Jennifer Haley's ingenious horror story about those video games kids get addicted to playing stands high among entries in this year's 32nd annual Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theater of Louisville. The last of six full-length plays to be unveiled, the fast-moving, comedy-laced Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom takes its unwieldy title from a game in which the real suburb where the obsessive players and their remote parents live merges with a make-believe online world where they must kill or be killed by roaming zombies who look a lot like the neighbors.
Electrifyingly directed by Kip Fagan, the play is superbly acted by a four-member cast (John Leonard Thompson, Kate Hampton, Robin Lord Taylor, Reyna de Courcy) inhabiting 15 quick-change roles of fathers, mothers, sons and daughters. It also features William McNulty in "walkthroughs," described as voiceovers "like game instructions or god." Keep a nervous eye on that white claw hammer that lies on Michael B. Raiford's shiny black vinyl stage. Blood will turn it red before play's end. Could it be that Snickers, a cat that died, was not really hit by a car?
The ever-watchful Neighborhood Association, which in real life requires residents to keep grass at a certain height and enforces other conformities, becomes the protector of zombies in the game. So killing zombies will put players in serious danger.
Sirens wail as the game's "last chapter" raises stakes extremely high. Players and their avatars enter "the final house" at their peril. Can they do so before zombies overrun it? "There's a wormhole between the neighborhood we know and the neighborhood in the game," one father says his son told him. "Once you go in you take your family with you. They appear to you as zombies and finally you can kill them without remorse." Be alert for golf clubs, weed whackers, circular saws, lawn darts, and hedge clippers. And ponder the wise words of one weary dad: "A neighborhood that tries so hard to deny fear magnifies it."
