Once More With Natalie Ryan: Fun Stage Sci-fi

Over the years, I've come to enjoy just about every major commercial genre of storytelling. There's a special place in my heart for sci-fi, though. Science Fiction was really my first love as a kid. For numerous reasons, however, it doesn't exactly cross over to the live stage all that well. As many different genres as I've seen onstage over the years of covering theatre in Milwaukee, science fiction is the one the I've seen the least. 700 + shows in the past ten years and maybe a half a dozen of them or so were sci-fi. And three of those have been Natalie Ryan shows. 

This August, Vince Figueroa and Beth Lewinski return to the character of Natalie Ryan for a third and final show in the science fiction series. For the third time, Anna Wolfe plays a 444-year-old time traveler who happens to look a lot like a girl young enough to have just entered Columbia College in Chicago last year. Also returning from last year's part two is Grace DeWolff as her daughter who, due to the complexities of time travel actually looks just a little bit older than she does. Throw-in a few really interesting supporting characters and you've got a fun show to close-out the summer theatre season. 

In her third consecutive summer in the role, Anna Wolfe continues to be really fun as Natalie Ryan. She's charming as the type of sweetly brilliant save-the-world heroine that never quite gets enough play in the genre. Here Ryan gets to meet a man she knows she will fall in love with. Her future daughter has already told her the name of the man destined to be her father. In the course of things in this third episode, she actually runs into the guy, which gives Wolfe a bit more of a dramatic challenge to work with than either of the previous two Natalie Ryan shows. As expected, it's kind of fun to watch her fall in love even if the plot doesn't spend a whole lot of time on the romantic angle of things. 

Once again, DeWolff nails the mood and tone of this type of story perfectly. Like Figueroa and Lewinski, she's got a real love of this genre that shows through in another extremely fun performance. Once again, she sounds really convincing when delivering murky sci-fi jargon. Here again she shows a flare for doing very, very physical stuff as well. 

Rob Maass returns for another turn as the villain. This time he's The Last Man. Here he's the big arch villain by virtue of the fact that he wants to create a new universe. Kind of a clever reversal--So often we're asked to accept the destructive urges of villains in this type of genre as being a product of simple evil. Figueroa and Lewinski give this character a believable (if under-rendered) kind of motivation. He's seen the end of the universe and he wants to build a new one. Kind of a fascinating idea that never really has the time to get explored in full. 

We're not asked to accept that The Last Man is evil by virtue of the fact that he's evil--a problem that plagues so many villains in action genre stories. Of course, even if The Last Man was completely 2-dimensional, Maass would have been able to bring it to the stage convincingly. He's got the stature, the voice and the stage presence for villainy. That The Last Man is reasonably fleshed-out as a character as well only makes things better.

The rest of the cast is enjoyable as well. Jake Brockmann has a casual kind of charisma in the role of Ryan's love interest. Becca Segal seems quite compellingly natural as an alien named Jeltz. Noah Silverstein has a sharp kind of comic cleverness as Albert Einstein. He may not look the part of the iconic legend, but he's got such a charming sense of humor in the role that it hardly matters. The accent he adopts is a lot of fun too. 

Natalie Ryan and the Edge of Eternity runs through August 25th at the Underground Collaborative. For ticket reservations, visit BrownPaperTickets.com

Tomorrow: why you really don't need $200 million to tell this kind of sci-fi story.