Scary plays are a lot harder to pull than scary movies, especially in small theaters without haunted house-level budgets. So it’s no faint praise to say that Terry Guest’s “Oak”, the all-new Halloween attraction at Raven Theatre, gets off some fierce chills and jumps.
They mostly come courtesy of director Mikael Burke and his design team (the clever set is by Sydney Lynne Thomas), who’ve together forged an admirably swampy milieu for this Georgia story of a woman named Luella from “slavery times” who had little choice but to disappear into a river and who has lured kids there ever since. The local TV news warns every year of “snatchin’ season,” just to make the situation clear. Lord, have mercy.
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Burke, in many ways, treats his material like he actually is directing a movie, weaving the dialogue around a hip soundtrack and constantly using only a tiny portion of the stage and thus closely controlling where he wants the audience to look and when (and where) he prefers they remain in the dark. The genre is exploited, all right, and plenty of nervous shrieks from the audience around me suggested that the show was causing conniptions.
Better yet, the play has plenty to say beyond the expectations of the season. As did, say, Jordan Peele in “Get Out,” the very talented Guest is using the horror convention to talk about the racist origins of many Black myths and nightmares, as well as to argue that too many Black kids, even in rural settings, still are not safe nor even allowed to be Black kids in the full freedom implied by that term.
Guest clearly intends his one-act play to be unnerving, and he succeeds on multiple levels and yet still manages to score some hard laughs, thanks in no small part to Jazzy Rush and Donovan Session, who play the way-too-curious sister and little brother at the core of the show. There’s also a compelling performance from Brianna Buckley, playing a stressed-out single mom (who wouldn’t be when everyone knows there is a “snatchin’ season” going on?), holding down a job at Krystals and worrying on a daily basis. Buckley looks far past the seductive conventions of the genre and instead treats Guest’s script as an intensely realistic blueprint. Thankfully, Burke is sufficiently skilled as a director to tie these disparate acting styles together.
Still, the script needs some work, especially when it comes to building the moment-by-moment tension on which all thrillers depend and, not unrelatedly, the main narrative voice tends to come and go. Some extraneous stuff could be cut but I think what needs to happen here is to give more storytelling control to Rush’s fabulously rendered Pickle, a fascinating and funny young woman at once daring and determined but also trapped, like the rest of these characters, in the long and troubled history of her community.
We need someone to pull us into the swamp and out the other side, so to speak, and Ms. Pickle knows where she’s at. Or so we hope.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “Oak” (3 stars)
When: Through Nov. 9
Where: Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark St.
Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Tickets: $45 at www.raventheatre.com