INTERVIEW: Rosie Benton on the technical genius of Broadway’s ‘Stranger Things’
Photo: From left, T.R. Knight, Louis McCartney and Rosie Benton star in Stranger Things: The First Shadow on Broadway. Photo courtesy of Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman / Provided by Polk & Co. with permission.
NEW YORK — Rosie Benton, an accomplished theater actor who has appeared on Broadway in a number of shows, has returned to Midtown Manhattan for the technologically extravagant Stranger Things: The First Shadow, a prequel play to the hit Netflix series. In the show, which is now running at the Marquis Theatre, Benton plays the crucial character of Virginia Creel, mother to the troubled Henry Creel, who is the focal point of the show.
“I had watched season one and part of season two, and I don’t know what happened,” Benton said about her previous knowledge of Stranger Things. “It might have just been life got in the way, but I hadn’t finished season two. And then I auditioned for this, got the part, and then my husband and I went back and sort of watched it all over again and fell in love with it and still are super-fans at this point.”
When Benton read the script, which is written by Kate Trefry, based on an original story by Trefry, the Duffer Brothers and Jack Thorne, she had a hard time conceptualizing what the spectacle would look like on stage. This is a prequel show that follows many of the adult characters in Netflix’s Stranger Things when they were students at Hawkins High. Henry Creel (Louis McCartney) is new to town and has some unexplained powers that he’s trying to keep harnessed. To tell the story, director Stephen Daldry pulls no punches; he envelops the Marquis Theatre in a stunning visual and sound design that is all-encompassing.
“There are some actors who can read a script and picture it right away or say, ‘This is going to be amazing on stage,'” Benton said. “I’ll read something and not understand it at all, so I just go with the character. And I read it again, and I read it again. I was totally confused how they were going to do it. … It did not read easily to me, but now that I’ve seen it, I get that you need the tech for it all to make sense.”
Benton added: “I love the challenge. I’ve done one other Broadway show that’s been tech-heavy, but most of the plays I’ve done have not been to this scale. So I like the challenge of it. A couple things have broken, but it’s not on the regular mostly. We just have this well-oiled machine, and you start to sort of rely on it as a scene partner. The sound and the visual effects, they become part of your psyche as the character, and I find that to be really exciting. Also, you need so much more technical acting work when things are this loud and this big, and I feel like that’s a really great challenge to sort of rise up to the level of the show and feel like you’re filling the space.”
Playing Virginia is a tough assignment. The actor tries to find the empathy behind the role, and Benton relied on her own experiences to fill in the blanks.
“I know that she’s trying really hard in a time period when people didn’t have a lot of help as parents, especially mothers, so I guess my grandmother was a little bit like her in trying to be perfect and wanting life to be perfect,” she said. “The loss of [control] is much harder for people like that, and so I try and come from a place of loving her son and loving him so much and not having the tools to know what to do. Some of her actions are not the best option, but because she doesn’t know what else to do and maybe wasn’t parented herself very well, she makes some poor decisions. So I try always to approach each show with my love for my son and have that be the guiding thing and then being terrified that I’m losing him to some greater force. I’m a parent. All parents can relate to that, so it’s sort of a tale as old as time being scared for your children. And this is just on a much greater cosmic scale.”
Benton said what happens to Henry during the show is both terrifying and heartbreaking, but there’s catharsis at the end of the journey. As an actor, of course, Benton is unable to see the play from the audience’s perspective, but she can feel them watching intently to this monster-filled story that feels so human.
“I was just recently on vacation, and when I came back, I started watching the show more, going down and watching it between scenes,” she said. “I’m just trying to reconnect always with the storytelling and the joy of it and how lucky I am to be doing what I’m doing because I think people get jaded very quickly, or you get burnt out. This show is so loud, and it’s so fast, and it’s so overwhelming, and I just try to remember about the storytelling. Everyone in this cast is so fantastic, and we all get along so well that that really helps because you’re trying to have fun and remember that you’re doing what you always wanted to do with your life. That’s a lucky thing.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Stranger Things: The First Shadow, featuring Rosie Benton, continues on Broadway at the Marquis Theatre. Click here for more information and tickets.
