Zombie Syndrome: Dead in the Water is a new production coming to Granville Island from October 4-31st. This production will be the fifth installment in a exciting, and unique, theatre experience. HCUBC spoke with Andy Thompson, the producer of the show, about his inspiration behind Zombie Syndrome and what audiences should expect from the show. The idea for this play started with Thompson 6 years ago when he visited London, England. Thompson saw a variety of plays in London and one particularly caught his attention. In describing that particular production, Thompson said, “it took place on the streets of London, and you were on a mission where you were an important character in the story and you had to do a special task … [it was] half scripted, half improvised, site specific, on your feet and in unconventional venues.” What initially drew him to like this play was the fact that, after decades in the business, “it was the opposite of half of entertainment.”
With all the different forms of entertainment that exist today, it is very challenging to develop fresh and interesting ideas, but this production has managed to do so through an interactive approach to theatre that mixes a variety of mediums. After asking audiences to vote for their preferred themes prior to Zombie Syndrome’s inception, the show was chosen by audiences to focus on zombie-vampires. The premise of Zombie Syndrome is that the world is ending, there are zombies everywhere, and the Canadian government needs your help. The story involves an evil vampire who decides to find a way to “take the zombies genetic material and mutate it into the vampire genome” in order to eliminate all death threats (including wooden stakes and holy water), and as the audience, you are “endowed with being elite agents of some form or another.”
The play is not only interactive in the sense that the audience is moving around to different sites and interacting with the actors, but also in the sense that the audience can even drive the narrative. Thompson says, “near the end, it becomes a choose your own adventure style of story, so the audience has the opportunity to make decisions and affect the narrative; some of the endings are catastrophic and one is correct.” The use of smartphones is also crucial to the advancement of the plot because, as Thompson explained, “information is sent to the user’s phone by the government of this story: the government gives the audience updates and dossiers on important players in the story and whatnot.” On top of all this, this will also be the first ever production in Canadian history to incorporate iBeacon. IBeacon is an Apple app developed a few years ago “that can interact with your phone and actually detect where you are in relation to it through Bluetooth, so it’s quite a precise measure and we’ve imbedded beacons all through out the show.” So, on top of being a part of the story, you can even take part in testing out this new technology in an exciting and fun manner!
The production is not just a play, but rather an interactive experience in which the audience is integrated into the narrative, and in part guides it. Because of the highly experimental nature of this production, in the beginning there were initial anxieties about how audiences would react. In the end, “it was a big creative risk, and it came with a big payoff,” as it ended up being a huge success and the audiences loved it. Now, Johnson says, “people are excited about this and we’ve got audience members that come every single year. It’s become one of their Halloween traditions.” Perhaps it could become yours too?
All in all, this production manages to give you a night where you not only get to watch a play, but rather get to be a crucial part of the story. Don’t miss out on your chance to save the world from a zombie-vampire invasion!