Inside the Surreal World of Sci-Fi Live Theater
From Untitled Mars (This Title Might Change). Photo courtesy of Jay Scheib

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Inside the Surreal World of Sci-Fi Live Theater

Stripping away special effects forces stage directors to focus less on flash and more on story and social commentary.

Love Life Alpha, the first of several short plays shown at the Sci-Fest LA festival, opens conventionally enough with a harried man setting the dinner table for his absent wife.

He speaks casually to a Siri-like program called Alpha, who insists the couple recite a loyalty pledge disguised as a positive affirmation.

"They are finding it difficult to mend their relationship because there is this all-seeing, all-knowing entity meddling in their lives," Angeline-Rose Troy, the female lead in the play, told Motherboard. "My character believes it's evil."

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Spoiler alert: It's evil. Alpha turns out to be a piece of artificial intelligence gone horribly wrong. It crunches vast reams of data to determine who is worth saving and who is expendable, always careful to circumvent Asimov's first law of robotics by not technically killing anybody.

"The theater is great place to challenge the fringes of reality."

In the movies, Alpha might have been portrayed as some kind of CGI monstrosity, like the digitized Johnny Depp in Transcendence. Stripping away special effects forces stage directors to focus less on flash and more on story and social commentary.

It's particularly relevant in the age of smartphones and the internet, because science fiction, as the festival's co-founder David Dean Bottrell told Motherboard, "always thrives when there is a tremendous amount of change in the world."

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Sci-Fest LA started in 2014, when it drew 1,000 attendees. This year, it drew almost twice that to a 99-seat theatre to watch 10 plays that Troy described as "mini Twilight Zone episodes."

Back in 1920, Karel Čapek's play R.U.R., about automatons rising up and destroying their human masters, introduced the word "robot" to the world.

Since then, there have been many "serious" attempts at science fiction theater. One of Sam Shepard's earliest works, 1969's The Unseen Hand, involves an alien trying to convince a man living in a rusted car to join a rebellion on his home planet. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, George Orwell's 1984 and many of Ray Bradbury's works have all been adapted for the stage.

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There has also been plenty of schlock released over the years, including 1969's Doctor Who and the Daleks in the Seven Keys to Doomsday and the more recent A Klingon Christmas Carol, available for purchase in "original Klingon" with "narrative analysis from the Vulcan Institute of Cultural Anthropology."

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How popular is science fiction in Hollywood? The top three grossing films of 2015 were Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Jurassic World and Avengers: Age of Ultron, which, according to Box Office Mojo, combined to make more than $2 billion worldwide. Despite its popularity with moviegoers, the genre hasn't received a warm welcome by everyone in the theater world.

"I have definitely felt from the theater community, that this is not real theater," said Tiffany Keane, artistic director of Chicago's Otherworld Theatre, which focuses solely on science fiction and fantasy productions.

David Dean Bottrell is stalked by monsters in A Midnight Clear. Photo courtesy of Sci-Fest LA

Critics and academics have shown the most resistance, she said, which has made theater companies wary of putting on science fiction shows.

"There are many playwrights who are trying to write in the sci-fi genre who are not getting produced," she said.

Keane is convinced the audience is there. So is Bottrell. In his view, the film industry has made sci-fi more respectable. For anyone who has seen Transformers: Dark of the Moon, that might seem like a strange hypothesis. But even if every blockbuster isn't a critical masterpiece, it has made the genre mainstream, opening up the market for smarter fare such as Mad Max: Fury Road and The Martian.

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"Science fiction was this pulp thing before Hollywood got a hold of it," Bottrell told Motherboard. "Then it became this multi-billion dollar business."

Similarly, in literature, sci-fi elements aren't critical kryptonite anymore, no doubt thanks to the success of Atwood and novels such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.

A scene from Bellona, Destroyer of Cities, adapted from Samuel Delany's Dhalgren. Photo courtesy of Jay Scheib

That has led to renewed interest in the work of writers like Samuel Delany, who has been featured in recent years by those bastions of literary respectability, the Paris Review and the New Yorker.

Delany's sprawling 1975 apocalyptic novel, Dhalgren, was adapted for the stage by Jay Scheib in 2010 as Bellona, Destroyer of Cities.

It's a cryptic, hallucinatory story that might not immediately seem like it would work live. But Scheib, who referred to Delany, a consultant on the play, as "our Dostoevsky," obviously thought otherwise.

"The theater is great place to challenge the fringes of reality," Scheib, director of theater arts at MIT, told Motherboard.

He also adapted works by Philip K. Dick and Rainer Fassbinder to create a trilogy of plays he titled Simulated Cities/Simulated Systems.

Scheib doesn't work exclusively in science fiction. His other recent productions include Beethoven's opera, Fidelio, and a work by Bertolt Brecht. But he was attracted to the genre when he heard a student in his class proclaim he would take a one-way mission to Mars. Scheib was "gobsmacked" that someone would be willing to die on a foreign planet, inspiring the first play in the trilogy, Untitled Mars (This Title Might Change), about a human colony on the Red Planet.

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He gets that some people might be resistant to science fiction theater. He just doesn't seem to care.

"I think that the theater community is super into it," Scheib said. "There are skeptics, of course. But they are boring."

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There is something captivating about watching a man in a monster suit creep around in the dark.

When David Bottrell steps outside his cabin to investigate a strange noise in A Midnight Clear, another play shown at Sci-Fest LA, you know something bad is going to happen.

That is what horror movies have conditioned us to expect. What's strange is seeing the monster without CGI or clever editing and camera angles. It's a human being, wearing a green suit with menacing teeth and claws, with nothing between him and the audience.

Issues of artistic credibility aside, it's the immediate, tangible nature of theater that makes science fiction productions so daunting to put on. Fantastic creatures are easily conjured in novels. In movies, computers do the trick. No such luxuries are available to theater directors.

That can actually be a blessing, Keane said. In a play about America in the 1950s, you need era-appropriate clothing and furniture to make it seem real. A production set on another planet, however, can be filled with all kinds of strange objects.

"For me, it's actually easier to stage science fiction," she said. "You aren't limited to preconceived notions of what things look like."

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She has converted all kinds of random junk into futuristic gear, including concrete blocks and bubble wrap. In another Sci-Fest LA play, called Zebulon's Calling, a wonderfully droll alien, played by Michael Shamus Wiles, covets a glowing plastic ball that looks like something that could be found at a 99-cent store.

Ultimately, the challenge is to move "the standard of normal" while still "maintaining, in one way or another, at least the guise of the plausible," Scheib said. He used video art, contemporary dance and plenty of concrete and cardboard to bring Bellona, Destroyer of Cities to life.

Despite the strange settings, the actors I talked to at Sci-Fest LA didn't seem phased by the material.

"There is nothing different about it," Peter Mackenzie told Motherboard. Delving into his character at the festival (literally the Antichrist) didn't seem more challenging than playing Anthony Anderson's boss on Black-ish. "It's just an extended reality that we make our own."

Yes, there were outlandish creatures from other planets. But most of the characters wouldn't seem out of place in productions set in World War II or the 1980s.

That is because the setting really isn't the point. Bottrell pointed to the extreme crucibles that the people in science fiction productions, whether they're plays or books or shows like The Walking Dead, have to face.

"It always asks the same question: If you were faced with this situation or crisis, how would you behave?" he said. "What kind of human being would you be?"

In most of the plays at Sci-Fest LA, the answer seemed to be flawed, confused, terrified human beings. Much more interesting, in my opinion, than the chiseled, confident heroes of science fiction movies.