A famous character of the stage once remarked there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. It’s a truism which holds for our world, as well as that of Hawkins, Indiana. Sure, Lucas, Dustin, Eleven, and the rest of the gang might have faced the Demogorgon in the Upside-Down, and the Mind Flayer and Vecna too, but there are so many other horrors the writers have dreamed up for this poor town that no single TV show can contain them. These days even Broadway appears to be straining to its technical limit in assisting the effort, as gleaned during the opening prologue of Stranger Things: The First Shadow, a new original play written by Kate Trefry, a veteran of Stranger Things’ writers’ room since season 2 and a co-author of the story for First Shadow alongside series creators Matt and Ross Duffer, and The Cursed Child’s Jack Thorne. Their story, like so much else of Stranger Things, also begins with a mind-bending spectacle: an American battleship during World War II vanishing before a live audience’s eyes and being transported into hell. Into the Upside-Down. “It’s something that we had been floating around in the writers’ room for a long time in Stranger Things,” Trefry admits with a wry smile a few weeks after The First Shadow’s premiere at the Marquis Theatre on Broadway. “The Philadelphia Experiment is like the Montauk Project and MKUltra, one of those touchstones of American conspiracy theory heavy hitters.” First Shadow’s theatrical cold open is indeed informed by the supposed real-life cover up of an American naval ship that is said to have accidentally discovered teleportation, much to the physical and mental horror of its crew. Trefry muses that this old story plays out a little like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, albeit if Mike Teavee’s atoms were reassembled with his brain stuck between a wall. It’s a concept she and the Duffers always wanted to work into the show, and it became the first thing Trefry wrote down when asked to pen the Stranger Things “They challenged me to write whatever I want, and they’d figure out how to make it into a play,” Trefry recalls. “So I was like, ‘Okay, let me just throw down this gauntlet.’ I was kind of testing to see what the limits of the stage were, because it seemed so impossible what I wanted to do. But they went crazy for it because it was so audacious.” Audacity might be the guiding star for every aspect of The First Shadow. Obviously co-directors Stephen Daldry and Justin Mark immediately warmed to the idea of doing a riff on the Philadelphia Experiment, complete with the familiar silhouette of the Mind Flayer, yet everything about this production is massive, with stars of the production comparing it to doing an Olympic marathon on stage every night. This ranges from the massive ensemble cast of 34 players to a veritable village of costumers, stagehands, techies, and various other crew members always scrambling behind the scenes. “Physically, what this show requires of us, does not feel like a normal play,” says Alison Jaye, who stars in the show as a young Joyce Maldonado (later Byers). “If anything it feels closer to a musical, but even then, like a steroid version of anything you’re seeing on stage.” It is in fact one of the most spectacular theatrical experiences this writer has viewed in terms of stagecraft and visual illusion. As writer Trefry surmises, “The images, if they were strong enough, would catch on like a disease. And once everyone was infected, every department couldn’t help but get obsessed with trying to make it work.” Yet what might be more impressive is that for as much obvious visual panache as a Stranger Things production must sport, there is a similar narrative ambition at work in First Shadow as well. Not only is the play an original story set in 1950s Hawkins—back before Eleven, Max, and Steve the Babysitter—but it is one suffused with as much emotional pathos and dread as the series. It even centers its narrative on the most monstrous creation from Season 4, if not the whole series: young Henry Creel, the boy who would grow up to be Vecna, played on stage by the now Tony-nominated Louis McCartney. “Knowing where the TV show goes, it was fun to conceive a play that is in its heart a tragedy, which is so different tonally from the show,” Trefry says of her Vecna protagonist. It’s a subtle but profound aesthetic detour, and one which invites even the staunchest Stranger Things into the truly unknown. Here the shadows are deep—and perhaps revealing about the still developing season 5. At the beginning of The First Shadow’s second act, a young man and woman share a flirtation and daydream anyone who was ever young might recognize: two kids imagining what it would be like to leave their small town and escape to a better life. Most audience members will understand the yearning to be free, but in the show it comes with the bitterest of bittersweet edges. If you’ve watched Stranger Things the TV series, you know the destinies of this would-be couple, a slouching high school cool guy named Hopper (Burke Swanson) and a boundlessly optimistic go-getter they call Joyce. And that future’s a million miles away from their fantasy life in sunny Mexico. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! “That scene feels as serious to me and honest in terms of what their love is as anything you see in season 4,” says Joyce performer Jaye of the moment. “A lot of people can connect to the love of your life; a single person following you through the world, or in your head and in your body, never being able to let go of that person, whether or not you’re able to live the story with them.” It’s a scene that also was developed in tech only days and weeks before Stranger Things: The First Shadow’s earliest bow in New York City. While the play opened last year in London’s West End, Trefry and directors Martin and Daldry have been tinkering with and perfecting the hitherto unknown backstories of Joyce and Hop ever since, as well as other fan favorite characters like Bob Newby (Juan Carlos) and Dr. Brenner (Alex Breaux). “We did about a month of workshops in London in November before we came over to America in January,” explains Trefry, “Almost every page has had some tweak to it. We strengthened storylines; we made things better; we cut 20 minutes; it was actually an amazing opportunity to get another crack at it.” It heightened the inherent opportunity in The First Shadow which always appealed to Trefry: digging into the lives of the many adult characters in Stranger Things, and perhaps tweak our very understanding of who they are—from an innocent like Bob (Sean Astin’s character from season 2 who Trefry half-jokes “we did pretty dirty”) to the play’s central protagonist: Henry Creel. Despite being the seemingly most irredeemably evil character in the TV series (#JusticeForMax), Henry is introduced here as a scared adolescent haunted by horrible images in his head that he cannot control. “His story is very personal to me, being somebody who’s struggled a lot with bad thoughts,” Trefry says. “I have very hardcore OCD, so the life of Henry Creel being inundated with dark imagery is close to my heart.” The playwright admits that when they first developed Vecna for season 4, they imagined him as a “Michael Myers” type. Someone born bad. But she and the Duffers saw the chance to go beyond a bad seed backstory when legendary theater director Daldry first approached about doing a Stranger Things play. Hence the stage’s story of young Henry moving to Hawkins with his ill-fated family, and genuinely hoping to start a better life at a new school. In fact, one of the many complex scenes of the play is how the production uses three rotating turntables to introduce an entire cast of ‘50s high school archetypes in the show. It’s a marvel of stagecraft that Bob actor Juan Carlos reveals is so complex that if audiences applaud or laugh too long, or on an odd beat, it can throw the entire watchlike timing off. This technical feat can also prove illuminating for the whole Stranger Things universe. For example, we discover that Joyce and Bob knew each other in the drama club, which surprise, surprise, Joyce is the president of. “There’s a couple of off the cuff references to Joyce being a communist [in the TV series],” muses Trefrey. “To me [that means] she’s a champion for the underdog. And who other than the theater kids are bigger underdogs?” Her Broadway performer certainly thinks it makes sense. “Oh my God, I feel like she’s such an obvious theater kid!” Jaye enthuses. “I feel like there is a kind of a cool girl, tough exterior that then underneath it all is like, ‘no, no, no. She is as weird as everybody else.’” It also allows Stranger Things the play to tap into some of the same meta joys of Stranger Things the TV series. “I think one of the lovely things about the series is how it pays homage to the movies of the ‘80s,” Carlos acknowledges of the setup. “We’re kind of paying homage to theater in a very similar sense and I think it fits right in.” Whereas the TV show centers on the type of nerd who obsessed over Dungeons & Dragons and Ghostbusters in the ‘80s, it is likely a theatrical audience of young people can relate to a Bob Newby who seems to be at least initially excited about doing Oklahoma! at his school. “We [theater kids] are kind of outcasts,” Carlos says, “especially in high school and middle school when it’s like, ‘Oh there goes the drama geek.’” Or as their writer observes, “A little inside baseball isn’t necessarily a bad thing.” Hence there are quite a few laughs about a play within a play at Hawkins’ high school. Hopper actor Swanson even ruefully concedes he can relate a bit since like Hawkins, his school put on Oklahoma! back in the day where he played Curly and did “a pretty spot on impersonation of Hugh Jackman’s version.” Yet so much of the humor and pleasure of this side of the play is derived from the familiar characters we think we know in suddenly new contexts. “There’s this really beautiful balance that we’re all trying to play in,” Swanson notes. “These characters are so iconic and they’re so beloved by so many that to ignore completely what’s been done before would be, I think, a disservice to the fans and to those who are hoping to see a taste and new version of those people. But at that same exact point, it is a new version… Jaye, for instance, drew as much inspiration from watching Winona Ryder in her 1988 breakout film, Heathers, as Stranger Things, citing the unlikely angst of Ryder’s popular (and arguably murderous) high schooler in that dark comedy as informative. Nonetheless, the actor believes “the way to do justice to that is to tell the story, be truthful, and people will give you endless flowers for that because they believe you.” Ultimately they are trying to get you to believe these characters in a different context that takes on shadings of a ‘50s adventure story, particularly as Hopper, Bob, and Joyce eventually investigate the darker side of the play like a veritable Nancy Drew novel. But no matter the setting, their seemingly innocent adventure still exists in the emotionally mercurial world of Stranger Things. Says Swanson, “This sort of Scooby-Doo element of our story in First Shadow, with Bob, Joyce, and Hopper trying to investigate something that they really don’t fully understand and won’t fully understand for 30-plus years, adds to this level of tragedy that Stranger Things does so well—in the most painful, beautiful sense of the word.” Going into Stranger Things 5 When we catch up over Zoom with Trefry, the writer says she is in her “floating” stage after completion of production on an extremely anticipated season of television. She has just come back from checking in with the Duffers in the edit bay for Stranger Things 5. In one sense, it’s a million miles away from the 1950s setting she and those same brothers settled on for the play. (Mind you, one reason the setting worked in Trefry’s mind is that, like the 1980s, the ‘50s were hotbed for science fiction cinema and literature, plus the cynical paranoia that breeds conspiracy theories.) Nevertheless, the two creative endeavors are interwoven. While the playwright strongly insists First Shadow is intended to stand on its own for newcomers, and is not meant to be a preview of Stranger Things Season 5, overlap becomes inevitable when one realizes it is exploring what Hopper and Joyce might remember of a boy named Henry Creel. “It’s interesting because Joyce and Hopper are sequestered all of season 4 in Russia,” Trefry says. “We did talk about what the implication is. If Henry Creel lived in Hawkins during this time, then ostensibly they would have encountered him. But because they were sequestered, it gave us an opportunity to have the teenagers [of the TV show] discover all of this information and not just have it be told to them by the adults.” It also invites tantalizing possibilities for season 5. For instance, might Hopper and Joyce tell Eleven or Will about that kid they knew in their drama club with a strange shine about him? As signaled by the writer’s tight smile toward the question, no one is going to directly answer the question. However, there would appear to be some intersection. “Knowing some of the gifts that will go on for the audience in season 5, [Trefry] lines it up perfectly,” Jaye teases. Her co-star Swanson would agree. “I really don’t think folks who have come to see the show, and who will see the show, realize how integral and irrevocably linked it is to season 5 and to the show itself,” Swanson says. “We get to plant the seeds that we see starting to sprout and come to fruition within the TV show. And from a sense of season 5, it is my opinion that you will not be able to see season 5 without seeing this show, and I think that when people do see season 5, they’re going to come back to this show in droves because they’re going to realize how laid out it was actually for you.” Still, for the play’s writer who has lived with these characters for nearly a decade, and can relate to all her beloved outsiders, from Eleven to the boy who became Vecna, it is about more than lore and all that visual razzle dazzle. “The spectacle is amazing,” Trefrey considers, “but selfishly from a personal angle I hope that there is emotional resonance. I have put a lot of emotion into the play, and I hope that that reads past all the incredible illusion work. That there’s a real story at the core of it that people can connect to and feel seen by.” Audiences can see for themselves right now at the Marquis Theatre in New York, as well as the Phoenix Theatre in London.