陰陽魔界 The Twilight Zone (同場加映)

The Twilight Zone review

We saw an afternoon performance of The Twilight Zone. The venue had a small café/coffee shop just inside it near the entrance, and right when we walked in the door (about an hour before the start of the show) was the moment that the last seat in the small cafe (which could hold maybe around 12 people) filled up.  So I still got a coffee but had to congregate outside the little seating area.  It was not exactly a negative, just a small amount of bad luck, but soon the whole place filled with fellow coffee-drinkers just before the show so I felt a bit of camaraderie among the other theater-goers and we could chat a bit.

I liked the program which told some of the history of the TV show The Twilight Zone.  I hadn't really watched too many episodes of it when I was a kid, but one sticks out in my mind - the one where William Shatner (Captain Kirk on Star Trek) had a window seat on an airplane and saw gremlins on the wings in flight and thought he was going crazy.  Even now, I can't recall the full plot of any other Twilight Zone episode but I remember that all of them that I saw were interesting and had twist endings. I wasn't sure what to expect about this theater play, whether it would be a new Twilight-zone-like story or whether it would be a single story from the series. In the end it was more of a few pieces of several stories melded together. I thought it was well done.

One vignette dealt with astronaut lovers split by incommensurate aging, one with a boy trapped in another dimension, one with an alien hidden among humans in a cafe, and a couple others.  The vignette on which the play spent the longest amount of time was a story about who among several families is most deserving to get into a nuclear fallout shelter - it touches on tribalism, racism, and how friendship is tested in a disaster. I personally wouldn't have spent so much time on that one at the expense of other possible vignettes but it was all right nonetheless and made a good story for the stage. Actually, seeing parts of these stories on the stage made me want to go back and start watching Twilight Zone episodes. I saw this show last month, though, and to be honest I haven't actually gone back and watched any, but I thought about it a few times!

Props and effects were pretty good. Nice venue; it can't really hold a lot of people but it was just nice for this show. I like complex sets, and these weren't really very complex, but they did change a lot and I like that.  Special effects, black-and-white things to match the black-and-white television, and having characters in another dimension/universe was done in a thoughtful way. That's really good!