theater
BY SUZI STEFFEN
GRETCHEN DREW
Rachael Davies applies
the foundation for
zombie makeup
Bloody or Nothing
UO prof takes his Hamlet with a zombie chaser
J
ohn Schmor sees Hamlet as the
original teen horror fl ick.
“That fi rst scene, Bernardo’s
lines are, ‘The graves stood tenantless and the
sheeted dead / Did squeak and gibber in the
Roman streets,’” he says. “Right away, it’s a
Fright Night movie!”
So Schmor, theater department chair at
the UO, spent a year working on a script that
melds Shakespeare’s words into the context
of zombie movies. His Or Not to Be opens
Friday, May 9, at the Lord Leebrick Theatre
(there’s also a preview on Thursday, May 8).
Schmor has more backing than a guard’s
idle chatter. He has history on his side.
Picture the British audience in 1601. Their
queen had consolidated Protestant control of
England, but the Catholic Church told them
that they would experience torment after their
deaths. Catholic dogma warned that the Devil
himself could appear in many guises. For
instance, he could take the shape of a ghost
— the ghost of an old king, perhaps.
Add to that the history of British monarchs
murdering each other, usurping the throne
and creating widespread instability in prices
and politics, and a lot of audiences, Schmor
says, didn’t have a great deal of trust in the
ruling classes.
So when they watched young Hamlet
fall under the sway of old Hamlet’s ghost in
William Shakespeare’s new play, “they would
have been watching a college-educated kid, a
prince, tricked by the Devil,” Schmor says.
“The play would have been deeply unsettling
and scary.”
Wait a second. Tricked by the Devil?
What about our view of Hamlet as plagued by
indecision? Hamlet as wishy-washy, passive
one minute and crazed the next? You know,
velvet-jerkin Hamlet, all pale and wan?
“I don’t think that’s how the play worked
in its time,” Schmor says. He calls this image
the legacy of the Romantics who saw young
Hamlet as a sensitive, tortured soul — only
not in the sense of an actual soul tortured by
demons of Hell but in the “I’m a teenager full
of melancholy” manner.
“Hamlet as a fi gure and as a direction for
youth is so foundational,” he says. “They
come into class with their sunglasses on and
their iPods in their ears, wearing black and
being unhappy with the world, always on the
sunniest possible day.”
Schmor, who adapted and condensed The
Tempest for the Leebrick in 2004, wanted to
recreate the bloodier, scarier original — and
he wanted to examine a culture obsessed with
Hamlet-infl uenced archetypes.
So he started watching zombie movies as
he read and reread the play. Not that he liked
zombie movies, at least not to begin with. “I
had some dreadful nights where I watched two
or three of them in a row because I wanted to
get the conventions right,” he says.
Schmor knows he’ll have the avid
zombie subculture of Eugene watching those
conventions — as a matter of fact, one of
the popular zombie walks takes place before
the play’s previews. But Or Not to Be isn’t
a spoof or a Rocky Horror-like homage.
All of the lines save a very few come from
Hamlet and most of the rest from other
Shakespearean tragedies. That means it’s not
a comedy though some things about it should
elicit laughter from the audience. Again,
it’s grounded in Schmor’s study of history.
“Zombies are revived corpses, and their
rudimentary impulse is to eat,” he says. To
eat human brains, that is.
“Cannibalism is straight out of
Shakespeare’s period,” Schmor says. In
the European imagination, some of the
indigenous peoples they encountered in the
New World were terrifyingly different —
hence the obsession with cannibalism.
The 90-minute adaptation, with no
intermission, bears down on the characters
with relentless logic. There’s a survivor —
but, Schmor notes, as in zombie movies, it
isn’t the character you might expect.
Schmor loves the cast, a mix of experienced
professionals, community members and UO
students, and he says rehearsals have been
great fun. “We have laughed and played hard
and scared each other,” he says.
But when Schmor proposed the play to
Leebrick Artistic Director Craig Willis, he
outlined more than scary fun, more than that
teen horror fl ick. “I’ve tried to take the play
seriously,” Schmor says. “I promised Craig
an unusual entertainment, and I think we’re
delivering.”
ew
Or Not to Be runs through June 1 at the Lord
Leebrick Theatre. Tix at www.lordleebrick.com or
465-1506.
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