THEATER PREVIEW:B movie spoof hits playhouse

The time: 1952. The place: Mercury, Nev. An atomic test has gone bad — or is it something bigger?

If that teaser brings to mind those mostly black-and-white B movies from the early 1950s, then you’re old enough to appreciate the new production at the Costa Mesa Civic Playhouse.

It’s called “Earthlings Beware,” a spoof of all those sometimes scary and often unintentionally funny science-fiction flicks that were the staple of Saturday matinees back when 3-D was the latest craze, and it opens the playhouse’s new season this weekend.

The show is the brainchild of director Michael Dale Brown, a playhouse board member who wrote it last year for the Found Theater in Long Beach, with which he and his wife, Barbara, have a 27-year theatrical relationship.

“It offered me the opportunity to fulfill a longtime dream, to write and direct a play derived from my love of old science-fiction films,” said Brown, who’s a member of the Orange County branch of MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network.

The show was so well received that the Civic Playhouse opened its new season with it. “One critic in Long Beach wrote, ‘Who knew atomic radiation could be so much fun?’ ” Brown said.

With most of its original cast intact, “Earthlings Beware” has been re-imagined for the larger stage of the Costa Mesa theater, using video projection, miniatures, original music (by Roger Mexico) and an alien costume designed and built by puppet maker Joyce Hutter.

“We spoof all the old, familiar sci-fi movies from the good (‘It Came From Outer Space,’ ‘This Island Earth’) to the awful (‘the Amazing Colossal Man,’ ‘The Brain From Planet Arous’),” Brown noted, “with all their hokey dialogue, stiff acting and bad special effects intact.”

Also intact is most of the original Long Beach cast: Barbara Duncan Brown, Leonard Joseph Dunham, Ron Grigsby, Laura Lindahl, Tom Mazzone, Ed McBride, Nick Prelesnik, Kay Richey, John Schwendinger, Samantha Stedman, Travis Stolp, Jim Thoms and Heather Zavala.

When playgoers open their programs, they’re liable to recognize the names of characters played by these actors: Art Denning, Hoyt Bissell, Rachel Garland, General Tobey, Peter Carlson, etc. Brown has appropriated the names of 1950s actors Richard Carlson, Richard Denning, John Hoyt, Whit Bissell, Beverly Garland, Kenneth Tobey and others, who appeared in many of these potboilers.

Prelesnik, cast in a leading role as “Peter Carlson,” plans to mount a third production of “Earthlings Beware” at Riverside’s Poly High School, where he’s a theater arts director, next year.

“Earthlings Beware” opens tonight and runs through Aug. 26 at the Costa Mesa Civic Playhouse, 611 Hamilton St., with performances Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. Reservations are being taken at the theater’s box office, (949) 650-5269.