Foul-mouthed teens & mysterious moonshine fail to fright in Broadway’s ‘Grey House’

The Rundown

Note to self: If I’m ever on a rural road in the middle of a snowstorm, hit a deer, and break my foot, do not enter the creepy house occupied by foul-mouthed teenage girls and a fridge full of mysterious moonshine. It will not end well.

Such is the demise of Max and Henry in the new Broadway play Grey House, which opened May 30^th at the Lyceum Theatre. Of course, we’ve been down this path before — Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge in Knock at the Cabin, James Caan in Misery — but translating hair-raising thrills and chills to the stage is no easy feat.

Director Joe Mantello (The Boys in the Band, Wicked) makes the most of Levi Holloway’s confounding script, led by a reliable Laurie Metcalf as the girls’ hot-headed guardian.  

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No Tea, No Shade

It’s a heavy winter night in 1977 when Max (Tatiana Maslany)* and Henry (Paul Sparks) find themselves stranded after a car accident. The two-story home where they seek refuge isn’t your average boarding house. Raleigh (Metcalf) leads the clan, but what she lacks in maternal instinct, she makes up for in sharp-tongued one-liners about the couple’s inevitable fate.

Holloway, whose fascination with horror dates back to an early childhood viewing of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Stephen King novels as early reading material, establishes a 1970s-style purgatory that never quite descends into the depths of horror the play’s advertising suggests.

Instead, Grey House dabbles in satire as the couple quickly recognizes the absurd creepiness of their situation. The girls, led by Marlow (Sophia Anne Caruso), taunt them throughout the night as the storm rages on. A cellar door mysteriously opens on its own. The refrigerator’s contents transform from a mundane carton of eggs to chilled mason jars of that mysterious distillate. And when Henry starts swigging, things get even weirder.

Scott Pask’s grim scenic design, cluttered with artifacts, taxidermy, bric-à-brac, and a rotary phone with a severed cord, provides plenty of distraction from the circumventive dialogue, amplified by Tom Gibbons’ ambient sound design and Natasha Katz’s starkly shadowed lighting, which helps draw attention to the play’s more macabre moments.

But despite such atmospheric efforts, Henry’s fate feels predestined from the onset, as the girls suck the soul out of any man that crosses their path. Max’s fate isn’t much better, but these walls won’t talk.

Let’s Have a Moment

With a broken foot and bleeding head, things aren’t looking up for Henry, and it only gets worse when the rest of the house goes to sleep. Enter The Ancient (Cyndi Coyne), a grandmotherly version of M3GAN, who climbs out of the walls to lure and embalm the guy with what looks like a diluted jar of Monster Ultra Blue energy drink.

Henry perks up, but it’s just a matter of time before the girls gather around the dining table for a one-night-only feast that he should have considered skipping.

The Final Word

In a recent New York Times interview, the cast, director, and playwright offered various takes on the play’s themes, and their incongruous responses may validate this theatergoer’s equally as mystifying experience.

“It wears the jacket of horror,” Holloway said of his play, “But I think it’s more heart than horror.”

“I think that it’s important in this genre that this world has a particular set of rules, this house has a particular set of rules,” director Mantello said. “Though the audience may not ever completely comprehend exactly what those rules are, we all have to be crystal-clear about them and adhere to them.”

Metcalf, known to TV audiences for her role as Jackie on Roseanne, the spin-off The Conners, and back-to-back Tony wins for A Doll’s House, Part 2 (2017), and Three Tall Women (2018), hopes viewers can figure it out, saying, “The audience is going to teach us that piece of the puzzle — their reactions will definitely tell us a lot.”

For queer theatergoers looking for an occasional thrill without the typical Bury Your Gays trope, Grey House is entertaining enough, but for the price of a Broadway ticket, an overnighter at a haunted hotel might do the trick.

Grey House plays on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre through September 3.

*Claire Karpen played Max at the performance Queerty attended.