SLIPPERY ROCK — Sunny Texas is a far cry from a haunted Connecticut mansion, but David Skeele was ready for a change.

The professor of theater at Slippery Rock University is directing upcoming college productions of one-act comedies “Lone Star” and “Laundry and Bourbon.”

“It's a kind of play that is very rare for me. It's fairly light comedy,” Skeele, who teaches playwriting, acting and theater history, said. “It's something the Butler Little Theatre could do. I was in the mood for it.”

That might be because Skeele is making a name for himself and for the university by writing horror plays.

Since 2006, Skeele's one-act plays featuring ghosts, psychics and cults have played to rave reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland and in the United States.

He's readying another, “Electra: An American Gothic” the Greek tragedy of a vengeful daughter transposed to Appalachia, for this year's Edinburgh festival that runs from Aug. 1 through 25.

And this month, three of Skeele's plays, “Starla,” “The Margins” and “Hungry Jane” will be performed at the University of Basel in Basel, Switzerland, beginning April 18.

“Hungry Jane” will also be staged in Canberra, Australia, in October.

“I have a website, www.davidskeele.com, that features most of my plays with an emphasis on the horror plays,” he said. “That's how they found it.”

A graduate student at the University of Basel discovered his plays on the website, as did Lexx Productions in Australia.

“People Google horror theater and it's one of the first links that comes up,” Skeele said of his website.

Skeele, who has written more than 10 plays, said his horror output grew out of two events in 2005.

“I had gone to a playwriting seminar at the Kennedy Center and met Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who writes science fiction and horror plays. I didn't think it was possible. I got inspired,” Skeele said.

And Laura Smiley, Slippery Rock University associate professor of theater, had gone to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which Skeele called “the largest theater festival in the world,” on a scouting mission.

“She said we need a niche. We just can't go there and mount a production of 'A Streetcar Named Desire.' People are fighting over audiences,” said Skeele.

Horror became that niche in 2006 when Skeele wrote and Slippery Rock students and faculty performed “Dark North,” a one-act play about a fake psychic who “bites off more than he can chew” when he makes a house call to try and communicate with the ghost of a serial killer buried in the basement of a Connecticut mansion.

“By the end of the run, it was playing to sold-out houses,” he said of the Edinburgh audience reaction.

In 2008, Slippery Rock returned to Edinburgh with Skeele's “The Margins.”

“It's a play about more psychics gathered in a mansion to conjure up a ghost,” said Skeele. “They summon up the ghost of a 19th century schizophrenic house maid.”

In 2010, the university presented “Deep Church Hollow” with its hidden room and family secrets, and in 2012 “The Barwell Prophecy,” about a couple of Homeland Security agents working out of basement of a condemned church that once housed a weird religious sect.

He listed his influences as H.P. Lovecraft, Poe and Ray Bradbury.

And his favorite creature?

“Ghosts. I think that's what I like the most,” he said. “You encounter them as a suggestion, a shape vanishing around the corner.”

“It's very difficult to do horror well. I find some directors shy away from it. You have to fully throw yourself into it, commit to the idea you're looking in dark places.”

“You can't see what is going on in the character's head. It traps you in a room with actual people,” he said.

And that immediacy is new even to the most jaded slasher movie aficionado, he said.

Skeele said “The Margins” was performed for his Intro to Theater class.

“Many of them had never seen theater before,” he said of the students. “They loved it. They wrote us letters thanking us for the experience. They said they had no idea we were doing theater 'for us.'”

In Edinburgh, the plays are performed under the name “Slippery Rock Theater,” said Skeele, because college productions have a bad reputation at the festival.

“Starting in 2006, every other year we take 14 to 18 students to the festival for two weeks in August,” said SRU Department of Theater Chairman Gordon Phetteplace. “We mount a show with half the students as actors and half as designers and technicians. Three or four faculty members go also.”

Phetteplace said during the three-week festival between 400 to 500 plays are performed in venues ranging from church basements to hotel rooms.

The plays are mounted by students and faculty on a bare bones set.

“We don't do elaborate sets, but we use full costumes and full props,” said Phetteplace. “What we tell everyone is you are allowed two checked bags and one carry-on. One checked bag and the carry-on is for you, the other checked bag is for costumes and props.”

“I think it is really difficult to write a horror play,” said Skeele. “It has to be done in about an hour. It has a lot of actors and everything has to be boxed in a couple of crates.”

“Then it comes back here and during the first week of the semester, Welcome Week, we put it on campus,” Skeele said.

Skeele said he writes the plays on his own time and then they are further developed in a course called New Play Development.

Skeele said the play is rehearsed and rewritten and given a workshop production.

“I work on it again in the months of May and June, do revisions, rehearse it again, and it's boxed up and we fly everything to Edinburgh. “

For his latest, Skeele said he's always wanted to write his own version of an archetypal story.

“It's my own version of Greek tragedy set in rural America with its endless cycles of murder and retribution. How cool would it be, the challenge of combing the lyricism of the Greek with the bluntness of Appalachian dialect?” said Skeele.

“I think it is the best thing David's written, and I'm not biased because I'm directing,” said Phetteplace.

<B>WHAT: </B>Preview performances of “Laundry and Bourbon” and “Lone Star” with public discussion following the performances<B>WHEN: </B>7:30 p.m. April 15 and 16<B>WHERE: </B>Multipurpose room in the University Union on the Slippery Rock University campus<B>TICKETS: </B>Can be purchased at the information desk at the Smith Center on campus any time or at the door one hour before performance.