visit to a small planet gore vidal

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Visit to a Small Planet

July 12, 2011 by Rosalind Lacy

In Gore Vidal’s rarely mounted sci-fi, political satire, well-timed pyrotechnics have to run as smoothly as last week’s shuttle launch, and actors must have rapid-fire, elegant delivery. The American Century Theater skillfully rises to the challenge with an uplifting show that’s refreshing and fun, even in its darker moments.

Subtitled “A Comedy Akin to Vaudeville,” Visit to a Small Planet lampoons post-W.W.II Cold War fears of Communist take-overs during the McCarthy era. Yet TACT’s staging seems as relevant today as in 1957 when it was adapted from television for Broadway.

In this well-rehearsed enactment, director Rip Claassen establishes his signature style with a flair for fast pacing and vaudevillian theatrics. And that’s good. Playwright Vidal, also a renowned essayist and novelist, is a ventriloquist who channels his ideas through his characters.  And although some of the characters are stereotypes, Claassen brings them vividly to life by giving his acting ensemble tons of stage business. Attention to detail captures the mood of the period down to authentic 1958 Life magazines on the coffee table. Technical backup is essential and an efficient techie team makes the theatrics work like a fantastic dream.

Designer Noel Greer’s expansive, parallel middle-class set embraces three playing areas — a study, the living room, and the terrace to the rose garden. Dramatic strobe effects for the flying saucer landing and rosy-glow lighting changes, designed by Micah Stromberg, and supportive sounds by Ed Moser add an undercurrent of eeriness. But the hanging tree swing (not asked for in the script) introduces down-to-earth reality and helps launch what could be a dull, inert love scene between Ellen Spelding (a vivacious Megan Graves) and Conrad Mayberry (Noah Bird), into a romantic, physically cozy chat.

But this satire has dark, scathing undertones and that’s the job for Bruce Alan Rauscher as Kreton who is working out his plans for taking over the world until Delton 4 (Tamra Lynn Testerman), in an aside, reveals a surprising alternative at the end.

Bored with his distant planet, endowed with a technology far more advanced than ours, where immortality, perfection and peace co-exist, Kreton has adopted earth as a hobby to escape his intergalactic ennui. And that’s dangerous. The visitor loves violence and has decided to time-and-space travel to earth to experience a place where the inhabitants do war “really well.” Although this extraterrestrial, dressed as a Confederate gentleman expects the Battle of Bull Run, the first big battle of the American Civil War in 1861, he lands 100 years late in Manassas, Virginia in 1958. (His spaceship miscalculated.)

The start-up sounds innocent enough. Rauscher’s boyish, fun-loving, spontaneous moment-to-moment portrayal creates edginess. In his first entrance, the outer-space immigrant caresses furniture, as if testing reality, and reacts with awe. For a dizzying second, Kreton spins seated in the swivel office chair in the study. You never know what’s next. With a maniacal glint in his eye, and a hint of a British accent (Cyril Ritchard of Captain Hook fame originated the role on Broadway), Rauscher has great fun, as Kreton convinces his skeptical hosts, General Tom Powers (John Tweel), TV talking-head, Roger Speldman (Steve Lebens) and his wife Reba (Kelly Cronenberg), that he is from a superior culture. Reba, played by Cronenberg as a ditzy mother, dressed in a fifyish ballerina skirt, almost swoons into a clinch with Kreton on the wing-back sofa. On the surface the visitor is a harmless, devastating charmer, who is here to see earthlings as they are; not as he might want them to be. Although his words sound scary, his fussiness about his clothes remains disarmingly gentle.

But this disappointed guest will make his own war. Kreton with his unsettling mind-reading and levitating powers really is the cause of the dysfunctional family’s friction that rises to a national level. Everybody is wrapped up in their own self-centered universe. So the space traveller invades private thoughts, at first causing comic and embarrassing moments for the Army Aide (Brendan A. Haley) and his loud-mouthed commanding officer, General Powers. Even the cat gets her mind scanned, all light-hearted fun. The delightfully convincing enactment of Rauscher conversing with a mechanized, twitchy- earred white cat prop (not a puppet), plays really well and leads logically into an invasion of Ellen’s mind.

Kreton wants to watch her animalistic, human love making because on his planet where no one dies, there is no need for procreation or sex. Americans “revel in public slaughter,” broadcasting it; “yet you make love secretly, guiltily and with remorse….too delicious.” We have to remember that this is the fifties, the time when young unmarrieds staying overnight in a motel still had shock value.

Speldman, “America’s least accurate newsman,” solidly played by Steve Lebens, the narcissistic television talking head, in a sense is a villain who fans the flames of the arms race into total war. The newsman who never gets his facts right represents the growing importance of television in daily life and Vidal’s disdain, even dread of the media. Speldman’s telecast hypes the story that the Russians possess an “anti-gravity force” that is causing weaponry to levitate. Of course, all this Red Scare stuff really evolved out of Kreton’s parlor games of floating vases. His secret powers also caused rifles and weaponry to lift off the ground worldwide. In one important, climactic scene, Kreton aims his fingers and blows up the globe in the study.

Actor John Tweel as the warmongering Tom Powers of the Laundry Corps could flavor his role with more menace. He is too Mr. Nice Guy to be one-hundred percent convincing as the paranoid brigadier general. But that said, Powers is actually a dove underneath his soldierly strut, as he reveals in his anti-war speech that seems to foreshadow Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about the military-industrial complex. In the play, Powers says: “…Combat generals, that’s all you’ll read about, tearing around in tanks and planes, spending money like water.” We can imagine Vidal speaking to us today –  his commentary is painfully relevant.

Overall, the cast is a joy to watch as Rauscher develops a multi-dimensional Kreton. A visual costuming joke conveys the idea that deep down he wants to play war games and blow up the world just for the hell of it. The unflappable alien changes into a Confederate general’s uniform and dons thick sunglasses and gloves (costumes by Cecelia Albert andRosalie Ferris) , into a clone of Kubrick’s mad scientist, Dr. Strangelove, (the character from the movie Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb ), who loves H-bombs and mass destruction. Sometimes a director’s added sight gag is worth a thousand words.

It’s too bad that Jerry Lewis in his 1960 slapstick flop took the subtitle literally. Visit to a Small Planet, the original play by Gore Vidal, the master wordsmith, is a tightly written, intellectually challenging treasure, a worthy but neglected American play.

Visit to a Small Planet runs thru Aug 6, 2011 at Gunston Theatre Two, 2700 South Lang Street, Arlington, VA. Details Tickets

by Gore Vidal Directed by Rip Claassen Produced by The American Century Theater Reviewed by Rosalind Lacy

Highly recommended

Running Time: Two hours 15 minutes including two intermissions for this three-act play.

John Glass .  DramaUrge

Barbara Mackay .  Washington Examiner Jeanne Theismann .  Mt Vernon Gazette Joe Adcock .  ShowbizRadio

About Rosalind Lacy

Rosalind Lacy MacLennan, who hails from Los Angeles, has enjoyed writing for DCTheatreScene since 2006. A 20-year journalism veteran, with newspapers such as the Pittsburgh-Post Gazette, the Butler Eagle in Pennsylvania, the Suburban Newspapers of Northern New Jersey, Rosalind won a MD-DC press award for the Montgomery Journal in 1999. Since Rosalind’s heady days training and performing professionally in summer stock out of New York City, Rosalind has taught drama in high school, directed and acted in community theaters, and is the proud mother of three young adults. Still an avid theater nut, Rosalind is a former board member of www.Footlightsdc.org, and an aficionada of Spanish theater.

July 13, 2011 at 8:56 pm

Roz, thank you for the long,long review of Gore Vidall’s play. I read it, fasinated. so he has retired to Hollywood? great writer.            Ernest

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Visit to a Small Planet

The weirdest alien of the galaxy pays a visit to Earth... The weirdest alien of the galaxy pays a visit to Earth... The weirdest alien of the galaxy pays a visit to Earth...

• Norman Taurog
• Edmund Beloin
• Henry Garson
• Jerry Lewis
• Joan Blackman
• Earl Holliman
• 25 User reviews
• 15 Critic reviews
• 1 nomination total

Top cast 40

• Ellen Spelding

• Maj. Roger Putnam Spelding

• George Abercrombie

• Bob Mayberry

• Rheba Spelding

• Police Commissioner

• Mrs. Mabel Mayberry
• Desdemona - Beatnik Dancer
• (as Barbara Lawson)
• (uncredited)

• Percussionist

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• Trivia Gore Vidal , who wrote the original play, was extremely upset with the choice of Jerry Lewis as the lead in the movie version. On Broadway Vidal's play ran for 388 performances between Feb 7, 1957-Jan 11, 1958 and won Cyril Ritchard , originator of the Kreton character, a 1957 Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in Play. However, Lewis was a star, 12 times named to the Top Ten list of Box Office Stars, six times with partner Dean Martin (with whom he was the top star of 1952), and six times solo (ranking as high as #3 in 1958). He got the part.
• Goofs During the Hungry Brain sequence, the jazz band's trumpet player is shown playing with his horn "open" (unmuted), but the trumpeter heard on the soundtrack is using a mute.

Conrad : Remember that scoop you had about Elvis? You said he was going into the Navy.

• Connections Featured in E.T. and Friends: Magical Movie Visitors (1982)
• Soundtracks Desdemona's Lament (uncredited) Written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman Performed by Barbara Bostock

User reviews 25

• Aug 14, 2000
• How long is Visit to a Small Planet? Powered by Alexa
• February 4, 1960 (United States)
• United States
• Besuch auf einem kleinen Planeten
• Paramount Studios - 5555 Melrose Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA (Studio)
• Hal Wallis Productions
• See more company credits at IMDbPro

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 25 minutes
• Black and White

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Introduction & Overview of Visit to a Small Planet

Visit to a small planet

A comedy akin to a vaudeville, by gore vidal.

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Visit to a Small Planet Paperback – January 1, 1959

• Print length 77 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Dramatists Play Service
• Publication date January 1, 1959
• See all details

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B000HVVZSI
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Dramatists Play Service; revised edition (January 1, 1959)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 77 pages
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds

About the author

Gore Vidal has received the National Book Award, written numerous novels, short stories, plays and essays. He has been a political activist and as Democratic candidate for Congress from upstate New York, he received the most votes of any Democrat in a half-century.

Photo by David Shankbone (Photographer's blog post about the photo and event) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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