THE TWILIGHT ZONE

Based on stories by Rod Serling, Charles Beaumont, and Richard Matheson; adapted by Anne Washburn

6M 3W (casting includes one child and a dog)

SETS

A diner, a bar, a child’s bedroom, an apartment, a therapist’s office, a carnival, and The Twilight Zone.

SYNOPSIS

The play consists of eight intersecting stories from the classic Rod Serling television Show. It opens with eight strangers, marooned in a diner from a snowstorm. In classic fashion, an officer arrives to inform the party that one of them is an alien. The scene ends right as the accusations begin. A school teacher is visited by a strange child who re-awakens her memories about her mother’s murder but the child flees right as a stranger knocks on her door. The Stranger is none other than her mother’s killer, however the authorities arrive in time to apprehend him. The strange child was revealed to be the woman’s younger self, returning to warn her. A trio of astronauts return to earth after a mysterious voyage only to find themselves blinking in and out of existence as they cast no reflection, create no memories, and disappear from photographs. One by one the men vanish into a different world. Back in the diner, the strangers have already left on a bus bound for Boston. One man re-enters the diner, revealing that a bridge collapsed killing all aboard with the exception of himself. He reveals his third arm to the waiter, casually announcing a Martian invasion. The waiter in turn reveals a third eye, and says the Venus aliens look forward to enslaving the Martians. A man on the cusp of a nervous breakdown, falls asleep in his therapist’s office to a nightmarish vision of a carnival. A child disappears into another realm whose portal is under her bed. Act I concludes with the father bounding into the Twilight Zone after her. The nightmare of the Twilight Zone is realized as he successfully rescues his daughter. The man caught in the carnival awakens only to find the characters from his dream are in the office, and he promptly throws himself out of a window. A woman undergoes extensive plastic surgery to make herself beautiful; the surgery is a failure as she lives in a world of deformed monsters who find our concept of beauty repulsive. A man and woman fall in love before his fifty year voyage to space. A child carries a dummy that is seemingly alive into a bar in preparation for the final act. The final story is of a family preparing for a nuclear strike in their shelter. Their neighbors arrive, demanding entry, and soon become a mob ready to commit murder before they are given the All Clear from the president. 

The finale concludes with all of the nightmarish creatures and characters drinking in a bar, with the chain-smoking narrator thanking the audience for spending their evening in The Twilight Zone.

NOTES

This is a really incredible adaptation, one of the few works where translating a property across a medium benefits the stories. The tools of live theatre elevate the alienating and creepy atmosphere of Serling’s world. Anne Washburn’s script does a wonderful service to the original melodramas, both as evocation of The Twilight Zone and a love letter. While some film-to-stage adaptations fail to do anything for the work (Lord of the Rings: the Musical comes to mind), the timeless, ensemble quality of the series fits naturally with theatre’s innate qualities.

The scale of this production makes it inappropriate for the Studio space however this work is perfect for the mainstage. The brand recognition, the incredible production aspects, and the broad appeal of this script make it more than an appropriate fit for our audiences.