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Madness! Murder! Mayhem
Reviewed by Myron Meisel
Zombie Joe’s Underground
Through July 31
RECOMMENDED:
Zombie Joe’s Underground soldiers on towards a third decade, a proud outlier even within the independent ethos of the Los Angeles intimate theater scene, devoted to plumbing the depths of gore and horror with some excursions to tortured psyches and aberrant desires.
Notwithstanding his public persona of unfettered self-promotion on his website, Bitter Lemons, Colin Mitchell remains a committed playwright and capable performer. His Breaking and Entering fit snugly within the ZJU house style in 2013, and his solo show, Linden Arden Stole the Highlights, earned hit status for 2014’s Hollywood Fringe.
Mitchell’s trio of vivid campfire tales at ZJU (Madness! Murder! Mayhem!) brings just a slight modernizing touch of lo-fi grunge to classic forms of scary storytelling. Lasting altogether less than an hour, in spirit they fit the template of a half-hour radio or television anthology series, although the material would certainly have been too scabrous for network during the form’s heyday. They are vivid, proudly old-fashioned and revel in just enough trangressiveness to keep their chestnut situations theatrically fresh for their modest duration.
Ostensibly occurring in different places on the single date of April 19, 1905, each vignette presents personalities in extremis. In “At the Break of Day,” an older prisoner awaits the imminent execution of a newly arrived condemned man by baiting him with terrors and tortures both imagined and real.
In “Natasha,” a manipulative psychiatrist importunes a judge after a murder acquittal to allow the hypnosis of the defendant to reveal appalling truths of irredeemable injustice. Mitchell himself relishes the pretensions and domineering theatricality of the arcane shrink, while Jonica Patella as the pathetic governess of the murdered children executes a bravura display of split personality.
The final, “Orgy in the Lighthouse,” fits most snugly into the ZJU aesthetic with its yarn of serial killing and mass death, although even here, the Grand Guignol quotient falls considerably below that of the space’s usually graphic guts.
There is nothing essential about these playlets, which are meant to entertain with mild shock and a modicum of DIY style. They succeed at what they set out to do. They neither overstay their welcome nor burden themselves with pretensions other than the preening sadism of their characters. Unlike most horn-tooters, Mitchell actually possesses the lapidary skill required to make these genre exercises accomplish exactly what they ought to, under Jana Wimer’s staging.
Zombie Joe’s Underground, 4850 Lankershim Blvd., N. Hlywd.; Fri., 8:30 p.m.; through July 31, www.zombiejoes.com
