Theater Works staging 'Night of the Living Dead'

Theater Works is bringing a midnight-movie mainstay to the stage for Halloween, but it isn't the Rocky Horror Picture Show. The West Valley community theater's youth program is presenting an adaptation of George Romero's 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead. The play opens Friday in the Black Box theater at the Peoria Center for the Performing Arts.

"For our first season we had wanted to do a sort of interactive haunted house for Halloween, but it didn't happen," said Theater Works for Youth director Jim Gradillas. "I found this adaptation of Night of the Living Dead and it seemed to be a great way to bring in more of a teenage crowd. All of the adults know it, but it's less familiar to younger audiences."

Theater Works is planning a special midnight showing on Oct. 24 in honor of Night of the Living Dead's midnight-movie following.

"We're hoping to have some sort of zombie party or something like that as part of the midnight performance, but we're not sure just yet what we're going to do," said Gradillas. "This is the 40th anniversary of the film, and it really is the most important midnight movie next to Rocky Horror. We want to do so much more, but we need to see what the response is like first."

The play follows a group of humans hiding inside a farmhouse as hordes of zombies relentlessly assault the building. According to Gradillas, the adaptation is remarkably faithful to the film, which is widely acclaimed as a horror masterpiece.

"It's such a campy script - the dialogue is word for word from the movie. It is very cheesy at times, but that fits the B-movie feel. We're still trying to keep it realistic and scary," he said. "There was a lot of consideration as to whether it was appropriate for youth theater, but it actually has been mostly staged by high-school theater classes. We did end up cutting some things out, however."

Because it is being staged in the Black Box, it has the claustrophobic and interactive quality that Gradillas was hoping for when he conceived the haunted house last year.

"The audience is seated in the graveyard, so we constantly have zombies moving around. We have 15 zombies who are just wandering through the audience. You never know where they might come from - you are watching the action inside the house and zombies will come up behind you to attack," he said. "In some ways it is better than a haunted house. You are going to get scared, but you will also get to see a play."

Theater Works for Youth presents a stage adaptation of the horror classic Night of the Living Dead.