House lights remain at half when a red curtain parts just enough to show a curled hand, then another, then two more. Fingers emerge, tentatively explore, then walk, then intertwine in what will be one last touch between performers Sarah Olmsted Thomas and Alex Vernon before a tiny space ship, blasts off into outer space and our story begins.
Marooned! is subtitled A Space Comedy but it is, at its core, about loneliness and longing.
Astronaut (Thomas), wearing a cool white spacesuit has crash landed on a low-gravity, thin-atmosphered planet. She is billions and billions of miles away from home, and everything she has brought with her from our small blue globe is precious. When her glove floats away in the low gravity, it is as though she has lost her dearest friend. One of NASA’s Voyager spacecrafts had crash landed previously, and, among the remains, she discovers The Golden Record and we hear Kurt Weldheim, Secretary General of the United Nations, communicate our peaceful intent to galaxies unknown:
“We step into the universe to teach, if we are called upon; to learn, if we are fortunate.”
She plays this record on an Autonomous Task Assistant (ATA), one of puppet maker Vernon’s most complex and communicable puppets in the show. For our astronaut is not only marooned, her radio transmitter has been smashed to smithereens in her crash landing. She is nonetheless able to send rescue messages through the ATA to an intelligent feather, a rat, and others who pop in on this sort of party line in outer space, which ATA projects onto a moon shaped screen.
One standout among the projected creatures is the incredibly funny Cosmic Peanut (Sylvia Vernon) who seems to be a three-year-old child, with a child’s enthusiasms and openheartedness. It is impossible, as the Peanut says goodbye, not to remember that we lose three-year-olds all the time, when they become four-year-olds, and twenty-year-olds, and fifty-year olds.
Some creatures make personal visits, including an amorous green flying devil (our astronaut points to her wedding ring as the reason she can’t take him up on his offers), and two highly articulated marionette puppets.
Ultimately, she finds help from the planet’s hive-mind. I can tell you who will play that character when you to: you will, from reading prompts projected on the screen. Our audience on Saturday night, was magnificent.
Like all space comedies, Marooned! comes to a resolution, although it is not the one you’ll be expecting.
Marooned! Baltimore Theatre Project until May 5, 2019 Details and tickets
But telling you this story can’t possibly tell you how good it is. Thomas mimics the effect of low gravity with balletic grace. Though deprived of words, and barely visible behind her helmet’s copper face guard (think of a fencer’s mask) Thomas communicates with such kinetic urgency that every cosmic character understands her completely.
All of the puppets – and there are many more than I have described – have been built and are operated by Thomas’ artistic partner, Alex Vernon. Dressed entirely in black to minimize his footprint, he pilots these devised creatures with such casual ease that we are moved at their dilemmas, and sad when they go.
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Notwithstanding the sadness inherent in Marooned!‘s premise – as Elton John wrote, it’s lonely out in space – much of these 70 minutes were amusing, charming, delightful and, at times, utterly and completely astonishing.
These comic inventions come about because Sarah Olmsted Thomas and Alex Vernon are serious, and very good artists. Both are long time members of the acclaimed Happenstance Theater and, as Alex & Olmsted, have performed with their puppets in South Korea, Montreal and New York city as well as in the Puppet Capital of America – Bread and Puppet Theater in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Their highly acclaimed Milo the Magnificent heads for Denmark this fall. But Alex & Olmsted are now at the Baltimore Theatre Project on Cathedral Street for one more week, and I can say, with confidence, that they are out of this world.
Marooned! A Space Comedy, devised by Alex & Olmsted, featuring Sarah Olmsted Thomas, Alex Vernon, and Sylvia Vernon, lighting by Scotty Walker, produced by Alex & Olmstead, reviewed by Lorraine Treanor.
