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by Keith Barker & Thomas Morgan Jones, directed by Helen Juvonen

Thought For Food Productions with Crow’s Theatre & Guild Festival Theatre, Streetcar Crowsnest, 345 Carlaw Avenue, Toronto

September 19-October 19, 2025

The Man: “I need you to believe me”

Nowadays it’s difficult for a fictional story to scare us when the real world has become so frightening. Nevertheless, The Veil by Keith Barker and Thomas Morgan Jones, now having its world premiere in the Studio Theatre at Streetcar Crowsnest, still makes a bold attempt. The show features an unusual set-up, but the story includes too many familiar ghost story tropes to be exciting. It may be a new story but it keeps sounding like we’ve heard it all before. The evening’s greatest pleasure comes from the fully committed performance of Byron Abalos as the sole narrator.

The conceit of the play is that a nameless man, whom I will call the Man, has somehow gathered us in a disused theatre space to tell us about the distress he is in. The Man, Abalos, finds the theatre after we have all assembled and has to knock on the window to get the stage manager, Kiera Doerksen Smith, to let him in. Once the Man makes his apologies and expresses his surprise that so many have attended, he moves a table, apparently property of the COC, and a chair into place and opens a cloth containing a small oblong box. He then takes a bottle and pours a circle of white powder (we later hear that it is salt) around himself and the table and chair. Those familiar with ancient traditions will know that this is a magic circle meant to protect the person inside from malign forces. The ritual is as old as ancient Mesopotamia and is mentioned in writing sometime before 1046 BC. Once the circle is complete the Man never leaves it until the show ends.

One problem with the conceit that becomes more nagging as the show progresses is how exactly the Man could have worded his advertisement to make a hundred people show up for one night to hear his story. “Desperate Man Needs an Audience to Hear His Tale of Woe” would not work. “Lawyer Wants to Tell You Stories of the Supernatural” might attract some but certainly not many. Once we see how the show ends, we really want to know the pretenses were used to gather us, since, knowing what we now know, nobody would willingly attend. As it is, we never do find out what supposedly induced us to be there.

After urgently pleading with us to believe what he says, no matter how unbelievable it may seem, the Man tells us that he is a lawyer who sought to rise to the rank of partner in his firm as rapidly as possible. Working excessively long hours to impress his boss has only succeeded in alienating his wife and has kept him from his 6-year-old daughter. When his boss finally does offer him a partnership, the Man thinks his worries are over. Unfortunately, the boss wants the Man to help him with a problem.

The boss has taken on a curse from someone else and it has started to crush his life. He explains how he took on the curse and how he could pass it to someone else. The Man, not believing any of mumbo jumbo his boss says about the curse, is only too ready to ingratiate himself by taking on the curse. This includes possession of the small oblong box which contains a candle which once lit obliges an uncursed person to take on the curse willingly or be subject to its ill effects if the candle goes out on its own.

As the Man discovers, all the supernatural lore the boss said about the curse is true. The Man finds that every bad deed he has done and every bad thing he has said have combined themselves in to a single being which remains hidden from him by a veil. The Man obtains all his worldly goals, but the evil force begins ruining his personal life and mental health.

Authors Keith Barker and Thomas Morgan Jones have structured the play so that the events the Man experiences become progressively worse until finally the life or death of a family member hangs in the balance. The problem is that if Barker and Jones thought that the Mon’s worsening experiences would cause us increasing anxiety, they are wrong. All the events the Man tells us about already seem familiar either from films or stories.

This isn’t too surprising. The Background Notes in the publicity materials for the show tell us “For Keith & Thomas, that [i.e., experimenting with the past] meant drawing inspiration from the great works of literary horror and exploring how those haunting forms could come to life on stage”. The Crow’s website even says that the show is “Inspired by classic horror writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Shirley Jackson”. The trouble is that the narrative is so inspired by pre-existing texts that it seems more like a traversal of familiar horror motifsthan a lived experience.

One precedent for the story is the story “La Horla” (1887) by Guy de Maupassant in which an upper-class man unintentionally invites a malevolent supernatural being to haunt him. The nonce word “horla” (i.e., “hors” plus “là”) means an unknown something out there. Another pertinent reference is to one of the most famous of English horror stories, “The Monkey’s Paw” (1902) by W.W. Jacobs which features a curse that can be passed from one person to another by passing on the mummified paw. The paw grants wishes but at a terrifying cost to the one who makes the wish. It would be unfair to the play, but a person could play a game of “spot the reference” with every circumstance that the Man narrates.

Even the notion of a veil is not new. In fact, it is extremely old. The original reason brides wore veils in ancient Greece and Rome was to ward off evil. The Greek word for veil was καλύπτρα or “covering”. We can see how significant this word became in the biblical notion of ᾰ̓ποκᾰ́λῠψῐς (apocalypse) “unveiling” when supernatural powers break through the delicate veil that separates their world to enter ours. As for the title, the authors should know that in 2011 Conon McPherson, known for such theatrical ghost stories The Weir (1997), premiered a play called The Veil whose title also referred to the thin separation between the natural and supernatural worlds.

What is new in the play is the idea of a man telling a what is essentially a ghost story in a room with the lights up, or at least not fully dimmed. The effect Barker and Jones and director Helen Juvonen aim at is a stage show that seems as real as possible. This is why there is the pretense of the Man not knowing how to get into the theatre.

This being the case, we have to wonder why Juvonen has need of lighting designer Jareth Li or sound designer Ashley Naomi. If the show means to imitate reality the only lighting cues would be lights on, lights off. As for sound, we notice that the further the Man gets into his story, the more the events are illustrated by sounds cues like dogs barking or mysterious crashes. These sounds are meant make us hear what the Man is recalling but they also emphasize that what we are watching is a fiction.

Much of the reason Barker, Jones and director Juvonen want the play to feel real is to make the show’s conclusion spine-chilling. This does not happen. There has been so much artifice in the narrative that we are not taken in. On opening night, the ending felt more awkward than anything else.

What really made us pay attention to the action was not any dread of hidden evil lurking just over our left shoulder. Rather what enthralls us is not the story but the storyteller, Byron Abalos. Abalos begins the play by presenting the Man as approachable. He is able to joke and interact with the audience and smile at his own initial folly. As the story progresses Abalos draws further into himself and becomes more constrained in both posture and voice as he narrates ever more disturbing events. Juvonen has Abalos gradually remove parts of his businessman’s attire – taking off his jacket, loosening his tie, rolling up his sleeves – as if having to relive his story was causing the Man to be more physically worked up, By the end Abalos shows that the Man is no longer narrating a story but reliving it. It is thoroughly masterful performance.

The main way to make the play more effective would be to remove all pretense that what we are witnesses is “real”. A solo performer telling a scary story can be mesmerizing and then all the effects of sound and light can be used to enhance the atmosphere. I’ve seen this in a performance of St. Nicholas (1997) and in monologuist Martin Dockery’s works like The Dark Fantastic (2014) which he narrated to a continuous soundtrack. The strangely paradoxical feeling of those works was of being totally drawn in to the story despite being aware of its artifice. In any case, the piece is a fine showcase of Abalos and fans of his or of fine acting in general should not hesitate to see him on stage.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Byron Abalos as the Man. © 2025 Raph Nogal.

For tickets visit: www.crowstheatre.com.