Recap Night Of The Living Dead at the Bug Theatre

George A. Romero’s original Night Of The Living Dead is considered a horror movie classic, but compared with modern zombie flicks, it looks and feels a little dated, at times more campy than blood-curdling. Papercut Films’ stage adaptation—running Fridays and Saturdays all month at the Bug Theatre—stays lovingly true to the source, while also poking fun.

The 1968 film is dark, loaded with a sense of impending dread; conversely, the play’s opening scene—in which a zombie repeatedly fails at feasting on two old ladies until one of them finally slips on his severed tongue—establishes the play as a comedy. Lead actress Laura “Faith” Moore, who plays Barbara, then appears through a filmed sequence that segues seamlessly to her stage entrance. On camera and in person, she’s dramatic, clutching trees, mailboxes and plywood in an over-the-top parody of overwhelming fear as she runs from a bumbling zombie. From her piercing screams to her goofy, traumatized expressions, Moore is the perfect caricature of the helpless woman portrayed at the beginning of the original film. The production also features a hilarious filmed intermission sequence in which zombies stumble awkwardly around a playground to the tune of “Let’s All Go To The Lobby.”

But as funny as it is, it’s a zombie story first, and zombie stories are gory. While there are a couple of fairly gruesome scenes—a man gets his bowels eaten by his zombified daughter while the audience watches (and laughs) in horror, for example—the violence is mostly cartoonish. The set—the interior of an old farmhouse—looks great but could have been doused with a few more paint buckets’ worth of fake blood. The zombie makeup is at times unimpressive, only lightly covering the actors’ faces and leaving their arms and torsos all too clean and untouched by the marks of death and decay.

This effect doesn’t necessarily open the show to a wider audience, either. It’s not appropriate for young kids, but the production doesn’t push the gore very far into R-rated territory. Instead it slouches along somewhere in the middle, as if no one had the guts to take a firm stance on age-appropriateness one way or the other. The play sticks true to the film where it counts, ends just as bleakly, and closes with, of all things, a cheesy and impressive dance sequence in which the entire cast re-enacts Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Living Dead isn’t quite sure what it wants to be, but, hell, it is chock full of zombies, and that counts for something.