Greeted by the home’s oddball inhabitants, the couple (performed by Paul Sparks and Tatiana Maslany) overlook the ominous indicators, gratefully ingesting from a fridge stocked totally with beakers of pale-colored liquids which can be named for males, comparable to “Douglas 1971.” In addition they keep away from dwelling on the preoccupied younger lady who goes to the basement to cut up bloody, stringy issues, or on the overfilled basket of mountaineering boots in a nook that nobody within the family wears.
Actually, playwright Levi Holloway’s “Gray Home,” which marked its official opening Thursday evening at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre, is creepy and spooky. It additionally has weightier targets than scaring the, er, boots off you, which is why Atwood’s work in dystopian feminist parable involves thoughts.
However other than Laurie Metcalf’s fulfilling portrayal of an inscrutable mountain lady, and a set by Scott Pask out of the Grimms’ grimmest fairy story, the play itself exists in a type of grey zone — neither significantly terrifying nor profound. It belongs in that lesser rank of thrillers that whip up suspense by withholding very important info, the sort that requires gullible characters to take the bait and audiences to attend for clarification earlier than the ultimate bows.
Efficiently stirring up horror on a stage is an elusive quest (Signature Theatre’s underwhelming revival of “Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Road” being a present instance). I can rely on one hand the instances I’ve been deliberately and authentically dazzled by chiller theater: Martin McDonagh’s “The Pillowman” (2003), Jack Thorne’s “Let the Proper One In” (2013), the unique manufacturing of “Sweeney Todd” (1979). The units of moviemaking are so significantly better geared up to awaken nightmares that theater’s efforts to make the pores and skin crawl appear hokey by comparability.
For “Gray Home,” director Joe Mantello recycles a couple of backyard selection shocks — haunting figures on the home windows, eerie noises, that type of factor. And Holloway pokes some enjoyable on the fashionable Gen X tastes of Sparks’s Henry and Maslany’s Max. The play’s mechanics, too, embody meta-theatrical winks on the style. Nonetheless, the plot ties up the manufacturing in ponderous knots, and its doubtlessly shifting spin on the revenge play will get misplaced in murky moralizing.
The drama is much less a whodunit than a whoizzit. The connection among the many younger girls buzzing about (performed with convincing adolescent insouciance by Sophia Anne Caruso, Millicent Simmonds, Colby Kipnes and Alyssa Emily Marvin), and alternately welcoming and menacing the company, is a riddle you most likely gained’t have the ability to clear up by yourself. It’s honest preparation to say that the ache and grief circulating via the cabin, a sort of supernatural midway home, is a bonding agent for its inhabitants.
Metcalf, as all the time, is aware of find out how to take up the correct amount of emotional house in a room: Her Raleigh, robust and hard-bitten, is a delightful anchor for “Gray Home,” at the same time as we lose curiosity in its enigmatic machinations. Sparks and Maslany are themselves vivid presences.
Nonetheless, should you’re the kind of individual intent on cracking each code, your tolerance for “Gray Home” will likely be restricted. I don’t thoughts being stored at midnight by a thriller, as long as I can maintain the expectation of a scorching payoff. Alas, on this event I extra typically sank again into my seat than perched on the sting of it.
Gray Home, by Levi Holloway. Directed by Joe Mantello. Set, Scott Pask; costumes, Rudy Mance; lighting, Natasha Katz; sound, Tom Gibbons; motion, Ellenore Scott; inventive signal language, Andrew Morrill; music supervision, Or Matias. With Cyndi Coyne, Eamon Patrick O’Connell. About 100 minutes. On the Lyceum Theatre, 149 W. 45th St., New York. greyhousebroadway.com.