I’m Not Sure I’ve Ever Had a Theater Experience Like This One

Wide Angle Broadway’s Paranormal Activity Had My Audience Losing Their Minds Can a play really be scary? The ingenious new show offers a resounding answer. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Sam Adams? Aug 28, 20261:46 PM Matthew Murphy Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. When was the last time you heard an audience hold their breath? Screams are pretty common, laughter too, but it’s hard to catch 1,200 people truly off guard, especially when they think they know what they’re in for. But as primed as the crowd at Paranormal Activity was for spooky shenanigans and supernatural goings-on, they were still audibly shocked by some of its scares, and then thrilled by how thoroughly they’d been fooled. I am speaking, to be clear, of Paranormal Activity, the play, currently up at Broadway’s August Wilson Theatre—not the 2009 movie, its five sequels, or the 2021 reboot that laid the groundwork for yet another movie scheduled to be released next year. Levi Holloway’s script takes elements from the original series, namely its focus on a young, perennially feuding couple whose house is inhabited by an unearthly entity with a penchant for slamming doors and rearranging kitchens. But it’s not a continuation of the movies’ increasingly complicated story, which grew from an elemental tale of demonic possession to one involving old-timey cults and time travel. We’re back to basics here: a man, a woman, and a mysterious someone, or something, else. Where recent productions like The Lost Boys and Back to the Future have endeavored to bring big-screen spectacle to the stage, the Paranormal Activity movies are rooted in the mundane rather than the fantastic. Their protagonists are ordinary people, and often quite annoying ones, so preoccupied by their petty squabbles that they can’t unite to face the common threat until it’s too late—although another common element of the Paranormal movies is that it’s pretty much always too late. At the August Wilson, the doomed couple are James (Travis A. Knight) and Lou (Cher Álvarez), who have just relocated to London to escape something unnerving that happened in Chicago. (The play was originally staged in Leeds, later in the West End, and, more uncommonly, in several cities in the U.S. before making its way to New York.) Exactly what isn’t clear, of course, but it leaks out in dribs and drabs, as when James’ fussbudget mother Carolanne (Shannon Cochran) FaceTimes in from Boca Raton and asks if Lou is still on her antipsychotics. (Antidepressants, Lou sharply corrects her.) Lou has felt a strange presence around her since childhood, but lately it’s been getting worse: She’ll black out, sometimes for hours at a time, and end up in another room with no memory of how she got there, and at night, she swears, she can hear something next to her, breathing. Spooky! I wouldn’t make great claims for the Paranormal Activity movies as capital-C cinema (although the third, the one that straps a camera to an oscillating fan, is pretty neat). But there’s no denying that they work like gangbusters. Their open, often unmoving tableaus, justified by the camcorders their victims set up to capture what’s happening to them—or, as the series moves closer to the present, by the growth of in-home surveillance networks—force audiences to lock their eyes on the frame, lest they miss the telltale flicker in the darkness betraying the presence of something other than human. (Put another way, you absolutely cannot watch a Paranormal movie while you’re on your phone.) One of my most cherished moviegoing memories was seeing the first screening of Paranormal Activity 4 and witnessing a woman sprint out of the theater full-tilt after a particularly scary revelation. Rather than trick out the stage with a wall of screens, the stage version finds an ingenious analog to the movie’s fixed POV in Fly Davis’ cutaway set, which presents the couple’s home as a two-story dollhouse, frequently dispatching the actors to opposite corners so that you’re forced to frantically toggle between them. Anna Watson’s lighting throws shadows across the stage, and every time a passing car made them shift, I felt a ripple of anxiety as they moved through the kitchen or up the stairs. Was that a hint of an unnatural shape moving in the background, or just a trick of the eye? And at what point can you no longer tell the difference? Director Felix Barrett is best known as the founder of Punchdrunk, the immersive theater company behind Sleep No More, and while Paranormal Activity’s audience stays firmly in its seats, Barrett works some of the same muscles, subtly directing its attention around the set. That’s much harder to do on stage than it is on film, where even a primitive camera setup can point the eye where it needs to go, and sometimes I found myself taking my cues not from the lighting or sound cues but the people around me, who spotted a silhouette moving through an upstairs doorway, or a suspiciously active comforter, an instant before I did. It’s not all so subtle: Like the movies, the stage version isn’t afraid to hit the audience with a startling bass-heavy womp just to put their nervous systems on high alert. (If you’re wearing a smartwatch, you might want to disable the decibel alarm in advance.) Perhaps I just got weary of the onstage bickering, but at a certain point, I realized I was as interested in what was going on in the crowd as anything happening on the other side of the proscenium. You could hear people bracing for a scare, some chuckling in anticipation or in a vain attempt to defuse the tension; then a WHAM! followed by more giggles, this time pitched halfway between delight and relief. It’s a thrill to be part of an audience like this, hyped and happy and satisfied, even though you may feel a little spent by the time its substantial length has elapsed. (The play takes a lot of things from the movies, but clocking in around 90 minutes is not one of them.) After one particularly violent jolt, I heard a man behind me whisper to his seatmate, “I never should have let you take me to this.” Holloway’s script occasionally waves its hands in the direction of grand themes: The show opens with a blaring podcast about supernatural phenomena whose host (Eva Kaminsky) concludes that the ultimate question is not whether you believe in ghosts, but whether you believe in God. (Insert thinky-face emoji.) But this is fundamentally low art, and not ashamed of it. The play compels the audience’s rapt attention, but I imagine not a performance goes by in which someone doesn’t yell out “Don’t go in there” as a character approaches the door to the nursery James and Lou have started to set up for their as-yet-unconceived child. Someone certainly did the night I saw it. That door ominously creaks open and loudly slams shut about as often as you’d expect it to, and the attic door above it, the one no one ever uses or mentions, eventually does just what you’d think it would. (Chekhov would be proud.) But not every scare comes when or where you’d expect, and when the audience is genuinely surprised, it’s like you’re at the greatest show on earth. Movies Theater Horror