Spooky play captivates audience

On those dark and stormy nights, the ones where the lights go out and the wind howls, almost everyone thinks of ghosts. Something about the darkness and the sudden revelation at each lightning strike reaches into one’s deepest sense of terror.

“The Haunting of Grayson Manor” is a ghost story that gave me shivers and kept me intrigued. There were also pleasant moments of humor interspersed throughout the play, helping to keep it light and enjoyable. It had both murder and mystery. Beyond the story itself, it also featured good acting and an amazing set. Overall, I feel pretty good about the “The Haunting of Grayson Manor.”

It all starts in the foyer and adjacent sitting room of a creepy centennial manor on a night where the wind howls and the sky bellows. This may seem like a bit of a cliché to start with, but honestly, it works; it is a story about a haunted house. The professor of parapsychology, Dr. Samuel Moore, has arrived at the manor in order to investigate alleged paranormal events. The house is occupied by an old widow named Ellen Grayson and her maid of some 40 years, Velda Graves. Some apparition has been appearing before Grayson in the middle of the night for several weeks and speaks to her in a hushed voice. Besides being a widow, Grayson also lost her son almost exactly 20 years ago, 20 years after she lost her husband.

Moore decides to involve some of his more senior students in order to give them some in-the-field experience as well as take advantage of the additional eyes, ears and brains. The experience and mystery expands as the voice and apparition are identified as Grayson’s own deceased son. Along with Grayson’s astrologer, Cybil Bane, they have a séance in order to talk to the dead son of Grayson. What follows is a very creepy sequence involving a bleeding portrait and a disembodied voice.

The story is fun and the actors’ portrayal is what made it so. A cast of mostly veterans from the theater department, they made their characters believable, like they were actual people. Based on talking to a few of the actors and the play’s author, Gregory Forbes, after the show, I found out one of the reasons why.

This is the first time and place that “The Haunting of Grayson Manor” has ever been performed. The actors got to work directly with Forbes during the rehearsals and the implementation as a whole. Small rewrites were made even up until the second showing, to make the characters truer and make the story snappier. Forbes gave credit to the actors and the rest of the people who made the play work for their professionalism.

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