Review: Paranormal Activity Stage Play Will Keep You Up All Night

A spine-tingling house of horrors lurks into the Ahmanson Theatre with the stage adaptation of Paranormal Activity. Based on the successful movie franchise, the eerie ghost tale relies on special effects and mood to make audience members scream, faint, and jump into their partner’s lap. Just don’t try to follow the plot.

In their rented home in Britain, American expats Lou (Cher Álvarez) and James (Patrick Heusinger) are still recovering from a mysterious ordeal in their last home in Chicago. Lou obsesses over a podcast led by mystical medium Etheline Cotgrave (Kate Fry), desperate to discover why she feels so haunted.

She hears voices, sees objects move, and believes that evil followed them to England. James grapples with the dread that his wife has gone insane, while feeling the burden from his pushy mother (Shannon Cochran) to conceive a grandchild. The pressure between the two hits a boiling point when James sees with his own eyes all the terrors his wife has been witnessing. Now, the couple finds themselves battling pure evil, but leaving the house will save no one. The monsters are not invading the house; they’re hounding the couple themselves.

Director Felix Barrett and writer Levi Holloway have devised a crackerjack nightmare for an entire audience to eyewitness. The play starts with Smashing Pumpkins blasting through the Ahmanson (a bit too loudly, so bring ear plugs). The curtain opens to Fly Davis’s vast two-story set with doors hiding secrets and lies. Gareth Fry’s sound design features banshee shrieks and ominous warnings. Anna Watson’s lighting makes a quaint cottage into The Amityville Horror, with smoke, flickering lights, and a window that tracks headlights making spooky visions in the darkest of rooms.

But the main course is the litany of effects by video designer Luke Halls and illusionist Chris Fisher. Without revealing any of the surprises ahead, it can be said that audience members will spend all night wide-eyed awake, desperate to figure out how they possibly saw what they know they saw.

Holloway’s script is confounding and one has to just let it wash over them. There are plot holes that the entire house could fall through, and twists that turn other facts into quicksand. Thankfully, one does not go to horror for Shakespearean construction. The storyline is mostly window dressing.

The cast of four are all excellent. Álvarez and Heusinger convey two people too frayed to sleep or even breathe. The horrors engulfing them leave the two beaten and punch-drunk, yet the actors never lose their energy, which keeps them compelling. Fry is delightful as a countryside psychic, one who has seen everything, but still would like a nice cup of tea with her exorcism. Cochran is relatable as the mother from hell, one who knows where that line is, but crosses willfully because she believes every comment in her head warrants being expressed.

Whether at the local cinema or in the packed Ahmanson, there’s nothing more enjoyable than a collective audience screaming at the bumps in the night. Horror brings people together in a communal experience, and Paranormal Activity is a roller coaster.