To Zombie or Not to Zombie At Rorschach, a delightfully undead Shakespeare pastiche

Upon learning that Living Dead in Denmark was originally produced by Vampire Cowboys, the much-buzzed New York–based theatrical company whose gleefully geeky mission statement reads: “To create and produce new works with an emphasis on stage combat and dark comedy with a comic book aesthetic,” potential theatergoers divide themselves into two distinct camps. These are, respectively, “No thanks,” and “Yes, I will take half a dozen.” This reviewer pitches his tent in the “Yes” camp, and I’ll confess that when I read playwright and Vampire Cowboys co-founder Qui Nguyen’s description of the show as a “love letter to Shakespeare, comic books and Hong Kong style action,” said tent-pitching verged on the literal. If actually seeing Rorschach’s staging caused some of that ardor to flag, perhaps that was inevitable; you certainly can’t chalk it up to a lack of effort on director/fight choreographer Casey Kaleba’s part. Goofiness and gore are cheerfully, ravenously embraced—which makes sense, as Nguyen’s script is little more than a pop culture gag-a-thon affixed to a self-consciously shlocky Roger Corman plot: Five years after the characters in Hamlet undergo their climactic mass exeunt, Ophelia (Amy Quiggens) is resurrected, upgraded with super fighty-fight powers, by Fortinbras (Ben Cunis) to join the similarly revivified Juliet (Megan Riechert) and Lady Macbeth (Katie Atkinson). Together, the Bard’s three badass broads wage a pitched battle against a plague of zombies led by a mysterious figure (Tony Bullock) given to ham-fisted oratory. (That’s a hint.) If ever a show resolutely resisted analysis and explication, it’s this one—Nguyen tosses in so many incongruous, omnidirectional, and deliberately momentum-killing jokes that recognizing the reference becomes its own reward. The whole thing’s essentially a game of pop-culture bingo featuring—but by no means limited to—shoutouts to Scooby Doo, The Incredible Hulk, Patton, The Six Million Dollar Man, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, James Bond, Brokeback Mountain (really? still?), Trix commercials, Resident Evil 4, the Undertaker’s tombstone pile driver and “Thriller” (the latter a gimme, given the subject matter.) Living Dead in Denmark takes nothing seriously, least of all itself: It’s the kind of play where plot twists are announced by a character piping up with “Now that’s what I call a plot twist!” This can get a bit wearying, yes, and even the impressive, wall-to-wall fight scenes set to a fuzzy synth beat soon start to look too similar to one another. But then again, the production team includes a “Blood Intern,” according to the program, which is just empirically cool. And those bad puns and stupid jokes are defensible, from a dramaturgical perspective; after all, what do you ask of a show about zombies but a few good groaners?