(BLAIRSTOWN, NJ) -- The Devil and Daisy Dirt - A Garden State Gothic Event comes to Roy's Hall on Saturday, May 3, 2025 at 8:00pm. This production features live music, a life-sized puppet, and takes a deep dive into New Jersey's most intriguing lore. The cast includes Alex Dawson, Dan Diana, Arlan Feiles, and Jackie Fogel. This is one show you won't want to miss!
On the night of an annual appetite contest called "I 8 the Devil," Daisy Dirt finds something strange - winged and antlered, wounded but alive - in the dumpster behind Lucille's Luncheonette (aka the Devil's Diner). With the help of a Piney palm reader named Effie and a piece of magic muscle meat from the basement game locker, Daisy evades a villainous poacher named Tasty (Murder) and risks everything to save it.
Think Pine Barrens “Our Town” meets E.T., with a shoulder-shot cryptid instead of a stranded extraterrestrial, deer hunters instead of federal agents, and a portal that opens above the Apple Pie Hill fire tower after a midnight lightening strike instead of an alien mothership shaped like a Christmas tree ornament. All backed by a high lonesome sound.
Tickets are $28 (plus fees) and available for purchase online. Roy's Hall is located at 30 Main Street in Blairstown, New Jersey.
Click here to sample the soundtrack by Arlan Feiles.
ALEX DAWSON (writer/director/narrator) is full time faculty at Rutgers University, where he teaches creative writing (with a focus on folklore and horror) and leads fable-fueled Study Abroad programs to some of the worlds most mythical places. He is the owner/creator of the the Rac-On-Tour, a mobile bookstore/cabinet of wonder built on the back of a flatbed farm truck, and he curates/hosts R.O.T. Fest, a bi-monthly vaudevillian variety show that puts writers onstage alongside musicians, puppeteers, and sideshow performers. He is an award-winning playwright/set designer. His many NYC productions include Room to Swing an Axe and Deep in the Jeeps of Georgia. His forthcoming novel, Welcome to White Hart, has been called "magical and masterful" (Lev Grossman, The Magicians) and "a work of wizardry" (Idra Novey, Those Who Knew). Samantha Hunt (Mr. Splitfoot) called it a "wonder" and said it was "impossible not to be amazed.
ARLAN FEILES (composer/lyricist/performer) is an award winning, internationally touring Asbury Park singer/songwriter and music producer mentored by the late great Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame record producer Tom Dowd. He has released six critically acclaimed records, and his music can be heard in many TV programs and movies, including the trailer for the Academy award winning film “The Dallas Buyers Club.” His band is The Brokenhearted. His albums included Razing a Nation, Weeds Kill the Wildflowers, and What Kind of World.
DAN DIANA (fabricator/puppeteer/Devil) was a Special FX Artist/Prop Fabricator in Hollywood for seven years, working on mostly Marvel movies, like Guardians of the Galaxy & The Avengers. He built the battered Iron Man Helmet in Endgame. Dan studied prosthetic make-up with Tom Savini at The Douglas Education Center in Pennsylvania. Dan currently works for Four Horsemen Studios, where he sculpts/fabricates hyper-detailed, life-size replicas of the various figures that populate their Mythic Legions universe. Diana and Dawson have collaborated on many other projects including Nosferatu: The First Vampyre, a theatrical production inspired by the silent film, and The Thing at Raritan Landing, a theatrical haunt set in colonial New Jersey.
JACKIE FOGEL (Daisy Dirt) holds a BFA in Acting from Northern Illinois University, trained at the Moscow Art Theatre, and was accepted into The Actors Studio as a working finalist. Jackie performed in New York City theater, followed by a decade in Los Angeles, where she did voiceover work and appeared in commercials and indie films. She now teaches middle school theater in Westfield, NJ, where she helps students find their voices, build confidence, and develop a deeper understanding of themselves and others through the art of performance.
DEVON BORKOWSKI (original cast member, Daisy Dirt) is an actress, writer, and artist. She is a Ren Faire regular and a trained sword-fighter. She graduated with a BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts in 2022. She specializes in surrealist oil paintings and much of her art is inspired by her childhood in the New Jersey Pine Barrens (see ART). She is currently working on a novel called The Blood Ran Red, an indigenous dark fantasy revolving around Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, blood quantum, and ancestral trauma. She previously collaborated with Dawson on The Wolf of Washington Forge (2022) and The Thing at Raritan Landing (2023), theatrical haunts set in colonial New Jersey.
Roy's Hall is operated by Blairstown Live-Arts, Inc., a NJ (501(c)(3) non-profit cultural institution with the goal of promoting a broad appreciation of the interplay between culture and artistic expression. It does this by acting as a forum for artists who best exemplify world traditions, reflect contemporary trends and explore artistic frontiers, and by nurturing the artistic and cultural life of its own community in and around the Skylands region of New Jersey.
Photos by Nina Westervelt
