Adapting a horror classic for today's audiences

By Charlene Arsenault

When Jeremy Woloski was seven or eight, his parents bought him a little black-and-white TV for his room. Yeah, nowadays that's not a big deal; kids have a flat-screen TV, laptop, cell phone, Bose system, tanning bed and refrigerator in their room by the time they're 12. But back then - watching shows in your room? Wow. Woloski's parents must have been cool.

When he was nine and his parents went to bed, those rabbit ears brought the Night of the Living Dead to his room, and Woloski was transfixed. Even though it terrified him — particularly because his family lived across the street from a cemetery in Franklin — he developed a penchant for zombie and horror flicks from that day on. "I wouldn't even walk by that cemetery," says Woloski. "I used to imagine seeing people walking across the cemetery. I had an overactive imagination."

Some cast members of Night of the Living Dead.

That overactive imagination led to his love of theatre, and he teaches it to seventh and eighth graders at Burncoat Middle School now. They do about four to six shows a year, but Woloski also works extensively with the Stageloft Repertory Theatre in Sturbridge, too.

George A. Romero's 1968 classic, redone by Tom Savini in 1990, details the likely story of a group of humans fending off the raised dead in a secluded Pennsylvania farmhouse. Not only is the feud between these flesh-eating zombies a problem, but so is the feuding that develops among the normal humans. Some surmise that radiation causes the zombie attack, but a large number of enthusiasts argue that it is never stated. That sort of stuff matters to some. In fact, horror-film nuts are surely saddling in for a season of Halloween TV marathons.

Starting this weekend, Stageloft will premiere the first truly adapted-for-stage production of Night of the Living Dead, written and directed by Woloski. Stageloft has long wanted to complement the season with a production. Artistic director Ed Cornely has been trying to do a Halloween-themed show in October for quite some time.

"Last year, I kind of mentioned doing it," says Woloski. "I started to research the play and found this one script. I ordered it, read it, and it was very true to the movie. But things don't work well on the stage. You have to take creative license to adapt certain things, I think. Sometimes they'll have characters listening to the radio for 10 minutes. I gave the script to Ed and he had the same criticisms of it that I did as far as the pacing, and that it's dated. I thought, ‘Well, if Woloski did it, the rights must be available.'"

Woloski discovered that the original movie was in the public domain — the characters, story and whatever else could be used for whatever purpose. So Woloski took that nugget and converted it into a Night of the Living Dead of his own. This version retains important elements of the story, but it's been modernized — it takes place in today's times, and the ending has been altered.

"I pulled things I liked and changed things I didn't," says Woloski. "I fleshed out some of the characters. In the original, they are very one-dimensional. I did the best I could to make them more realistic. Hopefully they are more believable — in the original movie, you didn't care about them too much. I'm hoping that we haven't veered too far from the original, but I'm hoping we've changed it enough so that people who are fans will still enjoy the new things. The basic plot of these strangers being trapped in a house and fighting off the dead is the same, but the methods of escape are different."

Woloski employs fun little elements such as placing TVs around the audience to plug in newscasts or Centers for Disease Control press conferences [both filmed by the cast] about the events they are seeing on stage. For Woloski, he says not only does it keep the play moving, but "creates the isolation that these characters have."

As for whether radiation causes this uprising of the dead, Woloski likes the way Romero left that theory vague. "In the fake newscasts we created for when the show starts," he says, "we do mention radiation from Mars, but we never say that is 100%. If you give an explanation, that gives away the mystery. Some characters think it's terrorists, or a virus. In the end, it doesn't matter why it's happening. It matters how they get out of it."

This is the first true stage play Woloski has penned that has made it to the stage, though he wrote some murder mysteries in college. He's hoping to get it published so it can be produced by other groups. At the least, the buzz about this production is strong.

"I just find horror movies exciting," says Woloski, "because they are about events that won't happen in the everyday world. The chances of there being a zombie uprising are slim to none, as is a serial killer that comes back from the dead time and time again. As with every movie, it's escapism. With zombie movies, in particular, I've always found them disturbing because it's not one mass murderer. It's faceless. It's an army and just people that can overcome the living." o