‘The Creeps’ Review: A One-Woman Cast of the Uncanny

New York

As she slithers around the floor in a black bodysuit, Catherine Waller, the creator and performer of the solo show “The Creeps,” resembles a human-size lizard, complete with flicking tongue. Should you be unnaturally, or perhaps naturally, averse to lizards, the effect promised by the play’s title will set in quickly.

It will probably happen eventually for most attending this arrestingly strange show, which has been seen, and piled up several prizes, at various theater festivals. (It was part of the United Solo Theater Festival in New York in 2018.) Ms. Waller is a chameleonic performer, most impressively in the way she imbues each of the characters she portrays here with a distinctive physicality. In the show’s introduction—it turns out, according to the script, that she is playing a character called Lizardman—she rises from the floor to move into a bent-kneed stance, arms flared at her sides, in a pose that strikingly recalls that of a Merce Cunningham dancer.

In playing the first human character we meet, a man named Bill, she throws on a woolen cap and kneels into a deep crouch, remaining there as he unfolds bits of his grim life story, which includes the death of a daughter in mysterious circumstances relating to the building in which Bill is now the basement-dwelling caretaker. The premises are owned and presided over by a doctor who sounds increasingly sinister as the show proceeds. Bill’s squint isn’t just a squint: In addition to his daughter, he has also lost his eyes.

He is not alone in affliction. There is also the pregnant prostitute—Bill’s home is apparently, among its other grisly functions, a brothel—who is drug-addicted and piteously hoping to bring her child into even the dire world she inhabits. Later we meet an endearingly chipper young girl who has had her hands and feet removed. So she cheerily tells us. And while her bright squeak of a voice is in stark contrast to the horrific details she lets slip about her experience, again it is Ms. Waller’s physical embodiment of this girl that brings her to vividly disturbing life.

No one who inhabits the building where the doctor holds sway is safe from the shadowy specter of his apparent malevolence, although Ms. Waller stokes suspense by keeping us in the dark about many details. Even after the show, which runs just over an hour, had drawn to its (slightly abrupt) conclusion, I was left wondering precisely what this murky tale was intended to mean, other than to display before us, freak-show-like, the ghoulish cast of characters.

Yet what is most surprising about “The Creeps” is not its gothic, Grand Guignol flourishes—although Ms. Waller deserves credit for delving into realms that are more easily explored on film or in prose—but instead the uncanny manner in which she blends them with disarmingly appealing passages in which the characters engage with the audience. That young girl, for instance, in addition to imploring audience members to give her a piece of jewelry—there is pathos in her cajoling desperation—also shares bad jokes and invites us to contribute our own.

Many will shudder at the idea of partaking in these strange proceedings—I’m generally a hearty non-fan of immersive, or, as it is advertised here, “interactive” theater—but Ms. Waller, while remaining in character(s), brings an easy naturalness to the manner in which she welcomes the audience into the show, so that the rapport between these weird dramatis personae and those who voluntarily exchange words with them feels unintimidating and even, at times, affecting. (Of course, Ms. Waller’s daring also means risk: At the show I saw, one audience member seemed to want to join her onstage, so insistent was he on obeying one of the “rules” she set out at the top of the show, to feel free to talk.)

“The Creeps,” which features terrific sound design by Hidenori Nakajo and lighting by Scott Monnin

—Mr. Isherwood is the Journal’s theater critic.