In Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster, “Jurassic Park,” the Tyrannosaurus rex leaps off the screen through a combination of animatronics and CGI. At the time, the filmmaking redefined the possibilities in visual storytelling.
Now, imagine instead of special effects, the T. rex was depicted by a human before a live audience? And what if the human was sporting a bike helmet and a traffic cone on his back?
No imagining is necessary as an upcoming performance at the Academy of Music in Northampton includes just that. “Hold On To Your Butts,” a live, shot-for-shot parody of “Jurassic Park” starring actors Nick Abeel and Kyle Schaefer, accompanied by live Foley artist (sound designer) Blair Busbee, on Saturday, Nov. 15, at 7:30 p.m.
“Hold On To Your Butts” takes household objects and turns them into — often multipurpose — props throughout the show. In one scene, a baby dinosaur portrayed by a hand “hatches” out of a paper towel.
“[It’s] really simple, really playful,” said Kristin McCarthy Parker, director, producer and one-third of the creative ensemble, Recent Cutbacks.
To recreate the iconic shots of water rippling in a cup as the T. rex approaches, one actor shakes a cup as another holds a black frame. Then, a few seconds later, the actor replaces the black frame with a smaller one, representing the zooming in of the camera.
In one scene, an umbrella is used to represent a gun. In another scene, that same umbrella is used to represent the frills of a Dilophosaurus, and in yet another, the umbrella is spun around to represent the blades of a helicopter. To recreate the scene where the helicopter arrives at the island, actors swap out the umbrella for a cocktail umbrella.
“It’s all about not trying to make it exactly like the way that it looks in the movie, but more like asking you to imagine along with us, which is more playful and fun,” Parker said. “If you ask the audience … ‘Okay, imagine this to be this thing,’ then once you’ve established it, you can do a lot of different things with it, and they’ll go along with you.”
In addition to “Hold On To Your Butts,” Parker has also directed or produced several other shows that spoof popular films.
“The more epic the movie, the more we have to play off of,” she said.
Those shows include “Puffs, or Seven Increasingly Eventful Years at a Certain School of Magic and Magic,” an Off-Broadway show set in the “Harry Potter” universe; “KEVIN!!!!!,” a “Home Alone” parody in which the character Kevin McCallister is a puppet while everyone else is a human; and “Fly, You Fools!,” which, like “Hold On To Your Butts,” condenses the entire movie of “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” into one hour, featuring three actors and a Foley artist.
“Like all of our projects, [“Hold On To Your Butts”] comes from a love for the source material and the nostalgia that we have around it, and that’s reflected in the work,” Parker said. “Some parodies can be really mean to the thing that they’re poking fun of, but ours comes from a place of love.”
Another benefit of pop culture-based theater is that a show like this can be an entry point to other types of live entertainment, to “all the many beautiful and wonderful things that theater can do,” Parker said. “Hold On To Your Butts” uses lots of mime, for example, but there are plenty of people who might not want to see a mime show otherwise. In a similar vein, most people don’t get to watch a Foley artist live. Typically, their work is usually performed in recording studios.
“What’s really fun about our shows is that we really are just using stuff that you probably have in your garage,” Parker said, “so, particularly if younger audiences come, I think it’s a really great source of inspiration for people who are wanting to make their own work but feeling like, ‘Well, I don’t know, I don’t have a theater.’ You can. And you can be really imaginative and playful, and you certainly don’t need to travel far and wide or be in New York to do it.”
Even if you’ve never seen “Jurassic Park,” that won’t stop you from enjoying “Hold On To Your Butts,” Parker said. Though there are “plenty of Easter eggs” to fans who know the movie, the storyline — “dinosaurs have been genetically engineered on an island, and then they go rogue” — remains the same.
“As long as you understand that general plot, you’ll be able to follow along,” Parker said. Plus, there’ll be a few local in-jokes.
In any case, she added, “It’s a great story, and we retell it faithfully” — with or without “real” dinosaurs.
For more information about “Hold On To Your Butts” or to purchase tickets, visit aomtheatre.com.