In The Haunting of Night Vale, an Internet community finds home
.jpg "Cecil Baldwin during a live show in 2020.")
The Carolina Theatre wasn’t full Tuesday night, but it was energetic. There were teenagers and millennials in costumes and graphic t-shirts, with Crayola-colored hair and kitschy hats. There was the deep bass of a techno beat, and the electricity that flows through all of us, at every event, after two years of sporadic cancellations and socially distant seating and the internal argument over whether or not a show is worth the possibility of getting sick.
Cecil Baldwin, by comparison, looked plain in a tweed blazer and jeans, standing on a near-empty stage. But Baldwin doesn’t need to wear bright colors to grab your attention; his booming voice has kept listeners engaged for a decade on Welcome to Night Vale, a sci-fi podcast telling the story of a fictional Southwest desert town “where every conspiracy theory is true.”
Baldwin and the actors and musicians along for the ride can feel that electricity, too. This is the first time they’ve gone on tour since COVID-19 cut their 2020 tour short.
“Our first night in Washington, D.C. we had a standing ovation, just because I think people were so excited just to be out at a theater and enjoying live entertainment again,” Baldwin told the News & Observer in a softer version of the radio-ready voice he uses to host the show.
The live show, a one-off episode called The Haunting of Night Vale, is the same script from 2020. It takes on new meaning two years later, as our concepts of “home” have changed with the pandemic. You don’t have to have listened to the series or be invested in the lore for the live show to make sense, although a quick glance through a character list would help.
In the show, Baldwin’s character (another Cecil, but with a different surname) is building a house with his husband Carlos and the assistance of HGTV’s Property Brothers, whose camera crew and construction know-how is no match for Night Vale. Hauntings ensue, unseen but described by Baldwin with the help of other Night Vale residents on his community radio show. All of the action is set to the sound of synthesizers played in real-time by Disparition, the show’s longtime composer.
The story benefits from being a predominantly audio format: even though the actors and characters are diverse in race, gender, and sexuality, you can imagine them and the townspeople however you want. The show is scary in the same way The Addams Family is scary; creepiness is the backdrop that colors a story not about the supernatural, but the incredibly natural feelings that come with being alive, and how we find company with the other people who feel they don’t fit in.
Coincidentally, Baldwin began building a new home of his own last summer when he moved from New York City to Asheville. “I’m definitely finding that building a new life, in a new town, especially during a pandemic, is so challenging,” Baldwin told me. “Just getting to meet people and make friends.”
Night Vale is a fictional community deep in the desert and a real community deeply online. It has amassed a following over a decade that led to multiple tours, books, and a television show reportedly in the works. Its momentum came from the social media platform Tumblr, where swaths of fans who would have never crossed paths could talk about their interpretations of the characters and the town they lived in. It was part of the larger cultural shift in how we find community when the place we live and the people we’re around aren’t the right fit.
But as nice as an online community is, it’s equally important to commune, together, something that has been hard for two years. It’s important for young people, people of color, LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities to have space where, for a few hours, they don’t have to defend their right to exist somewhere in the offline world; Night Vale provides that.
And, even for the casual observer, there’s comfort to be found in the excited chatter at the end of a show, the circle of teenagers waiting for their parents to pick them up, and the laughs shared between cars in a parking deck on a Tuesday night.
This story was originally published March 31, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
