When Joseph Papp first launched the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park as opposed to a theater, the concept not only became a regular feature in the Big Apple but in cities across the country as well. Other visionaries expanded upon the idea, taking the basic premise of Shakespeare in the Park – a free theater performance outside instead of inside – and adding their own twists.
Atomic Arts in Portland was one such innovator, using scripts from the original Star Trek television series as opposed to the works of William Shakespeare for their productions. Just like Shakespeare in the Park quickly spread to other cities, the same held true for Trek in the Park, with Hello Earth Productions transporting the concept from Oregon to Washington in 2010.
“We drove down to see (Atomic Arts’) adaptation of ‘Amok Time,’ and it was so delightful that on the way home, we decided we should do something in Seattle,” Kris Hambrick explained to Geek Girl Con. “And we quickly decided that we weren’t going to try to mimic either Atomic Arts or the original show, but treat it like any other script, and cast without regard to the gender, race, ethnicity or any other quality of the original crew, aside from talent and the rapport needed between the characters. We wanted to play with what this text – and others – means to our culture, in the same way any other ‘classic’ is carried over and reinvented.”
Hello Earth Productions premiered their version of Trek in the Park – which they named “Outdoor Trek” – at Seattle’s Dr. Blanche Lavizzo Park in August 2010, and chose the episode “The Naked Time” as their first production. “This Side of Paradise” followed in 2011, with “The Devil in the Dark” in 2013. Although the first four performances of Outdoor Trek featured different Star Trek installments than Portland’s Trek in the Park, the 2014 production did overlap with “Mirror, Mirror.”
Regardless of the city or the episode, live performances of Star Trek in the parks of the Pacific Northwest have met with equal success. “The outdoor ambiance adds a lot,” Kris Hambrick said in 2011. “Both years we performed while the Blue Angels flew overhead. Both years ice cream trucks passed by during performances, and this year a car alarm started going off right when a character was talking about how the planet Starfleet was exploring lived in harmony and perfect peace.”
The diversity of Hello Earth also adds to the appeal of Outdoor Trek. “For the first play we did, ‘Naked Time,’ I had no preconceived ideas about whom I would cast,” cofounder Joy DeLyria explained to Transformative Works. “Depending on who showed up at auditions, Kirk could have been a man, a woman, white, a person of color, cisgender, transgender, able, differently abled, short, tall, old, young, petite, plus-size.”
For DeLyria, it’s the performance that matters. “Sometimes when they are playing their roles, aspects of that person’s appearance and identity fall away as he or she becomes the character,” she said. “I don’t claim to be blind to color or size or age or sex or whatever else – at times, that is impossible. Yet when I cast an African American man as Doctor McCoy or a woman as Doctor McCoy, they are not ‘the black Doctor McCoy’ and ‘the female Doctor McCoy.’ Each of them is just Doctor McCoy.”
Despite such tweaks to the original, Outdoor Trek has resonated with Star Trek fans nonetheless. “We weren’t part of that first wave of Trek fandom, but we have definitely heard feedback from those who have been in the Trek fan community a lot longer than we have, and it’s been overwhelmingly positive,” Kris Hambrick noted. “No one has come up and said, ‘You can’t do that to Star Trek.’ They all believe in the spirit of what we’re doing, because, I think, it follows the spirit of both fandom and Trek itself. In some ways, too, our audience and our production team represent a merging of the old and new fan experience.”
After successfully transporting Star Trek from the farthest reaches of the final frontier and into the parks of the Pacific Northwest, Hello Earth decided to switch things up and tackle another geek culture staple – Star Wars. Starting with the original 1977 film in 2018 and The Empire Strikes Back in 2019, the adventures of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia were likewise brought to life as a theater production, utilizing the same innovation and diverse casting that Kris Hambrick and Joy DeLyria brought to Star Trek.
“People, when I tell them about this, are baffled at how anyone can adapt such an effects-heavy space war film into an outdoor theatrical play,” Greg Hatcher, a regularly volunteer for Outdoor Trek, wrote on Atomic Junk Shop after the premier of The Empire Strikes Back. “Hell, I was baffled when I first heard about it. But the Hello Earth company are beyond ingenious when it comes to using the space available in the park and figuring out costuming and props.”
For Hatcher, it is the shared experience of an audience raised on Star Trek and Star Wars that most resonates at a Hello Earth production. “These are stories we love and they are essentially modern folk tales at this point,” he wrote. “The show becomes a celebration of everything we liked about these stories in the first place. My favorite example of this from both last year and this year is when the characters of Threepio (Abby Pierce) and Artoo (Jamie Sumire Costantino) first appear on stage. Jamie does the entire thing on roller skates, and she has a little novelty whistle to approximate Artoo’s sound effects. The first time Artoo replies to Threepio with the trademark beep-boop-beep, the roar of delight from the audience is huge; YES, we are HERE for this, we are SO WITH YOU. After that it’s on rails.”
Just as the fans are there for Hello Earth, the production company is also there for the fans, whether it be the Star Trek variety and performances of Outdoor Trek, or Star Wars afficionados and Wars Outdoors. One may be set in the “Final Frontier” and the other “in a galaxy far, far away,” but the Pacific Northwest in general and Seattle in particular are ample stand-ins, adding a new dimension to geek culture fandom in the process.
Anthony Letizia