“Dummies” at Zombie Joe’s Underground Theater: Weird but Good, and Not for Dummies

The natural descendant of theater’s long-running tradition of Southern Gothic family-based plays, DUMMIES is what you’d expect of Zombie Joe’s Underground Theater—unsettling, organic, complex storytelling that eagerly acknowledges the fourth wall without ever breaking it.

Over the top from its very first minute, the play is a twisted goulash of Fellini, Lynch, Cronenberg, Williams, Faulkner and deeply mannered text. The dialogue bears no resemblance at all to human conversation, and is obviously modeled on the novel or even the prose-poem. Playwright Robert Riemer displays a cheerful disregard for speech as everybody people accept it, and crams every character’s words full of unlikely exposition and amusingly distasteful character development at the same time. Riemer wants you to know that you’re in a theater, and to sit there, take it, and like it.

And like it you do, because the entire cast is completely committed to what they’re doing. The strength of Zombie Joe’s Underground Theater (“ZJUT” from here on in) is that the actors on stage hold nothing back and see this tiny, intimate space as a chance for them to bare their souls to the audience with only a few feet of thin air as separation. While a show like DUMMIES is outrageous and “theater for the sake of theater,” it’s also a rallying cry for the people watching it to ask themselves what they’re doing sitting in the dark watching mad people do mad things. It’s not just “being silly,” but a series of questions and meta-questions about life, posed in the form of a stage play.

 

DUMMIES is really very simple, given that it tells the multi-generational tale of a family that has run out of money and must sell their ideals, morals and ethics in order to live through the Great Depression. The story is about just a few people who have no choice but to do disgusting things for survival in a time when no one cares what they do, and when a family home can devolve into a brothel called “Nowhere.” But that’s just the surface, of course. The question we’re asked—in between ridiculous Tennessee Williams moments where two half-sisters sleep with their half-brother, and grand orgies are staged in a pleasant living room—is what would you do for money? Where is your line, audience member?

 

This all seems to have nothing to do with Halloween or horror, but if you’re patient, you’ll see the connection. By the end of the story, half the cast have had gruesome things done to them, bloodstained bandages abound, and there is a twisted sense that this whole thing is an urban legend of a sort. It’s like how a kid in the 21st century might retell the sickening 1970s exploitation film version of an awful 1930s rumor of bad things that happened during the lean years. And we seem to have a few lean years ourselves, and a few bad things happening to us, so maybe this is a horror we’d rather not face…

 

DUMMIES runs Saturday nights through October 4 at Zombie Joe’s Underground Theater in North Hollywood, with the dark comedy SNUG’S REVENGE on Sunday nights. And from October 10-November 1, don’t miss Zombie Joe’s Urban Death Tour of Terror, a haunted theater attraction (which will be covered here soon)…