Theater review | 'Neighborhood 3' at Washington Ensemble Theatre is a serio-comic social-breakdown alert

Theater review |

Something is very, very rotten in the generically suburban town where the play "Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom" is set. It isn't just that many of the local teens are glued to their all-absorbing computer fantasy games.

Or that their parents are hooked also (not on Xboxes, but on work, booze, pills).

As if that weren't enough, people are leaving far too many implements lying around — barbecue forks, hammers — to serve as zombie-whacking weapons.

Some locked toolsheds might prevent some of the garish violence in "Neighborhood 3." But this clever serio-comic horror fest and social-breakdown alert by Jennifer Haley is about other stuff, too. Like the festering rot of parental neglect and indulgence, and the adolescent cult behavior and brattiness that certain computer games can exploit.

Haley's ingenious gambit, not completely realized in Washington Ensemble Theatre's regional premiere of the widely produced "Neighborhood 3," is to structure the hourlong piece like a virtual reality game — complete with a robotic narrator delivering creepy instructions to players who step over the "virtual" line into the "reality" zone.

At WET, under the direction of Makaela Pollock, a cluster of teens (all portrayed by Josh Aaseng and Natalie Breitmeyer) obsessively play a game that maps out their community (with Global Positioning System technology) and identifies certain houses as zombie havens.

The players conspire to eradicate the zombies. And, natch, these monsters usually merge with annoying parental types (all played by Kelly Hyde and Patrick Allcorn) who are desperately but belatedly trying to reconnect with their hollow-eyed, nihilistic kids.

Haley (a former Seattle resident, now based in Los Angeles) keeps the tension crackling in "Neighborhood 3," and Brendan Patrick Hogan's excellently ominous sound design enhances it.

Andrea Bryn Bush's set is a subdivision archetype, in which one of a subdivision's copycat homes serves as several different houses.

What's not quite in sync here is the acting. For the play to keep teetering dangerously on the precipice between au courant satire and horrific pathos, the pacing should pick up and the multiple roles each actor plays should be sharp and distinct. Allcorn and Breitmeyer are more successful on that score than their colleagues.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com