Dina Rose Rivera gets our attention.

Some shows blend genres, like dramedies or tragicomedies or period satires. Others defy pigeonholes entirely. Take Bryan Enk and Matt Gray’s Penny Dreadful series, which is midseason right now at Williamsburg’s Brick Theater. Just trying to cover the backstory of this byzantine sci-fi retro-melodramatic soap opera would take not a few blog posts. Suffice to say that the ongoing epic involves President William H. Taft, Einstein, William Jennings Bryan, a time-traveling device, aliens, a secret society and man-made earthquakes (an in the one that hit San Francisco in 1906). There’s horror, kitschy-campy laughs, melodrama and plot, plot, plot, plot. (And lots of twists to go with that.) It’s all produced resourcefully on a shoestring and offered to you for a piffling $15. We sat down with the series’s cocreator and picked his Gray matter.

Matt Gray

Where did you get the idea for this crazy world?
In 2006, the Brick Theater approached my creative partner, Bryan Enk, about doing a late-night monthly serial. Bryan had already written and directed several late-night original horror plays for them over the past few years and they had the idea of doing something on a more regular basis. Their only stipulation was that it be called Penny Dreadful. They just liked the sound of it. When Bryan brought me on to brainstorm, we went through numerous ideas before finally going back to the original penny dreadfuls as our inspiration. So we dug into the pulpy, serialized Victorian adventure and horror novels that were the precursor to paperback fiction and comic books. What we came away with was wanting to do a period piece, our own penny dreadfuls that had a modern sensibility for style and storytelling techniques. I thought the Victorian era was a bit played out and decided to bump it up to the Edwardian era (or in America the Gilded Age or Progressive Age). There was so much going on at the turn of the 20th century to use as a creative resource, and yet for the most part it’s not a period that audiences are that familiar with. We thought that bringing in people like Thomas Edison and Harry Houdini and Jack London would make the story feel both fresh and familiar at the same time.

You must be a major history/sci fi/comix nut.
I’m a big history buff and I’ve loved doing research for the project. I knew very little about this period of American history so it was particularly fun. We started out trying to be very faithful to history, but like most historical-fiction writers we’ve veered a bit. Luckily, the nature and tone of the project doesn’t call for a documentarian’s fidelity. But we’ve had fun with that, too. Some of our anachronisms are actually big plot points, and we relied on people thinking that we had erred only to reveal later that the oversight was intentional and part of the story.

I collected comics as a kid until the early ’90s and I still follow some noteworthy titles. I learned from comics what comics learned from penny dreadfuls—how to tell a serialized story with maximum suspense and ongoing character development. So we’ve come full circle in a way. We’ve taken 150 years of serialized story innovation and reinjected it back into its original source.

One of the most challenging things in writing any serial is developing both a seasonal arc and an episode arc at the same time. Each show needs to work by itself and at the same time propel the action of the bigger story. Luckily, the resurgence of serialized television has given us a lot to study. In particular, I was watching Rome, Lost and Battlestar Galactica when we began. They were particularly helpful. And I watch Raiders of the Lost Ark over and over. That is the blend of history and adventure and horror and humor that I try to go for when I tackle the script.

Bryan is the one with the passion for horror and sci-fi. I tend to write period melodrama well, but it’s Bryan who comes in and figures out how to make it horrific or creepy or just plain strange. He loves upsetting and thrilling the audience, and what’s important is that it is done in a way that is not off-putting. Most of our horror is more macabre than brutal, but the show has been getting darker as we’ve gone along. This next one, episode ten, is probably our least humorous of any of our episodes thus far.

For the Penny Dreadful virgin, what do they have to know to get up to speed with the series?
Everything they need is on the Penny Dreadful website. We have each show available for free download to iPod or plot summaries for those who prefer reading their theater instead of watching it in their hands. We also show a brief movie before every show called “Our Story So Far…” that highlights just the plot points needed to understand that month’s show. It’s certainly a richer experience for those who know the whole story and we have a great group of fans to prove that, but we also get new audience members every month who know nothing of the story and come away with a fun and unique night.

So is it basically steampunk?
Steampunk came about after I had stopped collecting comic books. I had read a few and knew of the style, but I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know that it had a name or was considered a genre until last year. I think we have less of a fusion of history and futurism than steampunk tends to have; we aren’t retrofitting the costumes or the props of 1909 with 2009 designs or anything like that, but certainly we have not resisted putting a 21st-century style onto a period piece.

Your day job is with American Opera Projects. Has close contact with opera influenced Penny Dreadful at all?
It’s funny that you mention that because Bryan and Christiaan Koop (our sound designer) jokingly called episode nine, which I wrote and directed, “American Opera Projects Presents Penny Dreadful.” That episode had a lot of story revelations and scientific theories and metaphysical concepts, and I wasn’t sure how to do it until I saw Satyagraha at the Met last year, which I thought was brilliant. I used music to really drive the story along and more conceptual staging to reflect the headier ideas. And then of course there were a few murders and historical characters to ground the piece in Penny Dreadful land. Our shows are at times operatic in the grand, melodrama sense—and I mean that in the best way. If you get the tone right, melodrama is excellent. I also sometimes put into the script music that I listened to when I wrote the scene and often the director runs with it. So we’ve had some Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Saint-Saens… oh, and I almost forgot, Enrico Caruso made a guest appearance in episode six! He sang an aria just before our villain the Black Dragon created the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

Penny Dreadful’s Episode #10 (”The Science and the Seance: Two Tales of Love and Horror”) is at the Brick Sat 17 at 11pm and Sun 18 at 2pm.