Undead Theater: Zombies on Stage

Monsters such as the ghost, the witch, the vampire, the shapeshifter, created monsters, and natural monsters have a long and storied history in the theater, haunting the stage for centuries, if not millennia. Not so the zombie, a latecomer to the theater. The zombie occupies a unique place in stage history, appearing before zombies in film, yet vanishing just as quickly, leaving the zombie to cinema. Yet in the wake of the zombie renaissance of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, zombies have become a feature of contemporary theater, appearing in musicals, serving as metaphors, or recreating zombie cinema in a live format. A subtrend of intermixing Shakespeare and zombies has also emerged, resulting in a variety of adaptions of the Bard’s plays with the living dead. Zombies are also a significant presence in children’s theater, as well as in international theater, from South African social drama to contemporary kabuki in Japan.