B-movie fun, live

You know that cool-looking B-movie on the SyFy Channel your friends flipped past despite your protests? That’s “Natalie Ryan and the Brain Thieves, which opened April 29 at the Alchemist Theatre. You can always hope for a second chance to see that B-movie. But Natalie Ryan will vanish like the time traveler herself when the show closes on May 14.

Co-writers/directors Vince Figueroa and Beth Lewinski crafted the play meticulously and gave it a heart of carbonite. They adhered to all the structural conceits of a classic sci-fi B-movie: Devious supervillain with ties to the hero’s origin story, kooky mad scientist with a deux ex machina in his back pocket, techno-jargon accepted without question. And yet they subvert the format; Natalie Ryan is more metafiction than fiction. Figueroa and Lewinski play with expectations without devolving into parody.

The plot is simple. Natalie Ryan (Anna Wolfe), a chatty ’50s high school student, gains the ability to travel through time and becomes effectively immortal after an accident at her school science fair. Cut to the present day; Sam (Lee Rowley), a stereotypically mild-mannered college student, meets a strange girl named Natalie. She gradually reveals she’s there to save the world — from his brain-stealing physics professor.

Some of the appeal in “Natalie Ryan” lies in the play’s comic subversion of sci-fi stereotypes. Genre awareness helps with as few of the subtler jokes, such as the mention of a monster in the garbage compactor. If you get them, they’re laugh-out-loud funny.

Most of the humor, however, is supremely accessible. One of the play’s funniest scenes involves Sam trying to wake his recently de-brained classmate, Lindsey (Lindsey Gagliano), by screaming her name over and over again. Many of the others involve the cross-cultural misunderstandings of the alien Musgeegans. The Musgeegans, by the way, are part mosquitoe and part manatee.

Wolfe and Rowley are solid as the play’s main characters. Cynthia Kmak revels in the freedom of the role as the maniacal villain, Professor Reed (Cynthia Kmak), a gloriously ambitious woman who will whatever it takes to get what she wants.

“Natalie Ryan” may be just a play posing as a B-movie, but like the best of B-movies, it embraces that fact and runs with it.