In the 2007 horror movie “Paranormal Activity,” video footage — much of it grainy and dim — shows us the evil that human eyes might miss. A young couple sets up a camera in their bedroom, and over the course of several nights, it captures evidence of something lurking near their sleeping bodies. The menace approaches sloooooooowly: a door moves; someone shrieks. (Fine, OK, that was me.)
How do you translate that particular suspense-based dread to the theater? Horror is cheap to film, but galactically expensive to recreate onstage. And a theater audience has a whole set’s worth of stuff to look at, so it’s difficult to create that crawling, back-of-the-neck feeling that something is lurking just out of sight.
Wisely, for the thrilling “Paranormal Activity” experience now on Broadway, the playwright Levi Holloway and the director Felix Barrett have jettisoned almost every characteristic of the movie franchise. There’s no “found footage” and barely a nod to the original film’s plot. Instead, their show is a testament to pre-cinematic scare techniques, like an abruptly loud DOORBELL (Gareth Fry is the sound designer) or a hypnotic sequence of storytelling in the dark.
The plot still revolves around a beleaguered couple, though: the affectionate Lou (Cher Álvarez) and James (Travis A. Knight), married a year but already in the deep weeds. Lou feels a kind of all-pervading dread, as if something’s watching her. James has moved them to London following a vaguely defined crisis, a series of “missing time” blackouts that Lou had endured back home in Chicago.
They’ve secured a massive house, yet the couple still seems crowded by other presences: James has invasive video chats with his evangelical Floridian mother, Carolanne (Shannon Cochran), and he furnishes a nursery, long before Lou is ready to have a baby. (“It’s bad luck,” she says, understating things nicely.) He tries to convince her that he shares her belief in the supernatural, even buying her a bell that they agree to ring from beyond the grave, should one predecease the other. Normal couple stuff.
The play starts with voice over, which turns out to be a podcast episode about ghosts. “Places aren’t haunted, people are,” the voice murmurs, but we’re skeptical. The set (designed by Fly Davis) certainly looks a little haunted: It’s two stories, sliced down the middle like a cake. Even cut open to our gaze, the house has too many places to hide, and its temperamental electrical wiring clearly hates the living. (Anna Watson designed the lighting.)
We know enough to mistrust the dark area at the top of the stairs and the way the bathroom door swings open to conceal a person-sized space. One of the show’s most appreciative laughs comes when a character approaches a shower curtain with an appropriate SEAL Team 6-level of caution.
Watching “Paranormal Activity” with a crowd feels like watching a magic show on a roller coaster. We scream, then we laugh because we screamed (aren’t we silly?), then we scream again when the ride takes another drop. After having toured widely — the show has been in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington — it is polished to a cold shine. From a design and direction standpoint, it’s incredible, and the illusions designer Chris Fisher has a true sorcerer’s touch: an exhilarating scare in the first act breaks every brain in the audience.
Barrett is the founder and artistic director of the immersive theater company Punchdrunk, and under his direction, Álvarez and Knight carry the whole thing with an impressively unaffected naturalism. Heavy miking (again, thanks to Fry) lets the couple murmur to each other, since we still hear them over the creaks and groans of the house. Holloway’s often comic script, which is best in its grace notes, makes the couple appealingly down-to-earth. (When the DOORBELL rings again, James swears at it with a relatable frustration.)
Several of the script’s phrases are also pointed enough to catch at your sleeve. An otherwise unhelpful psychic (Eva Kaminsky), for example, tells the pair that “a fire makes a shadow.” As we’ll learn, Lou and James are burning up in ways they don’t realize. In Holloway’s construction, paranormal activity is a marker of retribution. “We earned everything we got coming,” one of them will say.
Holloway’s last Broadway outing was “Grey House,” another horror play, though one that was much less effective. In that show, the mythology was so unwieldy that the production sent to some critics PDF cheat sheets to explain its lore. He sketches more lightly here, though the story still wobbles, if you think about it after the lights come up — so don’t think about it too much after the lights come up.
Horror is a prevailing trend in theater right now. At least, that’s true when it comes to British exports: Both the stage play “Stranger Things: The First Shadow” and “2:22: A Ghost Story,” arriving this fall, started in England, as did “Paranormal Activity.” The obsession is of long standing. The pseudo-gothic thriller “The Woman in Black” ran for 33 years in London, and the British stage-horror tradition staggers bloodily back to 1920s Guignols to 1870s penny dreadfuls to 1600s revenge tragedies.
At the risk of overanalyzing a show that is, in essence, a whole bunch of beautifully made fun (for those with a low resting heart rate), I wonder if we hear an echo of that 400-year-old history in “Paranormal Activity.” Jacobean London was a top place for plays about the supernatural partly because the Reformation had made certain cryptic Catholic customs illegal, and the stage awakened those unquiet spirits.
Holloway is clearly interested in the religious dimension of horror, the way it encodes beliefs about sin and suffering and the possibility of intercession. For instance, James’s mother, Carolanne, is named for Carol Anne, the little girl in the “Poltergeist” movies, in which a town’s defiling of a cemetery (holy ground!) incurs terrible vengeance. At one point, Holloway demonstrates how ineffectual Carolanne’s prayers are when arrayed against the presence that tortures her family. His is a particularly moral ontology. Holloway’s Bad Things don’t behave at random, they don’t forgive, and they don’t waylay the innocent.
Now, I am a big old scaredy-cat, and I did plenty of arm-clutching (sorry, neighbor to my left!) during “Paranormal Activity.” Yet the sense of release that follows horror of this kind might not only be the relief of having survived the jump scares. There’s also a strangely comforting suggestion that in a world where evil doers seem beyond the reach of justice, something is watching. If it’s hard to see for now, that’s only because it’s waiting to make the sinners pay.
Paranormal Activity
Through Jan. 3 at the August Wilson Theater, Manhattan; paranormalbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.
