Paranormal Activity Is All Scares, No Substance
Impressive stagecraft and jump scares can’t make up for Levi Holloway’s thin story and underwritten characters.
Supposedly inhabiting the same world as the film franchise, Levi Holloway’s play Paranormal Activities gives “crowd-pleaser” a bad name. Where the films brought top-notch terror to HGTV homes and the people who love them, this spin-off may have some clever stagecraft, but it can’t hide the fact that it’s an inch deep and an inch wide. In between a few quality jump-scares (at least by theatrical standards), this is a paper-thin story about a couple who are about as interesting as a pair of Hydro Flasks bouncing around in a backpack.
There’s certainly potential here. A young American couple lands in a London house where they feel alone and isolated. Lou (Cher Alvarez) is quickly revealed to be psychically (and possibly psychologically) unsettled, while James (Travis A. Knight) is the kind of guy who thinks minimizing things will keep the lid on life. But unlike the films, where the pool-noodle realism created an entirely novel home for horror, everything here is so short-handed, there’s simply no sense of a real place where God-awful things are happening.
The first problem is the way these two characters communicate. If you asked a smoothie-promoting social influencer to write a soap opera, this is pretty much what you’d get. Lou and James may find themselves in an increasingly scary house, but because all they do is blandly agitate like a couple of kids raised on their phones, they do nothing to create suspense or a sense of impending doom. When there is a revelation (no spoilers here), it is so derivative of a thousand other dramas, it’s just more of the same in a long evening of “meh.”
If you’re feeling really generous, you might try to argue that the hopeless connection between these two is some kind of meta-comment on how social media has changed the very fabric of relationships; that young people have simply lost the ability to know themselves or one another.
But that would have required evidence of real psyches under the hood — not just a general air of tension and a big (improbable) secret. And while there’s no doubt director Felix Barrett skillfully balances the couple’s dynamic with the well-timed frighteners, there’s just no escaping how flat the story is and how little it brings to the table — be it psychological or supernatural.
If this all sounds harsh, the upside — and the reasons to see Paranormal Activity — are scenic designer Fly Davis’ clever evocation of the young couple’s house in London and the stellar illusion designs of Chris Fisher. While the choice to bathe the interior in a 24-7 fever-dream of gloom grows tiresome, Anna Watson’s lighting is certainly a skilled adjunct to the visual stunts when called for. Taken together, there’s no question this team delivers some seriously sophisticated spookery.
Alvarez and Knight work hard to overcome the painfully bad dialogue, and manage the staging with energy and aplomb. As medium Mrs. Cotgrave, Kate Frye brings some much-needed warmth and charisma, while Shannon Cochran’s Carolanne is everything she needs to be, because who doesn’t need another overbearing mother joke? Still, as pieces moving around a complex set, these are skilled performances.
Which leads to the question of what, if anything, the play adds to the Paranormal canon? It was never going to be about replicating the filmic experience — nor should it be. The remit here was to do what theater does best: bring into focus some living, breathing, right-before-our-eyes, shared human drama. And that’s one trick Holloway’s play doesn’t pull off.
Paranormal Activity (★★☆☆☆) runs through Feb. 7 at The Shakespeare Theatre’s Harman Hall, 610 F St. NW. Ticket prices vary based on date and availability. Call 202-547-1122 or visit shakespearetheatre.org.
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