Lawrence.com

The year is 1933 and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Molly Sloan and her assistant, Timmy Mendez, are traveling through the Carpathian Mountains in Eastern Europe during a blizzard. Molly is meeting a contact for a story she’s writing about an international smuggling ring; however, the contact warns Molly that her story is dead, because the smugglers have been disappearing. As their adventure continues, Molly and Tim meet Ben Wilcott, a mysterious librarian, and together they attempt to survive an impending invasion of sludge monsters from the planet Zygon.

This premise belongs to "The Intergalactic Nemesis," a new species of show opening Oct. 29 at the Lied Center, 1600 Stewart Drive. The show is an amalgam of movies, graphic novels and radio plays, featuring three voice actors and 1,250 hand-drawn projections adapted from a comic book.

Jason Neulander, the show’s writer and director, says that his inspiration to tell this story came from his own sense of adventure as a twelve-year-old boy, plus from dozens of other comic books, pulp novels from the 1940s, classic science fiction, and a host of other places and stories.

“One of the biggest influences on the material is the script from the movie 'His Girl Friday,'” Neulander says, citing the film that stars Cary Grant as a newspaper editor. “We really wanted to capture that snappy 1940s dialogue. The show started out as a radio play, and became popular in that format,” Neulander adds.

Even the radio play version of "The Intergalactic Nemesis" was an intricate production. Buzz Moran served as an essential part of the original play — and now serves on the crew of the live show — operating as sound effects designer. His job includes producing the sound of a runaway train by shaking a box of dry macaroni noodles.

“Having a musician’s sense of timing and rhythm helps,” Moran says, laughing. “You can’t just grab a pair of shoes and hit a table to make the sound of someone walking.”

“Everything you pick up is a potential sound effect,” Moran adds. “A lot of times, places like Home Depot and toy stores are great places to look for sound effects.”

The show operated in the radio play format for a while, playing in small cafes and other public locations, until a larger venue asked if the production team could perform to a crowd of roughly 2,400. Neulander says he was uncertain that The Intergalactic Nemesis would be complex enough to entertain that many people in its current arrangement.

“The visuals just weren’t big enough for a venue of that size,” Neulander says. “I was actually just on the verge of declining when I had this vision: I remembered a production I saw a bunch of years ago, and that led me toward this idea of a live-action graphic novel.”

Neulander says the production he remembered involved a re-scoring of the 1931 film "Dracula" by Philip Glass and the Kronos Quartet. The musicians performed the new score upstage of a screen where the film was projected. “You could kind of see them through the screen. I said, ‘We can do this kind of thing with the comic book projections,’” Neulander says. “I’d been working with an artist to develop the comic book already. The first issue had been inked, the first two pages had been colored.”

Neulander used the radio play and those first two pages (drawn by artist Tim Doyle) to make a video that would demonstrate his idea. Even though he was excited, and working in an unexplored format, he had no idea how popular his new show would become. The show has become a critical and commercial success ahead of its first nationwide tour.

“The response we get from audiences is wild,” says Christopher Lee Gibson, a voice actor who plays nine different characters in the show. “It’s crazy to see how into it people get.”

Gibson had trained as a stage actor, and voice acting was a new experience for him. When the radio play first began with local shows, he had only one part — the voice of the hero. However, he soon found himself taking on more and more dialogue.

“As the show evolved into this live-action graphic novel, I ended up taking multiple roles to play, and I found that I really enjoyed it,” Gibson says. Now, all told, he has nine characters. His favorite part about the production, he says, is the delicate interplay between the cast and crew.

“All of us are double- and triple-cast. It’s an ensemble piece. It’s three actors doing I don’t know how many characters. It’s an intricately choreographed performance, to the point that if we’re doing it right the audience would never know exactly how choreographed it is. It should come across as seamless. It requires five or six different artists all being on the exact same page for two hours.”

For his part, Jason Neulander is pleased (and a little surprised) at how well the production has transitioned to a live show. Like Gibson, he credits The Intergalactic Nemesis’s accomplishment to the cast and crew, and to the sense of fun and adventure that the story encourages in audiences of all ages.

“We had these disparate elements going—radio, comic book,” Neulander says. “But in putting them together in this one show, it’s just got a level of a attention that, frankly, previously, I could only have dreamed about.”