Jordyn Wood can really write.
In Vascular Necrosis, they take a fantastic premise and sustain their exploration of its potential for almost two hours. Halle-frickin’-lujah! Wood is a young playwright, a brand-new playwright to me, so their success is cause for celebration. I feel like I’m writing a birth announcement.
The premise: we’re five years into a zombie uprising; two years previously, a medical treatment for the undead was discovered.
Penelope, our zombie protagonist, committed suicide. Having suffered crushing depression, she liked the unfeeling peacefulness of being a zombie, so she’s not exactly thrilled about having been forcibly returned to human form. Her fiancée Charlie, who okayed the treatment, is loving but controlling. Bela, a fellow returnee whom Penelope meets in group therapy, flirts with her, dangling the prospect of, to an undefined degree, returning to the wild side.
So that’s where it starts. Zombie-ism is, paradoxically, a form of both opening up and shutting down; it’s sexual, but without physical sensation. Wood plays with the genre in ways that are often hilarious. When Penelope first regains consciousness, she has no memory of the past five years so, when her doctor tells her she’s been a zombie, she deadpans, “I want to see another doctor.” Wood sends up commercialism: the bank of TV screens on Paula Vitanen Aldazosa’s set lights up with glamorous ads for the treatment of rotting skin. And Wood yanks the chain of political correctness: “zombie” is far too pejorative to be in common use; the preferred form of reference is “individuals suffering from vascular necrosis disease.”
And, as Penelope negotiates her relationships with Bela, Charlie, and her former friends, Vascular Necrosis goes deeper in its explorations of responsibility, denial, prejudice, alienation, agency — and tangentially, at least for me, addiction.
That’s a lot, but Vascular Necrosis never feels overloaded, just rich and full.
That said, the one place the script left me longing was in my desire for a clearer narrative framework in which to explore these themes. Another way of saying this: I wanted more emotional heft and focus on the sexual/romantic triangle, and a more visceral understanding (maybe in the form of more concrete imagery) of Penelope’s suicidality.
But I am in no way dissing Wood’s significant accomplishment or that of their director/dramaturge Daniela Atiencia.
The physical production, including David Mesiha’s sometimes bone-rattling score and Aldazosa’s set, is satisfying.
And some of the performances are terrific. Playing Penelope, Gabriela Nebrida-Pepin’s work is impressively film-performance naturalistic, including when her eyes roll back and she’s undead. And, in an array of supporting characterizations, Brynna Drummond is a knockout. The only other time I’ve seen her onstage, she was playing Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire: her characterization there was a revelation. What she’s called upon to do here is wildly different and she nails it: all her roles are comic, but she infuses every one of them with emotional truth. Alex, who leads the therapy group, for instance, is also in recovery from VND: Alex embodies desperate denialism, but Drummond allows heartbreaking tenderness to seep through.
Marguerite Hanna makes a wackily engaging Bela. Her work is admirably honest, but she could pull back on the self-conscious eccentricity just a bit. Like Drummond, Terrence Zhou plays multiple secondary roles. He’s strongest when his assignment is most clearly naturalistic; when he’s called upon to add more comic spin, notably in his performance as Penelope’s doctor, he leans into caricature and loses subtlety.
Similarly, Evelyn Chew is working a bit too hard as Charlie: at least on opening night, her performance was too loud and pre-determined. Still, there’s a workable core of truth.
I don’t want any of these observations to be disheartening to any of the performers — I hope they’re helpful — and I don’t want them to dissuade you for a minute from seeing Vascular Necrosis.
Good for Touchstone Theatre for developing and producing Vascular Necrosis through their Flying Start script development initiative. It’s such important work.
And congratulations to everybody — especially Jordyn Wood — on the results.
VASCULAR NECROSIS by Jordyn Wood. Directed and dramaturged by Daniela Atiencia. A Touchstone Theatre and Glitch Theatre co-production running at The Nest until October 18. Tickets and information.
PHOTO CREDIT: (Photo of Gabrielle Nebrida-Pepin and Marguerite Hanna by Chelsey Stuyt. Set: Paula Vitanen Aldazosa. Costumes: Emily Friesen. Lighting: Jonathan Kim.)
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