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| PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE LIVE ONSTAGE |
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Plan Nine's Perfect Fun For Humbugs by Elaine Liner, Dallas Observer 12/9/2009 ©2009 There's nothing Christmas-y at all, you'll be happy to know, about Plan Nine From Outer Space, Level Ground Arts' low-budget staging of the 1959 sci-fi movie, now in the late-night weekend slot at the Dallas Hub Theater. The play is 75 minutes of cheap props, flimsy scenery, wooden acting, bungled cues and terrible dialogue—pretty much a perfect homage to the original film written and directed by Ed Wood Jr. The stage version by writer-director Billy Fountain, who also co-stars in the Bela Lugosi role, stays loyal to its inspiration, long regarded as the worst motion picture ever made. The Level Ground actors—Andi Allen, Zac Ramsey, Robert G. Shores, Tyler Wilson, Brooke Riley—seem to have studied every syllable and gesture in the flick. Allen practices the flat affect and monotonous speech of Mona McKinnon, the non-actress who played housewife Paula Trent onscreen. That's killer funny. Allen also flits in and out in many other roles, wearing a different wig and vacant expression for each. Ramsey and Wilson are silly as hell using odd accents and awkward timing as airline pilots spotting UFOs. Just like the film, the airplane scenes are acted against a shower curtain backdrop. And the flying saucers are glued-together picnic plates dangled on a string. The plot, if you can call it that, is less sturdy than the saucers. Level Ground's cast injects some of their own madness, mostly when pieces of the scenery fly apart, which happens frequently. Their judicious use of puppets, Barbie dolls, fog machines and lawn furniture adds to the wack factor. With 37 company members working for next to nothing, Level Ground Arts may be the most ambitious, minimally funded and strangest (in a good way) acting company in town at the moment. They drew standing room crowds this fall for Evil Dead: The Musical, then played to crickets with an experimental new drama by Fountain called Crushing Grain, about Lee Harvey Oswald. They sometimes have three shows running at once and plan to produce at least nine more, including the premieres of three musicals and another B-movie tribute, next year. To borrow a line from Plan Nine: I'll bet my badge that we haven't seen the last of these weirdies. The Worstest Story Ever Told: Just in time for Christmas, Level Ground Arts offers the gift of Wood. Ed Wood by Mark Lowry, TheaterJones.com December 9, 2009 ©2009 You gotta feel a little sorry for the millions of filmmakers, past and present, who make mediocre-to-horrible films that will never again be remembered. But it takes a special gift to create a spectacularly awful movie that will forever be celebrated for its rancidity…Edward D. Wood Jr. was the king of producing such gems, although you couldn't tell him that. He's now revered (reviled?) as the world's worst film director...So how else would one adapt his magnum crappus, Plan 9 From Outer Space, other than by appreciatively sending it up and paying homage to its badness? Seems pretty easy, huh? Not so fast. There are many ways such a project could go horribly wrong and end up, well, horrible. It must be done with flair and wit, which is exactly how it's handled by Bill Fountain, who directs and performs in it for his outfit Level Ground Arts. The script isn't an adaptation. Fountain uses Wood's screenplay and lets it—along with his ace cast and cadre of designers—do the work…The six-pack of actors (Fountain, Andi Allen, Zac Ramsey, Brooke Riley, Robert G. Shores and Tyler Wilson) play multiple characters. They have the advantage of doing this on Ande Bewley's clever set of painted privacy curtains that represent various locations (on one, a cemetery crypt is labled "crypt") and her imaginatively designed, deliciously bad props. The flying saucer, famously constructed of pie tins in Burton's film, is made from two Styrofoam bowls and dangled from a string on the end of stick, like a carrot for the world's tackiest mule. In another scene, a mangled body part is a plastic Halloween-store prop still in its packaging. And the graveyard is actually a costume, but it's too brilliant of an idea to ruin here. You'll just have to see it. (Costumes aren't credited, but they're fantastic, and Melody Jones' expert makeup design adds to the overall effect.) In translating unintentionally bad cinema to skillfully bad theater, Level Ground's production has actors occasionally making wrong entrances and starting lines—words, even—that are never finished. Each of the actors understands the types of humor—especially those deceptively difficult skills of deadpan and mimicry—needed to make this kind of show sparkle. Wilson, who has Don Knotts-esque expressions, and Riley, playing the actress Vampira, are both hysterical. Shores, who played JFK in Fountain's head-scratcher Crushing Grain, is devilishly dashing, which works out well as a narrator whose body is a cartoonish, tuxedo-wearing puppet. Fountain humorously takes on Bela Lugosi (who filmed footage for another Wood movie that ended up in P9) and also does a spot as the cross-dressing Wood, a cameo that's more over-the-top than the angora sweater-wearing Wood of Glen or Glenda. Ramsey showed a flair for parody in LGA's Evil Dead: The Musical, and he's even better here (because he doesn't have to sing). And then there's Allen, who could teach a master class in the art of stylish lampoonery. All of her roles are well-done, but as Mrs. Trent, the housewife who is caught up in the middle of the bizarro plot, she parrots Mona McKinnon's expressionless, inflectionless performance from the movie. Her focus and artistry are peerless. This staging couldn't go on any longer than it does or it would risk unbearable repetition, but at 75 minutes—about the length of the movie—it's perfection. Like Eros and Tanna, the aliens who warn the humans that "all you of Earth are idiots," it looks like Level Ground Arts is plotting something. If it's a takeover of the DFW theater scene, then we surrender. |