A one-man show at the Huntington celebrates and parodies 'Die Hard'

It’s been 35 years since the cult classic “Die Hard” hit the big screen. The movie stars Bruce Willis as the gun-toting, foul-mouthed John McClane. Over the course of Christmas Eve, McClane battles a group of German terrorists in his quest to save his wife and a group of hostages.

London-based writer Richard Marsh has seen “Die Hard” so many times that he can’t remember when he first watched it. He knows he was a teenager, enthralled with Willis’ portrayal of the off-duty detective. “He doesn't just go in all guns blazing against 12 terrorists,” Marsh says. “He's quite vulnerable and he gets hurt and he bleeds and so I think he's a more believable hero, a more grounded hero.”

His enduring love of “Die Hard” inspired his one-man play, “Yippee Ki Yay,” which comes to the Huntington Theatre Dec. 17-Dec. 31 for its Boston premiere, with direction by Hal Chambers. The idea for the play formed during the pandemic, when Marsh started to think more deeply about “Die Hard” and the themes in the film. The play was first previewed in 2022 at London's Omnibus Theatre before its first showing later that year at the Gilded Balloon at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

For Marsh, watching the movie as a teenager was a different experience than watching it as an adult, now married with children. While action certainly drives the plot, it’s also about love. In the film, McClane and his wife Holly are attempting to salvage their struggling marriage. “I think there’s an emotional truth to ‘Die Hard’ as well,” Marsh says. “The reason for the hero being heroic, there's an emotional drive to it.”

With “Yippee Ki Yay,” Marsh wanted to tell a different kind of “Die Hard” story. There’s an obvious difference in form — while “Die Hard” was a highly produced film with many different actors, the play stars performer Darrel Bailey as all of the characters. There’s no elaborate set or state-of-the-art pyrotechnics. “I think, the nature of watching one person, it's just a very different narrative and emotional experience to watching a movie,” Marsh says. “Part of the fun of it is the audiences are kind of complicit in the telling of these big moments in creative and comic ways.”

The general idea of the plot is the same. John McClane is still an off-duty cop trying to save Holly and a building filled with hostages. But there’s also the addition of two new characters who are "Die Hard” fans. Since it is a one-man play, it gives audiences a more in-depth, nuanced look into the different characters in the plot. “As a writer, I was going into John's head and telling you what he's thinking at different moments and the nice thing is we also get to do that for other characters as well,” says Marsh.

Marsh emphasizes that "Yippee Ki Yay" is not an attempt to simply imitate the characters in "Die Hard." "We're not doing impressions of Bruce Willis or whoever it might be," he points out. "We're doing our versions of the character."

Lovers of the film can expect the action of “Die Hard” with lots of comedy. “It's gonna make you laugh a lot,” Marsh says. “But it's probably gonna move you too.

"Yippee Ki Yay" runs at the Huntington Dec. 27-Dec. 31 before going back to the U.K. and then Australia.