Time to take the twilight zone home
looked up at the box set and the box set looked back (kind of), is worthy of the series’ famously eerie theme tune. Because as well as the nearmiraculous achievement, by writer Anne Washburn and director Richard Jones, in transposing this TV-shaped world to the Almeida Theatre’s stage, and then to West End where it will soon finish its run, the production is now setting its sights on New York. And there is nothing like it currently on the stage. A mix of nostalgia and the downright weird, the production hilariously lampoons the camp style of the original while regenerating the same sense of disquiet and even horror. Key to it all is that, at its heart, sits the moral compass of the TV show’s Jewish creator Rod Serling.
“I have come to appreciate how important Serling was,” says Fogelman. “Before The Twilight Zone, he was a household name writing serious drama that was performed live in American TV.”
One play concerned the new employee of a big corporation where he was asked to behave unethically. The play was performed live and made such an impact that the broadcaster decided on a repeat — also live. “This was before video tape,” explains Fogelman with the geeky enthusiasm of a fan. But Serling found that the network hampered his attempt to air urgent subjects such as the infamous case of Emmett Till, the 14-yearold African American boy who was lynched in Mississippi for offending a white woman by whistling at her, a subject that was apparently too sensitive for TV executives at the time.
“But through fantasy, sci-fi genre he was able to capture everything he wanted to say without any interference, so he could deal with such issues as civil rights, prejudice, racism – even the Holocaust in the [Twilight Zone] episode called Death Head Revisited,” says Fogelman whose career has been forged on the distribution and finance of such movies as The Big Lebowsky and Notting Hill. The Twilight Zone is his first foray into theatre.
His parents ran a menswear business and he was the first in his family to go into the entertainment industry. But his father introduced him to the television shows he loved with the same enthusiasm that Fogelman has shown his own children.
“My dad loved westerns and he definitely got me into the writing of Neil Simon and Sgt Bilko,” remembers Fogelman. “I wouldn’t have discovered them if it wasn’t for him.” But his father’s love for a very different show most inspired Fogelman’s Twilight Zone venture. “When I was growing up, Dad was even more passionate about Star Trek than I was,” he says.
‘The Twilight Zone’ is at the Ambassadors Theatre