By Lucy Komisar
When a stage adaptation of “Paranormal Activity” by Levi Halloway opens with a man video-calling his mother in Boca Raton, you’d be forgiven for wondering if you’d wandered into a sitcom taping instead of a horror play. Based on the 2007 found-footage film franchise — though “based on” is generous — this dim cluttered two-story set (living room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and a tellingly empty nursery) houses something far less frightening than the title promises. (Director is Felix Barrett)
Lou (Cher Álvarez) and James (Travis A. Knight) are Americans in London — she’s depressed, he’s distant, and their marriage consists of equal parts sex and sniping. The first forty minutes offer no paranormal activity whatsoever unless you count the mother-in-law Carolanne (Shannon Cochron) on the big screen, an interfering, grandchild-pressing, evangelical obnoxious presence who proves more irritating than terrifying. A bird smashing into glass gets a jump, a door opens by itself, the TV changes channels. Standard haunted-house bingo.
Then the bathrobe drops. James, talking to Lou, watches as her robe, now empty, collapses to the floor, and she sitting on the stairs behind him asks: “Do you finally believe me now?”
Summoned medium Dr. Etheline ( Eva Kaminsky) arrives with two large cases and a candlelit séance that devolves into static, distraught warnings (“will kill you”), and possession. We learn Lou survived a house fire at seven — parents drunk downstairs, locked in her room, hairpin escape, gas, match. And James later confesses to a drunken hit-and-run at twenty on a northern Florida dirt road. The ghost connects to that. And he will go out the door to his destiny.
Actors and director are fine. But the play that starts as a sitcom, never quite escapes that tonal confusion, and ends as a pedestrian exercise in haunted-house tropes. The mother-in-law is the real threat — she prays, she rings the doorbell, she declaims her son is “not fit to be a father” — is she a ghost, a metaphor, or maybe just an annoying Floridian?
Director Barrett delivers some heart-thumping sight-and-sound gags — lights go out and flash, big noises blast, shadow pass upstairs and outside the front glass door, the mother’s face pulls off.
But the “jump scares” are pretentious and gimmicky, the chair-moving, the possession, the disappearing Louise — none of it lands as genuinely scary.
The play wants to be a surreal ghost story about murderous pasts and the sins that find us. The evil-doers are dispatched by the ghost, whose identity we discover at the end. Problem is that this is a gimmicky, never-really-scary adaptation that squanders its film source and its own potential.
“Paranormal Activity.” Written by Levi Halloway, directed by Felix Barrett. August Wilson Theatre. 245 West 52 St, NYC. Runtime 2hrs10min. Opened Sept 15, 2026, closes Feb 28, 2027.