Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

(Transcript from EDGE Boston. Published November 11, 2008.)

By Kilian Melloy

X-1–pronounced “X Minus One”–is good old-fashioned fun, and by old-fashioned I mean pre-TV, pre-CGI movie spectacle, pre-iPod… pre-just-about-everything, except, of course, for theater.

Which makes the stage the perfect place for a new rendering of three episodes of the 1950s NBC-radio program by the same name, which, in its turn, has its roots in an earlier anthology series of radio plays called Dimension X.

In the tradition of other anthology dramas of the period like TV’s The Twilight Zone, X-1 featured fantastical stories each week, including a mix of adaptations of short stories and scripts originally written for the show. (Unlike The Twilight Zone, X-1 never made it to the new medium of television.)

In the Counter-Productions Theatre Company’s stage production of three episodes of the X-1 radio series, director Brian McCarthy has near-carte blanche when it comes to the matter of visual storytelling, and he uses the shoestring resources of independent theater to convey not only the “awe and mystery” of Outer Limits-like fables, but also the cheesy fun of such creakily vintage fare.

My husband couldn’t resist telling people at the theater that I am a Twilight Zone enthusiast and that I had been looking forward to this play with glee. Guilty as charged: and let me tell you, I was not disappointed. The three episodes adapted for the stage by McCarthy were a worthy mix of comedy and drama, tinfoil and galaxy-spanning vision, pulpy sci-fi tropes and high-minded, if far-out, speculation.

The first episode, The Parade, is based on a story by George Lefferts, and concerns a Martian who approaches a New York City publicist with a briefcase full of cash and a big advertising campaign: “We are selling a concept,” the Martian, a big-haired, sunglasses-sporting fellow named Looshaw (Gregory Glenn) tells ad-man Syd Ryan (Ted Clement). “The concept of invasion–from Mars.” But is it all a matter of shock and awe in the name of subduing the Earthlings… or a studio’s clever ploy to attract attention to a War of the Worlds-style epic?

Sci-fi great Murray Leinster provided the story for the second episode presented here, A Logic Named Joe. This is a brisk and breezy comedy in which the year is 1974, and futuristic contraptions called Logics make everyday tasks like commuication and research a snap. Indeed, Logics do everything that computers and the Internet do… including, unfortunately, providing bratty teens like Freddy (Glenn) with step-by-step instructions on how to make your own ray gun, giving your home address to psycho former flames, and helpfully offering up recipes for untraceable poisons.

Unlike the Internet, however, Logics are not supposed to do any of this: they are meant to operate within benign parameters. But a Logic named… that’s right, J.O.E… has developed a glitch and spread chaos to the whole system. If heroic repairman Frank Caldwell (Ian Conway) can’t fix the system and save the day, his wife Gertrude (Meghan Hamilton) will leave him, his murderous ex-girlfriend Lorriene (Alison Meirowitz) will make hamburger of him, and a chrome-plated cop (Rob Gustison) will hunt him down.

Episode Three, Hallucination Orbit, tackles one of the great motifs of science fiction: discerning reality from illusion. If everything you think you know is the product of the brain’s interpretation of the senses, then how can you ever be sure that what you think you see, hear, and touch is really there at all? What if it’s all some sort of dream, brought on–in the case of Collin Orde (Devon Scalisi)–by years of solitary duty on a far-flung outpost located on an uninhabited planet?

Star Trek had its big-lobed Talosians with throbbing veins and telepathically projected illusions used for control; The Matrix played with the idea that life is but an electronically generated dream; even The X Files dipped a toe into the well with a story about killer hallucinogenic mushrooms. But this story pre-dated them all, and in this case it’s a matter of a man’s own mind working against itself: a terrifying proposition, because the brain is the ultimate black box, and a plot exploring its ability to fool itself (or reason its way out of its own trap) is the ultimate puzzle-box story.

John-Eric Strom’s props are bargain-basement and note-perfect; Ted Clement’s sound design is half the fun, with its screaming crowds and intermission music mix (everything from David Bowie’s Starman to the theme from Back to the Future); and Meghan Hamilton has too much fun entirely with the purposefully unconvincing costumes.

“A million could-be years on a thousand maybe worlds,” the title narration to each episode promises, and with these three selections, McCarthy and his gallant crew (and cast) engage the imagination while tickling the funny bone in a pleasantly nostalgic way. Campy and classic!