Chilling Out Over Today’s Urban Decay : A couple seeking to escape into a better world lose their heads in the musical ‘Frozen Futures’

Blame it on the fact that he once wrote science fiction stories, but while brainstorming one day, playwright Michael R. Farkash thought he had come across a nifty idea for surviving World War III.

OK, Beam us up, Michael.

“Well, it could be either by time travel,” says the quiet, unassuming writer, relaxing in his North Hollywood living room, “or by cryogenic suspension.”

The former, of course, belongs in the realm of fantasy; the latter in current but very esoteric science. Cryogenic suspension is a high-tech method of freezing the body and preserving it for an appointed time in the future, when the body would be “defrosted” and revived.

Where most writers would automatically think movie, Farkash--whose body of work flaunts its resistance to classification--thought play . Then, with further drafts and an obvious relish for high-risk ventures, he thought musical .

The result, after a 2 1/2-year gestation, is “Frozen Futures,” at Theatre/Theater in Hollywood. As opposed to cryogenics’ upscale profile (a good cryogenic job nowadays runs between five and six figures), “Frozen Futures” is, as Farkash likes to quote Theatre/Theater’s artistic director Jeff Murray, “low-tech.”

The farcical odyssey of Santa Monicans Sid and Beth Langdon (played by Richard Fox and Paty Lombard) begins in today’s urban decay, in which freezing one’s head, all in the hope of a better future, might be the best way out. The joke, though, is on Sid and Beth, who wake up in a totalitarian near-future where defrosted heads are a dime a dozen.

“This idea of jumping across time, cheating death,” remarks Farkash, “is the vanity of the Egyptian Pharaohs all over again. I’m making fun of this kind of vanity that takes over people who think they deserve to live at the expense of others.”

Indeed, in his early drafts, Farkash, 39, had Sid and Beth ultimately separated for good. This mirrored the sort of funny, macabre plays that Farkash, a Cal State Northridge graduate, has written since the mid-’80s: short works for the Padua Hills Playwrights’ Festival; “The Fishery” (paired in 1987 with Susan Champagne’s “Honeymoon” at the old Wallenboyd theatre); the outlandish 1989 black comedy “Perpetual Care”; and last year, his darkly sardonic look at a crazed deli owner run amok, “Meat Dreams.”

When asked which Los Angeles writers deserve more attention than they’re getting, playwright John Steppling readily mentions Farkash’s name. “What I love about Mike’s writing,” offers actor and “Meat Dreams” director Barry Livingston, “is his surprisingly twisted, poetic language.”

But perhaps out of a fear of becoming known as a laureate of the weird, Farkash signed up in 1989 for the Los Angeles Theatre Center’s short-lived musical theater workshop, and met musician Miriam Cutler, an ex-member of the cult band The Mystic Knights of the Oingo-Boingo.

Neither had ever dabbled in musicals before, and found themselves surrounded by, in Cutler’s view, “fairly conventional musical comedy people.” Like two odd ducks spotting each other across a pond, Farkash and Cutler put their heads together--he with his cryogenic scenario, she with a palette of musical ideas, and fashioned a 15-minute workshop version of “Frozen Futures.”

Although Farkash now says that “a 15-minute musical just isn’t very satisfying, because, like one-act plays, nobody takes them very seriously,” their micro-musical received the kind of strong response in a public performance at LATC to keep them developing the piece into a full-length work.

As time went on, Cutler, in her 30s, found that she had to put the project aside for more lucrative work. Farkash himself continues to juggle his writing for theater and film with a part-time stint as entertainment writer for the Simi Valley Enterprise.

But instead of putting “Frozen Futures” in the freezer, Cutler handed the musical duties over to a composer pal, her Echo Park neighbor Keith Bilderbeck.

It turns out that Bilderbeck, 32, a Florida native, was peculiarly qualified for the job. A sound-effects editor for “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” he had majored in physics at Florida State University and fashioned an opera for Florida public television titled “Spacey Juan.”

“When I did gigs in Florida,” explains Bilderbeck, sitting with Cutler in the Theatre/Theater lobby, “my stage name was Juan Fumar, so I gave this character the name and turned him into a musician who entertains for bored astronauts deep in outer space. It’s completely coincidental that I keep finding myself writing music for science fiction shows, so it’s a good thing that I really like science fiction.”

So does Cutler, but with a detectably different philosophical slant from Farkash’s. “The great thing about science fiction,” she remarks, “is that it provides the chance to imagine a hopeful view of the future.” But while Farkash acknowledges that Cutler prodded him toward a happy ending, he feels much more dubious about What’s Ahead.

“Our only hope is to transform in some way,” he notes, adding with a cautionary pause, “but it may happen in a way that I call ‘genetic devolution,’ more of an animal state. In science fiction, the future is always the present disguised, so I suppose it isn’t accidental that there are these sinister, dictatorial forces at work on the fringes of the show’s story. Those forces are out there today.”

In the early days of the show’s run, other forces--the critics--have not looked so kindly upon “Frozen Futures.” (Variety: “There are comical props and trendy references, but there’s nothing at the center of it all. In fact, there is no center.”) Cutler, for one, discounts the pans, noting that The Mystic Knights used to get the same kind of reviews: “I think reviewers sometimes take things a little too seriously. But when you’re doing what I call guerrilla theater, you expect that kind of reaction.”

Nevertheless, the team of Farkash, Cutler and Bilderbeck is in the middle of retinkering their “Future.” Harking back to an earlier phase, when Cutler’s and Bilderbeck’s songs were primarily based on phrases or words in Farkash’s dialogue, the trio is now, as Bilderbeck puts it, “getting back to the story. In the first readings we did, the characters had an innocence that we got away from. It became more burlesque. That’s getting toned down now.”

Farkash admits to habitually wanting to refine--and refine again--his plays, “but at a certain point, you’ve got to put a stop to it. If I included everything that’s been suggested to me about this show, we’d have a real epic on our hands.” He put a sarcastic spin on that last phrase.

So, this playwright’s way of Just Saying No to further rewrites is simple. He’s busily involved with collaborator and fellow Padua playwright Kelly Stuart on “Fontana Produce,” a drama about gay bashing.

There’s nothing like the present to get you out of the future.