Stranger Things: The First Shadow’s creators explain how their Broadway show ‘complicates’ season 5

Stranger Things is everywhere, now more than ever as the series heads into its fifth and final season. After the show blew up on Netflix, you could find Stranger Things-branded everything: $64 waffle necklaces, Demogorgon tiki mugs, Funko Pops, and more. You could live like it was 1985 again with assistance from Stranger Things Nike sneakers, drink New Coke bearing the show’s logo, get some ice cream at a Baskin-Robbins rebranded as Scoops Ahoy, or even draft a document in throwback Microsoft 1. 

But those items didn’t have any bearing on the actual plot of the show — they just borrowed the iconography. Stranger Things: The First Shadow, the new-to-Broadway show behind the series, is aiming to do both. The story has to transport Stranger Things as we know it to the theater, as well as provide important context for fans who are clamoring to see a new side of Hawkins and the Upside Down. So the million-dollar question becomes: Will the play be crucial to understanding Stranger Things’ fifth season, coming later this year? 

“We had to make the play both a stand-alone thing and the TV show a stand-alone thing, just because it’s not fair to demand people go see the play in order to understand the fifth season,” Kate Trefry, who penned the play and writes on the show, tells Polygon. But that comes with a caveat: “I definitely think the fifth season is much more satisfying if you make your way to the play — because it does complicate it.”

From Henry to Vecna

The First Shadow takes Hawkins, Indiana, all the way back to 1959, where the Creel family is seeking a fresh start. Unfortunately, their son Henry isn’t having much luck outrunning the troubled past that brought them there. As a crime wave sweeps Hawkins, Henry has to confront something much more terrifying than just fitting in at a new school: Is something inside him causing the horrors around him? 

The stage show’s characters include various parents of the main Stranger Things characters, from an era when they were teens themselves. But Henry Creel is the big name for Stranger Things — now better known as “Vecna,” Henry is the first Hawkins National Lab test subject. As we learned in season 4, after getting a younger Eleven to remove the Soteria chip that limited his powers, he got sent through a gate to an alternate dimension, slowly morphing into the disfigured Upside Down monster the kids of Stranger Things are currently gearing up to face off against in season 5.

Still, beyond the Creel connection and the Hawkins setting, there’s not a lot in The First Shadow that people would consider the essence of Stranger Things. A young Joyce and Hopper are the most recognizable characters. And there’s obviously no ’80s nostalgia laced through the 1950s-set Broadway show. Coupled with Stranger Things being built on monsters and science fiction bombast, which define so much of the show’s action, taking on Stranger Things as a Broadway production isn’t a project for the faint of heart. 

Which is ultimately exactly what drew co-director Justin Martin to the production. 

Stranger Things and impossible tricks

“As soon as Stranger Things was brought up, we all got really excited, because it felt so impossible to do,” Martin says. He and co-director Stephen Daldry gave Trefry the assignment of not trying to write two acts of a play, but rather just two episodes of Stranger Things. “And so she wrote these impossible things — which was really great, because it really stretched us in the way I’d hoped.”

One of the earliest challenges of Trefry’s script was how to find a way into one of Stranger Things’ starkly ambitious set-pieces: the Void. “The Darkness,” as Eleven calls it on the show, is a perfectly black, empty space that Eleven visits with her psychic powers. The quiet Zen and endless uncanniness is part of the sell — and part of what Trefry worried wouldn’t transfer to the stage at all. 

“[Justin’s] giving me all the credit for being the crazy one, but Justin and Stephen are psychotic,” Trefry laughs. When she asked Daldry about how they’d attempt to portray the Void, he was nonchalant, saying they could just flood the stage with water. “I was like ‘You’re going to flood the stage four times during this three-hour play?’ And he [said]: ‘Yeah, why not? We’ll just do it.’”

To Martin and Daldry, those kinds of feats of spectacle are what epitomizes the Stranger Things world, and something Martin felt drawn to try and capture on stage, no matter how difficult the technical elements would be. “It’s like the DNA of the series,” he tells Polygon. “It’s really pushed us creatively to find ways [to render it] so that we feel — I feel — certainly what you’re seeing, you’ve never seen before.” 

To do that, the show had to push past putting the impossible onstage, past even just figuring out the Void, to capture the rhythm of Stranger Things in a totally new format. One way they did that was intercutting, which Martin says Stranger Things is “built on” as a show — and, obviously, a lot harder to achieve onstage when you’re not cutting between one group in Russia and one group in the Upside Down as cleanly as television can.

Ultimately, the team did find a language for the propulsive intercutting of Stranger Things, preserving their ability to get snapshots of different parts of the journey, with different groups of kids exploring an alternate dimension’s mysteries. But even after mounting the play on the West End, building that language to play smoothly every night takes time: “It took us two and a half days to put all the lights and sound on it, because it is so complex,” Martin says of moving the stage show to New York. 

Not everything from Trefry’s original vision made it into the show. Martin references “the car,” which, for practical reasons, didn’t get to the stage. Trefry is still mourning the possibility of bringing the show to the quarry, a season 1 location that Netflix can no longer shoot in. (The Georgia location is a park now.) At one point, she also asked if they could have a live cat on stage, which got cut for the obvious “herding cats” reasons.

The First Shadow leads to… Stranger Things 5

Still, the biggest translation from screen to stage isn’t a set-piece at all — it’s Henry himself. Anyone who watched season 4 knows the broad strokes of his story. But The First Shadow is here to deepen the portrayal of who he is, and the great tragedy of his life. 

Trefry says in the writer’s room for the show, when they were first drafting Vecna’s character, there was a lot of discussion about what kind of evil he would be: Was he something like the Friday the 13th franchise’s Jason, where he came corrupted from the Darkness, or like Halloween’s Michael, as just a lurking, born-bad unknowable evil? For the show, it at least made more sense to make him a purely evil figure, particularly in terms of fitting him into the already wide ensemble and the battle between light and dark. But the play needed more.

“We kind of had a backstory in mind for him,” Trefry says. “But it wasn’t until we started working on the play [that] I got the chance to explore his backstory and look at the goalposts that were set in stone by season 4, and find this labyrinthine way through to all of them.”

The Broadway show provided her with space to revisit the early writers-room debates about Vecna and whether there was any innate good to him. In her mind, all of The First Shadow ends up being a discussion of Henry’s mental battles with the Mind Flayer — and vice versa. “Is there something inside him? He has this relationship with the Mind Flayer — how does that develop, how is that symbiotic or parasitic? Who’s the puppet and who’s the puppet master? 

“It’s kind of up for debate throughout the play, because I think that’s the most fun version of trying to sort out a bad guy.” 

Both she and Martin credit Louis McCartney, who originated the role of Henry in the West End production and is returning for the Broadway debut, as helping them properly capture the full clash of darkness, charm, and humanity that is Henry Creel. For Trefry — who was writing on season 5 at the same she was developing The First Shadow — it brought a new sense of depth to all of Vecna’s season 5 storylines. 

“What happens, what’s revealed about Henry in season 5, is a direct result of the work I was doing on the play,” Trefry says. “I kinda felt like I was cheating, because I would go into the writers room with fully formed ideas and pitches.” 

That’s ultimately the goal with a spinoff like The First Shadow: It’s not essential to Stranger Things 5, but you can get more out of the story when you know the hell Henry has been through before he even ends up in the hell of the Upside Down. The story is certainly penned in a bit — by the vision of Netflix and the Duffer brothers, by the practicalities of bringing a bunch of water onstage, by just how much lore they can reveal without stepping on the show — but there’s still plenty of ways to deepen the main story as we know it. That’s what has brought fans back to Stranger Things for years, and likely what will drive its spinoff Saturday morning cartoon. 

For Martin’s part, he’s loved seeing the audience’s big reactions when they first see the Void. To him, that translation really represents not only the power of Stranger Things, but the power of the theater. 

“As much as we would love infinite space,” Martin says, “we have to find our own space, because theater is built on a single imaginary space, transforming into other things. And the thing that I love about theater is that ultimately, it’s about how we inspire imagination in a different way. And you get that with monsters and all that sort of stuff within the series, because the legacy show is always scarier. But within the theater, it’s like everything is suggestion, and people’s imaginations are so powerful. They can do so much with so little.

“You’re not protected by the screen, and that feels really exciting.” 

Stranger Things: The First Shadow is now playing in previews at Broadway’s Marquis Theatre in New York City. The show officially opens on April 22.