Review: HOOKMAN at West End Players Guild is as Cheesy as the Slasher Movies it Parodies.

West End Players Guild is getting a jumpstart on spooky season with their production of Lauren Yee’s slasher send up Hookman. After premiering in 2015 at San Francisco’s Encore Theatre Company, Hookman was a nominated for a Theatre Bay Area Award for Outstanding World Premiere of a Play.

Hookman is a spoof of B-list horror movies. It tells the story of a college freshman struggling to accept the death of her closest friend in a gruesome accident.

Yee’s scripted dialogue is intentionally sophomoric. She has created the type of dim characters you would expect to see in the worst of the slasher genre movies.

Director Kayla Lindsay evokes deadpan, underplayed portrayals from her cast of six. The ridiculousness of their cardboard performances, peppered with a few pulpy theatrical shrieks, must have been an intentional directorial choice to sharpen the story’s satire.

Hookman opens with teenage Lexi (Angelia Prather) driving a vehicle with her best friend Jess (Payton Gillam) as a passenger. The two teens were involved in a fatal accident on their way to the movies. Jess expired, and Lexi is forced to examine her liability in her friend’s death.

Throughout the play Lexi replays the car ride leading up to the accident. She considers multiple scenarios including far-out folklore that a mad slashing serial killer stowed away in her backseat and slit her friend's throat.

As Lexi struggles to take accountability for the accident, the audience is privy to her existential dreams about the myth of the hooked marauder taking the lives of dim college coeds.

Joining Prather and Gillam in the company are Kalani Cing as Yoonji, Lexie Johnson as Chloe, Abbie Thornton as Kayleigh, and Victor Mendez as Sean, Adam, and the Hookman. Each of the actors plays a stereotypical character (the slutty friend, the cad boyfriend) lifted straight from cheesy, low-budget, and gloriously dumb teenage trash cinema.

Jacob Winslow and Bradley Rohlf’s cartoonish set and lighting design add to Lindsay’s homage to cringe-fest cinema. Winslow’s animated two-seater car, painted by Audrey Freeman, and Rohlf’s expressionistic lighting crank the absurdity up to an eleven.

Hookman is a goofy piece of theater that cannot be taken too seriously. Yee’s cheesy script is full of awful dialogue and unadulterated nonsense. Kayla Lindsay and the acting ensemble lean in and fully to milk as many laughs as possible without taking themselves too seriously, and that is a good thing.

Lauren Yee’s Hookman has a lot it wants to say about perpetrator induced-traumatic stress, but the message of accountability is lost in a painfully banal and utterly vacuous script.

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