Review: Zach Theatre's The Thin Place

(l-r) Fernando Rivera as Jerry, Danielle Bondurant as Sylvia, Katerina Papacostas as Hilda, and Elise Ogden as Linda in The Thin Place (Photo by Suzanne Cordeiro)

Horror in the theatre can be challenging to execute.

Gore is tough to pull off unless you're the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, and the sadly curtailed Broadway run of the haunting Grey House this year proved that audiences can be tough to attract outside of brief Halloween runs (case in point, Rebecca Maag's excellent immersive historical séance drama Flood of Spirits, which played across the haunting season after a premiere at this year's Frontera Fest). Even now, the biggest piece of horror theatre since The Woman in Black went dark last March, Stranger Things: The First Shadow, is prepping in London in hopes that the Netflix audience will make the trip to the West End.

It's therefore a little thrilling to know that the Zach Theatre is mounting Lucas Hnath's 2019 chiller The Thin Place past All Hallow's Eve and deep into November.

At the center of the play's supernatural phenomena is Hilda. Seemingly inspired at least a little by the poltergeist-plagued Eleanor Lance in seminal spooky horror The Haunting, Hilda can be played one of two ways. First, as a phantom in her own life (which was how Emily Cass McDonnell interpreted her in the original Off-Broadway production). Then there's how Katerina Papacostas inhabits her, a vivacious woman curtailed by her own sadness, her life perpetually limited by her perpetual embrace of the loss of her grandmother and disappearance of her mother. That yearning could be why she falls for Linda (Elise Ogden), a medium of questionable skills.

The aging British ex-pat is a big personality in hiding (in Blithe Spirit terms, Madame Arcati disguising herself as Edith the maid), and Ogden gives her both charm and a drop of mistrustworthiness. The sharp-eyed will realize quickly that she's a cold reader, using the vaguest of questions and simple parlor tricks to give the audience of the unhappy and bereaved what they want – a fact she eventually, and quite happily, confesses to Hilda. She's providing a service, she self-justifies, and through her running narration Hilda explains her acceptance of this seeming betrayal (in itself, a major act of self-justification).

The simple staging by Iakov Doumanoff – two chairs, a rug, and an occasional table – is serviceable. Most especially, it's designed for the awkward second act afterparty in which Linda plays host to her lovestruck nephew, Jerry (Fernando Rivera, excellently hiding his hapless pining for the unreachable Hilda under good humor), and Sylvia (Danielle Bondurant), the brazenly insecure source of Linda's finances, much to Hilda's quietly seething jealousy. Seething, that is, but quietly so, as she sits in stony-faced silence to her chair, uncomfortable in anything more than one-on-one conversations. As Papacostas pulls back from her narration, she still remains the stoic center of attention. The black box intimacy of the Zach's Kleberg stage enables such observation, letting the audience lean in to catch everything she is keeping under the skin. In this chamber piece sequence, all four excel, as Jerry tries to quell the gathering storm between his aunt and his friend, and Hilda simply ... watches.

But it's in the lighting design by Jacob Zamarripa that The Thin Place becomes truly haunting. Or rather, in one incredibly simple decision, one that makes a subtle demand of the audience, drags them into a place of utter darkness, and traps them there. Director Richard Robichaux avoids the trap that so many theatrical productions fall into of trying to emulate horror films with extravagant effects. Instead, he pulls the visuals to almost nothing, and in doing so crafts a simple reminder that there is little more theatrical or terrifying than the sound of breathing in the darkness.

Zach Theatre's The Thin Place