In their thirst for the blood of the living, mosquitoes have no respect for the resting place of the dead. It’s Saturday night, 10 minutes before the 8 p.m. curtain time for the new play Mary Shelley’s Monsters, and when playwright/producer/sole usher Bob Bartlett opens the house—which is the 122-year-old chapel at Congressional Cemetery—I’m getting eaten alive.

A few itchy bumps and a minute amount of my bodily fluids is a small price to pay for the atmospheric value-add of getting to see a spooky play in a church lit only by (electric) candlelight. But Bartlett, the Maryland-based theater-maker who’s created site-specific works for laundromats (The Accident Bear), record shops (Love & Vinyl), and in this very cemetery (Lýkos Ánthrōpos), has poured far more blood into this undead opus th

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