Four strange girls between the ages of 12 and 200 live in a secluded cabin in the woods. Isn’t that always the case?
Marlowe (Sophia Ann Caruso) is an alpha who bosses the people around her, even the outsiders who are left behind. Because in any play that uses the tropes of a million horror stories, there are bound to be outsiders left behind. In “The Gray House” the main trope is shy creepiness. Marlowe, who has a Wednesday Addams vibe about the little knife she occasionally wields, comforts her, saying, “You can see it in the eye, but it won’t hit the brain.”
Good to know. And it basically applies to the theater itself.
“Gray House” at the Lyceum Theater, certainly more in the manner of a John Carpenter movie than anything seen onstage since the soap opera era, no doubt more in the face. The piece is so expertly put together from spare parts by playwright Levi Holloway and director Joe Mantello that between the jump scares and the quivering stillness, you realize how thoughtless this piece is. maybe not. What about chains of abuse? A legacy of misogyny? Yes, let’s go with that.
But mostly, let’s get to the insane fun of four telekinetic weirdos and their den mother Laurie. Laurie Her Metcalf plays Laurie Her Metcalf, who wears a salt-and-pepper wig and is as hideous as she is. Laurie is not very maternal. Marlowe says she “sometimes” becomes their mother. She usually leaves them free, except that she feeds them like a garden weeder and untangles their hair.
At the beginning of the play, these devices include some sort of gas mask device being made by an otherworldly deaf girl named Barney (Millicent Simmons). (Hint: this is not a gas mask.) What Rhys (Colby Kipnes) is making is even worse, a tapestry of her guts. (She’s called a squirrel, probably because she has a tendency to nibble on things like phone cords, and the plot will short out if you leave her alone.)
Fortunately, the fourth girl, A1656 (Alyssa Emily Marvin), is just right. She acts as Barney’s interpreter and humors her outsiders to calm them down when they arrive. Explaining her own name, she admits, unusual as it may be, that she is “not A1655.”
An outsider, a childless couple, has inevitably just wrecked a car on a dark, snowy mountain road and needs to calm down. Max (Tatiana Maslany) was driving. I turned around to hit the deer, but I hit him anyway. In an accident, Henry (Paul Sparks) damaged his ankle, or his leg, or his soul. As the play’s 95 minutes pass, it strikes within him as a restless injury. Either way, Laurie splints him and the girls give him moonshine as an anesthetic.
Well, not really moonshine.
“Grey House” came to Broadway from Chicago. World Premiere at the Red Orchid Theater In 2019, the impact is noticeable, but the secret is kept quiet. How Max and Henry’s marriage was falling apart even before the accident, and why he’s so much into helping a group of girls, if not their caretaker, completely fall apart. We will gradually come to understand whether they are interested in By the time we start putting together possible explanation schemes, it won’t matter. The fear trap scared Bejesus out of the psychological drama, even though there was no meaningful terror underneath it.
At least those traps are great. I didn’t discuss her two other humans who make up the cast (at least I think they’re humans), but even more prominently, there’s nothing to discuss about his character. Designed by Scott Pask, lit by Natasha Katz, and especially voiced by sound designer Tom Gibbons, the house seems to be a treasure trove of emotion and history that everyone else has mostly avoided. Moan while teasing.
Its teasing nature, though charming at times, and if you’re a frightened cat, often breaks the hardcore shock, but despite alluding to reality, the “gray house” ‘ shouldn’t be taken too seriously. The horrors of the world past and present. (Yes, the Holocaust gets a hat-tip.) We know too much about the rules of the genre, how information and rendition can be manipulated to frighten or please us, You can’t give much credence to something deeper. In that sense, “Grey House” is like a jukebox musical, cramming gore, ghosts, and other familiar arias into almost empty but chic and fun new containers.
Letting go of the theatrical meaning in favor of the senses is a major challenge today. The playwright’s ambition to speak directly to our time through emotional naturalism has nearly wiped out horror, mystery, and the like from our theater. One of his last such plays to be staged on Broadway was 2015 adaptation of Stephen King’s “Misery”stars Bruce Willis as the author of a mystery novel and once again the great Laurie Metcalf as a psychopathic fan who leads him to death.
So one more thing to say about “Grey House” is that this work presents a rare opportunity for an outdated form and an artist who wants to explore a particular language. Metcalf and the rest of the cast turn the occasion into a meal. By investing in that cliché without condescending, they do a lot to break it.
But it may not make sense to us that this effort is meaningful to an artist, that Holloway started thinking about stories in the wake of a family tragedy. And while theaters are already kind of haunted houses, filled with strange beings and strange noises, horror could simply work better in a less lively medium. When Max and Henry show up at the shack, unaware that anyone is there, they look around their eerie surroundings, hear the howl of the wind, and somehow realize that everything is so nostalgic.
“I’ve seen this movie,” Henry says. That’s exactly the problem.
gray house
At the Lyceum Theater in Manhattan. Gray House Broadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
