FEAST FOR THE DEAD to Have World Premiere at Soho Rep

Soho Rep will present the world premiere production of Feast for the Dead, by Madeline Easley (Wyandotte Nation), May 26 - June 20 (location TBA). The playwright and director Tara Moses (Seminole Nation) make their respective Off-Broadway debuts in Easley's action-packed speculative drama.

In Feast for the Dead, a zombie apocalypse of epic proportions has swept through Turtle Island. Fourteen years later, the settler government has fallen; Randy and Lester are spinning sick indie tracks on RezDog radio; there's enough food if you live on the right side of the boundary line; and Kay is an important warrior in the Confederacy of Tribes. When the zombies suddenly disintegrate, it's finally time to bury the dead with dignity. But there's a ship approaching on the horizon line… Feast for the Dead invites us into a propulsive and surprisingly funny Indigenous futurity where the real struggle is staying human.

Zombie narratives particularly spoke to the dissonances she felt with her surroundings as a teen. The genre carried enough resonances to make her a Walking Dead obsessive. But she found many of these pop cultural incarnations wholly divorced from history and context.

The play moves at the breakneck pace of iconic zombie works but is visualized, per Easley's script, with “light, shadow, projections, locational sound, or other creative modes moving in the seamless dance of oral tradition”— its futurism propelled by a soundtrack of Native indie music.