Robert O’Hara’s Zombie: The American makes an interesting bookend to Woolly’s season with its opener, David Adjmi’s Marie Antoinette, in that both imagine the courtly intrigues in the centers of power—as Adjmi looks at late 18th-century France, O’Hara fancies a mid-21st-century USA in profound eclipse. But where Adjmi’s theatricality revealed a tender heart, the present work is a Grand Guignol melodrama of mashed-up metaphors. O’Hara’s heavy-handed message is that our culture has done some brutal things to get where it is today, and we should just own up to that. OK, there are zombies in the basement.
The future setting allows the imagination of costume designer Ivania Stack, who produces some trippy suits for the American President and his First Gentleman: exaggerated, but following a believable trend line. Sarah Marshall’s Lady Secretary of State Jessica Bloom resembles one of Ian Falconer’s ladies of a certain age, grimly leaning into the wind. The hidden treat of this show is Luigi Sottile, who plays three different factotums of the Presidential Court, all of them biological clones equipped with some sort of bionic artificial intelligence. His supercilious, sexy Royal Butler is worth the trip to D Street, N.W.
- Zombie: The American, by Robert O’Hara, directed by Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington