By Jennifer Appleby

We all need a place to call home. Someplace not just familiar, but where we belong and feel welcome and wanted. The more fragmented our world becomes, the more we crave that feeling, but what if we choose wrong? What if the place we are most drawn to isn’t actually good for us?

This is one of the questions at the center of The Haunting of Hill House, currently playing at the Very Little Theatre. Although adapted from the classic horror novel by Shirley Jackson, it sounds more like Agatha Christie: a group of strangers arrive at a country manor, having received a mysterious invitation from an eccentric host. They are a wild medley of personalities guaranteed to clash.

There is an additional character present, however – the house itself, “a place of contained ill will” with motives of its own. None who enter will leave unchanged, and some may never leave at all.

Horror on stage is a very tricky thing. We are so accustomed in the age of film to tightly curated scares — the closeup, the perspective shot, the dramatic cutaway. So much depends on what we cannot see. Live performance, however, shows everything. How, then, can a play make the backs of our necks prickle?

The answer is mostly through design, especially sound and lighting. This production draws equally from the cinema and the live haunted house. Sound design by Michael Gerondale is a mix of atmospheric music and abstract sound effects. Amanda Ferguson’s lighting grows gradually dimmer and spookier until the characters are literally stumbling about with flashlights. The visible set of Hill House itself (a joint effort by Sara Etherton and Ali McQueen), although only two rooms, successfully conveys the sense of many more foreboding spaces beyond.

Although Hill House’s victims are a varied bunch, they all have two things in common: a yearning to connect with something, and a belief that they can do it here. The engagement they seek may be spiritual, intellectual, or social, but it pulls them all in from afar.
Theodora (Zayne Clayton) wants a diversion from problems at home. The manor’s heir (Ryan Leffingwell) is curious about the place he will inherit. The group’s ringleader, Dr. Montague (Russell Dyball), hopes to conduct paranormal research, though he is often undermined by the parallel efforts of his loopy occultist wife and her assistant (Mari Kenney and Rohan Myers). Their testy tête-a-tête is one of the best dynamics in the production and brings some much-needed comedy to the gloom.

At the center of it all is Eleanor, played with tense earnestness by Zoë Holbo, who brings many secrets and secret desires with her to Hill House. She has the most to gain and lose by being here, and the house knows it. Of those present, she is the only one who truly understands the personhood of this place. It will be her undoing.

Special note also goes to Davida Bloom as Mrs. Dudley, the house’s implacable caretaker, who manages to steal most of her scenes with only a handful of lines.

One does wish the cast had something different to work with than F. Andrew Leslie’s script. It tends to bog down the pace with its talkiness and is written in a highly dated language that some of the actors struggle with. This could be chalked up to its age — Leslie penned it in 1964, adapting a novel from 1959 – but he loses the elegance of Shirley Jackson’s original prose. Director Kari Boldon Welch also notes that he eliminates many thematic elements which gave the novel cohesion.

“Hill House has a reputation for insistent hospitality.” Dr. Montague’s warning to his companions is prudent but ultimately inadequate. None of them are really prepared to resist this place, especially when it gives them exactly what they are looking for, and ultimately it brings out the darkness in everyone. For better and for worse, our geography defines us.