Olympia Little Theater heads to a new sci-fi frontier for its latest production

Molly Gilmore
·3 min read

With “The Man From Earth,” Olympia Little Theatre goes where relatively few theaters have gone before — to theatrical science fiction.

OK, that opening sentence is a bit of a stretch, but how often do arts writers get to talk “Trek”? (And yes, liking both Shakespeare and “Trek” is a thing, though some might feel that series sans William Shatner are a bit more high-brow.)

“The Man From Earth,” opening Friday, Jan. 27, has major cred. Jerome Bixby, who wrote the screenplay on which the play is based, wrote for both “Star Trek: The Original Series” and “The Twilight Zone.”

Further, “Man” explores immortality, the same theme Bixby addressed in his four “Trek” episodes, including “Requiem for Methuselah,” about an 8,000-year-old alien.

“He wrote an arc about an immortal who had been alive for thousands and thousands of years,” said Robert McConkey, who’s directing the Olympia Little Theatre production.

“I was just clicking through YouTube one day and stumbled across the film version of ‘The Man From Earth,’ and I sat down and watched it, and I was just sucked in,” he told The Olympian. “I wasn’t intending to sit down and watch a movie, but there I was. … I found it absolutely fascinating, and before I knew it, the movie was over.”

The director is not the only fan of the story. The film version got a 100 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes — though no well-known reviewers weighed in. Prolific online reviewer Dennis Schwartz called it “an intriguing cerebral psychological sci-fi yarn.”

The show has quite an origin story, too. Bixby, who had a lot more to express about immortality after his “Trek” work, dictated “Man” to his son on his deathbed in 1998, and Richard Schenkman directed the film, released in 2007. In 2012, the director adapted it into a play.

“I thought it was such a cool story about how it came to be,” McConkey said.

The titular “Man,” John Oldman (Mark Peterson), is a college professor who abruptly resigns, planning to move without saying goodbye to fellow faculty. Before Oldman — wink, nudge — leaves town, though, his curious colleagues descend on his home, barraging him with questions — and Oldman decides to answer them.

“He tells them that he is a 14,000-year-old caveman, and because they are all professors at a university, they treat it as an intellectual exercise,” said McConkey, familiar to regular theatergoers as both an actor and a director. “They start asking him questions, and he has an answer for every single question.”

The show also features Victor Rodgers, Tom Sanders, Debbie Sampson, Erin Chanfrau, Gabe Hacker, Becki Perez, Dennis Rolly, Ray Bentson and Will Tobey.

“Man” isn’t the only unusual show in Olympia Little Theatre’s season.

“Out of the seven plays OLT is doing this season, I had never heard of any of them,” McConkey said. “I thought that was really interesting. It’s not often that theaters will select an entire season of more obscure work. I hope that pays off.”

Still to come this season are:

• “One Slight Hitch” (March 10-26), a comedy about a wedding gone wrong.

• “Into the Breeches” (April 21-May 7), about an all-female Shakespeare show during World War II.

• “In the Gutter” (June 2-18), a comic noir.

‘The Man From Earth’

  • What: Olympia Little Theatre’s latest is a science-fiction tale by a writer whose credits include “Star Trek” and “The Twilight Zone.”

  • When: 7:25 p.m. Jan. 27-28 and Feb. 3-4 and 9-11, with matinees at 1:55 p.m. Jan. 29 and Feb. 5 and 12

  • Where: Olympia Little Theatre, 1925 Miller Ave. NE, Olympia

  • Tickets: $9-$15

  • More information: 360-786-9484, http://www.olympialittletheater.org