Jason Grote is certainly charming his way through the Washington theater scene.

The young playwright first dazzled audiences this summer with his poignant, thought-provoking, sexy and even scary This Storm Is What We Call Progress. And while his Maria/Stuart, now being staged at Woolly Mammoth, doesn’t have quite the grandeur of Storm, it still offers a tale of family dysfunction where the stakes are high, the words hit close to home, and there’s still enough creepy mystery to keep it all original.

That main touch of distinctiveness comes from the Changeling, the ghost that is haunting the family at Maria/Stuart‘s center. Grote plays with the mythological roots of the creature – its stifled gait, its insatiable appetite – and adapts them in entirely modern and delightfully quirky ways – this being loves to guzzle soda and shout “Hep! Hep! Hep!” upon each entrance – when it’s not sputtering German babble, that is. The creature’s a shape-shifter, and takes on the faces of the various family members, causing much confusion and apprehension in this dark family tale.