'Jurassic' Parody a Low-Budget Laugh

“Jurassic Park,” read the little brown archway at the entrance of a Massachusetts College of Art and Design auditorium last Friday. Modeled after the distinctive gate from the fictional park itself, the entrance led to “They Should All Be Destroyed: A Jurassic Park Play,” a dramatic adaptation of the movie by the Baltimore-based artist collective Wham City. Like the park, the show initially looked like it might lack the technology to succeed in its ambitious enterprise. Before the show began, the audience was treated to a rendition of John Williams’s distinctive theme song that sounded like it was coming from a first-generation Game Boy. The only scenery consisted of a few fake plants and some cardboard painted with leaf prints. But this minimalism belied Wham City’s enthusiasm: the play brilliantly balanced reverence and irreverence for its source material.

The play opened with Dennis Nedry (Benjamin O’Brien), doubled over, pant legs stuffed with padding, lumbering across the stage and gnawing on what seemed to be a strip of raw meat. As the scene continued, O’Brien ate two raw eggs after cracking them on his glasses, vomited slightly, and delivered his lines in a grating voice that suggested a less-subtle Gilbert Gottfried. His shady partner Dodgeson (Justin Durel) was disgusted; the audience loved it.

Although the play’s lines and plot were mostly taken from the movie, the resulting spectacle was vastly different. In the absence of special effects, the characters’ awe at the dinosaurs became absurd. Upon arriving at the island and seeing a “Brontosaurus,” Alan Grant (Adam Endres) fell to the ground in hysterical amazement. The Brontosaurus’s legs—two tall pieces of painted cardboard that actors tapped on the ground in sync with thumping sound effects—appeared unfazed. Later on, to simulate saving young Tim (Joshua Kelberman) from an impending fall, Endres stood just far enough away from Kelberman that their outstretched arms couldn’t touch and screamed at him, “Reach farther, Timmy!”

Similarly, every poignant moment became playful. Near the end of the story, after the park has fallen apart, the movie contains a scene in which the park’s founder, John Hammond, shares ice cream with paleobotanist Ellie Satler. In the play’s version of the scene, Satler (Rose Chase)—who has fluctuated from timid to nymphomaniacal to bloodthirsty—devoured a tub of ice cream with her bare hands. Hammond (Ed Schrader), a frequent fourth-wall breaker who had just finished an extended Bob Hope routine, came up from behind and tried to snuggle with her as he talked. “I just want to make sure you can hear me,” he explained. In the movie, the scene ends with Hammond’s melancholy summary of the ice cream and the park itself: “I spared no expense.” Schrader instead delivered this as a vaudevillian punch line, holding out his cane and smiling as the stage went black.

The energetic, ad-libbing cast makes the show a joy. Doomsaying beatnik Ian Malcolm (Mason Ross) punctuated pauses by jiggling his head and muttering inaudibly. Lex (April Camlin), the hyper-annoying computer nerd, carried her character’s emotional outbursts to the limits of human expression. Robert Muldoon (Connor Kizer) played every scene with a Sean Connery-ish accent and an insane excitement at the prospect of death. And of course Samuel L. Jackson’s character—referred to in the play only as Samuel L. Jackson (Stephen Strohmeier)—got to scream a line about being “sick of these... dinosaurs in this... park!” (You fill in the blanks.)

The show was technically brilliant, as well, and action scenes reflected the production’s thoughtfulness, variety, and limited budget. The Dilophosaur “spitter” wore a purple bodysuit and no mask as he shot silly string through a contraption in his hand. The Velociraptors were eerie, with long tails and elongated masks that opened and closed with the jaws of the wearer. The Tyrannosaurus was by far the most intricate—and most impressive—costume; two people stood under a sheet, with one manipulating the two-fingered arms and another holding the top half of the T-Rex’s massive jaw. The scene when this beast attacked the visitors’ cars was a marvel of homemade choreography and powerful sound effects.

And even amid the violence and sex and nonsense, there was something strangely moving about the show’s unexplained interlude, during which musical director Connor Kizer came onstage and sang self-written lyrics to the movie’s theme song: “Jurassic Park it’s a time out of time and a place / Of awe where we all can learn / To respect the power of nature / And the lesson that we learn’s / Jurassic Park!” The lyrics were printed on the programs, allowing the audience to sing along with the cast at the end of the play. The song was at once a parody, a tribute, and a chance for enthusiastic actors to show off for an enthusiastic crowd—just like the rest of this unconventional performance.