Grey House (2023) [Modern Theatrical Masterpiece Review]

AndersonVision debuts its first stage review, with a disability and genre focus, on the first-of-its-kind Broadway production Grey House, starring Laurie Metcalf, Tatiana Maslany, Millicent Simmonds, and an incredible young cast.

All images provided are CREDIT: MurphyMade, 2023. They were provided by Polk and Company for the purposes of this review.

Embracing the Grey House

It’s a very strange person who doesn’t embrace the theatre sometimes. There is a vitality and an immediacy to a live performance, in front of people, with live people unspooling in front of you, that you just can’t get anywhere else.

So, when news first came out about the Broadway production of Grey House, which had been put on before at Chicago’s A Red Orchid Theatre, was going to center deaf and ASL-speaking characters, and was to star acclaimed actresses Laurie Metcalf (multiple Tony-winner, Emmy-winner, and Oscar-nominee), Tatiana Maslany (Emmy-winner, multiple Canadian Screen Awards), and Millicent Simmonds (who first broke out with Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck), we got pretty darned excited about the prospect of covering it.

AndersonVision visits the theater

We at AndersonVision have always had a love of genre art, particularly genre art done well, and this is no exception. To fiddle with a phrase, it’s an exception that breaks the rules – and, in doing so, transcends them into the realm of pure genius.

We don’t use these terms lightly; we were frankly awe-struck. Your reviewer could not have been more delighted and emotionally-moved by the production, while also being deeply appreciative and aware of the purposefulness of the staging and the centering of usually-marginalized voices. It’s no surprise that Levi Holloway, with much experience with deaf and ASL work in Chicago, would come up with something that integrates the language so well into the play text.

But, let’s touch upon the plot a bit. The official synopsis, to my mind, does not do the actual play’s plot justice, because the play opens not with whom we expect the central characters/protagonists to be, but within the lone location of the play – the cabin – and with a group of children doing activities you might expect children in a period piece (the play’s setting is 1978) would do.

Center-stage is a small television playing a Road Runner cartoon; around the stage are four girls whom we soon learn are named Marlow (Sophia Ann Caruso), Bernie (Millicent Simmonds), Squirrel (Colby Kipnes), and A1656 (Alyssa Emily Marvin), and a young boy, whom we learn has had many names (Eamon O’Connell).

Their seeming mother figure is Laurie Metcalf’s Raleigh, who seems, at first, a “battleaxe” – but we soon learn so much more.

The house’s denizens are soon joined by Max (Tatiana Maslany) and Henry (Paul Sparks), who’ve crashed their car after almost hitting a deer in a violent snowstorm that now seems to have left them stranded for the time being. Henry, who is soon to be pointedly called “Hank” by the house’s women, has a badly-injured foot, but still tries to keep their spirits up: “I’ve seen this movie before,” he says to his wife. “We don’t make it.”

We don’t quite understand how true that becomes until very late in the play – because “we don’t make it” doesn’t necessarily mean each of them; it can also mean their relationship. And it transpires it’s on rockier ground than we first might assume.

This is something of the brilliance of the play – it has a metatextuality, and a double – sometimes even triple – meaning of phrases and words that you require attending more than one performance to completely grasp.

It plays with time in a way that would shock Aristotle – it frequently uses blackout transitions between scenes to both mark the passage of time and punctuate important moments, but the 90-minute-runtime, without an intermission, lets the minutes passing both elongate and sharpen our feeling of the piece, as more time passes for our characters than it does for us – in their isolated cabin, slowly becoming detached from what their reality might have been.

And, at the same time, detaching us from what we might think in the play is real or something out of a dream. It is a production whose events you have to sit with and process – just like a great film or television show. It’s been a selling point in promoting the show, and very truly, too, because I think that quality is at least part of what makes it brilliant.

Repeat viewings help the Grey House

I had the opportunity of seeing the play more than once – on its April 29th first preview performance, and on a later, post-opening performance on June 15th. As such, I was able to be aware not only of how Grey House developed in its staging, but how the arcs of characters curved and turned from the moment the play started the second time around.

There are something like spirits haunting this little snow-bound cabin – as Prospero’s isle was once full of noises, so, too, is this house full of ghosts. Are the women living there? We don’t quite know until the end.

Appearing and disappearing and seemingly invisible to Maslany’s Max but who captivates Sparks’s Henry, is an older woman called The Ancient (Cyndi Coyne) appearing to be more representational than literal flesh – something akin to the woman in the bathtub from the film version of The Shining, perhaps.

ASL as language driving the play

The house itself is alive with many languages – ASL and Morse code being most prominent among them – and it makes its feelings known, from time to time, with creaks and groans. This is not theatrical realism – this is a wonderful playing with of the theatrical format, and what one can do within the confines of theatre. You must not take it to be any sort of grounded thriller – it isn’t; it doesn’t want to be.

It’s like a Polanski movie

The director, Joe Mantello, has compared Grey House to a classic Polanski film, and while I can see that, the very first time I saw this play, I couldn’t help but feel there were more parallels with another work – Charles Laughton’s adaptation of The Night of the Hunter, from 1955.

The use of music, the setting (an older woman with children who are not her own dealing with intruders who seem to threaten the stability of their home), the sense of primal terror, the mythical tenor of the whole piece – the sheer magic of it all. It is a dark, and truly “American”, sort of story – “American“, both for good and ill.

And the set itself is reminiscent of one of those many gorgeous shots of interiors from the film – the frame of a room, or a house, suspended on all sides in an inky black void. Life goes on beyond the walls and that void – there is a shower and bedrooms mention — but we don’t see it; the play’s house, that central room, contains all the action we need to see.

The play, obviously, has one thing The Night of the Hunter does not – not having to deal with the Hollywood Production Code, it is very able to allude to and depict violent assault, sexual and otherwise, in ways only the novel version of Hunter could, and it revels in using mature language that 1955 audiences would have blanched at – but it uses such language with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel, for the most dramatic moments and the funniest punch-lines in the text.

Laurie Metcalf and her F bomb

Laurie Metcalf, in particular, has one of the funniest f-bomb drops in the whole thing, coming at the end of an incredibly tense scene where she is offstage and the house appears to be magically hurting her via an occult symbol carved into the floor – the line comes as a great relief point for the audience, and both times I saw it, it got a well-deserved big “pop” of laughter.

As a button for one of the many strange things that happen in the play, that f-bomb serves its purpose well; it brings to salty earth what had just been terrifying unreality – a game of “Show-and-Hell”, where Maslany’s Max has to guess which of the girls is lying and is forced to admit terrible things about herself while standing in the middle of that occult symbol – forced because, if she doesn’t admit in this magical game, Raleigh is seemingly being hurt offstage, in the basement, by the house until she complies.

It’s not realism, but that’s the point; by transcending realism, it more strongly reveals human truths about its characters, in ways only this overpowering sort of destiny-warping magic can do. The characters, thus thrust into these completely extraordinary experiences, are stretched to their emotional limit – until they might snap.

The play builds, becoming seemingly stranger and stranger as it goes along, but it has a purpose – it’s just keeping it from you. Seemingly unmotivated events in the first half of the play, you suddenly realize why they occurred. You realize the motivations driving the characters, particularly the most prominent of the four girls, Marlow, and the motherly Raleigh – the dynamic tension between them slowly unravels, and we see the true situation of their relationship.

Love that Marlow

Sophia Ann Caruso, as Marlow, commands the stage – she is so central to the play and such a forceful presence, from the first, that you’re almost taken aback. Caruso has so much experience – in both David Bowie’s Lazarus and the Beetlejuice musical – and it really shows in her performance; aside from Laurie Metcalf and Paul Sparks, she practically is the play.

Marlow has many long, complicated monologues, and Caruso plays them word- and note-perfect; I can very easily see her doing Shakespeare, at some point. She’s truly impressive, and when she sings in the play – her background being musicals – she fills the entire auditorium of the Lyceum Theatre, which is not an easy feat.

Paul Sparks as Henry also slowly comes to the fore over the course of the play, and he has an intensely physical role to embody; he must act as if he is injured, limp around the stage, get in and out of layers of clothing, chug down from various disgusting-looking mason jars full of moonshine (which we’ll get to in a bit), do a foot-stomping hambone dance with Colby Kipnes’s Squirrel, and – finally – thrash painfully on a table.

Any actor who can do that two times a day, seven days a week, and still keep that same energy the entire time, is one to be reckoned with. I came away extremely impressed, and eager to see him in more things.

Of the younger cast making their Broadway debuts, Colby Kipnes’s Squirrel gets the most to do, and she does it with relish – sitting n a chair in a corner of the stage, or revealing herself from atop a refrigerator, her performance is so strong you’re continually amazed at the fact that this is just her debut.

She successfully goes toe-to-toe with Paul Sparks, matching him in energy and power, to the point where, even as you understand why, you really don’t want to see her character leave at play’s end – you want to see more of her, even as it’s the natural end point for Squirrel’s arc.

The power of the character arc

Not every character has an “arc”, per se, in Grey House – Millicent Simmonds’s Bernie, Alyssa Emily Marvin’s A1656, and Eamon O’Connell’s The Boy certainly do not – but all register very strongly, and what we learn about each over the course of the play, the events that impacted their lives, more than makes up for what one might call “character growth”.

The nature of The Boy, in particular, is divulged a bit more in an illuminating scene involving him, Raleigh, Henry, and a story book titled “Grey Mouse” – a book containing a rather horrifying parable about starving children and motherhood; one which Henry balks at reading to The Boy but which by recitation’s end he seems to know already by heart.

Then there is a moment, after Raleigh departs the stage, where Henry and The Boy sit upon the central sofa in the house and silently mirror each other’s movements – so much said in action without a word spoken; the man become The Boy, The Boy becoming the man. Because The Boy is something of a representation, of all men.

It was Shakespeare’s Marc Antony who said, “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones”. Shakespeare meant “men” as in the then-widely-used sense of “humanity”, but this play takes aim square at the evil that men do – that evil which lives after them; the evil spawned by their actions, embodied spiritually in Henry as he is subsumed by the spirits of men past as he drinks the moonshine given him.

At play’s climax, he confesses to crimes he can’t possibly have committed, but which other men did, against the women of the house – he is the vessel for which these women, ignored by a patriarchal society in life, can finally take agency and punish for wrongdoing. It is not realistic – it is metaphysical – but it is that metaphysical nature that allows the acts done against these women over history to be avenged.

And it seems to be a process that has been happening since long before we entered this house, and may continue long after.

The way roles shift

Roles shift within the play in a way that can really only be done within the confines of a theatre; that’s the genius of Levi Holloway’s use of a format like this. I don’t think this would be quite so effective on a movie or television screen, because that proscenium arch, and the live performance, help foster the reality of the roles being roles; something representational, rather than a strict “this person is only this person” structure.

Squirrel and The Ancient blend together, no time more blatantly than when Squirrel dives into the sofa and comes back up as The Ancient; an extended vignette has Henry recreating a night at a diner with The Ancient representing his date and Squirrel a demented waitress; another vignette has Henry recreating a school anatomy lesson with a bird Squirrel has brought in from the cold – Squirrel dressed as a schoolgirl for the occasion, and seemingly representing someone Henry had hurt.

Henry, being filled with many men, takes on several different dispositions – most of them decidedly not the man Max had married. And it’s Max’s role within the house, and the gradual reveal of the meaning of Raleigh being in the house, that is the greatest, longest shift that occurs over the course of the play – for Raleigh is a mother, but she is not these children’s mother. Or, at least, will not be for very much longer.

Metcalf, as Raleigh, is a salty, tough woman, but there is a softer core. She has clearly been in this house for a long time, and is bone-tired. But… she doesn’t really want to leave. When I realized just how much of Metcalf’s performance was Raleigh externalizing her process of grief – something I didn’t realize until my second go-around – it hit me like a freight train.

There really is something to be said for seeing this twice, and for going in knowing what will happen. You simply can’t let your preconceived notions lead you astray on this – you’ve got be at least a little informed, or you might not take what Holloway’s play is offering you. And that’d be a shame, because it’s the sort of theatrical food-for-thought that can only nourish you.

Raleigh braiding Marlow’s hair

There is a scene, late in the play, before the final climax, where Raleigh consents to Marlow gently braiding her hair, and Marlow tells a story – about herself. About the depths of love, and the inky depths of the sea. It doesn’t just function as a straight telling of “backstory”; it shows the deep bond between Raleigh and Marlow forged over their long time in the house.

All Metcalf has to do is respond emotionally, silently, to Caruso’s story. The two play it so beautifully that the monologue’s end can only wallop you deep in the feelings; it’s perfect theatre. It’s two masters of the craft at their best. You don’t want it to end, even as it is emotionally painful as a story to tell.

Back to Max

Tatiana Maslany’s Max, although she doesn’t really have an “arc” over the course of the play – although she doesn’t really do much in the way of proactive “action” to drive the immediate plot of the play in what’s depicted within the confines of the house – is still central to the narrative, and still a great demonstration of just why Maslany has been acclaimed time and again as the best actress of her generation.

It’s been four years since the last time she was on Broadway, with Bryan Cranston and Tony Goldwyn in Network, and although I wasn’t able to see her in that production, I felt I could not not see her, particularly with the incredible cast and promising-sounding story, disability representation, and deep genre grounding, in this play.

I admit, I’ve already covered some of her previous work for AndersonVision – the wickedly dark and funny short film Snatched, directed by Michael Schwartz, and the wonderfully sharp, magical, and relevant Power Trip, an audio podcast from Realm, which I especially appreciated as a piece of truthful disability representation – and, quite frankly, I’ve been a fan of her and her work for about a decade now, since her BBC America program Orphan Black captured the attention and hearts of folx online and around the world.

Already fluent in four languages – English, French, German, and Spanish – Grey House would allow her to add a fifth to her repertoire: American Sign Language, which her character, Max, is necessarily fluent in, having a deaf sister and needing to be able for purposes of the plot to communicate with Bernie. (And a sixth, Morse code, is well-deployed in a delightful setting-scene in the middle of the play, that doesn’t do much to advance the “plot” but does make this house feel so much more appreciably lived-in.)

Max comes to life

Max’s character role’s slow shift is pinpointed within the play by a certain phrase referring to the denizens of the house – ”Willful creatures!” – which first Raleigh exclaims, then Max picks up, and finally Raleigh says again before departing. It happens naturally, but directly points to exactly what the play – what the house – necessarily wants Max to become, and how Raleigh is slowly leaving the routine set by the house to be filled by Max. It’s something to be played with subtlety and humanity by Maslany.

And she delivers– she nails the comedy, she nails the drama, she nails the complicated physical actions that Max has to perform, all perfectly timed – she is never not present in the scene. She is offstage for several different scenes in the play, which surprised me the first go-around, but I understood why the second time, and particularly as Paul Spark’s Henry slowly came more and more to the fore during that first preview I attended.

It’s not the most prominent role in the play, but it’s important, and if you have the opportunity to see Tatiana Maslany on the Broadway stage showing just why she’s so acclaimed, you damned well take it. If she’s not nominated for a Tony next year, along with the rest of the cast, somebody ought to sue.

I probably shouldn’t have been surprised by this, considering the director is Joe Mantello — director of the original production of Wicked and a Broadway legend – but this play has some of the best incorporation of music in a non-musical production I’ve ever seen.

Simply gorgeous a capella renditions of “Come On Stella” and “Hey Mama”, led by the incredible voice of Sophia Ann Caruso, that bring a sense of wonder and unreality to the whole piece. It is a little like a fairy tale, in that sense – a dark, musical, beautiful, wonderful fairy story. This music effectively anchors moments in the play and gives them even more pathos than might have been apparent just on the page.

The staging, how the actors move, the incorporation of ASL into the dialogue, naturalistically, are all credits to the amazing movement director and Director of ASL, or DASL. There is not a movement wasted; there is not a line which is not important to the play. And the extraordinary vitality of these actors, their ability to keep pace with the play and never flag for energy, is a marvel and a true testament to the talent of the company, and in particular to the young actors making their Broadway debuts.

If I hadn’t known beforehand this was their debut, I don’t know that I would have been able to realize, because these kids are generationally-good talents, and I expect to see them in many more things once this play’s run is done.

The curtain drops on Grey House on July 30th

This brings me to a conclusion I hadn’t expected from this play – its run is ending July 30th. Grey House, being such a play you need to think about and appreciate from seeing more than once, is surely going to miss audiences willing to brave its summer chills for this. So, I say to you, and I say VERY fervent, see it now. If you are in the New York City area, see it. If you’ve already seen it, see it again.

You really don’t get a chance like this, a play so incredible as this and a company so strong and populated by such incredible actors, every damned theatrical season. This is a maybe-once-in-a-decade occurrence – I simply must insist you, Reader, must go.

And if you’re reading this after the play has closed, I can only tell you that it was something truly magical – one of those stage experiences you treasure all your life. This reviewer, having been treated with so much courtesy and proper accommodation of his physical disability by the folx of the Lyceum Theatre, and having been able to view the play twice, certainly will. But, if you can only see it once, at least see it. Experience it. You won’t regret it, and you’ll never forget it – and you’ll be glad you were in the Lyceum Theatre for it at least once.

Where can I still see Grey House?

Grey House is playing exclusively at the Lyceum Theatre until July 30th. It is written by Levi Holloway, directed by Joe Mantello, and produced by Tom Kirdahy Productions. Starring Laurie Metcalf, Tatiana Maslany, Sophia Ann Caruso, Millicent Simmonds, Paul Sparks, Cyndi Coyne, Colby Kipness, Alyssa Emily Marvin, and Eamon O’Connell. Features English, ASL, and Morse. Contains flashing lights, loud noises, partial nudity, violent content, and adult language.

This has been the AndersonVision review of Grey House.