They’re Coming to Get You, D.C.

Rorschach Theatre knows it’s difficult to stage a truly scary story. Instead of going for cheap thrills, Night of the Living Dead goes for deep laughs—the kind that makes you clutch your stomach—at least until the lights go off. Then you can’t help but wonder: What exactly is lurking behind you?

Not unlike the 1968 George A. Romero film it’s based on, this Lilli Hokama-directed stage version of Night of the Living Dead poses a handful of questions: Is the cellar safer than the living room? (Six of one, half a dozen of the other.) Who should be in charge? (You’re fucked either way.) Who survives in a zombie apocalypse? (No one.) 

With an absolutely brilliant cast of comedians, the play opens, as the film does, on Barbara (Mollie Greenberg) and Johnny (Taylor Stevens) arriving at the cemetery to place flowers on dear old dad’s gravestone. Johnny delivers his iconic line, “They’re coming to get you, Barbara,” shortly before the zombies actually come and get him for dinner. Greenberg, funny from the jump, drones on about sunset and her brother’s drinking habits. But she quickly spirals into the horror trope of Freaked Out Girl as she takes shelter in what appears to be an empty farmhouse.

Frank Labovitz’s has done an outstanding job on the set, which for the most part is the farmhouse’s living room (with a quick push of the couch or fabric draped atop it, the set also becomes the cellar and the cemetery). Through slats by the door to the “outside,” the audience can see zombies lurking, and the boarded up windows give the room a sinister feel. Like other Rorschach productions, this one does not take place in a theater but instead sets up shop in a two-story former retail space along Connecticut Avenue NW. 

The house obviously isn’t empty, though. We’re quickly introduced to our hero Ben (James Stringer Jr.), wannabe leader and family man Harry (Erik Harrison giving serious Richard Dreyfus in Jaws vibes), his wife Helen (Karina Hilleard), and a few other would-be survivors. I’ll try my best to avoid spoilers, but with a 55-year-old movie, the grace period has expired. The first act of the play ends as tragically as the movie does. (Though the comedy really pulls this punch and, I for one, am alright with that.) As Hollywood Reporter put it in 2018, the film’s shocking end made Romero’s story “one of the most socially relevant horror movies to ever emerge from the darkened corners of America’s history.”