Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 249: The Tragicall Historie of Plan the IX (2018)

Let's get Shakespearean all up in here.

This series is called Ed Wood Wednesdays, and it aims to cover the wonky oeuvre of Edward Davis Wood, Jr. (1924-1978) in its bewildering totality—from the primitive Westerns he made at the beginning of his career to the even-more-primitive porn loops he made at the end of it. But I could have limited myself to discussing Eddie's most famous film, Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), and still not run out of material for many years. This one movie, just an hour and twenty minutes in length, has inspired an absurd amount of spinoffs over the years: books, articles, essays, stage adaptations, merchandise, and countless parodies. There's even a video game. It never ends.

There's so much Plan 9 flotsam in the world, frankly, that I cannot keep up with it. Just two weeks ago, for example, I reviewed Killian H. Gore's Plan 9 from Outer Space Quiz Book (2018). As the title indicates, it's a collection of trivia questions about the movie, supplemented with an original sci-fi short story. You'd think, as a certified Woodologist, I would be smack dab in the middle of the target audience for such a product, and yet I only stumbled upon it (seven years after it was published!) by pure chance while searching for something else entirely.

So what was the "something else entirely" I was trying to find?

Merrymaker Ryan D. Smith.

Well, back in 2018, Colorado-based author and podcaster Ryan D. Smith did something truly unusual and inexplicable. He took Plan 9 and transformed it into a five-act Elizabethan stage play written in the style of William Shakespeare (1564-1616). It is called The Tragicall Historie of Plan the IX: A Play in Verse, and it is one of the most intricate and elaborate works of fan fiction I have ever encountered. How elaborate are we talking? The published edition available on Amazon is extensively footnoted and lists the specific literary references made throughout the play, not just to William Shakespeare and Ed Wood but T.S. Eliot, Andrew Marvell, and Walt Whitman as well. 

Again, I should have been the ideal audience for Plan the IX, and yet I only know of its existence thanks to the kind intervention of reader Ed Goldstein. I have to wonder, though, how much more Plan 9 from Outer Space stuff is out there in the world, completely out of my field of vision? Maybe somewhere, halfway around the world, there is a kabuki version of Plan 9 being staged for an audience of nine people right now. Incidentally, you have to be very careful in your search engine queries when looking for information about Plan the IX or else you will get a lot of (presumably unsolicited) information about 9/11. This happened to me repeatedly while writing the article you are now reading. What can I say? It was a weird week.

What makes Plan the IX so remarkable to me is that Smith is essentially serving two very disparate masters here, William Shakespeare and Ed Wood, and he somehow manages to do justice to both of them. This is exceedingly tricky. After all, the plot of Plan 9 from Outer Space requires a great deal of technology that would have been impossible in the 1600s, including airplanes, television sets, radios, and telephones. While the published script of Plan the IX contains a humorous introduction claiming the play was written in Shakespeare's time, Ryan D. Smith cheerfully employs all of that aforementioned 20th century tech without further explanation or context. If Fred Flintstone can watch TV or make a phone call, so can the characters in this play. 

So "historical accuracy" is more or less out the window by Act I, Scene 2 of Plan the IX. But who needs it? What matters is that Smith emulates the tone and cadence of Shakespeare's writing, and this he does brilliantly throughout. Like any of the Bard's real plays, Plan the IX moves at a stately pace, and its characters are quite verbose and eloquent, often taking dozens and dozens of words to say what could be expressed in one short sentence. Even nonspeaking characters from the 1957 film, such as Vampire Girl (Vampira), Ghoul Man (Bela Lugosi), and the zombie Inspector Clay (Tor Johnson) are given speeches that provide insight into their personalities that we didn't get in Wood's original film.

The plot of The Tragicall Historie of Plan the IX follows the plot of Plan 9 from Outer Space scene for scene and nearly line for line. Let's say that Wood's movie provides the roadmap for Smith's play and that the playwright does not venture too far from the path. But a mere translation of Plan 9 into Elizabethan English might become monotonous over the course of five acts, so Smith embroiders upon the original text without fundamentally changing it. For instance, in this version, the two gravediggers (here called sextons) engage in some wordplay-filled banter to provide comic relief. Think of this as a bit of 17th century vaudeville.

FIRST SEXTON: Come, my spade. There is no ancient gentleman but gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers: they hold up Adam's profession.

SECOND SEXTON: Was he a gentleman?

FIRST SEXTON: He was the first that ever bore arms.

SECOND SEXTON: Why, he had none!

FIRST SEXTON: What, are thou a heathen? How dost thou understand the Scripture? The Scripture says, "Adam digg'd." How could he dig without arms? 

Make no mistake. Plan the IX is a work of satire, and it contains a great deal of humor at the expense of Ed Wood and Plan 9 from Outer Space. The play makes frequent comments on the shoddiness of the special effects (get used to the phrase "the effect is flawless," since it's used frequently), the nonsensical absurdity of the plot, and even the characters' choice of words. Copilot Danny, for instance, is chastised for referring to airplanes as "flybirds" and "skybirds," something I had never even noticed in the original movie. And the characters in Plan the IX are acutely aware that the role of the Ghoul Man (here called Old Man) is being played by two different actors. The character even soliloquizes about it, using Hamlet's immortal "to be or not to be" speech as the template.

The gentle ribbing of Plan 9 is to be expected in a work like this. Indeed, you can't ignore the very qualities that made the original movie famous in the first place. Ed Wood's movie would not have had its extraordinary afterlife if it hadn't been so oddly flawed in so many ways. As Criswell would say, "That is why you are here." 

But The Tragicall Historie of Plan the IX is not merely a snide putdown of the film. That would also quickly become dull. Instead, it's a painstaking tribute, pieced together one line at a time like a mosaic. Ryan D. Smith includes an afterword in the script in which he explains that Plan the IX is a labor of love. But his love was already obvious in every little detail of this work. I mean, who else would bother to write something like this, except a fan with the devotion of a cloistered monk?

ADDENDUM: There is also a much-expanded radio play based on The Tragicall Historie of Plan the IX, containing not only the entire text of Smith's original play but numerous commercial parodies, a theme song, and other wraparound material. The cast includes Ryan D. Smith in numerous roles, plus comedian Dana Gould, Jackey Neyman Jones from Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966), filmmaker Tonjia Atomic, and others. Supposedly, a performance of this exists somewhere on video, but I cannot find any footage. Meanwhile, the always-resourceful Ed Goldstein tracked down a 2018 audio-only performance. Here is Part the One. Here is Part the Two. The radio play is really a distinct work unto itself and may merit an article of its own in the future. God help us if it does.