The Villagers offer this Jane Anderson play to open their Black Box Series.
By: Stuart Duncan
If there were such a thing as a stagewriter’s union, one of the hot items on the agenda might well be the problem of television writers trying to adjust their scripts to the stage. The latest to try is Jane Anderson, who achieved some small measure of success with an HBO effort about a Texas-cheerleader-murdering mom.
Her instinct for stagecraft seems to be in serious question when you consider Defying Gravity, offered by The Villagers as the season opener in the Black Box Series. A talented cast of seven and a hard-working director try like fury to rescue the evening, but the material is just plain dreadful. Ms. Anderson has taken the story of the tragic ride of Challenger 11 that’s the one that blew up one minute and 18 seconds into the flight, killing the entire crew, including a school teacher named Christa McAuliffe and given us a 90-minute, episodic bunch of maudlin trash.
She opens her narrative with a character who claims he is French painter Claude Monet and has the slides of European cathedrals to prove it. She then introduces the teacher, her 5-year-old daughter, now grown up, a couple from Oregon who are rambling around the country in search of things to see, a NASA ground-crew worker, and a female barkeep who works in a café near the launching pad.
We then jump around, flipping time and location like so much confetti. We see the young daughter, planning to give her mom a cherry Lifesaver but hoping to get all the pocket lint off "or else she won’t come back." Or the daughter losing her mom in a supermarket and panicking. Or the couple finding a lifesaver on Cocoa Beach and tossing it away: "It’s not from the shuttle."
Perhaps worst of all is the Monet character visiting with the teacher while she is strapped into her launch seat and attempting to help her unstrap so she can make a cell phone call to her daughter. All this with music swelling and fading.
Don’t blame the cast: Alison Bryne, a fine actress, is wasted as the teacher, confined to looking professional in the classroom and a NASA uniform. Deborah Anderson (no relation) handles the daughter with great aplomb and considerable sympathy. Art Hickey plays Monet without reducing us to giggles, which is quite an achievement. Rich Kline and Diane Bloise actually make great sense as the couple in search of adventure. David Eppley plays the ground crewman with dignity, in spite of dialogue that makes him guilty for the tragedy. And Yaasmeen Mariyam plays the female barkeep with a nice sense of humor.
Tina Lee and Scott Hill have co-directed (and even cut out some of the garbage from the script) to keep things moving. A moving target is harder to hit, so that’s a clever idea. We still are left with a moral, lots of unpolished ideas and a wish that perhaps the author could have stuck to the murderous cheerleading mom.
Defying Gravity plays at The Villagers Theatre, 475 DeMott Lane, Somerset, through Oct. 26. Performances: Fri.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 3 p.m. Admission costs $10. For information, call (732) 873-2710. On the Web: www.villagerstheatre.com