‘Zombie’: Burrowing Into an Unbeautiful Mind
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The stage is one of the very few places where Joyce Carol Oates’s reputation as a master stylist has suffered a few bruises. Not from lack of effort: The dizzyingly prolific Ms. Oates has written enough adaptations of her own fiction (“Black Water”) as well as original works to fill a few anthologies. Still, for a woman whose name routinely surfaces during Nobel Prize speculation, Ms. Oates the playwright has typically met with responses ranging from tepid encouragement to benign neglect.
Enter Bill Connington, a reedy, nondescript-looking man in his early middle years who has chiseled her 1995 novella “Zombie” into a disciplined, no-frills, almost unbearably intense solo piece. (It’s one of two Oates adaptations to play at this year’s New York International Fringe Festival, along with “The Corn Maiden.”) Mr. Connington’s mission: Give plausible emotional life to a man whose existence consists almost entirely of torturing and killing teenage boys.
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