Quite the Haunted House at Chicago Shakes

The new play Paranormal Activity at Chicago Shakespeare’s Yard Theatre is an adrenaline jolt of a production that is absolutely perfect as Chicago plunges into the dark season on so many levels.  Loosely based on the indie film and subsequent film franchise, this collaboration between Chicago's Levy Holloway, who wrote and restaged the show, and the UK’s Felix Barrett (of Sleep No More fame) is a jump out of your seat evening of a domestic nightmare.

Fly Davis’s scenic design gives us a lovely house perfect for haunting, and illusions designer Chris Fisher is full of heart stopping surprises. Each scene becomes like going to the next room in a haunted house, though you sit in your comfy theatre seat awaiting for the next shock– nothing is as it seems in the rainy world with twisted energy. 

I cannot tell the plot without giving too much away and robbing you of the pleasure (or pain) of touring through this couple’s life with the interfering mom in Boca Raton and so many things going bump in the night, but if you know the original film or any of the franchise, this hits the notes of seeming to have bad stuff in the past and then finding out the hard way that “places aren’t haunted, people are”.

It may be a factor of having too much scary stuff in my actual life at the moment that I did not find the show frightening— based on the screams and gasps around me, I was in the minority. This is a well made horror experience, and Cher Álvarez as wife Lou is convincingly sweet and domestic, and Patrick Heusinger’s James seems like such a nice guy. Shannon Cochran steals her scenes as the meddling mother in law, terrifying in her intrusions from the get go.  Kate Fry’s Etheline is soothing and then startling as the ghost hunter with the awful premonition.  Unlike most haunted house actors, this ensemble is believable and subtle which makes the sudden twists like free falling off a cliff. What makes this show work well is not the buckets of blood but the ground shifting reveals that everything is far worse than you expected.  And that is a message for right now.  Given the choice of listening to the fear inducing story that is daily news right now or seeing an old fashioned night of horror in the theatre, I am off to Navy Pier.

Paranormal Activity is only here at Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier on Wednesdays through Sundays through All Souls Sunday (November 2) when it will travel to LA,  then Washington DC and then San Francisco. For tickets and information head to https://www.chicagoshakes.com/productions/2526-paranormal-activity/

 No part of this review was created using AI

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