Mishka Yarovoy (CFA’23), who plays Oskar, the bullied boy next door, with Leah Hohauser (CFA’24) in a scene from Let the Right One In. The two actors are close friends. Photos courtesy of BU School of Theatre

Arts & Culture

There Will Be Blood at the Booth Theatre for Halloween

Vampire tale Let the Right One In brings together School of Theatre and Actors’ Shakespeare Project

“I think the audience is going to be spooked,” Leah Hohauser says.

That’s a good thing, in this case. The College of Fine Arts School of Theatre is celebrating Halloween with a stage adaptation of Let the Right One In, a dark Scandinavian vampire tale that started as a novel and became a movie (twice) and a TV series.

Hohauser (CFA’24) stars as Eli, a vampire who’s 12 going on 200, opposite her good friend Mishka Yarovoy (CFA’23) as Oskar, the bullied boy-next-door. Eli becomes Oskar’s only friend—and vice versa.

“Everything is cold. It’s a cold world,” director Christopher V. Edwards says. “They’re both dealing with the anxiety of living on the fringe. It’s two odd people who find that their puzzle pieces fit together.”

A coproduction of the School of Theatre and the Actors’ Shakespeare Project (ASP), Let the Right One In runs October 20 through November 6 at BU’s Joan & Edgar Booth Theatre. 

Edwards is a CFA senior lecturer, better known around Boston as the artistic director of ASP. He brought on board five professional actors—including Richard Snee (GRS’08) as Hakan, Eli’s protector—to work alongside the undergraduate cast.

The School of Theatre also brought in Pittsburgh-based special effects ace Steve Tolin to give a workshop and contribute his skills to the production. Tolin is known for his work on and off-Broadway, including Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and several works by English playwright Martin McDonagh (The Pillowman). What’s he providing? “Blood, a lot of blood,” Edwards says, chuckling.

Written by Jack Thorne and based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In is the story of what happens after Eli (pronounced “E-lay”) and Hakan move in next door to Oskar, who has a lousy—if more ordinary—home life. The two outcasts bond quickly, but their neighbors and the local police are up in arms about a series of savage murders. 

“It’s the horror genre, which is hard to do,” Edwards says. “When I read it again, after the pandemic, I realized it’s really an exploration of being outside the norm, being bullied, being other-ized, and a look at what loneliness is. In the pandemic, so many folks, how lonely they were! I was lonely, and I have a family. It just hit me in a different way.”

Hohauser has been thinking a lot about Eli.

“She’s very different from me, the fact that she’s lived such a long time and has so long to live, but she’s eternally 12 years old,” the actor says, “So that’s a really complicated line to walk. Like, how much is her brain 200 years old and how much is [12]? Her concept of time is super different.

“She’s not really afraid of anyone. She can kill anybody that she comes in contact with, so she has no reason to be pleasant or anything like that. I spent time by myself researching what it feels like to be a predator and find that primitive animal part of me. So it’s walking that line, between that and her humanity, which hasn’t been touched for so long. And Oskar finds that nerve.”

Hohauser says she’s wanted to do Let the Right One In since she directed a couple of scenes from the play in a high school theater class—not vampire attacks, but tender, intimate moments between Eli and Oskar. “That was what spoke to me about the play,” she says, “this connection in the face of so much hardship for these characters. They get to find each other and be safe with each other.” 

Her real-life bond with Yarovoy helps in those moments, but when they met in an acting class a couple of years ago, they didn’t hit it off right away.

“Our first impressions of each other—we didn’t like each other, we didn’t even really give [the other] the time of day,” she says, amused by it now. “He would always ask so many questions, and I was like, ‘Oh, God.’ And apparently he thought that I was super pretentious and cared about my image. But we became fast friends shortly after that, and he is one of my best friends at the school, and in my life in general.”

Until now, the two had never  acted together, even in a class.

“It’s so special to be doing something like this with your actual best friend, because there’s a connection there already,” Hohauser says. “We feel really safe to go places physically and emotionally, because we know each other and trust each other.”

Though still an undergraduate, Yarovoy already has some good reviews for his performance as two characters in the Speakeasy Stage Company production of The Inheritance earlier this year—especially a scene where his characters meet.

Let the Right One In is ultimately Oskar’s story, Edwards says, “about this young boy who is fending off and battling loneliness, not being accepted. And finding who he is as a moral being, who he is sexually. It’s a coming-of-age romance as well.”

The eight undergraduate actors in the play have connected with the pros, who are all members of Actors’ Equity, the professional theater union. Snee and Sarah Newhouse, who plays Halmberg, the police commissioner, are ASP members.

“It has been a really amazing experience, honestly,” Hohauser says. “We had a week of rehearsal, just the students, and then the Equity actors came in, and we were terrified. I remember the first day we were all so stiff, and Chris was like, ‘What’s going on?’ And we said, ‘They’re scary, they’re Equity actors!’

But as the students got to know the professional actors, they became less and less intimidated. “We’re at the point now that we can banter with them, and I feel just as comfortable experimenting and playing with them,” she says. “Instead of paralyzing me, it’s motivated me more than anything.”

Bonus: lots of career advice about things like the difference between the theater scenes in Boston and New York and whether it’s worth making audition tapes 

“Just being in scenes with them, that’s like a gift in itself,” Hohauser says, “because you get to work off of what they’re giving you, and they give you so much.”