Kate O’Flynn and Kristin Hutchinson lead the haunting storytelling of Lula Raczka’s GREY MAN: A Stage and Screen Experiment
“You know why he’s grey, don’t you?
You know why he’s grey?
She turned him grey…”
Any opportunity to see Kate O’Flynn should immediately be taken up so it is entirely remiss of myself to have left it this long to catch GREY MAN: A Stage and Screen Experiment, available to watch now for another week. Lulu Raczka’s Grey Man is a monologue first seen in 2016 but in this digital production by Liminal Stage Productions, director Robyn Winfield-Smith splices it between two performers.
Kate O’Flynn and Kristin Hutchinson thus both play Maya, a woman whose older sister told the best scary stories, so scary they almost seemed real… The creepy fun of urban legends is gothically evoked but as is so often the way, the kernel of truth upon which they can be based slowly works its way to the surface here. What secrets can stories conceal? What truths can they hide in plain sight?
The clever thing about Grey Man is that no straight-forward answer is given. Winfield-Smith’s direction makes a strong case that issues of mental health are very much at play here, but the way that the older and younger version of Maya intersect don’t point towards a neat resolution, particularly as the ambiguity of the ending defies expectations. Complex but engaging, it certainly engages the interest.
