Theatrical Physicality, the Gross-out Zombie, and Michael Chekhov Technique: Creating a Bridge from the Actor’s Body to the Character’s Body via the Zombie-Body

Zombies are everywhere. They are eating brains and gobbling up entrails in movies and television shows around the world. They are clambering out of graves in books, short stories, and graphic novels. And yes, they have even been known to wander slack-jawed and slobbering onto the theatrical stage in plays, such as Geff Moyer’s Zombie Gunslingers and Never Play with Dead Things by Kamron Klitgaard. So prevalent are zombies that they have even infected the world of high literature, showing up in various stages of decomposition in the reanimated pages of literary pastiches, such as the Jane Austin/Seth Grahame-Smith mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and the humorously gruesome Mark Twain/W. Bill Czolgosz adaptation The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim. In fact, our culture is so infested with zombies that you should not be surprised if you find one living in your neighborhood or under your porch. And if you do, Max Brooks’s Zombie Survival Guide will tell you how to deal with it.

While I do not consider myself a zombie aficionado, I have seen my fair share of zombie films (perhaps fifty of them), and as an acting teacher I must acknowledge that the performance of the zombie-body, particularly in film and television, holds a great deal of cultural currency. I just do not accept this as a fact, I embrace it as a challenge, going so far as to set aside a couple of weeks each quarter to teach zombie performance in my acting classes at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham, Washington. Of course, I have a secret agenda in doing so. My typical class includes a host of 16- to 20-year olds with some performance experience and a smattering of STEM students who have never been to the theatre, let alone stood on a stage.¹ Regardless of their background, or because of it, I find that many students are trapped in a body capable of only the most pedestrian movements. Even students with a few genteel high school musical productions under their belts find themselves hard pressed to physicalize the emotive qualities of the realistic and admittedly challenging characters we study in the acting sequence. Whether it is Ibsen’s Nora Helmer or Eddie from Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love, characters tend to move in the same pedestrian manner as the students who play them. In my experience, this is a common conundrum for teachers of beginning acting students.

Over the years I have used a number of training tools in an attempt to break down those pedestrian bodies. Viewpoints, clowning, emotion memory, neutral mask—they are all wonderful tools and work with varying degree of success, depending on the receptiveness of the student. But nothing I have tried has helped the neophyte break out of her or his normative, pedestrian body and create a vivid physicality in realistic stage characters as the serious (but admittedly fun) teaching of zombie performance via the training techniques of Michael Chekhov (1891–1955). The “a-ha!” moment that led to this unconventional approach to character development came after rereading the core exercises of Chekhov’s technique one day and watching the Australian gorefest Undead (2003) that night. It occurred to me, as I double-checked the lock on my door, that some of the techniques of Chekhov were perfectly suited for training the actor in zombie performance. I wondered if using Chekhov technique to create the zombie-body might not be a sneaky way to get my students to free up their own bodies, thus making the difficult task of creating theatrical physicality easier. It also occurred to me that this idea could turn into a complete fiasco, but it was worth the try.

The narrative below describes a three-week process (six class periods) during which a class of young student-actors undertake a quest to create a unique theatrical physicality for characters drawn from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Shepard...