Mark Woods: More than a ghost story, a Broadway play written by Douglas Anderson graduate
Growing up in Northeast Florida, Levi Holloway had a twin sister. Or maybe we should say he still has a twin sister. He figures death doesn’t change this, that in so many ways she’s still a part of his life.
He talks to her every time he sees a play that’s now on Broadway.
Walk through New York’s Times Square and, among the sea of colorful billboards for musicals, you can find a purposefully haunting invitation to head to the Lyceum, the oldest continuously operating Broadway theater, for a play that one review described as “spin-chilling and unbearably tense.”
The posters for this play, with an eerie image of a girl in the middle, are all black-and-white, except for one red letter. The typeface has a hand-written feel to it.
“Grey House,” it says and, at the bottom, “written by Levi Holloway.”
From Douglas Anderson to Broadway
Holloway, 42, and his wife are in the process of moving from New York back to Chicago, where he’s lived most of his life since graduating from Douglas Anderson School of the Arts in 1999.
He grew up in Middleburg, with one old brother and his twin sister. When he tells the story of a lifelong attraction to the horror genre, he often starts with how he got this interest from his father. When Levi was 5, his dad took him to a movie theater, not to see a Disney movie, but for a viewing of “A Nightmare on Elm Street.”
As you might guess, he had trouble sleeping that night. The next day his father got him a subscription to Fangoria, a horror film magazine, so he could forensically break down fear and film.
His dad also was a big reader. And once Levi was able to read books, his father paid him $1 for every book he read. Comic books didn’t count. His father made suggestions, like Stephen King’s “The Stand.” And he gobbled them up. Decades later, Levi still appreciates the way King can tell a story.
“His prose is so comforting and sturdy,” Holloway says. “He’s very welcoming. And then, of course, he flips it and scares you.”
When Holloway got to high school, he decided he wanted to go to Douglas Anderson. His plan was to study visual arts. But when he got there, he switched to theater. His first acting teacher was Jan Wikstrom.
“She saved me in a certain way,” he said. “She definitely curated the artist in me and was such a guidepost for what I wanted to do with my life.”
Wikstrom, who now lives in California, remembers Holloway as this kid with hair down to the middle of his back. He was, she says, a bit of a rebel, with a bit of anger, balanced with a beautiful sense of wonder.
She says that when he stepped on a stage, his ability to get inside of the text of American playwrights — Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams — stood out, even at a school full of talented students.
“I’m going to use the g-word — gifted — not the other g-word,” she said, avoiding even saying genius. “That word is such a burden. But it was quite clear this guy was very, very, very gifted.”
She says at Douglas Anderson, he was “a rebel who found his home, his first artistic home.”
The theater bug also led him to leave his hometown, to head to DePaul in Chicago. He stayed there after college, embarking on what he calls a hyphenated career. By that he means that to make a living in theater, you do a lot of different things. For him, that included creating shows at the Bell School — one of the country’s oldest schools for deaf and hearing-impaired children.
To a degree, that is where he honed his skills as a playwright. To this day, it’s an integral part of how he thinks about how to tell a story on a stage. Even though he has moved far past elementary school plays, everything he writes is deaf and hearing integrated. He says he never writes about deafness. He writes of it. He writes plays that include deaf roles — including “Grey House.”
He didn’t write this play thinking it would be a commercial success. He certainly didn’t envision it as his big breakthrough, with performances at a big New York theater, with one of Broadway’s most in-demand directors (Joe Mantello) and a cast that includes Laurie Metcalf (a long and diverse acting resume but you may best know her as Jackie on “Roseanne”), Emmy winner Tatiana Maslany (“Orphan Black”), Emmy nominee Paul Sparks (“House of Cards”) and Millicent Simmonds (a deaf actress who played Emily Blunt’s daughter in “A Quiet Place”).
He wrote this play with an intimate, 70-seat Chicago theater in mind.
He wrote it with his twin sister in mind.
More than a ghost story
Ashleigh stayed in Florida longer than Levi and, their older brother, Casey. She got married and had three children. She and her family ended up moving to Utah. That’s where they were living when, in 2016, she was killed in a car crash. She was 35.
Levi doesn’t get into the details of what happened — the driver of another vehicle eventually was sent to prison — but, without prompting, he brings up the loss of his sister. He does this often in interviews about “Grey House” because, for him, it’s hard to separate that loss from this play.
“She was killed and it suddenly sort of changed the whole architecture of who my family was, and who I was,” he said. “It made me pay a lot closer attention to moment-to-moment life.”
He didn’t exactly know what to do with all that unmooring grief. So he started writing. And he says that he didn’t so much as write a story as it poured out of him.
A ghost story, about much more than ghosts.
This is how the “Grey House” website describes the plot: “When a couple crashes their car in the mountains, they seek shelter in an isolated cabin. Its inhabitants, though somewhat unusual, are eager to make their guests feel right at home. But as the blizzard outside rages on and one night turns into several, the couple becomes less and less sure of what’s true — about their hosts, themselves, and why that sound in the walls keeps getting louder.”
Holloway doesn’t want to give away, or explain too much, but he adds, “Over the course of their stay, they realize that their whole lives they were heading to this cabin.”
It’s the most personal thing he’s ever written, something that he says “wears the jacket of horror,” but he doesn’t consider it to be horror. It’s more heart. It's about loss and it's about found family. It was written while he was both grieving and falling in love with his wife. And while his sister is all over its pages — he says every time he sees the show, it’s as if he’s talking to her — it has seemed to resonate with people in their own very personal ways.
It had a successful run in the small theater in Chicago in 2019, shortly before the pandemic shut down everything, including Broadway. But that Chicago run led to him being represented by an agency that pitched it for New York, which led to the coveted director, high-profile cast and current run at the historic, 900-seat Lyceum Theatre on 45th Street.
It opened May 30. Jan Wikstrom, Levi’s former teacher, was at one of the first shows.
They’ve stayed in touch through the years and talk nearly every week. After he wrote “Grey House,” he asked her if she’d read it. She laughs when she recalls that she was babysitting a grandson and decided to start reading in the middle of the night.
“I don’t want to say it’s a horror story,” she said. “It’s mystery, in the capital M deep sense. It’s the scary story that keeps you awake at night. It entertains, but it also turns our minds toward something we deeply need to consider as a culture.”
Instead of elaborating, she adds something that others say. She doesn’t want to give away any spoilers. You really need to see it.
She was there for one of the first Broadway performances, along with her husband and her children. She said she was so nervous before the curtain went up — more nervous, it seemed, than Levi.
“He was a cool kid,” she said. “And now he’s a cool grown man. … I’m so deeply happy and thrilled and proud.”
It’s no small feat to get any play — no singing or dancing, just dialogue – alongside the Broadway staple of glitzy musicals and revivals. But an original play like this? The New York Times touched on the rarity with a review that began, “When it comes to plays that inspire fear, unsettle the audience or display horrific intensity, only a handful come to mind.”
Richard Margulies, a Jacksonville attorney, also went to New York to see “Grey House” (he’s who suggested I write about it). He coached Levi in Little League baseball. And Marguilies’ two sons, Alex and Adam, remain close friends with Levi and his brother.
Margulies echoes a sentiment I’ve seen elsewhere: “Grey House” is the kind of play that leaves you thinking about it days later. A story on Spin.com said it “implants lingering questions that will sit in your mind long after the show has ended.”
To a degree, that’s what “A Nightmare on Elm Street” did to Levi at age 5. He knows it wasn’t exactly orthodox parenting. But he says he’s grateful to his dad. His father was, he says, a hard-ass, a biker who had a hard life. He also was his connection to baseball, books and, yes, horror.
Lives are complicated. Death doesn’t change that. Sometimes it illuminates it.
His father died before “Grey House.” But he’s there, too, in the pages and now on a Broadway stage.
Levi Holloway says, yes, it’s a ghost story. But it’s more about the ghosts of the living than the dead. And when he describes walking through New York and seeing a “Grey House” poster, it seems like a surreal moment capable of producing chills. But, at least when he’s recalling it, he sounds calm, cool. Or maybe it's more of a sense of wonder that this story poured out of him and ended up here.
“You see a poster — and there's your name on it — and you’re like, that seems good," he said.
mwoods@jacksonville.com
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This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Broadway play 'Grey House' written by Jacksonville native Levi Holloway
