L.A.-spawned spaceflight saga is launched in Portland
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If anyone doubts the difficulty of creating a play with beyond-stratospheric ambitions, consider that it took the United States’ space program a bit more than eight years to send a crew to the moon after President Kennedy’s initial 1961 challenge to achieve that feat -- and it has taken nearly as long for L.A. director and playwright Nancy Keystone to bring ‘Apollo,’ her epic about spaceflight, to the launching pad for its first complete staging.
The countdown ends Jan. 16 at Portland Center Stage in Oregon, when the fully realized ‘Apollo’ will have its premiere. The play’s first two sections, then dubbed ‘Apollo [Part 1] -- Lebensraum,’ premiered in 2005, as part of the inaugural season of the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City. By then, Keystone already had started pushing the work’s envelope, expanding it under a grant secured by the Portland theater, where she has directed four other plays since 2000, including her own adaptation of Sophocles’ ‘Antigone.’
The result will be a 3-1/2 hour, three-act evening encompassing ‘Lebensraum,’ ‘Gravity’ (a new title for what in L.A. was the second act of ‘Lebensraum’), and the brand-new ‘Liberation.’
The 12-member cast embodies dozens of roles, including escaped 1850s slave Dred Scott, Jules Verne, Mickey Mouse, Adolf Hitler and George Wallace; four of the actors are holdovers from the L.A. production.
The show at the Douglas dealt with the wonder of advances in rocket science -- and the moral rot beneath the surface due to key roles played by German refugees who helped drive the American space effort -- having previously learned their craft on the V2 rockets that the Nazis built with slave labor and that rained on Britain during World War II.
In ‘Liberation,’ Keystone and her Critical Mass Performance Group turn to the 1960s intersection of the space race and the civil rights movement, as a member of the NASA team at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama becomes the first African American to enroll, amid furor, at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Keystone, who founded the first version of Critical Mass as a UCLA undergraduate in 1985 and began winning notices in L.A. in 2000 with an acclaimed original work about the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, traces her inspiration for ‘Apollo’ to a 1990 story in the Los Angeles Times about Arthur Rudolph, chief architect of the Saturn V rocket that took American astronauts to the moon. He was then trying to clear his name after being forced to renounce his U.S. citizenship for using slave labor while building the V2. Keystone filed the clipping away, pulled it out late in 2001 when she was scrounging for a new project and got going on the research for her play.
There was no hurrying it along, she said Monday from Portland, because the Critical Mass method calls for emphasizing movement along with speaking the script, and ‘the way we work is very labor intensive and collaborative.’
Gordon Davidson was in charge of Center Theatre Group when ‘Apollo [Pt. 1] -- Lebensraum’ was picked to help usher in the Douglas. Keystone said she has been in touch with the company’s current boss, Michael Ritchie, and Diane Rodriguez, who is in charge of new play production for CTG, in hopes they’ll see the finished play in Portland and consider staging it in L.A. Beyond that, she says, the goal is to take the show on tour.
-- Mike Boehm
Top photo: Actors aim skyward in a scene from the L.A.-spawned ‘Apollo’ at Portland Center Stage. Credit: Efren Delgadillo Jr. / Portland Center Stage.
