Designing the Upside Down in ‘Stranger Things: The First Shadow’ on Broadway

Four of the play's Tony-nominated designers — Miriam Buether, Benjamin Pearcy, Jamie Harrison, and Chris Fisher — share how they made the mind-boggling effects work.

Blurring the lines between life in a mid-20th-century small town and a sinister, supernatural universe is all in a day’s work for the five-time Tony Award-nominated designers of Stranger Things: The First Shadow on Broadway.

Set in 1959 in Hawkins, Indiana, decades before the events of the Netflix series, the play explores the town’s secrets and introduces young versions of key characters as it dives into the eerie, parallel dimension known as the Upside Down.

So, brace yourself for the “szchuum szchuum.”

That’s the design team’s term for the repeated visual effect that takes the story from the real world to the creepy alternate universe. Each time, it's ingeniously and swiftly realized with the swiping motion of red neon lines and a telltale sound. Like all the arresting effects in the show, which premiered in London in 2023, this particular one was the result of time — and trial and error.

So said Miriam Buether and Benjamin Pearcy of 59 Productions, who are Tony-nominated for Best Scenic Design of a Play, and Jamie Harrison and Chris Fisher, two of the illusions and visual effects designers. They will receive a Special Tony Award alongside fellow technical designers Gary Beestone and Edward Pierce.

Conjuring wow-worthy moments “was a huge challenge,” said Harrison, adding that director Stephen Daldry’s mandate upped the ante. “He wanted the world of the illusions and the effects to be real so the audience who’d watched the TV show could have something they recognized.”

Effects swirl around main character Henry Creel, a troubled teenager with psychic and telekinetic abilities, as he struggles with darkness inside him. At one point, Henry ominously levitates, a moment echoing a scene from the TV series when a teenager named Max (played by Sadie Sink, now on Broadway in John Proctor Is the Villain) hovers in midair.

The no-strings, gravity-defying effect builds on old-school stage trickery. “The key difference now is that we can use technology to push these effects further than the Victorians could do,” said Harrison, adding that safety is top priority. “The Victorian record with some of these effects was not the safest. There were all sorts of horrendous broken necks and legs and decapitations.”

In some ways, Louis McCartney, Tony-nominated for his Broadway debut as Henry, is a special effect in his own right. “We do a lot of things through the show that involve carefully synchronizing things with Louis’s performance,” said Pearcy. “As video designers, we’re using computers and playing back video files in complex ways and complex sequences of cues.”

“Louis’s ability to deliver exactly the same performance in exactly the same place every single night is just extraordinary and allows us to really push what we can do,” Pearcy added.

That includes when Henry is seemingly possessed by an unseen evil force, which manifests with him being enveloped in both real and video-generated smoke.

Another moment when spidery legs appear out of nowhere and, as Harrison puts it, “caress” him, also depends on McCartney hitting his marks precisely. (The design team’s internal term for this effect is “the octopus.”)

One of the most challenging illusions is having Henry’s nose bleed, another recurring image TV fans will recognize. “Making somebody's nose bleed on demand on stage is truly one of the most difficult things we have ever had to do,” said Harrison.

“And making it read,” added Fisher. That’s a good point: The Marquis Theatre seats 1,611 people. How do you make the trick obvious from the, well, nosebleed section?

“There are lots of different approaches to how we do blood in the show now,” said Harrison. “But it really started to work when we used misdirection. We watched the scene and listened to when the audience were and weren’t looking at him.”

In the end, when it came to designing the Upside Down, teamwork made the dream work. “I’ve never worked, actually, on the show with so many specialists and had such a close collaboration with all these different professions — with video and illusion and lighting,” said Buether, who’s previously been Tony-nominated for Three Tall Women, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Prima Facie.

“I think we were only able to pull all these sci-fi moments off,” she added, “because we worked so closely together.”

Get Stranger Things: The First Shadow tickets now.

Photo credit: Stranger Things: The First Shadow on Broadway. (Photos by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman; Manuel Harlan)