New York Fringe Festival Report: \'Night of the Auk\'

By ANITA GATES

Reviews of shows from the New York International Fringe Festival will appear on ArtsBeat through the festival's close on Aug. 26. For more information, go to fringenyc.org.

I'm not sure how “Night of the Auk” went over when it opened on Broadway in 1956. But during its just-completed Fringe run it was turned into “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” and that seems just what it was born to be.

Imagine Christopher Plummer, Claude Rains and three other distinguished actors as American astronauts in the distant future - the year 2000 - returning from the first manned moon landing, which has run into problems. (“Did I really see him abandoned, lost and screaming?” one man wails about a fellow explorer). Imagine this directed by Sidney Lumet and closing within a week.

In the hands of Outside Inside and HUBO Productions, Arch Oboler's earnest piece of blank verse, based on his radio play “Rocket From Manha ttan,” has been seriously condensed and tossed lightly onstage, and it is more fun than a space capsule of experimental animals. Mr. Oboler's moon-mission crew, imagined when Eisenhower was president, consisted of six men, of course, but Adam Levi and his co-director, Kaitlyn Samuel, have casually cast a couple of women in male roles without bothering to change character names or alter dialogue that refers to “he” or “him.” Hannah Timmons plays Lt. Maximilian Hartman as a deep-voiced guy's-guy type, while Suzy Kimball expresses the sensitive side of her male character, Dr. Bruner.

Heaven knows this group needs a little sensitivity. They have apparently left the sixth member of the team behind on the moon's surface, and exactly how that happened will take time to figure out. Lewis Rohnen (Michael Ross Albert), the token civilian, is even more selfish than he appears to be at first. The German guy, Lt. Jan Kephart (Lash Dooley), unthinkingly snaps into “Heil, Hitler” mode. Team members are dreaming about lucrative commercial deals with “Coke, Lucky Strike, Bromo-Seltzer.” And soon the mission's leader, Gen. Thomas Russell (Brian Rhinehart, the campest of them all), is lamenting, “Our species failed somewhere along the line.”

No cold-war-era script would be complete without a tiny global nuclear war back on Earth. The unofficial American theme of the 1950s - mankind is doomed, and it's our own damned fault - has rarely been turned into a finer piece of immense silliness.