Look Away: A Civil War Zombie Tragedy gets off to a powerful
start as Lijah, a runaway slave, addresses the audience and describes
an impending catastrophe. “The pale rider is coming,” he says with a
mounting combination of terror, urgency, and frustration that his
warnings aren’t being received with the gravity they deserve. The
lights go black. Smoke fills the theater. A rag-tag group makes its way
from stage left to stage right, firing their guns at the
blood-spattered zombie horde that pursues them.
“Lijah [played by Bernard Rule Jr.] is very in tune with what is
going on and why it’s happening,” says Gene Elliott, the subtle,
no-nonsense director who also helmed New Moon’s delightful production
of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead last season.
Elliott says he is particularly attracted to Lijah’s character, and his
affinity for that portion of the story shows throughout the
production.
“[Lijah’s] nature drives him to try and help this family out of
their situation, but because of who he is, they won’t listen to him,”
Elliott explains. “No matter how many times he tries to reach out and
help them, they reject his help because he is an ignorant slave. I find
that aspect of human nature fascinating. We can put blinders on and
ignore the truth that is being rubbed in our face and totally justify
that raw ignorance afterward.”
Only in this case there’s not much time to justify anything as every
act of raw ignorance is swiftly rewarded by death and dismemberment by
the hungry, lumbering undead. Still, it’s clear that Elliott is drawn
more to the play’s underlying social commentary than to its gore.
As zombie stories go, Look Away, an original script by
Memphis playwrights Zac Cunningham and Stephen Briner, feels a little
canned. Since indie filmmaker George Romero almost single-handedly
invented the zombie genre 41-years ago with the iconic Night of the
Living Dead, we’ve seen this same setup time and time again: A
contentious group is locked in a house (or mall or pub, etc.) while
mindless decaying corpses batter away at the doors and windows. As a
Civil War story, Look Away feels equally canned since there is
no shortage of stories about Southern families torn apart over issues
of pride, slavery, and who will inherit the family farm. But when you
mix these two, something interesting happens, or almost happens, as the
script could be tightened and tensions increased. But all in all,
Look Away functions well enough as both a morality tale and a
work of speculative science fiction.
Look Away is populated by stock characters from the canon of
Southern literature. Each of the main characters could have been lifted
from some lost Lillian Hellman drama. Aaron James plays John, a capable
man whose vast potential has been destroyed by his love of whiskey.
Stephen Tate is Simon, a crippled young scion with entitlement issues
and a driving need to prove his worth. Amy Van Doren, once a staple of
Sleeping Cat Studio productions, takes on Sarah, a cat on a hot tin
roof who’s becoming increasingly frustrated with Hank (Tyler Johnson),
her abolitionist husband. And so it goes. Of all these easily
recognizable characters, however, the most interesting and the least
developed is Dusty Walsh’s Rose, a Southern matriarch whose creeping
dementia is masked by her Christian charity. It’s no surprise that she
eventually gives herself over to the zombies, quoting the Bible on the
way down: “Take. Eat. This is my body.”
Although this New Moon production can be redundant and a bit
amateurish around the edges, it’s got heart. And it’s got guts, and
livers, and brains, and just enough blood to keep the horror fans
happy. It’s also a winning example of how important a role our small
theater companies play within the community. As first plays go, Look
Away isn’t bad, and, according to Cunningham, there are more
collaborations with Briner in the works.
“Stephen and I have talked a lot about co-writing another play,” he
says. “Two on the drawing board right now are a politically incorrect
romantic comedy about two hobos falling in love called Jack of
Hearts. Another is an as-of-yet unnamed Western centering on
gunslingers, gamblers, and other frontier rapscallions.”
