by Jeff Grygny
Do you get the feeling that everyone is out for blood these days? The air seems so heavy with rage, resentment, mutual incomprehension, and a general sense of doom, it’s no wonder millions of people are in some way or other prepping for the apocalypse.
The artists of the Constructivists, with their characteristic punk predilection for showing civilized people devolving into savagery, have decided that it’s time for a comedy! A farce, no less. Hence their latest offering, Bed and Breakfast Of The Damned, a horror/comedy currently in its world premiere at the Broadway Theater Center. And though part of me wishes that few people find it in themselves to laugh at such horribly damaged characters, it’s a daring, provocative, and grotesque spectacle that seems perfectly calibrated to our current historical anxieties. It really takes you on a harrowing ride—I’d not recommend it for children, elderly relatives, or the easily triggered.
Playwright Cameron McNary has given the artists a nearly impossible task: to bring a fresh spin to the well-worn zombie trope, and to render its horrific events in the guise of a classic bourgeois bedroom farce: an I Love Lucy episode full of misperceptions, desperately improvised lies, embarrassing contortions, and many doors opening and slamming shut. Director Jaimelyn Gray has had to walk a hair-thin line: too naturalistic, and it becomes horror, too goofy and it’s just a bad cartoon. But how do you find the funny side of human beings turning into mindless flesh-eating abominations while keeping the core of true comedy: that the character’s emotions are real, if only for them?
The setting, as crisp as a Magritte painting, is the sturdily-reinforced common room of a pug-themed B&B. Round-eyed scrunched-up faces peer out from every pillow, throw, and picture frame, as if we are the performers for this mute audience, staring at us while the grisly events unfold. The stage business depends so much on characters not seeing things that are happening right in front of them, it strains credulity. But it gets a pass, since they are all clearly suffering from PTSD—not an obvious fountain of laughs, but there is is.
If acting is like setting yourself on fire in front of an audience, this cast is blazing. They really rise to the challenges, navigating the most awkward and over-the top scenarios without missing a beat. There is a tendency to signal “humor” with high-pitched urgency; everyone clearly has the chops to finesse the challenge, if only they stop trying quite so hard to be funny as they did on preview night. And, though they display the outsized emotions and exaggerated mannerisms of farce, they might just as well be presenting stylized images of people so traumatized that their rendition of “normal” skews into gross caricature. After all, they have all “seen things” that would drive anyone mad.
It’s not spoiling much to say that Molly Kempfer’s character is infected quite early on: her creative vocalizations as she’s “turned” by an unseen mob are so peculiar, it’s hard to know if they’re horrific or hilarious (she also makes the most adorable zombie you could imagine). Burdened with the script’s most strained gags involving pugs and gift baskets, Matthew Scales gives us the B&Bs alternatively manic and narcotically blissed-out proprietor with a surprising core of truth. Ken Miller and stacymadson [sic] play the most severely psychopathic characters: he has a survivalist’s paranoid ruthlessness; she is even scarier, with her Joker’s grin, sexually preying on her housemates “like a cobra in a room full of hamsters.” (Intimacy coordinator Laura Sturm earns kudos for coaching the players through some really emotionally risky moments). Phillip Steenbekkers and Becky Cofta give us a baseline of what passes for normal in the End Times; they show us the play’s version of heroism at the end of the world, not by rushing into danger, but just by making the effort to cling to the shreds of their humanity.
Whether you find Bed and Breakfast of the Damned funny or scary, amusing, appalling, outrageous, or any combo thereof, the real meat (pardon the expression) of the production is in this heroism of holding onto your humanity when everyone around you is losing theirs. As our world sinks ever deeper into the unthinkable, this is the cadence that the off-beat comedy hammers in with surprising force: please stay human. Don’t let the craziness let you become predatory, ruthless, disassociated. Don’t turn on your friends, or attack your potential allies, even if they’re a little crazy too. And above all: LOOK OUT THEY’RE RIGHT BEHIND YOU!
Bed and Breakfast of the Damned
By Cameron McNary
directed by jaimelyn gray
October 25-November 7, 2025
Thursdays-Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 4pm
Studio Theater, Broadway Theatre Center, 158 N. Broadway, Milwaukee WI
TICKETS : https://www.theconstructivists.org/productions/25-26-season/bed-and-breakfast-of-the-damned
“This production contains adult subject matter. Viewer discretion strongly advised. We believe in the power of dark art catharsis. As such, every Constructivists production contains provoking words, ideas, and actions. We respect everyone’s boundaries, but also respect those who wish to know as little as possible about this production. General warnings are violence and language.”
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