Theater Review

Mystery Science Theater 2000

He seeks out the university's astronomer, Dr. Bernadette Jump Cannon. She is an attractive, elegant woman, although her assistant, Carl Himayo, is a shaggy hippie, seemingly more suited to astrology. Dr. Allan thinks he has met Dr. Bernadette before (in a previous existence, it is strongly implied). Dr. B. and Carl are waiting for word from other worlds: He keeps staring at his computer; she gazes, mostly with the naked eye, into that eponymous Space. Though thus far unconfirmed, their faith is strong and infects Dr. A. He is told not to expect little green men with transparent heads (too bad -- they might have enlivened the play) but to entertain possibilities. Unfortunately, possibilities are much more easily entertained than audiences.

A wan romance develops between Drs. A. and B. It is constantly waylaid by those three patients messing with Dr. A.'s head, fancy slide projections on the theater's back wall, an angel-like creature flitting about and singing musical-comedy ditties here out of place (or is it space?). Moreover, Dr. A. is made into a jumping jack full of contortions, dithers, and grimaces, and Dr. B. suffers from lupus, which carries her off in the very observatory where the two have just spent an idyllic night, stargazing and spouting highfalutin rubbish.

But fear not: Dr. B. dies beautifully, fading into a great white light, and Dr. A. is hardly bereaved, unless spouting even higher-falutin and longer-winded claptrap is a brand of bereavement. Here the text goes into free verse: "Yes. I was abducted -- and they led me to her, and she led me here, to Space. / Bernadette told me there is a star for everyone who has died. (Allan . . . throws something into the black space -- a star appears in the sky.) And there are more stars in our galaxy than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world. (He throws another star. . . .) And atoms just move from one thing to the next. / And it goes on and on and on." If by "it" the play is meant, that is certainly so.

After his projectiles have yielded "millions of stars" blazing on the back wall, Dr. A. and the play conclude: "Either the universe is teeming with life and we are not alone / Or there is no other life in the universe and we are alone. / Either way, the notion is remarkable. / Either way, what is out there is bound to be . . . beautiful." He is left standing and gaping upward in wonder, as we are left sitting and gaping ahead in utter disbelief.

Tina Landau is not alone to blame. As Dr. A., Tom Irwin is probably the most obnoxious performer since Nero fiddled to the flames of Rome. The rest do well enough, and Amy Morton, as Dr. B., better than that. A program note names among the inspirers 21 such unlikely bedfellows as Gaston Bachelard and L. Frank Baum, Lewis Carroll and Dante, Richard Feynman and Portia Nelson, and unnamed "others." It proves yet again how dangerous a little learning can be.

Marsha Norman wrote Getting Out and 'Night, Mother, which excuses much, but perhaps not her latest, Trudy Blue. A master of realism, Norman boldly resolved to try anti-naturalism here. So we get Ginger -- supposedly a novelist, not a playwright, but we are not fooled that easily -- struggling to create her latest heroine, the quasi-autobiographical Trudy Blue. She conducts lengthy duologues with Trudy, who, impudent thing, ballsily refuses to play ball, and strikes out on her own.

This would have been daringly innovative until 1921, when a certain Luigi Pirandello came out with Six Characters in Search of an Author. Ginger is also ailing from what may be fatal lung cancer or a diagnostic error, and her situation keeps drastically changing. Her doctor and nurse appear in clown getup, to give matters of life and death an absurdist glow.

A daughter and mother add to Ginger's problems: a husband, pretending to care, is a monumental swine who goes fishing when his afflicted wife needs him most. The chief innovation here is the repetition of scenes with minor but supposedly significant differences, such as moving the room around for a new angle of vision. No one emerges very interesting, not even the swine, played cloddishly by John Dossett, possibly at the behest of the undistinguished director, Michael Sexton. The only saving graces are Polly Draper's performance as Ginger and Mark Wendland's décor, conjuring up in a tiny theater a world on scarcely more than the head of a pin.