If you so desired, you could be entertained twenty-four/seven—hook up your iPod, log online, turn on the TV—tune in, turn on, drop out. You certainly don’t have to leave the house. Katie Hawkey, creator and director of Oracle Productions’ “Show Game Live! From the Milky Way!” wants to put an end to this technological ennui. Ironically quoting the TV station Nickelodeon, she states, “Don’t just sit there. If you want good things to happen, make them happen.” What Hawkey “made happen” is “Show Game Live!”—a quick jolt to the gray tissue and a sharp kick in the you-know-what.
“Show Game Live! From the Milky Way” parodies popular and forgotten game shows alike—from the iconic “Jeopardy!” to that parade of human idiocy, “Street Smarts.” Yes, “Saturday Night Live” has been lampooning “Celebrity Jeopardy!” for years (Oh, Sean Connery and his dirty mind), but “Show Game Live!” has a twist. Instead of taking place in Wisconsin, or some equally mundane locale, “Show Game Live!” is filmed in the Milky Way. In addition, the host is a purple-faced suave alien named Rip Kipley and all the contestants are slovenly earthlings abducted from our very own planet Earth. Each performance, the questions change and the actors, who just happen to be pop-culture fiends, answer from their own vast stores of useless knowledge. That means that each performance ends differently, with a new winner every night.
The audience is introduced to the characters by way of video introduction; Lindsay is an assistant manager at Catharine’s Plus Size Clothing and designs big-boned couture for her padded Barbies, Adam is a tollbooth worker whipped by his lizard-loving lady friend and Dan is a personal trainer with an affinity for James Blunt. “When [the audience] first meets the characters they are boring, humdrum people with apathy about their own life,” Hawkey says. “But as they are pushed farther and farther by the aliens they realize that they have the power to move forward.”
When you first enter the Oracle Theatre you snake down a hallway hung with insulation and wires meant to mimic the inside of a spaceship. Passing the gift shop, where you can pick up a clapper or a “Show Game Live!” t-shirt, you emerge into a black box so small that it might as well be called a black closet. Barely forty seats fill the theater and the front row practically sits on stage, which is decked out like the set of a game show with colorful podiums, graphics and all. On the right hangs a flat-screen TV used to introduce the characters and to screen intergalactic commercials hawking everything from energy drinks to space-age sexual enhancers.
The Oracle Theatre is known for making use of multimedia, which Katie Hawkey says is “an interesting way to take it back from big media and take it back to a small scale where people are involved. The crowd is the last actor; it doesn’t work if they don’t clap.” This interactive component was particularly crucial to the game-show atmosphere in which “the appeal is the real people on stage, the fact that you sympathize with them, you want to be part of it. You want to be up there.” The intimacy of the miniature black box brings the audience into the show, compelling them to examine themselves in the context of a culture obsessed with the exploits of K-Fed and TomKat.
“The average American day consists of two parts: work and leisure time,” writer and assistant director Laura K. Smith points out in her program notes. Most of the time we opt to fill our leisure time with reruns of “Next” or “My Super Sweet Sixteen,” but once in a while we’ll feel the need to get some “culture” and go to a play. It may not be its ultimate goal, but “Show Game Live!” demonstrates how solitary activities, such as watching TV, have become America’s new pastimes—instead of crying “Take me out to the ballgame,” we sigh, “I’ll TiVo it instead.” Crammed into the Oracle Theatre, people are forced to socialize, both with the actors on stage and the guy next to you impeding on your “personal space.” That’s all that Katie Hawkey wants, ultimately—for you to get off the couch and do something new. “I hope people come out, have fun and get this message,” she says. She quickly adds, “And, most importantly, I hope they have a good time.”
“Show Game Live! From the Milky Way!” runs at Oracle Theatre, 3809 North Broadway, (773)244-2980. $15-$20. Through December 17, 2006.
