"Oak" Turns an American Ghost Story Into a Luminous Tale of Inheritance

Terry Guest’s new play, Oak, now running at Alleyway Theatre, is a hell of a ghost story, with an undercurrent of personal reckoning that gives it weight. It confirms what I hoped after seeing Guest's 'The Magnolia Ballet' at Alleyway in 2022: that this playwright delivers.

The press materials call it “a thriller about three kids, a swamp monster, and a lady with a shotgun,” but Oak has more up its sleeve. Yes, there are thrills: fog, flashing lights, and jump scares. But there’s also heart, ache, and a haunting meditation on how trauma seeps down through generations like swamp water through the boards of a porch.

The action unfolds in a rural Georgia town called “Oak,” where, each year as summer begins, children vanish. Locals whisper about the ghost of Odella, an enslaved woman who drowned while fleeing captivity, leaving behind an infant she hoped to reclaim. When the season of disappearances returns -- locals call it snatching season -- people claim to hear whistling in the dark and glimpse two glowing eyes above the water. The question of whether Odella is real or myth matters less than what she represents: a past that never rests easy.

At the story's center is Peaches, a Black mother played with warmth and weary devotion by VerNia Sharisse Gavin. She's raising two children: the restless, clever, and analytical Pickle (Ember Tate-Steele), who narrates our journey into this haunted summer, and nine-year-old live wire Big Man (P.K. Forston). Their cousin Suga (Dasia Cervi), a teenager already haunted by life’s unfairness, lives nearby. Peaches works long shifts at Krystal, an actual Georgia hamburger chain, which her daughter despises as the emblem of the life she longs to escape. When Pickle blurts out her dream of something bigger, Peaches replies quietly, “Not like mine?” It’s a moment that lands with the sting of recognition between struggling mothers and daughters everywhere.

Guest weaves that domestic friction into the play’s supernatural tension. Peaches knows about sacrifice. Pregnant too young, betrayed by a husband who drifted away, she’s determined her children won’t repeat her mistakes. In a brilliantly spooky yet comical turn, Gavin also appears as the shotgun-wielding woman who keeps vigil at the edge of the woods, a doubling that adds to the play’s eerie, cyclical sense of inheritance and dread. As Odella once searched for her lost child, Peaches now fights to keep hers safe. Or did fate punish Odella because she abandoned her child? There is threat and consequence in not knowing what choices to make.

The ensemble brings depth to Guest's intergenerational story. Tate-Steele makes Pickle's narration feel both immediate and reflective, guiding us through the story with the sharp observational eye of someone who's already begun measuring the distance between herself and home. She captures that adolescent combination of certainty and confusion, the way teenagers can see their parents' lives with brutal clarity while remaining blind to their own vulnerabilities. Forston commits fully to Big Man's nine-year-old exuberance without condescension, finding the genuine wonder and sudden terror of childhood. And Cervi gives Suga a quiet devastation that accumulates across the evening; there's a resignation in her performance that suggests why some young people in this town might hear Odella's whistle as an inevitability.

Director Dawn M. Simmons gives the piece the pacing of a good horror film: taut, breathless, yet rooted in character. Emma Schimminger's sound and lighting design work in tandem to create atmosphere -- her soundscape slithers under the audience's skin while her lights punctuate the darkness with dread and revelation. Justin Lahue's environmental set wraps viewers in the humid Georgia night, boards glowing from below and Spanish moss swaying overhead. Costume designer E.L. Hohn grounds the production in a real place and time.

Performed without intermission, Oak sustains its intensity for the full hour and twenty minutes. It’s part of the National New Play Network’s Rolling World Premiere program, with productions also opening in Sarasota, Phoenix, and Indianapolis. The story may be steeped in Southern folklore, but its themes -- freedom, fear, and the price of survival -- reach far beyond one haunted creek.

Oak confirms that Guest is not just a writer of talent but of vision, inviting us to peer into the darkness and listen for the echoes that call us away or pull us back home.

Oak continues at Alleyway Theatre through November 15, 2025.

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