Review: Ghost Brothers of Darkland County at Road Less Traveled
- Anthony Chase
- 23 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Every Story Ends Badly
By Anthony Chase
Stephen King and John Mellencamp's Ghost Brothers of Darkland County begins with a promise: every story ends badly. Road Less Traveled Productions makes that promise irresistible.
Artistic director Scott Behrend first heard about the 2012 piece from actor Stephen McKinley Henderson, who had participated in the musical's first workshop reading. This is the first professional production of a heavily reworked and streamlined version. A play that once featured twenty characters and was described as “sprawling” has been tightened to seven characters and a tidy eighty minutes. A father character, who once forced his warring sons to share a night in a remote cabin, has been entirely supplanted by a Caretaker/Troubadour figure, played by Matt Witten, who very clearly represents Satan.
The opening number, “Tear This Cabin Down,” establishes a sense of driving urgency and menace, sung with power and precision by a gifted cast under music director Matt Caputy. Director Doug Weyand stages this with fluidity, driving the actors forward and arranging and rearranging them like cards being dealt from a deck. These choreographic patterns will gain meaning, as each character will turn out to have a match (or, dare I say, a sibling) from a different time.
Urgency and menace are quickly augmented by dark Southern Gothic humor when Witten, now clearly the devil, explains how he helps facilitate every bad decision and makes every story end badly. He prepares us for the tale he is about to tell. We are promised a ghost story. We will hear about conflict between brothers. We are reminded that Cain killed Abel. Witten handles this exposition with an easy, sardonic charm; he is constantly toying with the audience, tossing off punch lines one minute and letting the menace curdle in his voice the next.
Here in Darkland County, two brothers, Frank and Drake, despise each other and compete for the affections of Anna. Frank is an aspiring novelist who claims to have sold his first book for half a million dollars. Drake is an aspiring musician who scrapes by and plays in a bar on the weekend. Anna and Frank are planning to get married and are leaving Darkland County to pursue new lives in New York City. Alex Garcia is Frank. Ricky Needham is Drake. Anna is played by Leah Berst.
Garcia gives Frank a slick, self-mythologizing charm that curdles into something colder as the evening goes on; his Frank is always writing himself as the hero of his own story, even as his ethics slide. Needham's Drake comes at the triangle from the opposite direction, all frayed nerves and impulsive energy, a frustrated musician whose lack of self-control is comical but, in this context, also genuinely dangerous. Between them, Berst's Anna moves with a keen, appraising intelligence: you can see her clocking every lie, every flash of temper, and filing it away for later use.
Anna wants to spend her last night in Darkland in the infamous Murder Cabin, site of a horrific murder–suicide years before. It seems she has never seen the place. The entire piece is performed within the expanse of this space, with its mysterious caretaker and a door that has a habit of opening all by itself. The set is by Dyan Burlingame, whose rough-hewn, claustrophobic cabin gives the performers plenty of corners to disappear into and emerge from. Sound by Nicholas Quinn evokes the surrounding world, while lighting by John Rickus heightens the sense of foreboding.
Frank and Anna arrive after dark, but as they begin to settle in, they are interrupted by the Caretaker, who admonishes them for trespassing but then offers to tell the cabin's gruesome story. Anna hangs on every word. Indeed, she has a notable ability to anticipate narrative, to understand the all-too-predictable patterns of human behavior and the tawdry pull of desire, jealousy, and pride. Her almost preternatural sense of plot is key to the entire evening.
The vein of dark humor is amplified with Anna's first number, “That’s Who I Am.” She’s out for herself. We begin to suspect that she might not actually be head-over-heels in love with Frank. Berst leans into the song's acid self-awareness, letting Anna's self-interest play as both survival instinct and a kind of wry, millennial pragmatism.
Stephen King's yarn taunts us with the predictability of narrative and its inescapable nature once it is set in motion. The Caretaker's story introduces an earlier pair of brothers. The Murder Cabin got its name, and two bullet holes in its wall, when, years ago, brothers Jack and Andy, one college-educated with a bright future before him, the other working at a service station and barely scraping by, feuded over Jenna, the prettiest girl in town. The Troubadour evokes Cain and Abel, but Anna’s keen sense of the cyclical predictability of human behavior will make you think of other examples of fraternal hatred: Edmund and Edgar from King Lear, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, and the Karamazov brothers.
We swing back and forth between the contemporary story unfolding and the old tale of murder being told. The comedy takes a decided turn for the grotesque, which is marvelously fun, as Weyand rewinds the climactic scene, giving it a visual rendering reminiscent of reversing video to let the story play out with alternative choices. The staging asks a lot of the ensemble in terms of precision and timing, and they meet the challenge with crisp, almost ritual clarity.
The pairs of brothers are vivid, engaging, and odious. In the contemporary setting, Ricky Needham is Drake, the frustrated musician with no impulse control; Alex Garcia is the scheming novelist who feels no compunction about playing ethically fast and loose. Their scenes together crackle with petty one‑upmanship, ugly need, and grimly comic competitiveness that makes the inevitable violence feel both shocking and, in Anna’s terms, depressingly inevitable.
In the past, Thomas Evans is Andy, the elder brother, who derives his self-esteem from his talent with a rifle and from having a beauty queen for a girlfriend. Evans plays him as a swaggering local demigod, a man whose entire identity is wrapped up in aim and ownership. Ryan Butler is younger brother Jack, who has education and a promising future but still feels the need to compete with his brother. Butler's quieter, tenser energy makes Jack's eventual choices feel like a tragic failure of imagination rather than simple villainy.
The cast is strong. Matt Witten deftly walks the line between stand-up comedian and satanic menace, a kind of Mayberry Batman villain; he emcees the evening with a wicked glint but lets genuine threat seep in at the edges. Leah Berst is divine as the clever young woman with ambitions that outpace her resources, whose efforts take her in way over her head. Anna Fernandez is similarly compelling as the clever young woman from an earlier generation whose ambitions, too, outpace her resources, leaving her no room to maneuver. Fernandez gives her a bruised, yearning quality that makes her fate feel heartbreakingly boxed in. The fact that both women see riding the prospects of a promising young man as their best hope says a lot about the durability of certain sad narratives.
The band is thrilling, with Caputy on piano, Jake Payne on drums, Nick Corallo on percussion, Sam Osmond on guitar and banjo, Todd Glosser and Leah Zicari on guitar, and Marc Cousins on bass. These musicians give Mellencamp's score drive, texture, and atmosphere, from swampy grooves to jagged rock.
The Troubadour promises us a story that will end badly, and keeps his word. What’s remarkable is how much pleasure director Weyand and his company extract from that very inevitability. Ghost Brothers of Darkland County runs through May 17.