RERUN PLANET: THE ABDUCTION OF LINDA ZONEHAIR TO THE PLANET VIDEO SPONGO AND THE SHOCKINGLY DEAD AFTERMATH
Griffin Theatre Company
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Which may explain why I was so taken with Dan Ursini’s one-person one-act, a satirical fantasy comedy called Rerun Planet: The Abduction of Linda Zonehair to the Planet Video Spongo and the Shockingly Dead Aftermath: the title character discovers that the aliens lead lives every bit as mundane as our own–if not more so, since these creatures have patterned their civilization exclusively on the more vulgar aspects of American popular culture. On the outside their spacecraft looks like an ashtray stolen from a cheesy Las Vegas hotel, and on the inside it’s like a huge, multistoried shopping mall. These aliens depend for their sustenance upon the constant ingestion of trivia, celebrity gossip, and TV reruns, which they extract from the memories of the humans they capture.
Naturally, the success of this comedy depends a lot, perhaps entirely, on casting the right person as Linda. Happily, stand-up-comic-turned-actress Cathy Carlson from the moment she enters the theater, her teased henna-red hair tied up like Pebbles Flintstone’s, her eyes darting eccentrically around the audience, proves herself follicle and dendrite Linda Zonehair. Unlike Jane Baxter Miller, who never seemed consistently at ease as the title character in Ursini’s less successful one-woman show Susie Luck: Hostess of Mental Florida (performed last summer at Club Lower Links), Carlson seems completely at home with every bizarre twist in the script. She even manages to make it seem perfectly normal that the abducted Zonehair must take a job on the alien spacecraft.
What seems to matter is that Pape was able to fashion a work that slavishly repeats every well-worn ritual of two men talking–that we know at every moment that we are watching a play about male bonding. He even inserts a phony climax or two (one an utterly unbelievable episode when Alan, paralyzed by fear, can’t take his foot off the accelerator, and the other a fistfight between the two that ends with them chuckling, like a pair of self-absorbed lovers, in each other’s arms) just so we know we’re watching a work that was created by a playwright.
