenes of violence which result in puddles of blood all over the stage every show. Why would people like to see this onstage? I don’t really know.”

Information is scarce on the UM website, but The Lab: An Experiment in Grand Guignol appears to be an adaptation of Andre de Lorde’s play Laboratory of Hallucinations. It will have its final performance on Monday, April 2, 2007 at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center‘s Laboratory Theatre. Admission is free. Seating is limited.

Congrats to the cast and crew. Sounds like M. de Lorde would be proud.