There is a moment in Ryan Spahn’s backstage play that leaves the characters screaming and the audience gasping, but also laughing at how shocking it is, fulfilling anybody’s expectations of a live theatrical horror. 

But for the hour leading up to this moment, and for much of the twenty minutes or so following it, “Inspired by True Events” left me uninspired, despite all its attention to detail and occasional comedy. I kept thinking: What am I missing?

In that first hour, backstage in a community theater in Rochester, New York, the day after opening night, the four people involved in the show arrive one by one and go through their normal routines before the next performance.  But with each one, something is… off. The stage manager Mary (Dana Scurlock),makes a new cup of coffee, cleans up the pizza boxes from the night before; but she also realizes with disgust that the place might once again have mice.  Colin (Jack Difalco) takes a shower, puts on his costume; but he is upset, presumably because, as he tells Mary, broke up with his girlfriend. Mary wonders out of his earshot whether he’s “going through another one of his spells” and whether they should cancel the performance — which feels weird, because we didn’t see any spells.   

Eileen (Mallory Portnoy) arrives, eventually putting on a pregnancy suit and a blonde wig, but she’s shook up, for having just gotten into an accident on her bike. Finally, Robert (Lou Liberatore) shows up late, and starts steaming his costume, then opens the vent looking for the mice.  He says he was delayed because there was a large crowd outside and police and helicopters.

These off-kilter moments and comments felt too off-hand or vague to register as ominous, which was surely what was intended. More effective were some unexplained sounds, courtesy of sound designer Peter Mill Weiss – scratching (were those mice?), a loud bang (what was that?!)

But it’s not until Mary discovers a gym bag, and opens it up, that “Inspired by True Events” enters fully into the theatrical horror genre. The rest of the play more or less fills us in on what happened, which is slightly altered from the true events that is said to have inspired the play. Feel free to click on that link to learn the details; I will share none of them here except to say they are somewhat altered in the play to make them slightly more horrible than in real life, but no less bizarre.

It was hard for me to avoid feeling disappointed by “Inspired By True Events.” But there are aspects of the production that impressed and pleased me. Spahn, an experienced New York actor making his playwriting debut, works in some humorous and spot-on observations about the behind-the-scenes squalor, squabble and peculiarities of theater-making and theater-makers. He’s especially clever in the few scenes from the play-within-the-play that we glimpse through a TV monitor on the wall in the green room, that presents (and occasionally allows us to hear) what’s happening on stage, subtly (and cheekily) paralleling what’s happening off-stage.

Under the direction of Knud Adams, who has helmed two Pulitzer Prize winners in a row – “English” and “Primary Trust” – Spahn’s play gets an innovative production, with just thirty-five audience members per performance treated up-close to the quartet of veteran performers (such as Difalco, the intense, eminently watchable actor from The Ferryman, Torch Song, Mercury Fur) and to the elaborate authenticity of the design.

I’ve seen three plays in the last year that I could characterize as trafficking in stage horror (in one case, directly adapted from a horror movie.) None of these were among my favorite. I think it’s harder to do horror on stage than on film. As I wrote in my review of  Grey House “If it were easy to translate the genre to the stage, wouldn’t the Broadway adaptation of two of Stephen King’s bestsellers have been hits – “Misery” in 2015 and more infamously, “Carrie” in 1988?” 

But it also could just be a question of my personal taste. “Inspired by True Events” might have worked better for me if, rather than going for dread, it tried for a psychological investigation, a la “Equus.” In any case, I’d be drawn to another production by the same talented creative team, hoping it’s not another horror.

Inspired by True Events
Out of the Box Theatrics at Theater 154 through August 4
Running time: 95 minutes no intermission
Tickets: $72.50 – $85
Written by Ryan Spahn 
Directed by Knud Adams
Scenic design by Lindsay Fuori, costume design by Siena Zoë Allen, lighting design by Paige Seber, sound design by Peter Mills Weiss and props design by Sean Frank.
Cast: Jack Difalco as Colin, Lou Liberatore as Robert, Mallory Portnoy as Eileen and Dana Scurlock as Mary.
Photographs by Thomas Brunot