Living Dead in Denmark (Qui Nguyen)

Yesterday I talked about the stylistic aspects of Qui Nguyen’s work which didn’t sit well with me: an elevation of genre at the expense of characterization and plot. In today’s convenient excuse for a screed I’m going to use Living Dead in Denmark to talk about the things in his work that actually anger me, and one thing I’ve noticed more of which frustrates me in a lot of work: bad comedy, bad feminism, and shallow use of public domain characters.

But first, a summary: Living Dead in Denmark is a 2006 play about Ophelia waking up after the events of Hamlet to find that the world is overrun by zombies. She’s put on a team with Lady Macbeth and Juliet to stop the forces of evil (the council of Winter) and restore peace to the land. It’s formulaic in the ways you’d expect, and is an excuse to jam a bunch of Shakespeare characters into fights. Characters are strong or weak as the plot dictates with little rhyme or reason.

I first read this play over a decade ago on the suggestion of a friend, and I was surprised that I liked it more this time than I remember in the past, that’s fairly faint praise though.

I’m a comedian. I don’t shy away from comedy, and Pronoia is explicitly a comedic theater company. So I take comedy, jokes, and the use of them seriously, and Qui Nguyen is bad at comedy.

I want to make a distinction here, too frequently in our discourse we treat comedy’s worth as subjective and personal to the viewer: comedy is supposed to make me laugh, I didn’t laugh, therefore it’s bad comedy. I disagree, laughter is a byproduct of pointing out absurdities; it’s how we deal with the fundamental cruelty of existence. Therefore, as much as I think good comedy does aim for laughs, as much as I think laughter is a good sign, and as much as I crave laughs from things I do, it is not the actual thing comedy is doing, and so it is best used as a proxy.

So when I say “Qui Nguyen is bad at comedy,” I don’t mean that his work doesn’t make me laugh, although it doesn’t, I mean his attempts at comedy at obvious, lazy, and lowest common denominator. There’s only so much he can do when his characters are paper thin carbon copies of archetypes we’ve seen in movies, but every attempt at a joke is an out-of-place reference, or unclever verbal abuse towards a character onstage.

His stabs towards comedy are the humor equivalent of a jump scare: something that pops out and wants to shock you into a nervous laugh instead of something built up over time and informed by understanding. He trades in lazy stereotypes and cliche one-liners. A fighter delivers a pun-filled line after downing someone. An ugly character sings beautifully. Someone calls someone else “retarded”. That is the level of sophomoric humor Nguyen gives us.

Even in this play whose every character is taken from Shakespeare, and thus already has a deep amount of characterization behind them, he can’t pull anything relevant or interesting from the stories. The Danish Ghost constantly says “Mark me.” Characters call Puck “fairy” derisively. I can’t even come up with a third one there is so little grounding in the actual characters Shakespeare created.

Which brings me to the third point, quite out of order: for a play that draws heavily from characters created by someone else, it doesn’t actually do anything with those characters, settings, themes, or ideas! Ophelia, Juliet, and Lady Macbeth have no resemblance to the characters of their plays. Fortinbras and Horatio are nothing like themselves.

In this play Juliet’s whole characterization is that she’s a brainy girl who wears big glasses. Does that sound like the love-struck teenager of Shakespeare’s play? If it sounds like anyone it sounds like Portia, but she’s not as well known so we can’t pick her (also she didn’t die in her play,) but Nguyen wanted a brainy beauty stereotype so he made the one he could.

Harkening back to my look at The Book of Will too many playwrights are taking these characters because they’re recognizable and doing whatever they want with them, because that sells better than original work. It’s insulting, it’s distressing, and it’s frustrating. We should expect more from writers.

In today’s take-based world I think words that evoke hate are too broadly used, so I don’t want to call Nguyen’s body of work misogynistic, because I don’t think it is, but his shallow treatment of everything leads to disappointing patterns in the ways women appear in his work: always sexualized and frequently insulted for their base characteristic (that is, their femininity.)

All of his characters are mean. All of them. In any of his plays every character will constantly insult the other characters around them, regardless of whether they’re friends, enemies, or strangers, and because his writing has little apparent depth these insults are equally shallow: you suck, you’re stupid, you’re fat, dressed up in a lot of “yos” and “wacks” that is the essential meat of the message.

So his female characters are constantly subjected to the same treatment, but it rings a little different: you’re sexually too permissive, you’re not sexually permissive enough, you’re ugly, you’re so pretty you probably don’t work on anything else, you’re a dumb bitch (though that word isn’t used frequently.) Nguyen seems stuck in the old mold of writing “strong female characters” that are vicious, sexy, and without a lot of flaws.

This may have been fine in 2006, I don’t know, I wasn’t thinking deeply about literature at that point in my life, but at the very least I don’t think it should be the benchmark now, and it is part of what frustrates me about the very popular She Kills Monsters, which is the same dynamic, but now playing out with the power dynamic of teachers and students, with the most sexual and most violent characters being fantasy versions of high school girls being played by a high school boy at the demands of his teacher.

It isn’t the kind of work we should be exalting.

Living Dead in Denmark is a shallow, unfunny, poorly plotted show that is only notable for it’s wide variety of fights and giving characters proper nouns that theater-goers care about.