excerpted from on-line article
Hello Theatre Goers,
In October, the small theatre community has largely been concerned with the Edge of the World Theatre Festival and its offerings...
Edge Redux/The L.A. History Project: That EdgeFest has made it to four years with a fifth on the drawing board is worth applauding... The Los Angeles History Project (LAHP) continues to be one of the Festival's success stories. This year's edition was held on a sunny Saturday at the Autry Museum in Griffith Park which brought a large, appreciative crowd for three pieces in various stages of development...
It is difficult to describe the second piece, APOLLO, without overdoing the superlatives. Director Nancy Keystone is justifiably renowned for her meticulously researched and exceptionally performed movement pieces. In past efforts, she has explored the life and times of poet Anna Akhmatova as well as the Antigone story. APOLLO chronicles the rise of the United States space program under the guiding eyes and hands of captured German rocket scientists. It starts as Hermann Oberth fuels the imagination of a new generation of young Germans who then get absorbed into the Reich's weapon's program. Dreams of space travel morph to gleaming vengeance weapons built in hell by slave labor. A hot war ends, a cold war begins and the intellectual capital is quietly divided between U.S. and the Soviet Union with history rationalized according to need. Many playwrights have attempted to feature technical ideas and technical people into their works, often putting mini seminars into the middle of dramatic action or by dropping in buzzwords for effect. Keystone's use of movement bypasses that and is especially suited to showing multiple sides of complex problems at once. The mini-seminar on rocketry is blended with young men being consumed by the possibilities of rockets to he moon and beyond. A survivor of the Peenemunde factory pleads facts in vain as Operation Paperclip whitewashes the histories of his bosses, eagerly absorbed into the postwar American defense effort. APOLLO succeeds as an indictment and Keystone's simultaneous accomplishment is capturing the obsession that drives so many technical people, their desire to see their project through, their commitment to ideas over long times, funding miseries, projects done off to the side and stashed until their time is ripe. The Los Angeles connection to all this is explored through the then dominant aerospace industry and the Think Tanks that housed many of the rehabilitated German rocketeers. There is also an amazing sequence in which Walt Disney entices Wernher von Braun to appear on his TV show. The play's sole female performer, Valerie Spencer, serves as puppeteer and voice to Mickey Mouse who, like his creator, is fascinated by the possibilities of it all. While billed as a work-in-progress, this was as fine, as complete, and as exquisite a piece of theatre as has been seen in L.A. over the past three years. Combining three plays in one day also brought in the 'buzz,' prize but elusive energy sought by all arts organizations. The plaza of the Autry museum was full of theatregoers discussing plays they had seen, making recommendations to one another an, more importantly whipping our their cellphones to make reservations for the rest of the weekend.
Online Review: Apollo
by Ravi Narasimhan