- OTHER MEDIA
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- Night of the living theater
Sleepwalkers' Zombie Town has brains (and eats them, too!)
- SF Bay Guardian October 21, 2009 (Robert Avila)
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- A small Texas 'burb has just suffered attack by a horde of reanimated
corpses, which can happen to anyone. But as luck would have it, the members
of a bold experimental San Francisco theater company have taken it upon
themselves to alight on the ravaged community, channel their story to the
world, and thereby bestow on the good folk of Harwood "the healing
that only theater can provide."
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- The actors of "the Catharsis Theatre Collective," dressed
uniformly in black pants and tees, give or take a beret, begin by introducing
themselves to the audience and explaining their modus operandi: in-depth
interviews with a cross-section of the town's population, whose personalities
and stories they will then assume and relay to the audience as a living,
breathing, documentary account.
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- We get reincarnations of the town's mayor (Damian Lanahan), for instance,
who happens also to be a car salesman, amid gradual intimations of a political
cover-up and regular references to the superior craftsmanship in various
makes of Toyotas.
- Or we hear from the proprietor of a local tavern (Ariane Owens) as
she intones last call to her regulars on the night in question: "OK
folks, you don't have to go out and face the undead, but you can't stay
here." And, at steady intervals, we get the reenacted tale of three
unlikely allies — an unabashed rocker dude (Ian Riley); a prissy and
reluctant high school party chick (Owens); and an egotistical accountant
(Drew Lanning) — holed up together through the night in an out-of-the-way
cabin, where they battle an army of brain-eating creatures risen from the
local cemetery (for reasons various characters are at pains to hypothesize
over) while bickering ferociously among themselves.
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- As this familiar-sounding scenario of late-night TV and the multiplex
develops, so too does another, equally familiar-sounding, meta-narrative,
as we the audience get treated to the thoughts and feelings and interpersonal
exchanges of the Catharsis members themselves, wrestling with the awesome
responsibility of their task.
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- The real theatrical mavericks behind this Laramie-style "Zombie
Project" are, of course, the members of Sleepwalkers Theatre, the
talented young San Francisco–based company exclusively devoted to
producing original plays. This gem is penned by Tim Bauer, a San Francisco
playwright and former Texas resident, whose eye and ear for the culture
clashes attendant not only in zombie movies but also between the humbler
masses and certain rarified sections of the theater world makes Zombie
Town a consistently witty treat. Sleepwalkers' artistic director Tore Ingersoll-Thorp
directs with an equally strong parodic sense a lively cast of living and
post-living characters — played to perfection by an ensemble that
could hardly be sharper or funnier were it to have a mining pick protruding
from its collective forehead.
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