Alex Harvey & Victoria Finney
The Willows
This performance is sold out. To join the waitlist please email: boxoffice@ps21chatham.org
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Theatre
A hallucination in sound and voice, Alex Harvey’s adaptation of Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows exploits a tension between dream-time and clock-time through Victoria Finney’s lamplit one-woman recitation of the legendary short story.
Drawing on Blackwood’s entanglement with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, occult modernism and early 20th-century mystical experimentation, Harvey and Finney’s interpretation treats the text not merely as fiction but as an incantation— a deliberate shaping of inner experience through rhythm, cadence, breath and a phantasmic sound design. Blackwood and his esoteric contemporaries believed that words, spoken in the right order, could open the mind, expand perception, even shift reality. This adaptation approaches the story in exactly that way.
This immersive performance revives the nearly-lost practice of adult storytelling: a communal act of sitting in a darkened space, surrendering to a voice, and allowing one’s inner world to be shaped by language. What emerges is both intimate and mythic—a fire-lit encounter with a text that links 19th-century gothic nature writing to the birth of 20th-century psychological horror. A cross between Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Blair Witch Project.
The Willows is not a reading, nor a play, nor a radio drama.
It is a ritual of attention—a space where story becomes spell, voice becomes instrument, and the natural world becomes a site of supernatural rupture.
The Dark: PS21’s fearless winter festival of live performance radiating across Columbia County
The Dark is a new annual festival from PS21 : Center for Contemporary Performance that celebrates and elevates the depths of winter. Taking place February 16–22, 2026, the festival will unfold at PS21 and across Columbia County—in theatres, restaurants, libraries, saunas, and outdoor public spaces. Featuring more than 60 international artists and over 80 performances, The Dark offers a packed week of world-class contemporary performance, installation, music, dance, and theatre—all exploring winter as a time of community and solitude, fire and ice, darkness and light. A major new attraction for the region, the festival positions Columbia County as a year-round cultural destination—not just a summer one.
It is a light in the dark—and The Dark is the light.
Secure your Festival Pass to The Dark now which includes tickets to every performance along with a complimentary sauna and ice skating session!
Written by Algernon Blackwood
Adapted and Directed by Alex Harvey
Performed by Victoria Finney
Alex Harvey is a filmmaker, editor, writer, musician, theatre director and folklorist – He’s spent thirty years pushing the boundaries of how audiences experience storytelling. Alex created, produced, and directed the feature film Walden: Life in the Woods, starring Academy Award nominee Demián Bichir. The film screened at many festivals before its release on Prime in 2019. His pandemic-themed sci-fi feature, space//space, premiered at Anthology Film Archives in 2023. Alex also wrote and directed The Unsilent Picture, a black-and-white silent film starring Bill Irwin, presented with live orchestral and foley performances as the centerpiece of Horseman’s Hollow Festival in 2018 and 2019. Alex co-directed and produced I Am A Seagull, a hybrid film by the Lake Lucille Chekhov Project, which premiered at The Public Theatre’s Under the Radar Festival and toured globally. He apprenticed under Allen Coulter on HBO’s Boardwalk Empire and has presented video art projects like SONNET23 at Festival Cine Futuro in Brazil. He also edited feature docs, The Last Ecstatic Days and In Case We Never Meet Again.
Victoria Finney performed all over the UK and Europe for many years with theater companies, including The English Shakespeare Company and Shared Experience, appeared in several TV drama series, and was a storyteller and Radio Rep actor for the BBC. Eventually, she moved to New York, where she has been part of the Lake Lucille Chekhov project, including the film “I am a Seagull,” and has performed at The Lincoln Center and off Broadway. She co-adapted/directed “All American Boys” (now published and available from Playscripts) and co-adapted “White Rose” by Kip Wilson supported by The New Victory Theater, NYC and The Alliance Theater, Atlanta. She is currently featured as the narrator and storyteller on two popular children’s podcasts and plays a bunch of instruments and sings with Brooklyn based band, The Retro Fits.
Born in 1869, Algernon Blackwood was the first pioneer of Supernatural Fiction and is renowned for his masterful atmospheric settings in his paranormal tales, which submerge readers in the experience of the story itself. A member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—a secret society devoted to the study of the occult and esoteric knowledge—Blackwood had an outsized and often underappreciated influence on the horror genre. The Willows creates a narrative bridge that connects gothic horror of the 19th century to psychological horror of the modern age. Blackwood’s ability to evoke dread from natural settings and his use of the unseen to generate fear lays the groundwork for modern horror’s exploration of existential dread. Blackwood was a major influence on H.P. Lovecraft, who praised The Willows as “the finest supernatural tale in English literature.”
The Dark is supported through a Market New York grant, awarded to PS21 : Center for Contemporary Performance from Empire State Development and I LOVE NY, New York State’s Division of Tourism.
Digital content coverage for The Dark is supported by Bloomberg Connects.
The Dark‘s business sponsors are Millay Arts and The Mountains Media.
Thank you to the many generous individual supporters who helped fund The Dark.
PS21’s programs are made possible in part with support from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
While this performance does not have reserved seating, we are happy to accommodate any specific accessibility needs.
Please reach out to Adriana at boxoffice@ps21chatham.org, and she will coordinate with our front-of-house team to ensure your experience is comfortable and enjoyable.
