In ‘Hookman,’ college freshman copes with grief, horror movie monsters – Chicago Tribune

Dating back to the days of Nick Offerman and the late, lamented Defiant Theatre, Chicago has a long and tortured history with slasher theater. But although the desire to bring some of the iconography of a Freddy Krueger or a Jason Voorhees to a storefront space near you crops up from time to time, terrifying people while live and low-budget is a tough assignment. Unless you're embracing pulp a la the early days of the Annoyance Theatre, it's tricky to pull off.

All the more reason, then, to admire the work the remarkably versatile director Vanessa Stalling presently is doing at Steep Theatre with Lauren Yee's "Hookman."

This little, 75-minute creeper (penned by the same scribe who wrote "King of the Yees," recently at the Goodman Theatre) is high-end gore with a progressive twist. Yee calls this play "existential slasher theater,"' which is reasonably descriptive, given that she mostly is probing the psyche of a college freshman named Lexi (the rather inscrutable Kiayla Ryann). Lexi has been through some tough stuff you are better off not knowing the precise details when you walk through the door which leads her into, well, the play carries around Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking."

You'd normally think of Didion's dissection of grief as a long way from horror, but Yee's point here, I think, is that we can encounter times in our life when sudden loss renders everything that exists in rational thought nonsensical. Thus we are faced with a need to build something of our own to take its place. And in this play, it's the title character, a terrifying boogeyman (played by James Doherty) lurking in the shadows with his metal appendage.

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What is interesting about this show which I prefer to the misdirected production of "King of the Yees" is that, like the horror genre from which it draws, it is based in normalcy. In this case, dorm room life at an East Coast college, with all of its young adults living in close quarters and flailing about at relationships. That spooked version of familiarity a form of expressionism is what Stalling does so well, whether in a scary little overture of flickering dorm-room desk lamps or even a sardonic video montage that appears at the side of the action but does not detract from the live pressure. The designers here (Arnel Sancianco did the set, Pete Dully did the lights and Mieka van der Ploeg the costumes) combine to create a little, boxed world, with excursions of memory beyond, each a trip inside of Lexi's mind. Add in some very deft flashback scenes with Lexi's best friend Jess (Karen Isabel Rodriguez) and the show also displays a sophisticated sense of how real-life horrors usually spring from the quotidian tasks of our everyday. Like, say, eating a burger with a friend, and then driving to a movie at a mall.

Pursued.

Not every performance ranges as deep as it might, and there are overplayed scenes that wander too far into predictable type, dissipating credible tension. Some of that is the writing. This is a young show, all the way around. But Ryann is consistently engaging, and her scenes with Rodriguez are quite haunting.

Stalling whose growing body of fine, intense work in Chicago theater often reflects an interest in how we deal with unspeakable loss is an ideal match for Yee, embracing this writer's dark humor but also her palpable sense of longing. Stalling sets up a tightly defined world (which is exactly what the Goodman show lacked) and, from there, she shows us the boil of life's pressures on a young person, desperately trying to hang on to her own, crawling skin.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com

Twitter@ChrisJonesTrib

"Hookman" - 3 Stars

When: Through May 27

Where: Steep Theatre, 1115 W. Berwyn Ave.

Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes

Tickets: $25-$35 at 773-649-3186 or http://www.steeptheatre.com

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In 'Hookman,' college freshman copes with grief, horror movie monsters - Chicago Tribune