Since its founding in 2019, Loud Fridge Theatre Group has aimed to produce daring, inclusive, engaging and accessible new work to San Diego audiences. It achieves all four goals with its latest — and free of charge — offering, “Twelfth Night of the Living Dead (Or What You Kill).”
Local author-playwright A.J. Schaar’s world premiere script mixes William Shakespeare’s shipwreck comedy “Twelfth Night” with zombie horror a la “Night of the Living Dead.”
All of the lines in the play are Shakespeare’s own and the “Twelfth Night” story is mostly faithful, but Viola (and her twin brother, Sebastian) don’t wash ashore alive in Schaar’s version of the play. The twins drowned in a storm at sea and are now limping and growling their way through Illyria as undead flesh-eaters.
Loud Fridge co-founder Kate Rose Reynolds directs the entertaining production, which is creatively imagined in the City Heights Performance Annex with shadow puppetry, flashy lighting by Emily Johansson, fun-to-watch zombie physical comedy and modernized Elizabethan costumes by Heather K. Nunn that highlight the origin play’s gender duality.
For fans of “Twelfth Night,” Schaar’s clever use of the Bard’s word add extra layers of meaning to the play, but for newbies to the Bard, the acting and direction make the story easily accessible to all.
As in some other Shakespeare comedies, “Twelfth Night” has cross-dressing, long-separated twins and mistaken identity humor. Usually much effort is needed to suspend disbelief about the physical similarity between Viola and Sebastian. But Kaylin Saur as Viola and Hayden St. Clair are so identical, I didn’t know until the final bows that two actors played the roles.
While some Shakespeare characters emerge mostly unchanged in Schaar’s play — like Duke Orsino, Sir Toby Belch and the steward Malvolio — others emerge wildly different, like Viola and Sebastian, as well as Olivia, played in drag by Robert Del Pino as an heiress who mistakes Viola’s carnivorous bites for love nibbles.
One of the play’s standout performers is Loud Fridge co-founder William BJ Robinson, whose articulate language delivery, singing and emotional range bring depth and elegance to the wise clown Feste. Kaylin Saur is a talented acrobat as Viola; Ashley “Lee” Engelman is understated as Malvolio; and Nick Kennedy and Danny Campbell bring solid Shakespearean chops as Duke Orsino and Sir Toby, respectively.
Schaar’s play never explains why the Illyrians can’t recognize the clearly unusual zombies, and the script feels repetitive and a bit long. A growing number of infected zombies populate the play, but a moderate bit of biting, limping, mumbling and eviscerating goes a long way.
