Review: HELLS CANYON at 12th Ave Arts

What do we mean when we say someone is “like family”? In Washington Ensemble Theatre’s Hells Canyon, playwright Keiko Green takes that question and reveals the complicated debts, histories, and power dynamics hiding underneath. Directed by Amber Tanaka and now running at 12th Ave Arts through September 21st, Hells Canyon is a taut, genre-bending piece examining what haunts us that blends horror and psychological drama with real emotional teeth.

Five friends arrive at a remote cabin in Hells Canyon, Oregon for a final trip before a major life change. Claire (Valerie Ryan Miller) and Ben (Sean Hendrickson) are about to become parents. Their friend Ariel (Adele Lim) is carrying their twins as a surrogate. Also joining them for the weekend are Ariel’s brother Tommy (Rhys Daly), and Ariel’s ex-boyfriend Doug (Donovan Mahannah), both of whom are in a band with Ben, Claire, and Ariel.

From the start, the air is tense. Ariel is exhausted and physically uncomfortable from the pregnancy and altitude. When Claire and Ben notice a tiny blood stain on the back of Ariel’s dress, their concern is not about Ariel’s well-being but the twins she is carrying. Tommy bursts through the door with excited, frenetic energy, doing summersaults on the bed and swinging around a baseball bat he found. Doug tries to remain neutral as emotions rise when they’re already fighting about who gets what bed. Their relationships are established as brittle, and over the course of the play, their fractures deepen.

It isn’t just emotional tension. The land beneath them holds its own history: Hells Canyon is a site where Chinese gold miners were massacred, a legacy that may be echoing through the present. Ariel starts to have visions. The lights flicker. Bears roam the perimeter. There’s something watching. Or maybe it’s just everything left unsaid coming to the surface.

Green’s script excels at dropping us directly into these relationships without overexplaining them. The characters speak over each other, interrupt, deflect, and contradict. The overlapping dialogue not only feels realistic, it adds to the pressure in the room. You don’t need a character to say, “We’re on edge.” You feel it in how they talk to each other.

Thematically, the play takes on a lot. There’s a complex web of friendship, obligation, cultural tension, creative ownership, and historical trauma. Yet it never feels didactic. The questions arise naturally from the characters’ choices, and the horror elements sharpen, rather than distract from, the emotional stakes.

This isn’t a play that settles for easy symbolism. It pushes its characters, particularly Claire and Ben, to confront how transactional their so-called intimacy has become. It asks what we owe to those we rely on, especially when the structure of that reliance is built on uneven ground.

The levity comes from performance, not punchlines, which makes it all the more effective. Adele Lim gives a compelling performance as Ariel, whose emotional and physical exhaustion makes her feel at once grounded and haunted. Valerie Ryan Miller’s Claire is delicate and determined, navigating a white liberalism that uses care as a mask for control. Sean Hendrickson plays Ben as subdued and self-justifying, which allows the character’s avoidance to become part of the tension. Donovan Mahannah’s Doug is especially effective. His calm presence holds the room together, but there is an agita beneath the surface. That calm has limits, and Mahannah organically reveals its fraying edges over the course of the play. Rhys Daly’s hyper Tommy is a live wire, moving the play’s energy up and down as needed without ever veering into caricature. Tommy is a jumpy guy, but he also has a lot of tenderness and care for his sister, and provides some occasional comedic relief in such a harrowing pressure cooker.

Eunice Han’s set design gives the cabin an immediate sense of place. It’s realistically slightly rustic, which serves the story well. Kassey Castro’s sound design does much of the heavy lifting when the power goes out, allowing tension to build in darkness. A few well-timed sound cues heighten key moments and give the horror just enough weight.

While the script’s ambition is admirable, it does occasionally result in a kind of thematic traffic jam. With so many ideas in motion—ghosts, bears, cultural appropriation, massacres, racial dynamics, family systems—it can be difficult to track what’s happening. The emotional payoff is there, but the route to get there can feel a little confusing. I think horror is a genre that can get away with a little convolution in the plot as long as it’s evocative, but I think this play was trying to say something about ownership (e.g. of bodies, stories, and creative labor), and how that ownership gets tangled when layered over friendship, race, and history. When a play tries to both deliver visceral horror and provoke intellectual discourse, it risks obscuring its most resonant ideas in the noise of its own ambition.

A practical issue also affected the viewing experience. Much of the play’s action takes place inside the cabin, but some pivotal moments occur outside the front door, which is positioned upstage center. During particularly intense moments, the door swings open, where behind the door, in theory, something important happens, but the view is blocked by the door. I heard gasps from others in the audience seated center, but I could not see what prompted them. For a production that relies on visual storytelling, especially during moments of horror, attention to sight lines is crucial.

Hells Canyon isn’t tidy, and it isn’t comforting, and that’s exactly where its power lies. Green and Tanaka have created a piece that is ambitious in scope and unafraid to take risks. Even when it verges on narrative excess, the emotional center remains steady, and the horror—both literal and relational—lands with force. It’s a rare and potent thing to see a play that’s genuinely frightening not just because of what might be lurking in the woods, but because of what the people in the room are willing to say, to do, or to ignore. 

Grade: B+