Scifi Theater: Goldor $ Mythyka and Geek!

Goldor $ Mythyka

New Georges at the New Ohio Theater

written by Lynn Cohen

directed by Shana Gold

April 6, 2013

Geek!

Vampire Cowboys at Incubator Arts Project

written by Crystal Skillman

directed by Robert Ross Parker

April 11, 2013

Actually, this pair of shows aren't quite SF theater. But they're close, since they both take the role of fandom (especially the scifi/fantasy/comics fan) as their subjects.

Goldor (Garrett Neergaard), Mythyka (Jenny Seastone Stern),
and their DJ-commentator (Bobby Moreno)
Photo credit: Jim Baldassare

Basically, Goldor $ Mythyka revisits the Bonnie & Clyde myth. Its title characters are a pair of social misfits who find their ideal selves in role-playing games. Emboldened by their fantasy lives, they stage a heist and become folk heroes. But with a halfling on the way, Mythyka abandons fantasy and Goldor's revolutionary self-aggrandizement. The playwright adds flesh to the conventional arc by reframing the American myth of self-creation in light of the Great Recession. Her smartest twist is to suggest that parenting, in a sense, is a valid mode of self-creation. The play's only flaw is an onstage MC who comments on the drama. Though played by Bobby Moreno with charm and crack timing, the role's only substantive purpose is to exposit subtext that lies under the dialogue. The play's strong enough, with snazzy projections to set the scene and a cast of confident young and not-young actors, to establish its own identity.

Geek!, meanwhile, follows a pair of cosplayers through an actual convention. The two teens revel in the sense of belonging that dressing as manga characters offers them, but find that identity is more complex than pursuing an obsession, adopting a costume, or even abandoning those passions to stand alone. The sentiment that sorority and support is necessary could easily devolve into glib phrasing about belonging to a like-minded community. But Geek! goes beyond that by showing that self-disclosure (in this case, mourning a friend and sibling's suicide) is individualized and intimate. But that theme sounds heavy, which is the opposite of Geek!. Playwright Skillman knows pop subculture and, with director Robert Ross Parker and an exuberant design team, translates it into imaginative theatrics: dayglo hairdos and a steampunk cuirass; DIY YouTube videos that serve as flashbacks; crossdressing and crosscasting; a multiracial cast with a range of body types. It features plenty of stage combat―always a plus―yet it resolves the rivalry between two girls (not over a guy, incidentally) by joining them in friendship. 

The Geek! trio of Emily Williams,
Allison Buck, and Becky Byers

G$M and Geek! are both smart shows. Both have advantages and drawbacks, both succeed on their terms (modest) and Off-Off-B'way budgets (also modest), and both are fun and smart evenings at the theater. More broadly, taken together, Geek! and G$M suggest that American culture has converted everyone into “fans” of one thing or another. Fandom is an aid to self-discovery and the foundation of a community, a path to belonging. But that fact raises a dicey proposition: much of what we're fans of is corporate-owned (in my case, it's Marvel comics and Yankees baseball). So we're required to tithe to the owners (not the comics artists, not the ballplayers, note) to understand ourselves and discover others. Of the two, Geek! is more optimistic, maybe because it's less socially engaged than G$M. It finds a subversive streak in the DIY ethos of cosplay and in geekdom generally. G$M is more of a romance―like late Shakespearean plays, it leaps ahead 17 years to resolve its family triad. But both ultimately claim that eccentric passion strengthens a person only when it's shared with another.

Sci-fi theater: Inflatable Frankenstein

Mary Shelley comes online
in Inflatable Frankenstein
photo: Paula Court

Inflatable Frankenstein

Radiohole at the Kitchen

created & performed by Radiohole

January 6, 2013

Impishly, Radiohole starts its newest work where others end, with a post-show discussion. It's a parody of a panel, pitch-perfect, that allows the company both to set out and undercut their high-minded intention to excavate the story of Frankenstein. To capture the multiple perspectives and iterations of the mythos, the company has adopted a fragmentary, cubist structure. Weird scenes and frequently hilarious setpieces examine the themes of creation and creativity. The novel's referenced, of course, and James Whale (director of the 1930s classic films), but so are P-Funk's Dr. Funkenstein & Rocky Horror's Frank-n-furter. IF more or less disposes of the book in that opening panel, passing briskly by its moldy Romanticism and the Werther-like neuroses of its title character. The show's creators seem tickled to abandon the lumbering influence of Karloff as well.

In Radiohole's portrayal, the Creature is rock'n'roll cool, a rebel seeking an identity. He's also an avatar of sci-fi weirdness, an uncanny construct of biomatter. At his entrance, supine, his birthing platform (handcranked from above, naturally) drips goo in long, pale-flesh sheets. The show revolves giddily around a paradox: the Creature is a man without a mother yet his creator was a woman. In this way, Mary Shelley usurps Doctor F as the lead character. If IF is grounded in any meaning (at points, it's so busy and noisy it's almost abstract), it's this shot of feminism. But in technical terms it's also a fusion of man and machine. Rather than ceding control to a tech crew, the cast themselves operate the dazzlingly complex array of multimedia via smartphones embedded in their steampunk costumes. This allows for a spectacular level of control over the stage environment―IF may be the future of experimental theater.

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Inflatable Frankenstein plays at the Kitchen, closing on Jan. 19. Tickets?

2012 in SF Theater: A Top Ten List

In 2012, I began to seek out theater that had elements of science fiction. It's been a rewarding experience, especially since it's led me to shows I wouldn't otherwise have seen. SF has a vibrant and exciting environment Off-Off-Broadway. It only rarely appears Off-Broadway, and its sole representative on Broadway is Spider-Man (though you could stretch your definition to include Peter & the Starcatcher). To cap the year, enjoy my top ten list of SF theater, in no particular order. If this 2012 list proves anything, it's that Off-Off-Broadway is vibrant with smart, entertaining science fiction. 

Best show(s)

The Honeycomb Trilogy

playwright: Mac Rogers

director: Jordana Williams

company: Gideon Productions

Hands down the best SF work of 2012, Mac Rogers' Honeycomb Trilogy staged the decades-long story of an alien invasion in three full-length realistic dramas. This trio of plays deserves any number of year-end titles and awards. Most audacious vision: a trilogy of two-act, well-made dramas whose insight into the relationship between individual character and cultural dynamics closely resembled the dramaturgy of Henrik Ibsen. Aside from the giant telepathic wasps. Uncanniest aliens: those wasps, never seen onstage―except, memorably, for one nine-foot-long leg! Their hive-mind telepathy, the mirror opposite to humanity's individuality, had produced an anarcho-communist civilization beyond the imagination of Bakunin. Yet the species had destroyed their planet's ecosystem, and now hoped to save humanity from the same fate.  Most memorable character: protagonist Ronnie, who began as a hellion teen and ended as the iron-backed governor of Florida. Each episode of the trilogy uncovered new sides to this knotty role, from her daddy issues in part 1 to her maternal ambivalence in part 3.  Kinkiest romance: a homosexual, interspecies love affair between Ronnie's awkward younger brother and an astronaut whose mind had been replaced by the wasp hive's ambassador. Their relationship may've been unconventional but it was in no way deviant. Each psyche passionately desired communion with the other, which ironically led to both men betraying their species and losing each other.  Greatest undertaking: As befits a scifi epic, Honeycomb took plenty of chutzpah to produce; more established and high-profile theaters than Gideon Productions would've balked. To unroll the trio of shows, Jordana Williams directed her team of designers and 27 actors over a six-month period. The result was a thorough success, stupendous theater full of intellectual heft, emotional drama, and entertaining action. Mac Rogers' trilogy proved that science fiction need not lose its fantastic elements to be great theater.

Keeping it real in Spaceman
(credit: Clint Brandhagen)

Smartest AI or robot

The Navigator

playwright: Eddie Antar

director: Leslie Kincaid Burby

company: Workshop Theater Company

The canniest binary character of 2012 wasn't a killer robot, megalomaniac supercomputer, or cyborg demanding its rights. Rather, it was an extraordinary GPS. Spying into the future, the title character of The Navigator advised its owner on his best course of action, from shortcuts of Westchester County to the path to financial security and finally smartest route back into his wife's heart. In a smart theatrical twist, writer Eddie Antar personified the GPS as a character, played superbly by an android-icy Kelly Anne Burns. Her chemistry with her owner allowed the show to dramatize the relationship of Americans to our technology. In counterpoint, the production itself was charmingly low-fi―mainly a pair of chairs & steering wheel to represent a car. This charming comedy recalled The Twilight Zone at its fuzziest and most humane. And its heroine, by dint of her uncanny gift for prophecy, was the smartest computer of 2012―and the most winsome.

Most nightmarish dystopia

Through the Yellow Hour

playwright/director: Adam Rapp

company: Rattlestick Playwrights Theater

Even as Lower Manhattan nearly became a literal wasteland after Hurricane Sandy, it also saw a dystopia arise in Adam Rapp's latest play. Superficially, Through the Yellow Hour was a realistic three-scene drama, but (as some reviewers complained) its reality didn't quite convince. New York, depopulated and reduced to rubble by chemical dirty bombs, was under curfew enforced by armored gangs of foreign jihadis who castrate men. Improbably, they're funded by the 1% as part of a plan to cull humanity and practice eugenics. Rapp's scenario resisted plausibility; instead it possessed the irrationality of a fever dream. A dingy LES studio apartment, stripped of everything but a toilet and bathtub, lent the stage its innate claustrophobia, while a soundtrack of gunfire supplemented reports of the disfigured cityscape beyond its walls. Even when illogic and over-ripe dialogue threatened to puncture the illusion, its dream-like atmosphere held its coherence.

Cosmic comedy in Space//Space
(credit: Ryan Jensen)

Deadliest Apocalypse

Samuel and Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War

playwrights: Marc Bovino & Joe Curnette

director/co-creator: Lila Neugebauer

company: The Mad Ones

Samuel and Alasdair jettisoned the conventional tropes of endtimes and robotry yet it delivered the year's most vivid and hopeless apocalypse. A Siberian AM radio station aired a corn-pone romance of small-town Americana, interrupting their tale with country tunes, call-in contests, and more ominously, power outages and strange sonic feedback. The claustrophobic setting and its anonymous broadcasters disclosed an obscured history, one where, back in the Eisenhower era, atomic-era robots exterminated North America with death-ray eyes and telescoping limbs. The radio show suggested that the Russians were paying homage to a lost civilization, infusing the atmosphere with a lonely melancholy. The modest charms of the format (and the live foley-work) of radio was undercut by the hosts' fear and absence of hope. A minimalist style of performance encouraged attentiveness and focus, repaid by a superbly executed production. Though it was a eulogy for humanity, Samuel and Alasdair was deeply moving.

Hardest SF

Spaceman

playwright/director: Steven Gridley

company: Loading Dock

Spaceman imagined humanity's first trip to Mars with a pleasantly realistic approach. Rather than having an interplanetary adventure, its protagonist faced a numb routine of flight checks, the invisible hazard of cosmic radiation, the stifle of recycled air, and worst of all, the loneliness of the void. In this respect, the show's conflict was almost entirely internal, depicting the psyche of a person in extreme conditions. A smart script guided Erin Treadway's tight performance, helping her to hold the stage alone for almost the entire show. By avoiding the SF clichés of interplanetary travel, Spaceman brought out the true heroism of space exploration and the sense of wonder and transcendence that a Mars shot would have, yet the show didn't stint on the human cost. It may have presented a trip to Mars as a Beckett-like essay in tedium―but it was riveting.

Most far-out

Space//Space

playwright: Jason Craig

director: Mallory Catlett

company: Banana Bag & Bodice

Space madness with a method, Space//Space practiced avant-garde irony and destabilization to take its audience on a psychedelic journey. Set within a plexiglass pod in the interstellar void, the drama staged a “failed scientific experiment” involving a pair of twin brothers whose hamster outfits literalized their roles as lab rats. As one brother began to lose his sanity, the other spontaneously became a woman, as if gender were simply a quantum instability. Later, in a stunning theatrical coup, the actress (Jessica Jelliffe) stripped her costume to reveal a belly six months pregnant. Naked and serene, she took on the cosmic aspect of a goddess as she seemed to guide her fearful brother into his space odyssey of death/rebirth. Delightfully abstruse, Space//Space blew our collective mind, a reminder that SF can have a strong component of cosmic weirdness.

Radio days in Samuel & Alasdair
(credit: Ian Saville)

Coolest relic of a past SF production

Starstruck

Oddly, all that's left of a 1980 Off-Off-Broadway space-opera is a radio show and a comic book. A still-strong signal from the DIY scene of NYC yesteryear, Starstruck glue-gunned the puckish anarchism of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to the radical feminism of its time and place. Then, once the show closed, its playwright/director/star (Elaine Lee) collaborated with her neighbor, a famous young illustrator (Michael Kaluta), on a prequel that drew on the deco aesthetic of Flash Gordon. For two decades, issues were published by Marvel Comics and Dark Horse; in 2012, IDW reprinted the full series in paperback. But despite that corporate pedigree, the comic is a revolutionary work, just as dense and complex as caped classics like Watchmen but far more enlightened and far less serious. Meanwhile, Lee adapted the play for radio & webcast in 2010. Now, you can read the TPB, download the audio play, and return for the first time to the stellar adventures of Galatia 9 as she leads a space revolution against her evil sister!

Most overrated

World of Wires

playwright/director: Jay Scheib

company: The Kitchen

Jay Scheib continued to earn applause for his experimental theater in 2012 with World of Wires. His latest piece adapted a 1970s TV drama by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, which in turn was based on a '60s SF paperback. All three versions followed a computer scientist who begins to suspect he's actually inside one of his VR programs. The plot had noirish tones, with a dead body, an icy blonde, and a political conspiracy. But Scheib's method of staging felt cold, analytic, and ultimately uncompelling as anything more than an showcase for his obscurantist style of blocking the action behind walls of sheetrock and instead projecting it on flatscreen TVs. Yes, got it, the actors have been digitized. Scheib's style was more architectural than dramatic, failing to fracture the space-time of the stage in any theatrically productive way. Unlike the critics who raved about his work, I heard in World of Wires a snide, insider tone―alienation not as philosophy but as a measure of cool.

Starstruck: A Girl's Guide
to Space Anarchy
(image: Michael Wm. Kaluta)

The One I Missed

Deinde

playwright: August Schulenburg

director: Heather Cohn

company: Flux Theater Ensemble

Because a play only exists at one point in time, and so do I, I missed some good SF theater. This year, I'd rent a time machine to catch Deinde. A drama about quantum computing, neuropsychology, and a global pandemic, this drama sounded like exactly the sort of theater that I love. The company, Flux Theater Ensemble, has produced solid SF in the past (Dog Act) and later in the year, they would deliver a satisfying rom-com that mixed '60s romance comics with '40s vigilante action-adventure (Hearts Like Fists). Critics recommended Deinde, theatergoers buzzed about it, I even had tickets―and I couldn't go. Instead, I had to cover the bloated, blundering Broadway musicals during the April/May pre-Tony blitz. Won't make that mistake again.

Sci-Fi Theater: Heresy

Nearly alone in this show,
Reg Cathay doesn't phone his performance in

Heresy

The Flea Theater

written by A.R. Gurney

directed by Jim Simpson

It's a measure of sci-fi's ubiquity in American theater that even A.R. Gurney, an 82-year-old WASP, sets his latest drama in a dystopia. It's “New America” in the not-too-distant future, just long enough for five nation-wide “crackdowns” on un-American activity. The image that conjures—of NYPD bashing Occupy—is the only contemporary aspect of Gurney's setting. His targets are Bush-era: waterboarding, wiretaps, and massive databases on American citizenry get cited but not, say, drone assassination. Not a word about the Great Recession but plenty about a newfound unity of church and state. The near-absence of post-'08 malfeasance makes the play seem behind the times, already dated. The near-future resembles the near-past, but with a paranoid streak stemming from constant police surveillance. The lone bit of future-tech is a whooshing door out of BBC's MI-5.

If Heresy were stronger elsewhere, in script or show, Gurney's failure of imagination wouldn't matter so much. But the play is clumsy, its staging uninspired. Its basic conceit is awful: Mary (Annette O'Toole, wooden) visits DC to speak with Pilate about the arrest of her son, Chris. In case his audience misses his point, Gurney hamhandedly emphasizes the parallel: young officer Mark, transcribing the meeting, likes to re-translate prosaic dialogue back into its biblical phraseology. Jim Simpson ignores the script's blunt-edged satire, instead staging the play with a breezy tone. The flickers of enjoyment come from the always-awesome Reg E. Cathay, a Pilate whose bass voice belies a shallow desire for respect, and by Kathy Najimy as his tipsy wife, a society matron who says the dopiest things. The duo's rapport gives this doddering one-act its only moments of vitality.

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Heresy plays at the Flea Theater, closing on November 4. Tickets?

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Sci-Fi Theater: Space Captain

NoTea Productions

The Kraine Theater

written by Jeff Sproul

directed by Lindsey Moore Sproul

Happily, this Flash Gordon rip-off doesn't begin and end by parodying the cheap movie serials of the Great Depression. For one thing, it bounces exuberantly between live action and filmed location shots. Add the styrofoam “puppet” spaceships, which fire be-glittered popsicle sticks for laser blasts, and the production's aesthetic playfully echoes the high-tech/low-fi future of pre-WW2 SF. The bigger surprise is that the playwright Jeff Sproul takes his characters (semi-)seriously. Space Captain Rocky Lazer loses his two-fisted confidence when he realizes his love interest may be turned off by his patronizing attitude. To be a better hero, he must better himself. In fact, every character grows―something Flash, Ming, and the rest never did. Director Lindsey Moore Sproul, unfortunately, is more comfortable with Airplane-style hijinks. A stronger hand would've cut the plot's repetitions, picked up the pace, and even staged the actors better. Most importantly, she would've demanded a stronger end to the arc of damsel Jean Jarvis. Alicia Barnatchez gives a witty performance, but finally her part never rises above the role of Rocky's love interest. That fix would add sass to the show's snappy pleasures.

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Space Captain: Captain of Space plays at the Kraine Theater, closing on Sept. 15. Tickets?

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Sci-fi Theater: Flying Snakes in 3D

Flying Snakes in 3D

Everywhere Theater Group

The Ice Factory 2012 at the New Ohio Theater

written & directed by Leah Nanako Winkler & Teddy Nicholas

Thursday, July 5

The gentrification of New York's theater scene gets confronted, tackled, and beaten in this rough comedy of politics and passion. Everywhere Theater Group opens Snakes with a set of monologues by the creators, direct-address style, explaining that their company are survivors of bad neighborhoods and worse parents. Without connections or pedigrees, these young artists aren't just struggling to make art, they're actually and literally struggling to survive in Bloomberg's New York. Through their show, they aim to express the righteous fury that novaed too briefly in last fall's Occupy movement. Thus galvanizing opening, a political manifesto laced with friendly humor, admits what most Off-Off-Broadway theater tries to hide: its poverty is more a result of disenfranchisement than thwarted ambition or absence of talent. It sets the audience up for a punk-like show that won't aspire to look like the Establishment work uptown.

Once the play itself starts, however, it fails on this count. As a broad burlesque of summer blockbusters, Snakes hints that the creators want to stage an impossible piece of theater. But most of the action―like those soaring snakes of the title―is actually on video, not live. Ironically, the filmed, edited, and CGI-ed projections (courtesy Chase Voorhees) are the strongest facet of the whole show. The script, on the other hand, over-exposits its B-movie conventions. All along, it recognizes how mainstream theater exploits music, realism, and a desire for money and sex, all to manipulate the audience's sentiments. But recognition and subversion aren't the same thing; too often, and especially at its heartfelt action climax/curtain number, Snakes buys into the same conventions. ETG intends to be great on its own terms, but it needs to tighten its act and get truly subversive to undermine the system.

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Flying Snakes in 3D, part of the 2012 Ice Factory at the New Ohio Theater.

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Sci-fi Theater: Space//Space

Space//Space is the ultimate trip,
if your drug of choice is Lexapro
(photo credit: Ryan Jensen)

Space//Space

Banana Bag & Bodice at Collapsable Hole

written by Jason Craig

directed by Mallory Catlett

June 15, 2012

Before Space//Space begins, the plexiglass pod onstage and electronic soundscape evoke a low-budget, deep-space atmosphere. But it's the show's prologue that sets the tone. A mad scientist twitches through a logorrheic lecture describing what we'll see as a failed scientific experiment. Is this modernist drama itself a failed experiment as well? It's definitely a journey to the outer orbit of theatrical expression. Launched on a one-way mission into the void, brothers Jason Craig and Jessica Jelliffe are lab rats (they wear hamster outfits instead of jump-suits) who kill time by spinning LPs, rationing “emergency sandwiches”, and, in his case, reciting baldly sexist stand-up material. In a bit of quantum flux, Jelliffe's cosmonaut spontaneously turns into a woman. Despite odd outbursts of space madness and witty observations on boredom, after sixty minutes of ironic anti-performance Space//Space feels like the failed experiment it claimed to be.

But Craig, Jelliffe, and director/dramaturg Mallory Catlett have death on their minds as well as gender. Just as Space//Space starts to coast on its inertia, it turns into a cosmic pocket-epic with mythic resonances, a 2001 filtered through the knowing ironies of the 21C avant-garde. Mortal fears creep into Craig's voice, for even in the future the only thing more fearful than eternal boredom is oblivion. Jelliffe, however, strips to reveal a belly swollen by pregnancy that somehow doesn't clash with her bearded face. A holy androgyne, she morphs into some sort of Space Goddess, some future-myth's equivalent of an Earth Mother. Her previously hyper-casual style of performance takes on warm undertones, and she becomes a psychopomp who will guide the dying astronaut through a space odyssey of death and rebirth. In its final scenes, Space//Space goes further out than any show you'll see, skirting failure to reveal something rich and strange.

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Space//Space plays at Collapsable Hole, closing on July 1. Tickets?

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Sci-Fi Theater: The Navigator

Workshop Theater Company
written by Eddie Antar
directed by Leslie Kincaid Burby

Witness an everyman whose GPS starts offering stock tips, career advice, even solutions to his domestic stresses. The Navigator wears its Rod Serling influence broadly, by delivering the requisite twists, of course, but also a belief in the little guy and a touch of moral homily. It's even got a timely note in the hero's financial stresses. But it's no simple teleplay: a casting fillip adds theatricality with the GPS played by a live actor, Kelly Anne Burns, cool with her android twitches and robo-voice. She's paired with Joseph Franchini, whose ordinary Joe performance has a neurotic simmer that recalls Jack Lemmon. The deeper themes of how 21C Americans relate to our technology get brushed lightly, but they don't need much since the play views people with such warmth. This light comedy, just over an hour long, stands out as one of the most charming pieces of off-off-Broadway theater all season.

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The Navigator plays at the Workshop Company Theater, closing on February 26. Tickets?

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Science-Fiction Theater: Menders

(credit: Justin Hoch)

Flux Theater Ensemble at the Gym at Judson
written by Erin Browne
directed by Heather Cohn

In a catastrophic future, a young woman patrols the wall that keeps undesireables out of her city. To pass the time, her mentor tells her and her cousin parables with a slightly subversive tone, though the heroine can't say quite how. Erin Browne's self-serious drama expresses furious frustration over the political repression of homosexuality and a fearful depiction of how totalitarian states force its citizens to betray themselves by informing on others. But her dystopia is less like A Handmaid's Tale than The Hunger Games, substituting simple anti-authoritarianism for a more complex worldview and twisting the plot in obvious directions. Director (Heather Cohn) and dramaturg (Annie-Sage Whitehurst) should also have cut the recitations of Frost's “Mending Wall”. But these are faults of youth, forgivable with good performances (especially Matt Archambault) and a compelling design (Cory Rodriguez, who designs the set's walls slide ominously under their own power). Menders has the sincere intensity of a young company with something noble to say.

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Menders plays at the Gym at Judson, closing on February 11. Tickets?

Sci-Fi Theater: Advance Man

Here come the Martian Martians!
credit: Deborah Alexander

 

Advance Man

The Secret Theater

written by Mac Rogers

directed by Jordana Williams

January 13, 2012

When you trek out to Long Island City for a play about the first manned mission to Mars, you don't expect to see a beige living-room onstage. Instead of interplanetary action, Advance Man lifts its plot from a 1950s B-movie about pod people infiltrating suburbia. A housewife suspects her husband, the all-American captain of that Mars-shot, of an extramarital affair. But the truth is scarier: he and his crew have invited an insectoid race to save civilization from itself. Are they helping to found a planetary utopia or delivering humanity into slavery? Will all individuality be lost to a hive mind—and is that a bad thing? Part of the appeal of Advance Man's ambiguities is the knowledge that it's just the first play of The Honeycomb Trilogy; the plot will thicken with Blast Radius in April, and all questions will (hopefully) be answered by Sovereign in June.

As the first act of a longer drama, Advance Man suffers from the necessity of delivering backstory. The solution should be to establish a strong tone. And Mac Rogers' script tries to balance domestic melodrama—a troubled marriage, a hellion daughter—with sci-fi thriller. But director Jordana Williams doesn't exploit the seepage of weirdness into a suburban living room. And like even the most classic of '50s B-movie SF, the quality of performance is uneven. Fortunately, the pivotal roles go to the most consistently strong actors: Sean Williams (that gee-whiz captain), Becky Byers (his rebellious daughter), Abraham Makany (a surly astronaut). And Jason Howard steals the show as the victim of a mysterious accident on Mars. As his character's secrets come out, Advance Man picks up the pace. With the Martian invasion underway, part two is more likely to be fun theater, for sci-fi fans at least. Hopefully, it'll leave the living room behind.

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Advance Man plays at the Secret Theater (44-02 23rd Street), closing on January 29. Tickets?

Sci-Fi Theater: World of Wires

They're not real, they're actors

World of Wires
The Kitchen
adapted & directed by Jay Scheib
January 12, 2012

More sci-fi theater! But unlike last week's accessible apocalypse, World of Wires is theatrically challenging and philosophically abstruse. Jay Scheib, the It Boy of experimental theater, has adapted and directed a 1970s German TV film by Fassbinder, which itself was based on a '60s SF paperback. Every version of the work worries over the conceit that, if a computer were powerful enough and a program sophisticated enough, a simulated environment would be indistinguishable from reality itself. It follows a computer scientist who begins to suspect that his life is as artificial as any he's programmed. Scheib may be scratching his head over the existential implications, but fortunately he doesn't let his confusion show onstage. The source material keeps him grounded, because despite its futuristic trappings, the plot of this piece is patterned on film noir, with a missing person, a dead body, a mysterious blonde, and a political conspiracy.

With a solid story for his foundation, Scheib is free to apply the disorienting devices of modern experimental theater. He literally digitizes his actors by shadowing them with a camera and feeding the video to flatscreens onstage. He directs the cast to deliver their dialogue flatly but otherwise to perform with breakneck activity and sensual vivacity. He skews the sense of place and perspective with a set (designed by Sara Brown) that deliberately obscures which level of simulated reality a scene plays out on. Maybe Scheib's only significant error is that he paces his show at a constant level of hyperactivity, which becomes exhausting. The source material, meanwhile, finally fails him by wrapping up a little too optimistically, given its noir echoes and the adaptation's ironic posturing. But otherwise, World of Wires couches its forward-looking philosophy perfectly in an idiom of theatrical futurism.

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World of Wires plays at the Kitchen (512 West 19th Street), closing on January 21. Tickets?

Sci-Fi Theater: Samuel & Alasdair

Samuel and Alasdair: A History of the Robot Wars

The Mad Ones

January 6, 2012

I'm a sucker for science-fiction onstage, and this month, I'm seeing several plays with sci-fi elements. The first, Samuel and Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot Wars, may wear its genre in its subtitle but it rejects genre clichés almost entirely. Instead, this show is a tidy piece of naturalism. The action takes place over a 75-minute broadcast of an old-style American variety show made at a Siberian AM radio station. A corny tale of teen brothers competing for the same girl gets interrupted by call-in trivia contests, classic country tunes, and house ads, but also by unsettling power outages and strange sonic feedback. Hints about the recent past coalesce into a version of robot apocalypse. In the alternate history of Samuel and Alasdair, atomic-era robots with death-ray eyes and telescoping limbs destroyed North America sometime in the 1950s.

The trope of a robot uprising is at least as old as the word “robot” itself. But the company, the Mad Ones, offers a fresh take on the modern myth, recounting the fate of humanity through the prism of a few hopeless souls. Conceived by writer/actors Marc Bovino and Joe Curnutte and director Lila Neugebauer, the show rations exposition carefully, describing just enough of the catastrophe outside the station to evoke a sense of global despair. Neugebauer stages the action with quiet minimalism, so that an unobtrusive gesture can tip an unspoken romantic triangle on its end. Her approach encourages the audience to listen carefully and watch actively―so that we notice, for instance, that the most sophisticated piece of technology onstage is a rotary phone. But despite the quiet melancholy, Samuel and Alasdair is holds us rapt. This is a superb, moving drama, and incidentally, poignant science-fiction.

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Samuel and Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot Wars plays at the New Ohio Theater (154 Christopher Street), closing on January 21. Tickets?

Sci-Fi novels: We

I stopped reading sci-fi around age 15. But I've returned to the genre recently, playing catch-up on works like Dune. I just finished We, a very early Soviet sci-fi novel (1921) written by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It's not just a brisk, zesty read, it's got artistic substance beyond most sci-fi. George Orwell cribbed a lot from We: the mechanics of his dystopia as well as a few big plot points—including the climax! Basically, We is the prototype for dystopic sci-fi: the protag awakens to his home culture's injustice, joins the revolution, and dies.

It's the 26^th century. The OneState is a domed city of glass, a beautiful image subverted by its reason: to more easily spy on citizens. Free love is enforced by bureaucratic forms; people have alphanumeric IDs rather than names, like Star Wars droids. D-503, the protag, has designed the first interstellar rocket. Maybe that's why he's drafted into an anarchist cell by erotic I-330, drawn into despair by her dagger lips (it may be a lefty book, but it's not enlightened).

And so on. Part of the novel's fun is seeing sci-fi tropes in their raw state—you can get the same primitive futurism when you watch Fritz Lang's Metropolis. But We also works as a novel, probably better than 1984. Zamyatin gives D-503 a vivid inner life: the novel's arc is D's breakdown, caught between the anarchist and the state. His insanity is electric in a Dostoyevsky-like way, oscillating between obsessive hyperclarity and fevered ravings. And that climax that Orwell lifted? Actually, both scenes are riffs on the Grand Inquisitor: the State's torturer justifies totalitarian measures by citing his love for the populace.

If We is a sci-fi riff on Dosteyevsky, it's is some cackling-scientist version, a trip to the future in HG Wells' time machine. Zamyatin is ironic to his core: the book ends with anarchy threatening to topple the OneState (yes!), but the hero's been lobotomized (umm…). Still, there's a dashing element of romantic adventure to We. Check out this descrip of the femme fatale, who's been smuggled aboard the rocket:

“[T]he huge blue sparks above, over the radio antenna, seemed to come from her, and the faint, lightning smell of ozone, also from her.”

That's right out of Buck Rogers!

We's not a great novel, but it's brisk & engaging. The reason to read it isn't its vision of the future (which is dated) or its investigation of totalitarianism (which, yeah, Orwell did better). It's the mad vivacity that Zamyatin infuses D with. He puts us in D's head then sets it spinning into insanity. Poor D, driven mad by lust, scientific abstractions, and the State. A weird, Soviet electric fantasy.