Grey House Broadway Reviews

“Grey House,” at the Lyceum Theater, is certainly an in-your-face assault, more in the manner of John Carpenter movies than anything seen onstage since the age of melodrama. It is so expertly assembled from spare parts by the playwright Levi Holloway and the director Joe Mantello that you may not notice, between the jump scares and the shivery pauses, how little it has on its mind. Something about cycles of abuse? The legacy of misogyny? Sure, let’s go with that.

As Max, Claire Karpen (standing in for Tatiana Maslany at the performance reviewed) takes to confusion and resignation without muss or fuss. Confounded by her relationship to the self-flagellating Henry and beaten down from mourning a just-passed father and long-dead sister, Karpen’s Max is frightened but ready for the next act — and for someone to love who won’t die. As Henry, Sparks is elastic and electric. The most haunted, haunting performance comes from Sophia Anne Caruso as Marlow. The actress who originated the spooky-child lead role of Lydia in “Beetlejuice: The Musical,” Caruso knows how to play to fear, loathing and cutting dialogue. Cracking wise with aching vulnerability, Caruso is the insistent, irresistible heart of “Grey House” and its sonorous death knell.

When it comes to horror, Broadway typically cedes turf to Hollywood, the occasional Martin McDonough play notwithstanding. There have been giant apes, operatic phantoms, and a misguided vampire or two without providing so much as a single genuine tingle. All of which makes the effort of Grey House so bold. A creepy mash-up of haunted house tropes, cabin in the woods traditions, ghosty kids, errant hatchets, screams, black-outs and the sort of Lynchian lounge music that drips with reverb and menace, Grey House hails from the playwright Levi Holloway and director Joe Mantello, with stars Laurie Metcalf, Tatiana Maslany, and Paul Sparks joined by ferociously talented quintet of child-to-adolescent actors.

Although its overall message may be clouded amid the hazy supernatural storyline, Grey House is a bold, original, and unapologetically eerie play that will continue to haunt theatergoers long after they've left the theater. Those who are drawn to its call should definitely pay Grey House a visit — they've been expecting you. Grade: B

Unusually, but actually very helpfully, an email from the production landed after this critic had attended the play explaining what Grey House was really about. That is a first for this critic and—while welcome in this instance—perhaps not a good sign. If you have to send explanations of a play, it suggests some awareness within the production that the play is not being understood. This critic will not reveal the contents of that email—spoilers and all that—but the production itself does not make itself as crystal clear as the paragraphs later explaining it. That is not to say a bad time was had, but rather, for good and ill, Grey House is the strangest show on Broadway.

Mantello allows a deliberate clash between his horror-y staging and Holloway’s penchant for knowing humor. The clash sometimes works. Max is initially unfazed by the children’s creepy behavior, even meeting their strangeness with gallows humor. (When Marlow bemoans the difficulty of killing her with a small knife, Max does not miss a beat before replying: “You could go for the throat.”) At other times, the play’s humor confuses its overall tone. Max greets the house’s bizarre happenings with calm at one moment but fear the next, depending on the demands of the story. Metcalf fires off Raleigh’s explosions of anger with a sardonic “DAD’S DEAD” delivery style that deflates serious moments.

I won’t try to explain what exactly is going on in the Grey House, both in order to avoid spoiling the plot and because I’m not entirely sure myself. (The production sent over a PDF explaining the lore to critics after they attended, which may be a sign that things aren’t entirely clear in the performance.) I’ll just say that Holloway inches toward a double-underlined, not exactly groundbreaking message about how men treat women, though the more the play tried to emphasize its insights, the less I bought into them. Things are better unspoken, as in a gory set piece near the end of the play that’s accompanied by some haunting music (heed the chilling credit of “a cappella arranger” Or Matias in your program) that’s stuck with me more than any of the direct exposition.

One thing’s for sure about the first show of the 2023-24 Broadway season: Grey House has curb appeal. Actress Laurie Metcalf and director Joe Mantello each lend Tony Award-winning luster to the listing at the Lyceum Theatre. Moreover, haunted-house tales are rare commodities on stage, so that also counts as a clear credit. From there, things turn murkier with Chicago-based playwright Levi Holloway’s story set in a remote cabin that moans, groans, and features the freakiest refrigerator since a demon moved into one in Ghostbusters. The unspoken come-on of Grey House is: Be afraid, be very afraid. Yes, please! Although the 110-minute production oozes mystery and a ghostly vibe, it doesn’t deliver intense shivers. It’s too vague to stir psychological chills or, for that matter, good old-fashioned goosebumps. It’s as much a head-scratcher as it is a hair-raiser.

Playwright Levi Holloway is certainly lucky. His 2019 shocker was plucked out of obscurity (a Chicago run) by producers and director Joe Mantello (Wicked), who give it a deluxe production filled with A-list actors: Laurie Metcalf, Paul Sparks, and Beetlejuice TikTok sensation Sophia Anne Caruso. (Tatiana Maslany is in the ensemble but, due to illness, was not at the performance I attended; instead, the warm and appealing Claire Karpen played Max.) Yes, Holloway sure won the lottery; audiences who pay for his pretentious pulp? Not so much.

A first-rate cast and creative team have been assembled for the play which premiered at Chicago’s A Red Orchid Theatre in 2019. Director Joe Mantello’s production features contributions from scenic designer Scott Pask, costume designer Rudy Monce, lighting designer Natasha Katz and sound designer Tom Gibbons, all working at the top of their game. And the sterling ensemble includes Laurie Metcalf, Tatiana Maslany (who missed critics’ performances after being sidelined with Covid), Paul Sparks, and Sophia Anne Caruso. It’s hard to avoid the feeling, however, that the play, which depends highly on a tightly controlled, ominous atmosphere, might have been more impactful when presented in the Chicago theater’s much smaller space.

It may be that the challenging intricacies of Holloway’s plot – of what unappealingly unfolds in the final few moments – will result in some head-scratching and “Huh, what?” mouthings from those exiting the hushed auditorium. Spectators who get Holloway’s full intentions, who follow his incriminating sentiments about the nectar of dead men origins will not only declare themselves scarily entertained but will continue considering the charges he has incorporated about man’s cruelty throughout the ages.

“Grey House” is trying to honor that unstinting parentage, despite the baked-in demands on a mostly young cast of kids, who give it all they’ve got. The show also has to whip up interest on a hot summer night. That’s not an easy combo, and you can see the strains it puts on the second half of the show, but much of worth gets unpacked here. Scarily so, to boot.

Stories of horror are fantastical, but need to follow their own inner logic once the parameters of that fantasy have been established. One game played in “Grey House” dictates that a mother will die if the “it” person tells a lie. Well, many lies are told and Raleigh, while tortured, somehow survives. If she’s the kids’ mother, why doesn’t she die? If she isn’t their mother, why is she tortured by these lies? Raleigh survives because if she didn’t, “Grey House” would end well before Holloway delivers his climax, which is a very unappetizing dinner party that involves way too much exposition to make narrative sense of what’s happening.

Even with the likely post-performance discussions and musings about 'meaning,' the greatest strength of this production of Grey House is the consistency of its preternatural mood. That is all thanks to its fully committed cast, to Joe Mantello's sharply focused direction, and to the design team of Scott Pask, whose set draws us into both the seen and unseen areas of the cabin; Rudy Mance, whose costumes provide both contemporary and appropriately dated looks that help us differentiate between the living and the dead; and Natasha Katz's lighting and Tom Gibbons' sound design that gives the entire production its air of disquietude. I like that word 'disquietude.' It is the best description I can think of for Grey House. Nothing that jumps out at you, just a series of inexplicable and ominous moments that hold things together until the very end.

But apart from Laurie Metcalf’s enjoyable portrayal of an inscrutable mountain woman, and a set by Scott Pask out of the Grimms’ grimmest fairy tale, the play itself exists in a sort of gray zone — neither particularly terrifying nor profound. It belongs in that lesser rank of thrillers that whip up suspense by withholding vital information, the kind that requires gullible characters to take the bait and audiences to wait for clarification before the final bows.

As always, director Joe Mantello has gotten uniformly superb performances from everyone on stage; the cast gets a gold star for their commitment to this uneven material. On the downside, Mantello could pick up the pacing a little, the play often seems to be limping (just like Henry) to its conclusion as we impatiently wait for all to be revealed. And here’s the biggest rub: when everything is “explained,” you might still be unsure of what you just saw. That’s sadly not by design, but because Holloway’s plot ultimately turns out to be a little too complicated for its own good. Moreover, Holloway pays too much attention to the paranormal and not enough to the play’s psychological underpinnings; only if you have a lot of time to reflect on what you’ve seen can you really understand what the work is ultimately about.

However, director Joe Mantello’s production of “Grey House” only offers a few audio-based jump-scares and a vaguely spooky atmosphere. The tension is swallowed whole even by a house as intimate as the Lyceum, and shudders from the audience are rare. Once we’ve become accustomed to the occasional burst of unexpected noise, the play settles for being merely unsettling.