Brooklyn-based playwright Cory Finley's eerie domestic comedy The Feast is playing now through April 5th at The Flea Theater.  But though the play, receiving its world premiere in the TriBeCa venue, is new to the boards, Mr. Finley's work is anything but. A member of Youngblood at Ensemble Studio Theatre and the early career writer's group at Clubbed Thumb, his plays have been performed at Theater for the New City, ACT Theatre, Ars Nova's ANT Fest, Prospect Theater Company, Actors Theatre of Louisville, and the Lincoln Center Directors Lab. He is also a 2015 grantee of an Alfred P. Sloan commission for new plays about science and a part of Ars Nova's musical theatre development group, Uncharted.

Mr. Finley took some time out of his busy schedule to chat with us about his play, crummy apartments, rat monsters and engaging an audience with fear.

What was the genesis of The Feast?

It’s a tricky play to talk about in general because I think it’s best experienced by audience members who know very little about the turns it will take. So forgive me if I’m vague. The very first draft I wrote in 2011, actually, I had just moved to New York and I was in a sublet with some really lovely guys, but kind of a cruddy apartment. I felt like I was surrounded by this big, dense city full of people and I could hear strange things through the walls at night and everything seemed to creak. The building I was in was really old and there were weird noises coming in from all the plumbing and the radiators would hiss and I had this awful air conditioning unit that would make these weird, long low sounds all the time. And it just generally felt like a creepy alien environment. The two features that the earliest draft share with the current one are a focus on a couple and an interest in a domestic space becoming very alien and strange. I did a couple of workshops over the years and almost everything else about the play changed. There's sort of not a single word left over. But the core of the story has always remained the same.

It definitely shines through, this kind of urban claustrophobia we all have. Especially with roommates. Especially if that roommate is your significant other.

Mine was not.

The play has a few really good scares. Was there a philosophy in the rehearsal room about how to handle horror on stage? 

We talked a lot about how to handle the last third of the play where there are some scares. That whole section changed a lot in tech and the book really changed to accommodate what our amazing design team was able to do and what they thought would look cool and sound cool.

Well, it worked. What scares you?

I’ve always had a particular fear of faces changing. Even when I was a little kid. I remember there was a version of The Nutcracker ballet that played on PBS or something like that. It was for children. It was not meant to be scary, but there was one moment where Clara gets bitten by the Rat King in a dream sequence and the actress turned away and turned back and her face was green and that signified she was poisoned. That scared me so much that I ran, literally, screaming around my parents’ house and they had to catch me and calm me down. Something about people looking different — people’s faces changing -- has always been primally scary. And I shouldn't say anything more. We may have done something with it.

Any favorite horror movies?

I’m many years behind because I was terrified of horror movies as a kid. Didn’t watch any until I was almost college age. I’ve been trying to catch up on some of the classics. I wouldn’t say it’s a passion but it’s something I do more of every year.

In the play the rumblings in the sewer intensify as your couple Anna and Matt's relationship deteriorates. In exchange, though, Matt sort of receives his muse and produces a very good work of art. Does that seem like a fair tradeoff? Is it one you've had to make?

I don’t know if I’ve ever had to make a clear-cut choice between human love and artistic success. I would always choose human love and companionship. I think there’s always a certain amount of sacrifice of your relationships in pursuing any difficult endeavor whether it’s artistic or anything else. It’s not a tradeoff that I would ever make in the same way my main character does but certainly I wanted to get at that.

One thing I really admire about your writing is its economy. There never seems to be a wasted line that doesn't pay off somewhere or add something to the scene. How do you cut out the fat and keep it lean?

The cast and Courtney [Ulrich, director] were really good in our table work. We did it in about two weeks. They made it clear what pieces of dialogue were really doing the work of the scene for them and which ones weren’t. They often didn’t even need to tell me, but it’s a play that has to stay ahead of the audience to be effective, so we were all definitely really conscious of paring it down to as little a piece as possible so it could get quickly to the surprises. We were almost nervous that it would feel too short: it’s only about 55 minutes. It’s a very short piece of theatre, but I think for what it’s trying to do that’s its fighting weight.

I would agree. Now's your chance to plug. Any big projects coming up for you?

I’m in Ars Nova’s Musical Theatre writer’s group. It’s called Uncharted. I’m in it with my friend Jeremy Lloyd, who's a composer and electronic songwriter and producer. He’s one half of a musical duo called Marian Hill. He makes really beautiful, unique-sounding, strange but really melodic and accessible electronic music. And also has a musical theatre background. The Ars Nova group is focused on providing a home for nontraditional musicals. I don’t know if that’s officially in their mission statement, but most of the other groups in our year are playing with the form in some way and so it seemed like a great place to work on a project that’s fusing musical theatre with something really different. That’s a very different project from [The Feast], of course, it’s my first time working on a musical of that depth and it’s hard but super rewarding. We’ll have a full draft of it to show to people in the fall.

Anything else? 

I’m writing a play for a Sloan Grant. It’s set in McMurdo Base in Antarctica. A research base. There’s a great Werner Herzog documentary called Encounters at the End of the World set in the same base that I highly recommend. It’s about scientists working in extreme conditions and having rivalries and love affairs and all sorts of craziness. It’s a three-hander, if that’s a term. Three characters. Two hander plus one. I guess no one has three hands.

There’s a four in hand, which is a tie. So you might as well.

It’s a three in hand. So that, and writing some other plays which are in various stages as well. I want to write a movie at some point actually, and after writing this I want to try to write a thriller of some kind. We did a lot of uniquely theatrical tricks in this one. I think that fear is one of the most dynamic emotions to give an audience and I think that similarly to laughter it can unlock other emotions so if you scare people they’re very involved and very attentive and you can sucker punch them with more complex emotions as well.

The Feast is playing now through April 5th at The Flea Theater. Click here for more information.