
Catherine Waller in The Creeps. Photo: Andrew Patino
There is something unsettling about The Creeps, a solo show created and performed by Catherine Waller that’s having an Off-Broadway run (in an updated version) after appearing at various fringe and solo theater festivals. But I’m not sure it’s the thing Waller means us to be unsettled by. An author’s note in the program says, “The aim of The Creeps is to have people become unwaveringly present to the commonality between our humanity….[to] go beyond our initial expectations of these creeps.” But the characters it portrays are such abstract sketches that it’s hard to form expectations of them in the first place; it seems that bad things have happened to them all, but we’re given only a few lurid details without a real glimpse into their humanity. They’re creepy because they’ve been gathered together under the rubric of “creep,” not because one is blind and condemned to a basement or another is a coerced sex worker, and neither in the writing nor in the performance does Waller give us enough character or backstory to adjust that expectation. (A director isn’t credited for this iteration of the piece.) The whole thing feels like the starting point for an exploration, not its end point.
The world-building, too, is a light sketch, inflected with tropes from gothic noir and urban noir, but again without a lot of concrete details. We seem to be in a crypt or mysterious basement beneath a dance club (perhaps a strip club); Hidenori Nakajo’s sound does bring a creepy aura of abandoned space. Waller, clad in a catsuit and using shifts in physical position, accent, and lighting color (the design, full of saturated hues, is by Scott Monnin) to differentiate between characters, gives us four figures: a reptilian emcee who sets the scene; a blind man named Bill who is some sort of manual laborer and has lost a daughter; Stumpy, a child with amputated hands and feet who tells jokes and seeks affection from the audience; and Harley Harlett, a pregnant woman who is also a stripper or dancer in a sex club. Hanging over them all is the shadow of a mysterious doctor, who is their tormentor and perhaps captor, but who remains unseen.
Of the four, Bill and Stumpy are comparatively better developed; the Lizardman mostly sets the ground rules for audience interaction and acts as a narrator, and Harley has but a few brief and elliptical scenes. Bill, the Lizardman, and Stumpy engage with the audience a lot, though in fairly formulaic ways; Harley, by virtue of not doing that, remains even more of a cipher. Even the interaction with the audience–which feels like improv in the moment, but the outlines of which are pretty tightly scripted–has the feeling of a placeholder, the outline that the creator was meant to go back to and fill with life.
I think we are meant to see archetype in the characters, but mostly we see the physical postures that Waller uses to indicate them: a deep crouch for Bill, one that looks painful to maintain for the length of his scenes; a snaky rhythm in the neck and hands flaring behind like fins for the Lizardman; kneeling with clenched fists for Stumpy; a mix of exhausted and seductive gestures for Harley.
One part improv, two parts gothic noir, with a dash of movement theater and a lot of knock knock jokes, The Creeps seems to be hinging on Waller’s and the characters’ engagement with the audience to bring resonance to the proceedings. We’re all in this together, in theory, and trying to escape. But to escape what? I was never quite sure. “We have similar wants, desires, hopes, regrets,” says the program note, but I find myself at the end with only the faintest glimmer of an idea of what Bill, Stumpy, Harley might hope for, might want, or might regret.