Inside “The First Shadow”, the “Stranger Things” play expanding the mythology of the Upside Down

Cast and crew of the first "Stranger Things" offshoot explain how the West End theater production is setting up the events of the show's fifth and final season.

A scream rippled through the Phoenix Theatre in London’s West End on a Saturday night in late November. It was during a preview performance of Stranger Things: The First Shadow, Netflix’s first theater production that serves as a prequel tale set in the universe of the massively popular supernatural drama. The cast were only minutes into their latest runthrough, so the reaction came as a shock. According to Oscar Lloyd, who plays a younger version of David Harbour’s Jim Hopper, it emanated from a little girl sitting in the front row. Was she screaming from fear or excitement? Maybe both? He doesn’t know.

“I can say the scream was justified, but it was not what we were expecting,” Ella Karuna Williams, who plays Bob Newby’s sister Patty, tells EW days later from a vacant dressing room during a dinner break. “Normally there's a whoop or a clap, but this was bloodcurdling, and it set the tone for the whole show.”

There’s not much more any of the actors can say of what this five-minute opening sequence entails exactly, only that if they were to discuss it, they would be ruining it for incoming audiences. However, Kate Trefry, a writer on both the show and the stage play, offers a small tease: “In the spirit of the original Stranger Things [opening] titles, which was based on the Montauk experiments, I did a bunch of digging around to unearth other notorious conspiracy theories and really picked the most impossible one to try to do on stage. And they did it and it's absolutely insane.”

“We had an illusionist [visit] the other day and he couldn't work out how it was done, which I think is such a testament to it,” co-director Justin Martin says. That pretty much sums up the first offshoot to the Stranger Things universe, which Trefry adds is “not at all what you would ever expect if you were given a million guesses.”

The First Shadow, directed by Stephen Daldry, goes back to the fictionalized Hawkins, Ind., at a pivotal year in the Stranger Things mythology: 1959, when a little boy named Henry Creel (Louis McCartney), the psychic child who would one day become the monster known as Vecna, moves to the small Midwestern town with his family. The strange occurrences that happen here — also involving young Joyce (Isabella Pappas), Bob (Christopher Buckleym), and Dr. Brenner (Patrick Vaill) — will not only give more depth to the events of Stranger Things season 4, but will lay some of the groundwork explored on screen in the fifth and final season, which is currently in the works for a 2025 premiere.

"The First Shadow definitely gives fans some not-so-subtle teases and hints as to where certain storylines are heading in season 5," Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer tell EW in a joint email statement. "It touches on several themes and ideas that we will continue to explore in the show."

The Duffers, along with Daldry, Martin, and Jack Thorne (the scribe who penned another stage production based on a massive IP, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), had developed the skeleton of a story for their play from drafts of in-progress season 4 scripts. They knew they wanted something about Henry Creel, the 1950s time period, and an origin story with the Patty character. "Netflix was very excited as soon as Stephen Daldry brought up the idea," the Duffers remark. "If anyone could make this work, it was Stephen, a master in film, television, and theater. Once we had a great script, it was off to the races."

Trefry was a natural fit to grow that kernel into a full play; she had been instrumental in the Stranger Things writers’ room in creating the Henry, No. 1, and Vecna twist (that they're all the same character). “[It] will probably go down as the peak of my career,” Trefry recalls of the moment it all came together. “Everybody was like, ‘Oh s—!’ That’s literally never happened to me before and it will never happen again.”

“What we didn't do was go to Kate and say, ‘Here's how you write a play,’” Martin says. “What we did was, ‘Can you write a couple of episodes as if this were the series? We will then try to find the theater language to do that.’” Act I of The First Shadow, he notes, is more like a pilot episode. Act II is the second, and so on. What Trefry concocted was a story about a young boy who becomes the victim of circumstances that will one day lead Henry to the eventual conclusion of the Stranger Things saga. “Why Hawkins? Why is this happening here? Why is Hawkins Lab there? Why is Brenner there?” she asks. “It was important to me to give the town an original sin that it would then be punished for in these events that play out over the course of many decades. It could be any town, which is to say every town has a shadow.”

Many of the actors didn't know what they were getting into initially. Codenames were used to hide specific characters during the audition phase, like Rose and Beth for Joyce, and Johnny for Hopper, while the production was at times referred to only as "Untitled Stephen Daldry Project." Even when they finally landed the job and made it to the rehearsals, "We were sent scripts online that were password protected that you could only get from the company manager," Buckleym says. "You had to shred any old version of the scripts," Pappas adds.

It was still clear that the crew was planning to adapt many familiar elements from Stranger Things for the stage, including Demogorgons and the Black Void. Fans abroad have already caught a glimpse of the latter in recently released imagery of Henry closing his eyes to enter the telepathic space with a radio by his side. “He’s really a pioneer,” Trefrey points out of this moment in particular. “He’s the first to go into that and understand that.”

At the same time, the play will also be expanding upon the mythology of Stranger Things in various ways. "The audience will leave the theater with a better understanding of not just Henry Creel, but of his connection to the Upside Down and the Mind Flayer," the Duffers tease. "That being said, if you come into The First Shadow having not seen a single episode of Stranger Things, it totally works as an original piece. At the end of the day, the characters are what carry the show."

“The mythology is super complicated and, PS, is only going to get more complex in season 5 in a really fun way,” Trefry adds. “We always like to try to go back to the original pilot episode and say, what more is there to learn about this moment? There’s so much crazy s— that happens in the first five minutes of the show.”

The same is true of the stage play. That little girl’s reaction made clear to any audience lucky enough to score tickets to the preview performances ahead of Thursday’s opening night that the troupe is trying to bring the same kinds of spooks and frights of the show to a live theater setting. As EW speaks with Trefry and Martin backstage, they turn their attention to one such “illusion,” as they call them, via a live feed of the stage. “We had a little issue at the last show. They're just running again,” Martin says, while Trefry strategically turns the Zoom camera on her computer away to keep this particular illusion out of view of lingering eyes.

“I think it's at its best when it's about suggestion,” Martin explains of the horror elements. “It's like, as soon as you see a giant spider…” He then pauses as if realizing there is actually a giant spider in the Stranger Things mythology, the giant Mind Flayer from the Upside Down that Henry Creel formed into the likeness of his favorite eight-legged creature on the series. “I’m using this as an anecdote because there is no giant spider in the show. As soon as you see the giant spider, it's not as scary," Martin continues, adding how the fear is more about "the suggestion of it, the fact that it's coming, that you can feel it."

“For me, it always comes back to character,” Trefry says, whether that's Shannon Purser's Barb getting dragged to Hell by a Demogorgon or Noah Schnapp's Will Byers feeling the eerie lingering effects of the Upside Down underneath his skin. “What's going to be scary for the character is going to be scary for the audience if you're doing your job, which hopefully we are.”

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