Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? And Terminator 2 Live On Stage

By Brent McKnight | Updated

This article is more than 2 years old

Do Androids Dream of Electric SheepStage shows based on popular movies are always a good idea. We’re not talking about big time productions, like The Producers on Broadway, I mean things like Evil Dead: The Musical and Re-Animator: The Musical. Things that are a little more on the fringe. About ten or twelve years ago in Seattle a group staged Point Break Live, which is apparently now a regular thing, where the Johnny Utah role was played by a different, randomly selected audience member each and every night. It was the best thing I’ve ever seen, all three times. The latest installment in these games is a production of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, not to mention a group that recreates Terminator 2: Judgment Day using only lines from Shakespeare.

The basis for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Do Androids Dream has been adapted into a stage play. According to reports, this production is a more faithful adaptation of Dick’s novel than the film version, and deals with some of the author’s favorite themes like questioning reality and the search for what it truly means to be human a human being.

Here’s how the play describes itself:

In the dark we hear a lone electric cello. We discover a crumbling, tattered, discordant planet earth, decades after most of her original inhabitants have become extinct or moved on to greener pastures on the red planet. Those humans who remain are either hopelessly irradiated… or not human at all.

Reviews have been mixed, with some critics praising the show, and others being left wanting. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? runs through October 19 at Sacred Fools theater in Los Angeles. Be forewarned, the production features partial nudity and gunfire, so you have that to look forward to.

A few years back, the Husky Jackal Theater launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund their production of Terminator: The Second, an adaptation of James Cameron’s Terminator 2 where all of the dialogue was replaced with the words of William Shakespeare. Only proper nouns, pronouns, and verb tenses were changed.

Not only is that an amazing concept, the execution looks pretty damn fantastic to boot. After tons of research, the choices sound like they found the perfect lines to fit the various situations. I can’t imagine the amount of work that went into this project, and while I’m glad it wasn’t me, I certainly am glad that someone took the time and effort to make all of this happen.

The play made its debut in October of 2011, but today brings good news for those of us who weren’t fortunate to catch the Nashville run. A video of the performance is in the post-production stages, and will be ready for public consumption on November 1.