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There are ghosts and demons in Jeffrey M. Jones' "Seventy Scenes of Halloween," which makes it the perfect play for the haunting season, the shadowy, shivery time.

Georgia Athearn still gets goose bumps thinking about the first time she saw it, a 1979 production by the Remains Theater Company in a 26-seat black box space in Chicago.

"The play is like a (carnival) haunted house," Athearn said. "It is very fun, one of the most fun Halloween plays I've ever read. But it is not all dark and ookie."

In fact, it was the play's construction, not its fear factor, that gave her goose bumps all those years ago in Chicago.

"The play allows directors to put the scenes in any order they want, so that it tells a story of their choice," she said. "The playwright gives liberty to the director to tell the story from a direction about relationships or from a direction that is about the spookiness and the macabre."

Athearn, who is directing the play for Albuquerque's Desert Rose Playhouse, has chosen to go with the relationship angle.

A comedy with a bizarre edge, "Seventy Scenes of Halloween" is the story of a playwright named Jeff (Yannig Morin) and his wife, Joan (Robyn Wells), and how their lives spin into nightmare one Halloween evening.

"They have been married nine years and are going through the typical marital problems," Athearn said. "Some people have suggested that Jeff and Joan are two aspects of playwright Jeffrey Jones' personality."

There are also several ghosts, a beast (Travis Snow) and a witch (Lori Ubelhart).

"The beast is Jeff's alter ego and the witch is Joan's," Athearn said.

So the real horror is marriage - or at least Jeff and Joan's marriage.

"Halloween (in tradition) is that time of year when the veil between our real self and our alter ego is thinnest," Athearn said. "It is a great time of reflection, releasing a lot, getting ready for the dark time of the year.

"In revealing parts of themselves to each other, Jeff and Joan see each other in a new light."

So the play is more psychological horror story than slasher film.

"There is a little bit of gory stuff, climatic moments involving knives, but there's not any explicit violence," Athearn said.

And there are not 70 scenes. In Athearn's take on the story, there are just 67. But that'll probably be more than enough to give an audience goose bumps.