Get ready Camp Firewood campers, because next Friday evening, in its first play of its 2015 season, Long Beach’s The Garage Theater “Attempts Wet Hot American Summer… The Play?”
In one week, just off the corner of 7th Street and Long Beach Blvd. the Garage will host the world premier of their own adaptation of the cult classic film that was written by Michael Showalter and David Wain. Fans of the playfully satyrical movie and fans of exciting new theater in general, rejoice!
For this new adaptation of Wet Hot, writer and director Ryan McClary turned not only to the original screenplay for the film, but also to the radio play adaptation by Ben Acker and Ben Blacker which premiered with The Thrilling Adventure Hour at SF sketchfest in 2012. Thrilling Adventure Hour is known for staging productions in the style of old time radio plays with songs, sound effects and fake commercials to boot.
For those of you unfamiliar with the source material, (climb out of your weird, dark closets and see this freaking movie already people!) the film takes place on the last day of summer camp at Camp Firewood in 1981. As all the counselors try to sort out their unfinished business with their sex lives and their campers before everything gets packed away for the season, the talent show also looms heavily on everybody’s minds. Don’t worry though, this is a comedy through and through. Everything works out alright in the end.
McClary, who worked with the Garage in the past on the movement theater production Ravens and Writing Desks, expressed his gratitude to the Garage for being “a safe place to bring in even my more experimental ideas. It’s one of the few places in Long Beach I’d still make an effort to drive to to see theater, even if I lived elsewhere.”
Originally, the Garage thought they might just stage TheThrilling Adventure Hour adaptation as some sort of fundraiser or one off special event, but the more the idea got passed around, the more they fixated on turning it into a full on theatrical adaptation. “Everyone wanted it to happen” said McClary, “ but nobody knew exactly how to do it.”
Then, like a green light from the theater Gods, The Garage got the go ahead from David Wain to adapt the material. Then McClary got involved and things rapidly started to fall into place.
I assumed off the bat that the most challenging thing about adapting the film for the stage would be in finding the line between what classic material needed to stay and where one would decide to bring their own humor into the picture. When I asked McClary about this over an afternoon coffee last week, he seemed very confident in stating that he hadn’t really run into that issue with his adaptation so far.
“We are keeping big chunks of the source material, especially in the first act, but by placing the action in a theater and putting it on a set, we change so much of the context that many of those challenges sort of solved themselves before they even came about.”
He notes that in his production the cast plays multiple roles and that through working on the mechanics of the play’s scenes they have been able to build something more sound than just a karaoke rendering of the film or a series of back and forth one liners.
At the top of the play for example, all of the cast members come out and introduce not just themselves but also who they are playing. This is an attempt to separate the audience from the baggage they may be bringing to the theater and to help keep them from dwelling on the actors who made the film so iconic.
McClary went on; “We kind of have to say to the audience from the very beginning, ‘Hey this is what this show is, but also, this is what it isn’t.’ Hopefully, this will give the audience what they think they want but possibly, at least sometimes, in a different way.”
He also hopes this production will do away with some of the stigmas so many people have towards going to the theater nowadays.
“Theater turns people off in this day and age, and I’m not sure why. Hopefully this production will help make it more accessible without having to dumb things down.”
It’s mission statements like that that make The Garage Theater such a special institution in our city. Regardless of the end results, you gotta admire that kind of agenda.
I’ll see you all at camp.
“The Garage Theatre Attempts Wet Hot American Summer… The Play?” runs February 20th through March 21st Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00PM. The Garage Theatre is located at 251 East 7th Street.
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