reprinted in part
...The second piece, APOLLO, written and directed by Nancy Keystone, already appeared as a workshop at this year's A.S.K. Common Ground Festival and will again be workshopped at the Skirball Center in Spring 2004 as part of a touring exhibition, "The Life and Times of Albert Einstein," and will premiere in L.A. in 2004. That's a lot of time and opportunity for development, particularly for a piece that is already in such fantastic shape.
Not surprisingly, considering her past work, Keystone brought a purely physical, ensemble-based interpretation to the events surrounding the recruitment of Nazi scientists by the U.S government for the development of a space program. Even with bare-bones technical elements - cello accompaniment by Greg Adamson of Randy Tico's music and projections by Brian Lilienthal - Keystone's bold imagery and humor burned brightly. This is going to be one exciting show when it's complete.
The company was flawless - including the sweet, towering Hugo Armstrong, the impressively nimble Richard Gallegos, the stylishly sharp Valerie Spencer, and most of all, the impishly wild-eyed Andrew Wheeler. There were too many great sequences to enumerate. Particularly delicious however, were an early launching of paper airplanes by the boyish scientists, a Woman on the Moon pitch combined with Hermann Oberth's frenzied explanation of the hard science involved in a possible trip to the satellite, and a brilliantly hilarious scene in which Walt Disney wooed Wernher von Braun to the small screen with the help of his little friend, Mickey Mouse.
Keystone's central concern - that the triumphs of the U.S. Space Program were based on the accomplishments made possible by the brutal Nazi labor camps - doesn't have as much travel as a richer idea at work here: the often-destructive consequences of men whose dreams deny the reality in front of their faces. Nevertheless, this is a piece we're very much looking forward to in future incarnations.
BackStage West: Fully Grown
In its third year, EdgeFest's L.A. history Project comes into its own.