Zombie

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Bill Connington's Zombie is the original score: a wave of ominous soundscapes and fuzzbox guitar drone, fading in and out of the soundtrack like distant roiling thunder.

The set, meanwhile, consists of a small round table and two chairs lit by a ceiling lamp and a few supporting stage lights. These minimalist touches work to great effect, at once highlighting the visceral intensity of Connington's solo performance and blunting its rough edges. If only the rest of the play showed the same restraint.

"Zombie," written by Connington and based on the novella by Joyce Carol Oates, opens with the cagily named "Quentin P." setting up a game of chess against a mannequin with a white plaster face and rubber flesh-colored hands.

"I'm an admitted sex offender," he says.

Like Quentin, the script lays out all of its pieces right away.

"The boy was black and Quentin P. is white. I was so happy and feeling so free thinking of his black cock, his shy shrinking boy-penis like a baby rabbit, skinned."

So much for subtlety.

Quentin recounts his story from the basement of his grandmother's apartment "where she doesn't live anymore" after pleading guilty to "sexual misdemeanor against a minor."

"When Judge L. pronounced 'two years' there was a long moment before adding 'suspended sentence.' He knows my dad."

He then looks back to reveal a father who scorns him for budding homosexual tendencies, a cherubic fair-haired friend who rebuffs him on the playground, and a gang of black teenagers who beat and rob him in the park. Seeing his scarred, swollen face in the mirror, he gets an idea: he will make his own victims, docile sexual zombies. It will just take a simple procedure:

" 'Frontal lobotomy. Most extreme and irreversible form of psychosurgery...destroys white matter in both the left and right frontal loves of the human brain...' "

Of course, it doesn't go according to plan. There are complications. He doesn't mean to commit murder, not exactly.

"My first zombie, a grade of fucking F."

But he perseveres. "A safe specimen for a zombie would be somebody from out of town. A hitch-hiker or a drifter or a junkie...or someone from the projects downtown. Somebody who nobody gives a shit for. Somebody who never should have been born."

As such, all of his victims are black. "But I am not a racist. I don't even know what the fuck a racist is."

After the initial shocking revelations, the script becomes more effective in its ability to disclose details circuitously, weaving back and forth between Quentin's past and present to develop his neuroses. But once it gets back into the grisly details of his crimes and fantasies, there is little sense that Connington is aiming for anything other than shock value.

"A true zombie would be mine forever...He would lick with his tongue as bidden. He would suck with his mouth as bidden. He would spread the cheeks of his ass as bidden. He would say, 'Fuck me in the ass, Master, until I bleed blue guts.'"

Connington is captivating and frightening as Quentin; but, as with many extended monologues, he can't quite avoid an inherent staginess. Nevertheless, when he stares out into the audience his piercing gaze is as intense as a laser beam. If you're sitting in the first few rows, it's hard to meet that gaze head on.

"One, two, three thrusts piercing him like a sword. Who's your Master? Who's your Master? WHO'S YOUR MASTER?!"

"Zombie" also deserves credit for not compromising in its portrayal of pure evil. But the dark side of human nature is a theme that shows up in literature, film and theater again and again - usually in relation to its banality, the way it hides in plain site. This play ultimately fails to make an impression because there is no banality in Quentin P. There is nothing to link him to ordinary people or circumstances, or even the barest semblance of humanity - nothing to suggest he has ever struggled with his own internal nature. Clinical psychologists may argue that such a psychosis exists, but when reduced to a rambling confessional within a single cramped room, it begins to look as unreal and lifeless as, well, a zombie.

Zombie will run through April 26 at the Studio Theatre, 410 West 42nd Street.