MurphyMade
One of the great, not-talked-about-enough joys of various holiday times is the public service that the Syfy Channel does. It does not spray viewers with schmaltz and weepy goodwill. Instead, it serves up old episodes of The Twilight Zone. They run day and night, and—rather like the endless joys of The Golden Girls—sometimes you alight upon one you haven’t seen before. But again, like The Golden Girls, it doesn’t much matter if you have; they are engaging stories, with big ’60s themes and obsessions underpinning their wacky, supernatural window dressing—like the insidious rise of technology, invasion (so many UFO/aliens!), authoritarianism, and the place of the individual set against the apparatus of the superstate.
Grey House on Broadway (Lyceum Theatre, booking to Sept 3), directed by Joe Mantello, feels a bit like of one of those episodes, except unfortunately without the enforced economy of a half-hour time slot, with dashes of gothic ghost story, hillbilly horror, and Misery (and—very niche, for this Knots Landing fan—elements of the “Three Sisters” haunted house episode) mixed in.
This puzzling, undercooked, but still arresting play, set in 1977, knows and accords to the genre conventions from whence it derives. Its biggest laugh erupts at the beginning when Max (Clare Karpen, standing in for Tatiana Maslany who’s been off-sick, delaying the opening) and Henry (Paul Sparks) enter an isolated cabin in the woods as a snowstorm rages outside. They have crashed their car. This is the only place for miles with its lights on (you know the score!). Henry’s ankle is busted. As they come into the house, and survey its general grimness, Henry says: “I’ve seen this. All this. I‘ve seen this movie.”