In the Zone

By Mark Collins, Daily Camera
October 19, 2003

(Marty Caivano) Left to right, actors Ray Viggiano, David Bollenger, Christine Vozella and George Wales Ince work on the first segment of 'TZ3' during rehearsal at the Mary Miller Theater in Lafayette

The Lafayette Community Players put classic 'Twilight Zone' episodes on stage

LAFAYETTE — The lights fade. Familiar, strained music begins to play. A dark, brooding figure appears and begins to speak.

"You're traveling through another dimension. A dimension, not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land, whose boundaries are that of imagination. Your next stop, the Twilight Zone!"

But you're not sitting at home in front of your TV watching reruns on the Sci Fi Channel, and that's not really Rod Serling introducing an episode of the eerie classic. It's Dan Orner of the Lafayette Community Players at Lafayette's Mary Miller Theater, and you're watching "TZ3: Twilight Zone, A Parody."

The LCP, formed in 1996, stages three-play seasons as well as a few workshop productions each year at the Mary Miller, the 111-year-old former Congregational Church in the heart of Lafayette. The theater company began staging episodes of "The Twilight Zone" to coincide with the Halloween holiday three seasons ago. Beginning Friday, the company will present "TZ3," featuring three episodes from the cult TV hit that originally aired from 1959-64.

Madge Montgomery, LCP's artistic coordinator, had seen a theater company in Seattle whose staging of "Twilight Zone" episodes was wildly popular. When she moved to Colorado, she approached the LCP with the idea.

This season, the episodes "Perchance to Dream," "It's a Good Life" and "One For the Angels" are getting the LCP treatment. Each 30-minute story offers a different feel.

"Because 'Twilight Zone' was an anthology show, it had the funny ones, ones that were really scary, and then ones that had more social comment," says Montgomery, who teaches elementary school in Longmont. "We try to do a mix of the three as we come up with an evening."

From screen to stage

Montgomery directs "Perchance to Dream," the story of a man who is afraid to go to sleep because he knows he won't be able to wake up. It's the campiest of the three episodes this season, and, like all of them, presented the director with the unique challenge of translating something to the stage that was written for TV. Rather than relying on close-ups and camera edits, a stage director must use other elements to create the tension and intrigue in the original scripts.

"We might do some things with sound, with lighting, with casting, with costume," says Vonalda Utterback, a writer/editor and certified nutritionist during the day who's been directing "One For the Angels" at night.

Taking a cue from the black-and-white series, LCP's sets and costumes are mostly black, white and gray. The company secured the rights to use the original theme music and several sound segments from the television show.

"I think the stories themselves are really interesting and stand up well even in a different kind of presentation," Montgomery says.

And the "TZ" series has stood up well at the box office: the shows over the past two seasons have been among the most well-attended in LCP's history. Evie McCabe and her husband, Harry, live in Denver, but have made the trek to Lafayette to watch "TZ" the past two seasons. McCabe isn't a "Twilight Zone" fan per se, but enjoys what LCP does with the episodes.

"They're just fabulous," McCabe says. "The theater is a very intimate theater and they have a wonderful cast. They're very delightful and creative shows.

"And there's a real good audience, too. You see children in the audience, and teenagers, and you see an older population, too."

Over the top

The Rod Serling estate dictates that a theater company staging "Twilight Zone" episodes must bill them as "parody." But the directors and actors in "TZ3" are playing it fairly straight. Even so, the humor is in abundance, simply because the episodes reflect a style that strikes the funny bone of today's audience.

"The way they were written is over the top," Montgomery says. "And the acting, they borrowed really from the tradition of theater because TV was such a new medium.

"There's just a whole range of stylistic elements that have changed a lot over the years. So when we do them, we try to catch a little bit of the essence of what the acting was back then."

Bill Graham, 44, is a manager at the Colorado Bookstore and a veteran of several theater productions in the Boulder area. This is his first year with the LCP and his first journey into "The Twilight Zone."

"As we rehearsed it, funny moments came out," says Graham, who plays a psychiatrist in "Perchance to Dream." "I think we're staying true to the spirit of 'Twilight Zone,' but we are hamming it up a bit."

Making you think

The spirit of "The Twilight Zone" also includes distinct social commentary. Serling, who died in 1975 at the age of 50, created the show and served as one of its three main writers during the show's tenure on television. Serling's main interest wasn't science fiction, but he turned to the genre after a television pilot he wrote about a lynching incident got watered down by the networks before it aired.

"That's when he came up with the idea of 'The Twilight Zone,'" Montgomery says. "He thought if it was a fantasy genre, he could say whatever he wanted and no one would object to it."

"The Twilight Zone" cleverly dealt with themes like racism or political fearmongering at a time when those issues were too sensitive to be portrayed directly on television.

In "It's a Good Life," a 6-year old boy terrorizes a town and holds its people captive.

"My episode is about this kid who has the power to control people," says Ray Viggiano, 52, who works locally as a massage therapist and naturopathic doctor, and who directs "It's a Good Life." "There is a menace that needs to be dealt with, but people are so fearful that they're paralyzed."

Montgomery says the episode encapsulates Serling's take on America in the 1950s and early 1960s.

"Everybody has to pretend to be happy, and no one can acknowledge this horrible thing just under the surface, which is embodied in the character of Anthony, the little boy that controls everybody," she says. "They're totally isolated from the rest of the world. Everything has been taken away from them and they still go through this charade that everything is normal."

Ironically, she points out, television is now thought of as an isolating force in our society. But before it became so omnipresent, Serling thought of television as a vehicle for social change.

"It was obviously an odd time in American history. The Cold War was going on, but there was this veneer of optimism and cheerfulness. And yet there was kind of an ugliness under the surface," Montgomery says. "A lot of the episodes have this recurring theme that people are very isolated from each other. And one of the things that I think Rod Serling was trying to do was to use television as a medium to get people talking and thinking."

In "TZ3" it's the 34-year old Orner, a software developer, who develops Serling's persona on stage.

"I watched the episodes a bunch, and tried to get a feel for his mannerisms and his style, and realized I can't quite pull it off exactly," Orner admits. "So I've kind of come up with a quirky, Rod Serling/Carl Sagan (character)."

Though it's Orner's second year in LCP's "TZ" shows, this is the first year he's played the TV icon. Dressed in a black and white suit, he'll introduce each episode.

And the LCP will donate a portion of its proceeds from the production to the Rod Serling Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting and preserving the TV pioneer's works.

That benevolent move aside, the LCP's main objective is to put on a good show.

"We think Rod would approve," Utterback says.

Contact Mark Collins at (303) 473-1369 or dailycamera.com.

INFO • www.LCPtheatre.org