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In Broadway’s ‘Grey House,’ Something Nightmarish This Way Comes

I can only think of a handful of plays that incite fear, unsettle the audience, or display terrifying power. Martin McDonagh’s terrifying “Pillow Man” is one of them. Tracy Letts came up with her two, the hilariously mean thriller “Killer Joe” and the paranoid tale “Bug.”

This will certainly be Levi Holloway’s. “Grey House” It’s currently showing at the Lyceum Theater on Broadway, which is strange. The premise is classic horror. A couple (Tatiana Maslany and Paul Sparks) stranded in a blizzard end up in a creepy house full of eccentric children and their caretaker (Laurie Metcalfe).

“I wear a horror jacket,” Holloway said of his play. Premiered in Chicago in 2019. “But I think it’s more heart than horror.”

The genre may have little on stage, but none of the major players here are familiar with works that explore disturbing tensions and the boundaries of reality. Metcalfe and Sparks have ties to Stephen King, she was in Broadway’s “Misery” and he was in Season 2 of Hulu’s “Castle Rock,” set in King’s fictional world. . Maslany won an Emmy Award for his masterful portrayal of numerous clones in the “Orphan Black” series. Millicent Simmons played Emily Blunt’s daughter Regan in A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part 2, Sophia Ann Caruso played Lydia in the Broadway musical Beetlejuice, and starred in the Netflix fantasy film A Quiet Place. Starred in The School for Good. and evil. ”

Director Joe Mantello also participated, wearing an actor’s hat and playing the role of a reporter in “American Horror Story: NYC.”

During a series of interviews held in the Lyceum’s suitably atmospheric basement lounge, members of the show’s cast and creative team discussed what horror means to them, and what the “Grey House” special, which opens May 30, will be doing. We discussed challenges and rewards. Edited excerpts from these conversations.

When Holloway was five years old, his father took him to the cinema to see A Nightmare on Elm Street. “My skin was peeling off. I was so scared,” Holloway said.

But his father eventually bought him a subscription to Fangoria, a horror film magazine, to help little Levi understand how fear works. To encourage his child to read, his father gave him books by Stephen King, including The Stand.

As a playwright, he has partly embraced horror out of pure love (he cited John Carpenter’s The Thing as his favorite, but why The Exorcist III is the best of the series). Please don’t talk about how), and how to handle major trauma: In 2016, his twin sister was murdered at the age of 35. “It was so pointless, pointless, so inexplicable that it made me wonder why it happened,” he said.

“I started thinking about predestination and destiny, and how we eventually got where we were supposed to be, no matter what direction we were going. I did,” Holloway continued. “So I wanted to write about it, and I wanted to write about grief, where to put it and the house that holds it.”

“Mind games, manipulation, and psychological thrillers in general are the scariest genres of quote horror for me,” Caruso said. “And I think this play definitely falls into the ‘psychological thriller’ category of horror.”

The young actress has a problem with the genre where women often lose power. “But throughout this story, we hold a lot of power without people being aware of it directly,” she said of the women in the play. (Well, maybe not all of them.)

“What I love about my character is that she always feels one step ahead,” Caruso said of the role, which made the most of the actress’s gift for sarcasm. . “She knows exactly where we’re going, but she doesn’t show it. That’s a fun frustration.”

Before rehearsals began, Mantello watched The Shining, where he found similarities to Holloway’s play. “It’s a psychological thriller, and it definitely has elements of Gore, but I think it was a family isolation in a very wintery landscape,” he said of the Stanley Kubrick film. “And a certain entity that changes the trajectory of their lives.”

One of Broadway’s most sought-after directors, Mantello is no stranger to rigorous screenwriting, but initially found the script for “Grey House” elusive. So he asked Holloway what activated the play’s inner logic. “I think it’s important in this genre that this world has certain rules, and this house has certain rules,” said Mantello. “Audiences may not fully understand what these rules are, but we all need to have a clear understanding of them and abide by them.”

The “gray house” is also not just a physical place. Even though the show is set in his 1977, it seems to be associated with a general angst that feels very modern. “I feel like the world is in an incredibly dangerous place right now,” Mantello said. “In this particular case, it’s the seemingly benign children — the enigmatic children — who are at risk,” he added with a laugh.

“The one that rocked me the most was The Exorcist,” Metcalf said of his early encounters with horror films. “I was in my early teens, I think, and it terrified me for the next fifty-odd years.”

And now she’s starring in ‘Grey House’. Metcalfe was drawn to the prospect of working again with frequent collaborator Mantello, who wrote the script she admitted she “didn’t quite understand” when she first read it. I’m interested in how to handle it. “I knew Joe saw something in that room and I wanted to be there and find out,” she said.

The show has to balance a difficult mix of dark wit and disturbing atmosphere. “Audiences tell us pieces of the puzzle, and their reactions will definitely tell us a lot,” Metcalfe said, adding that audience feedback has made the comedy and horror genres more interesting. told about how to prosper. “Learn how far you can go with humor and thrills.”

Metcalf noted that he had starred in the 1999 Martin McDonagh play directed by Steppenwolf, adding, “I felt the same way about Leene’s Beauty Queen, which is both terrifying and funny.” It’s a really fun path for an actor to laugh and figure out where we’re going. ”

As Caruso pointed out, genre films, especially horror, can be an awkward place for women. For Simmons, who is deaf, there is an extra layer. “It’s rare to see a deaf person who actually has that kind of power and agency to navigate the world,” she said of her own character via her interpreter. “They are often portrayed as victims, pitiful beings, beings to help. When I read the scripts,” she added. “It was just about a person, not necessarily deaf.”

Simmons said she generally struggled to deal with spiders and graphic violence in movies, and said Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan was an influence, saying, “What’s real? And I don’t know what’s not true,” he said. “Gray house”.

Caigy, like her colleagues, concurred in discussing the play at length, and Simmons conceded that she sees the play as a story of motherhood. “The film explores the question of what it means to be a mother,” she said. “What is motherhood like for each of us? What sacrifices do we have to make to be mothers? How do we support our families?”

Like Mantello, Sparks connected the show to the great sense of dread that besets our society: the sense that the world is unstable. “There are many things that we cannot control, that we cannot understand, and that are different from what we think,” he said. “It’s all in this play.”

The actor noted that “Grey House” uses a major horror trope of a cabin in the woods. But Holloway spun it in a novel way, inserting cryptic aspects into the story that made Sparks want to take it apart and decipher it.

But he hopes audiences will show some restraint in how much they share after seeing the film. “I’ve been trying not to tell people what’s going on,” he said. “These actors, these kids – I think people don’t know what to expect. And it doesn’t even come close to what they can imagine.”

“I think you will be shocked,” he added. “It’s true.”

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