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April 1, 2024 Resurrecting the Zombie Life

My zombies are back and coming to campus.

After a pandemic-related online preview in 2020, the play world-premiered at Richmond’s Firehouse Theatre in 2021, was restaged in Williamsburg with a new cast in 2023, and now appears in Lexington on April 6 for the first time before returning to Williamsburg for a performance the following weekend.

I loved the first performance (and wrote about it here and here), but I love the current production even more — in part because we condensed the zombies from a horde of five to a cohesive team of four, and this round we really figured out who the therapist leading them is all about. The action scenes are tighter too:

A local reporter asked me some questions about the show, which I’ll share:

  • What is The Zombie Life about?

A therapist is presenting a series of seminars encouraging people to become zombies because it’s the best way to avoid the emotional pain of living. As evidence, he tours with a team of trained zombies that he enables to speak and explain to the audience their reasons for converting.  Although disturbingly well-intentioned, it’s all a terrible idea – which becomes increasingly obvious as an unplanned convert struggles but fails to adjust to the zombie life on stage during the seminar.

  • Why zombies?

The play began as a short story titled “The Zombie Monologues” and consisted of a dozen or so long paragraphs, each from the perspective of a zombie. Zombies are nominally alive but mindless and emotionless, which I imagined could feel like a kind of reprieve from the hard work of living. The point though was that each explanation was gut-wrenchingly wrong, revealing the necessity of struggling as the only way to find any meaning.

I began turning that disconnected series of textual monologues into a play with my sister, who is a dancer, dance instructor, choreographer, and now director. We first had to figure out why the free-floating monologues existed, which made us invent the new character of the tragically wrong-minded therapist. And the necessity of plot made us create the audience member who unexpectedly steps forward and converts at the start of the play.

At a personal level, our mother had recently died of Alzheimer’s. I’d been visiting her Williamsburg nursing home almost monthly for several years, which also kept me in touch with Joan. I was worried that we would drift apart without the struggles of taking care of our fading mother keeping us connected. A play collaboration was my solution. Probably any play would have been fine, but maybe it’s more than coincidence that we settled on one about grief.

  • It’s being performed at a college — where a lot of people struggle with their mental health, especially after the pandemic. How might your play resonate with students?

My anxiety is that the therapist’s surface message – which is essentially an endorsement of suicide – could be mistaken as sincere and actually convincing. The goal is overwhelmingly the opposite. Each zombie has made the most horrific and irreversible mistake possible, and though they think their reasons justify their giving up, the point is to reveal the absolute need of struggling despite all the pain it requires. It’s an anti-suicide message presented as a horrifyingly flawed pro-suicide message.

  • What do you hope the audience will take away?

I want them to feel uncomfortable while watching the play. I want that discomfort to release itself in laughter, tears, and occasional flinching while in the theater. Afterward, I hope the discomfort lingers and haunts in productive ways. Maybe they will keep thinking about the characters’ rationalizations. Or maybe just the emotions of the experience will continue to resonate as they reenter their lives just a little less zombie-like.   

I wasn’t asked, but I’m also really happy about my redesign of the poster art:

My original version was fun, but also cluttered and less clear in tone:

Apparently, the more you work at something the better it gets. And that’s not a bad description of our zombies either. Unlike TV zombies (though, yes, I’m somehow still watching The Walking Dead spin-offs), our zombies get a second chance at life.

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