Quindecim

Issue date: 3/28/08 Section: A & E

Media Credit: Wham City Collective

"Jurassic Park" cost $63,000,000 dollars to make, and was one of the first movies to popularize photorealistic computer-generated imagery. Wham City art collective's latest theatrical offering, an irreverent sendup of the movie, titled, "They Should All Be Destroyed," is appealing precisely because it's none of those things. It's campy, sardonic, and supremely self-conscious about its low-budget, second-grade-play aesthetic.

The show was easy enough to find, tucked away in the Floristree space of the H&H building on West Franklin Street, right in downtown Baltimore. The climb to the fifth floor recalled a trek through a dystopic, bombed-out Eastern European tenement until we emerged into a cozy living space that had been converted into a theatre for the evening. As we positioned ourselves, the familiar sounds and smells of people lighting up cigarettes and working their way through twelve packs of Natty Bo relaxed the crowd as the lights dimmed and the first stirring strings of John William's "Jurassic Park" theme music began to slowly fade in.

The play's opening scene mimicked the meeting at the beginning of the movie between the sinister (and adult-onset diabetic) computer programmer Dennis Nedry, played by Robby Rackleff, and the scheming Dodgeson. Nedry sat on stage, shoveling ice cream into his mouth and cackling dementedly for several minutes before finally vocalizing "Gluttony… personified!"

"They Should All Be Destroyed" marched forward from there with a kind of dizzying giddiness, cherry-picking the most memorable moments of the film and adapting them for the stage. As the protagonists of the story arrive on the island, lampooning the moment in the movie where they see dinosaurs for the first time, two gigantic cardboard dinosaur legs marched across the stage as Alan Grant, played by Adam Endres, exclaimed "They DO move in herds!"

The dead-on portrayal of Jeff Goldblum's slightly neurotic and inappropriately amorous character by Mason Ross was riotous, sprinkling his dialogue with trenchant lines like "Life breaks free, expands to new territory, and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even (FORESHADOWING) dangerously." Other standouts included Benny Boeldt's performance of Samuel L. Jackson's character, who drew wild applause by transposing the most famous line from "Snakes on a Plane" into the play.

The play came to a triumphant close with a recreation of the scene where the park banner flutters down around a roaring T. Rex, this time reading "THEY SHOULD ALL BE DESTROYED." The ending led into a rousing singalong rendition of the movie's theme music: "Jurassic Park! It's a time out of time and a place, of awe where we all can learn, to respect the power of nature and the lesson that we learn's, Jurassic Park!"
"They Should All Be Destroyed" was an utterly brilliant and endearing piece of satire; equal parts hilarious, gratifying and nostalgic. This should come as no surprise from a group that first cut their oh-so-ironic teeth on a musical revue of "Beauty and the Beast" in 2005. With Wham City maven Dan Deacon already pulling national recognition for his debut album, Spiderman of the Rings, they're going to be well worth keeping an eye on in the future.

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