The Framework of Fandom in Escape from Planet Death

The concept utilized when adapting the Escape from Planet Death podcast to the stage draws upon a type of performance consumption uncommon to traditional theatre fandom. In the world of our production, Escape from Planet Death was an authentic radio show that aired in the 1950s and built a cult fan base. In recent years the way in which audience members consume performance has become increasingly communal rather than individual. Fans and other consumers are invited to actively participate in the creation (or recreation) and circulation of new content, such as Fanfiction/remakes, cosplay, and collectibles.

In the age of the internet, the potential for Fan remakes has grown so much that entire films are remade just for the love of an original. One such example is Shrek Retold. Youtuber 3GI commissioned over 200 creators to help retell a snippet of the 2001 Dreamwork film Shrek. The creators had complete artistic liberty to retell their portion in any medium they saw fit. Published in November 2018, Shrek Retold features a variety of storytelling styles, from actors in homemade costumes, to low-budget computer animation, to paper puppets, claymation, and more. Escape from Planet Death at BYU shows a group of friends, all avid fans of a 1950’s radio show, restaging it themselves with costumes and props found in their basement, asserting a right to participate in the culture, on their own terms, when and where they wish.

Shrek Retold

Central to this type of deep fandom is media becoming an aspect of identity. Stories are an easy means by which mankind can relate to one another, many can relate to making small talk discussing the latest episode of The Mandalorian or new Marvel movie. While there are certainly degrees of engagement with these (yours truly owning a baby Yoda plush and substantial collection of marvel legos while others can bond over something more frugal, say a shirt) stories and fandom help foster connections and can biome a petri dish to examine issues in the source material in a productive way rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

For example, 14-year-old Heather Lawyer created a web-based “The Daily Prophet” and published weekly articles written by young Harry Potter fans all over the world. This resulted in a jointly produced fantasy – somewhere between a role-playing game and fan fiction. The Harry Potter has become distinctly more divisive since Heather created her Daily Prophet, but the fandom still exists and flourishes with podcasts and the podcast communities such as Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, Witch Please, and Potterless all taking a skeptical view of the source material while still honoring it’s cultural and personal significance.

Science Fiction in the 1950s, while iconic, does feature values that would make many modern viewers uncomfortable, particularly regarding race and gender. As the fans of this show restage it today in 2021 keep an eye out for the ways in which some contemporary values parody and satirize sexist aspects of the outdated source material.

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by Makenna Johnston, dramaturg In a ‘special projects’ theatre class held between January and March of 2020, four students and their professor began devising a show. Their devising team? David Morgan (professor), Clara Wright, Mikah Vaclaw, Sten Shearer, and Dylan Wright. Their source text? The Turn of the Screw, a novel by Henry James. Though the team’s original devising process was cut short due to the Covid-19 pandemic, aspects of their invaluable contributions to the production live on. Each student deviser's unique perspective about the story and devising process are explored below. Clara Wright Our professor David Morgan had the idea to create a devised piece of theatre to take to the Edinburgh fringe festival with a group of students. He was drawn to the script of the Turn of the Screw, but wanted to do his own take on it, so he decided to create a new adaptation of the original book with a group of students. He was drawn to the eerie nature of the piece, the elements of horror, and the slow descent into madness of the governess. I joined Dave's class to write and devise this script because, first of all, working with Dave has always been a pleasure, but the story was intriguing to me as well. I loved the idea of studying and understanding a layered female character. I don't think there are enough interesting female characters out there at the moment. The governess was affected greatly by societal pressures and a deep, depressing history that drove her to madness when she arrived at Bly. The story was mesmerizing. I was also excited to work the muscle of creating a new piece of theatre. I am not confident in my writing abilities, but it was exciting to take a piece of literature that already existed and make something new and interesting out of it, using visual elements that you can't get from reading a book. We not only wrote dialogue, but we also wrote out ways we could use movement, sound, lighting, puppetry, and more to tell the story in the most effective way possible. The devising process was a blast! Dave would tell us what scene he wanted us to write and we would each go home and write out our own interpretation of the story. The next class, we would get together and go over which elements of people's scenes we liked best, which moments were the most clear, and which lines we for sure wanted to keep in the final script. Sometimes our interpretations were so different and unique that it was difficult to choose which direction the piece needed to go. Ultimately, Dave would piece together each of our scenes into a cohesive script. Other moments I enjoyed were when we would put scenes on their feet and act them out to see how they translated to the stage. The introduction especially benefited from this exercise. The last exciting part of the devising process that I'll talk about is writing the music. I hadn't written original music like this before so it was such a cool experience creating sound like this for the first time. I didn't ever think about what scene I was writing for, but Dave told me what tone he was looking for in a piece of music and then I experimented until I found something I liked by layering on different sounds I could make on my violin. It was an overall thrilling experience! Turn of the Screw example music Turn of the Screw example music 2 Mikah Vaclaw Because of COVID, we didn’t get to fully get the script up on its feet, so we focused a lot on writing. First, we all read the book over Christmas break, and when we had our first meetings as a group, we talked about what stood out to us in the story and what we wanted our retelling of the story to be. Something we really wanted to explore was the idea that the ghosts were actually things born out of trauma the governess had experienced in her youth, and how she was the only one that could see them/was affected by them. We also wanted to explore jealousy between Mrs. Grose and the Governess. Once we had fleshed out what was important to us, we started writing. Dave would tell us what scene he wanted us to write for homework, and we’d all come back with our different written versions of that scene. Then, in class, we would read them aloud together and talk about what we thought worked, and what didn’t. Dave would then take all of our scripts and compile them together into one cohesive scene. We were able to start toying with the introduction to the play, and Clara wrote some really cool violin music for it. Sten Shearer The process of devising the script was the five of us (David Morgan, Clara and Dylan Wright, Mikah Vaclaw, and myself) would get together a couple times a week. Initially, David gave us some conceptual ideas he had for the show (like using movable screens that could utilize shadow work). Then we all read the original story. At each meeting, we would assign a chunk of the original story as our writing assignment. Using that chunk of the story as inspiration, the four students would go home and write a scene that translated that section of the original story into a play scene. Through that process, we collaboratively came to an understanding of the themes that we wanted the play to explore as well as theatrical devices and ideas that we thought would work well in putting the play on its feet. Simultaneously to writing these scenes, we were also using our class time to experiment with staging and blocking using the earlier scenes that we had written. So for instance, when we were about halfway through writing the script, we were also staging what the early scenes would look like to help test if the script we were writing worked in practice as well as on paper. Dylan Wright We chose this project because we obviously needed something in the public domain that we wouldn't need to pay royalties for, but aside from that this story really highlights the mental turmoil of a young governess as she grapples with her duties as a woman and her place in the world religiously as well. We took this story to an extremely dark place-- it has since been edited for this particular production-- that orbited around this idea of religious toxicity, something all too familiar in Utah. We felt that it was important to excavate and expose the uncomfortable and truly ugly parts of religion and the toll it can take on us. I wanted to work on this project because Mikah, Sten, Clara, and Dave are some of my favorite people and artists. The driving force really, as mentioned earlier, is that we wanted to create. We were all itching to create something. None of us needed this class credits-wise so the idea of coming together to tell a ghost story that echoes modern themes in a bare-bones, devised manner was extremely appealing. Unfortunately we were never able to perform this production because of COVID. But the devising process was an invaluable gem. We would each read the same chapter of The Turn of the Screw and then come to class with our own interpretation of this chapter in scene-form, creating dialogue and stage directions. Dave would then pull the pieces from each that rendered a clearer, more specific story and then we would go from there. When we would arrive in class we would also read each other's scenes out loud to get a feel for them. It was a marvelous process.

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The Framework of Fandom in Escape from Planet Death

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