Some actors would worry about building their career on the portrayal of a psychopath. Mental instability is one of the quickest paths to being typecast, and while it’s built some careers (Christopher Walken), it’s destroyed others (Anthony Perkins).
Bill Connington is the creator and star of the bone-chilling, critically lauded adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ 1995 novella Zombie. (The show opened at Theater Row on Saturday after a stint at the 2008 NYC Fringe Festival.) Connington admitted that “people tend to look at you and see something you do well.” What separates Connington’s Quentin P. from any run-of–the-mill serial killer you can see every week on Law & Order is what he described as the “bland, methodical personality of someone you wouldn’t look at twice,” yet who is capable of committing horribly gruesome acts — homemade lobotomies, child molestations, murders — with absolutely no remorse.
Connington, who grew up in Cincinnati but received his training at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, was drawn to the British system because he found it “very practical and pragmatic” in terms of voice and body work. Connington made sure to point out that “I am not a method actor” and noted, “It’s part of my personality to have an approach that is a little more objective.” When playing a character as violently disturbed and sociopathic as Quentin P., keeping a relative distance from his performance may be in Connington’s best interest. “I feel so bad when I hear about Heath Ledger and how he basically played two psychotics in a row. I mean it will always affect you somehow, but the British have this thing about leaving it in the theater…I’ve read that Boris Karloff, with all the terrible characters he played, was apparently the gentlest, nicest guy.”
Zombie was as much of an intellectual challenge for Connington as it was a theatrical one. His previous one-man show, Dating Rituals of the American Male, was a quirky work of indie theater that explored ten different characters from ten different decades in reverse chronological order. Connington then set out to adapt a work of literature by a great living American author. He had originally desired to produce a series of short stories as monologues. After first choosing eight of Oates’ hundreds of short stories to adapt, he read Zombie at Oates’ own suggestion.
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