AN OAK WHOSE ROOTS WON’T LET GO

A flashlight illuminating a face from below: what else could follow that image but a ghost story. And what better time for a ghost story than the month that culminates in Halloween, that night when the boundary between this and the other world is at its thinnest, when spirits, both vengeful and benign, can cross over. At Raven Theatre Chicago, Terry Guest’s Oak takes us into the marshes of Georgia to deliver a scary story that, like the best horror stories, has much more on its mind than chills and thrills.

Jazzy Rush and Donovan Session

In Sydney Lynne’s wonderfully creepy set, the cracked boards of a pier by a creek occupy most of the open space. Straggling trees evoking twisting, gnarly limbs form the backdrop. Moss is everywhere. A thin mist lingers, and the lighting by Eric Watkins doesn’t shine so much as weakly filter through.

The flashlight-lit face belongs to Pickle, a sixteen-year-old girl who opens the play with a prologue, telling us a ghost story about a runaway slave and the child she left behind. Pursued by dogs, she chose to drown herself in the creek, forming the basis of an urban legend that still terrifies the local children hundreds of years later.

Stephanie Mattos

Now children are being snatched, and the town is under curfew. Every night a stentorian voice booms, “It’s 7 pm, do you know where your children are?â€, while Pickle, her younger brother Big Man, and their cousin Suga, fight, make up, and scare each other silly with tales of the child-snatching monster in the creek.

Director Mikael Burke directs this fine Southern Gothic with flair and imagination. Wit abounds in just about every element of the production. A vintage, junked television set covered in moss flickers to life to display news reports of the abductions. Elsewhere on the stage, a woman irons her work uniform with the forest behind her and the juxtaposition of the quotidian foreground with the numinous background makes for a stunning image. The fantastic sound design is by Ethan Korvne, who also contributes wonderfully evocative incidental music. A horrific plot element is subtly and sensitively depicted using beautiful puppets created by Caitlin McCleod.

Jazzy Rush

Where Burke truly excels though is with his three principal actors: Jazzy Rush who plays Pickle is a marvel. From her opening flashlit monologue to her final scene, she holds the audience captive. Pickle is the heart of the play and the fight for her soul constitutes the plot. The part requires considerable talent and poise and Rush has an abundance of both. She should be giving voice lessons as a side hustle: her enunciation and voice projection puts some of the more seasoned actors I’ve witnessed to shame.

Donovan Sessions has a seemingly thankless part as the younger brother Big Man but does wonders with what he’s got. He’s hilarious for one thing, bringing bratty, annoying younger sibling energy in spades, but he also has genuine filial chemistry with Rush and the beautifully written and performed scenes with just the two of them on stage were my favorite parts of the play. A terrific listener—his silent reaction during a raw mother-daughter fight was one of the most heartbreaking moments on stage—I found myself searching him out even when he was on the sidelines.

Donovan Session and Jazzy Rush

It’s hard to talk about Stephanie Mattos’ Suga without revealing plot details but sufficeth to say she’s very good.

My sole quibble with the production would be Brianna Buckley’s performance as Peaches, the mother of Pickle and Big Man. It’s a shrill, overacted, and practically camp take that seems like it belongs in a different play altogether. It’s clearly a choice—she is fine in a later part as a shotgun-wielding old woman and lovely in soft voice during the puppet show—but I can’t imagine the reasoning behind it.

Bri Buckley and Donovan Session

At its best, horror is about more than just scares. It provides a way for us to deal with unpleasantness without explicitly foregrounding those issues, whether those issues are political, sexual, religious, or personal. It is no coincidence that some of the richest horror works have come during times of great tumult. Oak deals with weighty themes with a light hand, drawing a line from slavery to systematic racism in the modern day. Concealed in the depths of its plot is a real despair and fear of stasis, and the heartbreaking reality that to a child, the realization that a parent cannot protect them is far more terrifying than any monster could be.

Kudos to Mr. Guest for not chickening out. It couldn’t have ended any other way. Oak’s denouement is as sublime as it is nihilistic.

Donovan Session and Jazzy Rush

photos by Michael Brosilow

Oak
Raven Theatre Company
Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark St.
85 minutes with no intermission
Thurs-Sat at 7:30; Sun at 3
ends on November 9, 2025
for tickets ($30-$45). visit Raven Theatre

for more shows, visit Theatre in Chicago