Yale Cabaret Photo
Full of references to SF movies and cult TV shows, Ryan Campbell’s The Zero Scenario at Yale Cabaret recalls the days of staged rather than CGI special effects, and manages to be exciting, hilarious, and unsettling all at once.
Campbell, a third-year MFA student in playwriting at Yale School of Drama, riffs off tropes found in Starship Troopers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Independence Day, The Venture Brothers, War of the Worlds, and no doubt other tales of a plucky band of do-or-die vigilantes saving the planet from them. In Them!, the adversaries were giant ants made gargantuan by atomic testing; here it’s giant ticks (appropriate to Connecticut, no?) invading the surface from huge hives beneath every city in the United States named Cleveland.
Before we get to that, though, we’re treated to a comic, anxious, awkward monologue from Dace (Tom Pecinka) in the passenger seat of a car driven by his girlfriend Eden (Ariana Venturi), who says nothing for 17 hours of almost non-stop driving through the Plains states. Pecinka is a tour de force of tics (ha), pleas for attention, reminiscences about favorite movies, and a wild make-believe tale about his father the pirate. When Eden finally confronts Dace in a motel room, Dace realizes he is the hapless yet determined boyfriend of a specially trained agent, along for the ride of his life as Eden’s confederates crawl out of the woodwork to engage the monsters in our midst.
There are tough female commandos, Taryn (Sara Holdren, who also directs the play) and Oceane (Emily Zemba); their nerdy male counterparts, Laszlo (Ankur Sharma) and Nixon (Campbell); and the leader of their unit, Isaac (Aaron Profumo), a cocaine-snorting, gibberish-spouting commander who rallies his troops with wild bromides and inappropriate caresses. As Grandpa Simpson said, “Patton was a little nuts; this guy is completely insane. We can’t lose!”
So The Zero Scenario is primarily wacky fun, enough to inspire a video game. Campbell shows off his skill at verbal jousting as well as his grasp of action-film-speak, and introduces little fillips — quoting J. Robert Oppenheimer’s quote of the Bhagavad Gita and hanging his framed photo, an explanation of why fast food makes your blood less palatable to tics — that imply a satiric perspective found in some of your better SF adventures. As a spirited homage to film after film that milks the idea of a threat to the world, the play may make us wonder, a bit defensively, why every generation since the atom bomb has thrilled to the scenario of a planet besieged.
As with any SF extravaganza, much credit goes to the technical folks who make this show happen in the Cabaret’s intimate space. Director Holdren keeps the action suitably breathless, and the tick effects — including a Them-like high-pitched sound, creepy limbs and, at one point, a human-tick hybrid — are surprising and shocking enough to make us fear for our heroes. Venturi’s irritable and self-possessed heroine, who has simply got to do what a trained agent has got to do, gives The Zero Scenario’s hijinks a certain gravitas. Even though things may look dark in the end, the survivors stand unbowed, ticked off and unwilling to be bugged to death.
And you know what survivors mean: sequel!
The Zero Scenario ran Dec. 11 – 13. For information about upcoming Yale Cabaret shows, visit their website.