The London import 2:22 A Ghost Story is a kind of modern parable about the dangers of gentrification. Schoolteacher Jenny (Jasmine Cephas Jones, Hamilton) and physicist/writer Sam (Finn Jones, Iron Fist) are a young couple with an 11-month-old daughter who have moved into a fixer-upper house in an area of London that used to be pretty sketchy. They’ve ripped up the carpet, polished the hardwood floors, updated the kitchen with fancy tile and a Smeg refrigerator, installed new doors to the back porch, and are stripping away layers and layers of wallpaper. But when Sam leaves town for a work trip, Jenny discovers that the bones of their new home may not be so good after all.
In fact, every night at precisely 2:22 a.m., she experiences a series of unsettling noises that defy explanation: loud footsteps around the baby’s crib and a man’s voice whispering and crying. So Jenny explains to her American college pal Lauren (Anna Camp, Pitch Perfect) and Lauren’s contractor boyfriend, Ben (Hotel Babylon alum Martin Marquez, projecting a big-shouldered groundedness) when the two come for dinner on the evening of Sam’s return. Soon, Jenny persuades the guests to prolong their night out so that she can have additional witnesses to her reports — something that she suspects she needs to persuade her hyper-skeptical hubby that something is truly awry.
Danny Robins has written a puzzle-box of a script, full of long discussions about science, religion, and the supernatural — with Sam as an overzealous advocate for the view that nothing in this world lies outside the realm of rational explanation. Robins also gooses his play with cheap gimmicks. There are wild foxes in the neighborhood, conveniently, who occasionally emit piercing mating-call screams that are overamplified by sound designer Ian Dickinson and make everyone jumpy (including the characters on stage).
The production nails the look of a modern haunted house, simultaneously sleek and datedly grubby. Anna Fleischle’s set evokes a dream home in the midst of renovation and features a prominent digital clock ticking down to the title time, and Lucy Carter’s shadowy lighting exaggerates the creepy aesthetic while also masking the onstage illusions (by Chris Fisher) when things eventually turn supernatural. Needless to say, Sam’s composure begins to erode as events fall (and leap) outside his sphere of understanding. Finn tends to overplay Sam’s obnoxiousness, deriding the religious faith of Jenny’s upbringing and mocking Ben’s working class job and belief in ghosts. We yearn for his eventual comeuppance — which will come in a truly unexpected way.
Robins is also more convincing in sketching Sam and Ben than the show’s female characters. Jones makes the most of her underwritten role as a woman in the throes of fear, while Camp flails a bit as the stereotypical ugly American, who drinks too much booze and spends much of the night stumbling about the living room, making an awkward drunken pass at her ex, Sam, and slapping Ben when he calls her on her bad behavior. She’s a clueless guy’s version of what a complicated woman might be.
Ultimately, directors Matthew Dunster and Gabriel Vega Weissman are more interested in the clever mechanics of their horror yarn — the jump scares, the wonky Alexa, the introduction of a cursed teddy bear — than in grounding it in a recognizable world of human beings placed in extreme circumstances. There is craft here, particularly in the just-before-the-final-curtain twist that forces you to reassess much of what came before. It’s a doozy. Like the show’s title, though, 2:22 is a clockwork exercise that merely dabbles in the supernatural. ★★★☆☆
2:22 A GHOST STORY
Lucille Lortel Theatre, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours (with one intermission)
Tickets on sale through January 17 for $64 to $191