Review: The Creeps is a Spooky Solo Show with Audience Participation

Catherine Waller has introduced her interactive play for an prolonged keep in New York City.

After performing it at varied fringe festivals over the years, Catherine Waller has introduced her solo present The Creeps to New York City for a full off-Broadway run. It is just not an expertise you’ll quickly overlook. Whether that’s in a great way or not will rely upon the viewer, particularly one’s tolerance for viewers participation. Beyond the act of experiencing it, maybe the one manner one can really grapple with a present as defiantly singular, fascinatingly uncategorizable, and well-nigh inexplicable as this one is to merely describe what occurs in it and ponder its implications afterward — if you end up caring sufficient to take action.

At the very least, the present lives as much as its title even earlier than it begins. Lighting designer Scott Monnin bathes Playhouse 46 stage in a form of amber glow that dulls out all shade contrasts, with Hidenori Nakajo offering a pre-show soundscape that’s each vaguely menacing and surprisingly comforting. The ambiguous general impact is sufficient to ship a chill or two up one’s backbone. But then the present correct begins.

The stage abruptly plunges into black, just a few multicolored lights briefly flash earlier than a central highlight takes maintain, shifting round and shining a lightweight on all 4 exits earlier than it will definitely hits Waller, wearing skintight black apparel (no costume designer is credited, neither is there a director credit score) and shifting vigorously round like a lizard on all fours, leering at and interacting with viewers members like an MC.

It’s a becoming prelude for the utter strangeness to return. Instead of a plot, The Creeps is structured as a sequence of vignettes centering round all kinds of characters: the aforementioned lizard MC, a blind particular person (additionally on all fours) who seems to be some form of evening watchman, an obvious intercourse employee — known as a “harlette” within the script — and an toddler with out legs and fingers. Some of the characters sometimes reference an unseen physician which will join all of them, with an occasional hazy-sounding whistle in Nakajo’s sound design that aurally signifies the physician’s presence. But that’s all you’ll get for connective tissue and even readability. This is a present that operates almost completely on temper and the facility of suggestion.

It additionally is determined by how receptive the viewers is to interacting with these characters, since all of them attempt to interact us in their very own methods. The blind possible-night-watchman, as an example, asks a few of them about their lives and vocations earlier than divulging particulars of his personal tragic-sounding backstory involving his daughter. Meanwhile, the child, when she’s not making an attempt to entertain us with jokes, asks sure viewers members about rings and/or necklaces they’re sporting earlier than pressuring them at hand them over (on the efficiency I attended, one refused and one other obliged). And the “harlette” dances sexily for us and beckons us to hitch her for a “good time” earlier than the physician’s whistle leads her to run away.

What’s fascinating about this specific case of viewers participation is that Waller isn’t essentially aiming to carry us nearer to those characters with these interactions. The discomfort a few of us might really feel about being thrust into such an interactive place is sort of presumably one of many details of The Creeps as a theatrical expertise, one which extends to creating us take into consideration how we view off-putting characters like these typically. Such an try at implicating us and our stare upon figures that we might instinctively name freaks does carry a sure weight given the way in which Waller refuses any overt performs for sympathy or likability in her characterizations.

It’s debatable whether or not such intellectualizations are sufficient to justify the alternately intriguing and irritating 70-minute present itself. But The Creeps is nothing if not difficult in its pointed denial of the standard bourgeois comforts of theater. Provocations which can be as skillfully, single-mindedly, and intelligently wrought as these should be seen and brought significantly as a substitute of knee-jerk rejected. And if nothing else, The Creeps gives a powerful showcase for Waller’s personal chameleonic presents as an actress, her bodily prowess, and her capacity to improvise in character. Certainly, even when I stay uncertain of simply how a lot I really favored it, I left the theater understanding I had seen one thing — or on the very least, somebody — distinctive.