Expect madness this month, and not of the basketball type. We're talking witchcraft, mystery, gore and adventure — and that's just what you can expect from one of the plays opening Friday from THEATREdART. The local theater troupe that brought you the glorified horror of Grand Guignol will present three weekends of some of the most revered, yet horrific, literary works of the 20th century in Excerpts From the Miskatonic Library: An Evening of H.P. Lovecraft.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, author of great stories such as The Call of Cthulhu and The Shadow Out of Time, lived a tumultuous life in the early 1900s. His fiction, replete with images of cannibals, castles and meteors, has often been compared to that of Edgar Allan Poe.

"Laura Fuller, a writer that adapted one of the short stories for the stage, originally came to us with the idea," says director Tom Condas. "She was passionate about Lovecraft's ethos and the way he describes the indescribable. And pretty soon we were all just as obsessed with the idea."

Each night, TdA will portray three Lovecraft stories, including Fuller's take on The Dunwich Horror, as well as The Music of Erich Zann and Pickman's Model. "We all read as much Lovecraft as possible for about a month before we came together to pick these three," says producer Maelle Dassonville.

The company also brought in local artists to engineer "creepy, Twilight Zone-like" sets, as well as local musicians, like Ariel Robinson, to help compose and set the music for the plays.

"The theatre is not afraid of the dark and twisted," says Dassonville. "We're all looking forward to this one."