Oates had originally intended Zombie for the theater, but its eventual length turned it first into a New Yorker short story and then a novella. The book received mixed reviews upon publication and has been out of print for several years (Ecco is republishing it in September), but Connington described Zombie as “the only thing I’ve read as an adult that actually made me frightened.” Connington told me he could only get through the first three-quarters of the book after reading it the first time.
The ability to create that sense of terror for adults in the theater is similarly rare, but Connington’s adaptation produced some of the strongest reactions of any show in the 2008 NYC Fringe Festival. Audiences were legitimately terrified; at the matinee production I saw, a mostly elderly audience had dropped jaws in a mix of shock and revulsion. Connington describes one moment towards the end of the play where he consistently receives from the audience a “particular sound” of “an intake of air followed by a sardonic half-laugh,” which I remember hearing as well. He described the key to getting this response as similar to radio theater, “where the horror takes place in your mind.”
On the phone, Connington was charming, humble, and completely different from the character he inhabited on stage. But as much as his methodical approach to acting distanced him from forming a personal connection to Quentin, it also created a strange level of synergy with the character. “The scary thing,” Connington told me incredulously, “was that I had an immediate understanding of Quentin.” Midway into the rehearsal process, director Thomas Caruso pointed out to Connington that the actor had not asked Caruso for one single character note. “Maybe I should be worried about that?” Connington joked. In fact, the play's staging, a table and a couple of chairs with a notably eerie blow-up doll as a stand-in for Quentin’s multiple failed zombies, were all conceived by Connington immediately. He had never even considered taking the play out of the monologue format, as Oates herself had feared he might do in the adaptation process.
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