Listen.
A new ninety-minute collaborative musical theater piece called 1000 Airplanes on the Roof is touring the country, having had its American premiere at Philadelphia's American Music Theater Festival on September 21. The music is by Philip Glass, the text by Henry David Hwang, and set designs by Jerome Sirlin. It is an extraordinary piece--an eloquent act of empathy with the human condition.
It begins with the sound of airplane engines, building and building skyscrapers of sound into an assault on earthling ears. In its shattering, Senssurround effect, it's almost unbearable. Then Glass' music, a persistent rhythmic underpinning in the synthesizers, typically Glassian in the aggression of its repetition, begins, followed by the amplified woodwinds, unresolved and searching. After the maddening concussion of the engines, the music is like a balm.
A person with the Kafkaesque appellation of M appears on the dauntingly raked stage. I say a person, since Hwang, not coincidentally the author of M. Butterfly, has written the monodrama to be alternately enacted by a man and a woman. At the Philadelphia premiere I saw and heard a woman, Jodi Long, take on the brutal role, which requires her to hold the stage alone for an hour and a half.
1000 Airplanes on the Roof begins with M relating her meeting a young man in a copy shop in Manhattan--although, M informs us, she once lived in a converted farmhouse where the air was clear and the human traffic less congested (is Hwang hinting she was once a flower child?). M calls the young man her boyfriend and soon enough admits "boyfriend" is really "a glorification of the word," since they actually had only one date.
Desperate for Meaning
People in this, Hwang's brave new world, cling to the little they can and try to magnify its meaning in a life that has little meaning. M's memory of lying in her boyfriend's embrace is a poignant one: "In the sound of his life I would drift off to sleep."
Surrounding M and behind her, reaching into the recesses of the stage, are Sirlin's halographic projections (nine projectors are employed in the piece), sometimes abstracted, at other times quite specific--such as the skyscape of New York, or the brownstone in which M has an apartment--thrown onto a series of cutout panels to provide the illusion of depth. They are subjective images, appearing to emanate more from the poetic mind than from objective reality. At times M treads carefully along the ledges of the tall buildings: Living in New York, where life pulses at its most intense, is often a high-wire act, where you work without a net.
Like the best art, and this wondrous piece certainly falls within that category, 1000 Airplanes is metaphor at its most discursive and resonant. For about twenty minutes or so, Hwang's text relies on the audience's faith until the point at which M, her body glowing, has apparently been taken up into a spaceship by "visitors" from another world, subjected to physical and mental experiments she can barely articulate, and returned to earth with the caveat that she must not remember these events, that this never really
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