Theater Talkback: Screams, Silent and Otherwise

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Billy Crudup in the 2005 Broadway production of Martin McDonagh's “Pillowman.”

I do not scream at the theater. At the movies, sure, whenever any shark or zombie catches me off guard. But I go the the-a-tuh to be enlightened, not frightened. I laugh, I cry, I might even gasp. Scream? Almost never.

It is, however, that “almost” that I am thinking of just now, as Halloween creeps up on us. For there have been a few, isolated occasions when I have been scared out of my cucumber-cool skin by what was happening on a stage. And in honor of the imminence of All Hallow's Eve, a New Yorker's favorite holiday, I would like to enumerate the forms and content of theater that means to terrify.

First and most obviously, there's the rattle-trap dark old house play, a form once cherished on Broadway but rarely seen these days in the U.S. outside of a dinner or community theater. This type of show falls into the general categories of cobwebby and creaky (“The Bat,” “Night Must Fall”); smooth and well-oiled (“Deathtrap,” “Sleuth”); and the sure-to-be-a-movie-some-day suspenser (“Wait Until Dark”). I have sat through many performances of shows from all these categories and never uttered a squeak.

Then there is the spook-house play, which is often interactive and may even dispense with a conventional script. This form still flourishes in the West End of London (where I saw something called “Ghost Stories” a few years ago) and Off Broadway (“Play Dead,” created by Teller the magician) and usually involves plunging the audience into darkness at some p oint and subjecting its members to the touch of someone or something unknown. (Oh, was that just you, Mr. Nofsinger?) Of course I screamed; I have natural human reflexes.

And I am not forgetting the real spook houses for grown-ups, where we the audience wander through crepuscular rooms and look upon grisly sights. This kind of entertainment â€" which reached a peak of sophistication with “Sleep No More,” Punchdrunk's re-imagining of “Macbeth” as a highly moveable feast â€" abounds around Halloween.

(My colleague Jason Zinoman, who specializes in all things scary, has written about many current variations, including one that involves simulating real-life serial killers. And yes, I'm sure if I thought that was Jeffrey Dahmer standing before me, I would scream bloody murder.)

But another kind of show is, for me, the scariest. And that's the sort that uses the intimacy of theater â€" and the sense of one human being talking to others (that's us) â€" to say, “I'm going to tell you a story, and once you've heard it all, you may not get over it.” I don't always scream at such shows, but they tend to set off silent screams in my head that linger and echo.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Michael Cerveris, seated, and Manoel Felciano in the 2005 Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd.”

Consider, for example, John Doyle's 2005 revival of “Sweeney Todd,” the Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler musical about a homicidal Victorian barber. I've seen a lot of “Sweeneys” over the years, quite happily since it's one of my favorite musicals. But it was Mr. Doyle's version, set in what felt like a low-rent insane asylum, that really messed with my nervous system.

From the opening image â€" of a man in a strait jacket determined to tell the tale of one Mr. Todd â€" to the overflowing buckets of blood that were sloshed liberally throughout, this “Sweeney” brought the musical's madness â€" and by that I mean anger as well as insanity â€" to the surface. And because the cast members here were also the musicians, you felt that it was they who had control of the story.

There was no distance between the teller and the tale, and unusually little between the teller and the audience. The production made us feel complicit by accepting the tarnished pleasures of Grand Guignol.

It also, more than any other version I've seen, forced us into identifying with the demented, razor-wielding Sweeney (played by Michael Cerveris without a hint of a wink.) The nightmare didn't end when the curtain came down; it kept playing on subliminally (like certain of the show's pastiche melodies) in my mind (and come to think of it, my dreams).

The tradition of the seductively told ghost story is a respectable one in Irish literature. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that the three other works I'm listing as my top scary plays are all Irish. One comes from Martin McDonagh (who is Anglo-Irish but writes about Ireland), whose “Pillowman” (seen on Broadway in 2005) considered the dangers of diabolical yarn-spinning even as it spun a diabolical yarn. (Our hero wrote gruesome stories that were reflected bizarrely and not all that coincidentally in real life.)

I guess you could say “Pillowman” was what the academically inclined call meta theater, except that it offered no intellectual distance while you were watching it. And there was one little flash of a moment, illustrating a story within a story, that had us all either sinking beneath or leaping out of our seats. In any case, t he urge was to run for shelter, preferably to a clean, well-lighted place where no one had shivery stories to tell.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Oliver Platt in “Shining City” at the Biltmore Theater in 2006.

But my favorite living fright-meister is Conor McPherson, whose “The Weir” (seen on Broadway in 1998) portrayed elbow-benders in a pub, stretching out the hours until closing time with supernatural tales that they swore they knew were true, at least second- or third-hand. This was a quiet play, with very little action, that by degrees burrowed into your imagination, forcing you to see that whether the ghostly stories were literall y true or not was almost irrelevant. That's because they gave form to what is genuinely and abidingly scary in life â€" the losses and loneliness and guilt that we take to the very grave.

But best of all was Mr. McPherson's “Shining City” (on Broadway in 2006), about a therapist with his own psychological demons and a patient who insists he sees the ghost of his wife. Therapy is, I know, supposed to be a form of exorcism. But in this case, the process seemed to stir up more specters than it banished.

And though I'm reluctant tell you how “Shining City” ended, allow me to say that the first time I saw it â€" at the Royal Court Theater in London â€" the play's final image startled me as much as anything from “Psycho.” Reader, I screamed, as did everyone else in the theater, as far as I could tell. And while Mr. McPherson's stealth and subtlety as a writer is such that the haunting doesn't stop when the screaming does, I think we all felt we'd undergon e at least a temporary catharsis. Still, once the curtain went down I wasn't all that keen on returning to an empty flat.

So Happy Halloween. Those are a few of my favorite fright nights at the theater. What are some of yours?