‘Tis the season for ghouls, gravediggers and bad psychics. Luckily, all three appear in the Glaser Center’s staged reading this week of Plan 9 from Outer Space, that delightfully horrible Ed Wood film full of redundant lines and flimsy UFOs.
Because so much of the film’s humor comes from its shaky visuals—stock footage of dead actors, crypts that look like they belong in a second-grade play—it’s difficult to imagine the script without the reels. But this collaboration with KRCB highlights Wood’s fatally flawed dialogue, those philosophical crystals-in-the-rough of which “With your ancient, juvenile minds, you have developed explosives too fast for your minds to conceive what you were doing” and the famous “Future events such as these will affect you in the future” are only two examples.
Stage direction adaptations by Bohemian contributor David Templeton will also provide vivid descriptions of key action sequences, capturing each wobbling tombstone and unlit cigarette. Local actress and director Sheri Lee Miller plays the part of “Screenplay,” helping to guide audience-members’ imaginations as overweight zombies struggle to crawl from their graves, airplane pilots steer what look like large calzones, and heaven and earth battle for the blank-faced, stiff-jointed bodies of the recent dead. Drink in the awfulness when Plan 9 from Outer Space is read by Keith Baker, Allison Rae Baker, Mark Bradbury and others on Friday, Oct. 19, at the Glaser Center. 547 Mendocino Ave., Santa Rosa. 7:30pm. $10. 707.568.5381.
