Deep Beep-Beep: Theater Company of Lafayette presents eight short plays about Sputnik
By Mark Collins
September 28, 2007
LAFAYETTE — Fifty years ago this week, the Soviet Union launched a small orb into space.
Say it out loud today and "Sputnik" sounds cute. Like something you'd name your dog. But when Sputnik — the first space satellite to take flight above the Earth's atmosphere — beeped its way around the globe in 1957, it struck fear into the heart of America.
The Space Age had officially begun, and the Soviets had beaten the Americans to the punch. It was also the first punch in the Cold War.
U.S. politicians seized an opportunity. If the Soviets could launch a round metallic object the size of a basketball to orbit the Earth, bombs dropping from the sky could be next.
"Sputnik was the turning point for Americans," says Colorado playwright Edith Weiss. "They had that great victory in World War II and they became a superpower. And this was the first sting to their confidence — the fact that the Russians had put this up first."
Weiss' play "Dancing With The Jihad" is one of eight 10-minute plays that are part of "The Deep Beep-Beep: Short Plays Inspired By Sputnik," produced by the Theater Company of Lafayette. The show begins Oct. 6 with a special presentation at Fiske Planetarium.
TCL Artistic Director Madge Montgomery doesn't remember Sputnik — she was born soon after the small spacecraft was launched in 1957. But in researching the spacecraft and the late 1950s, she found similarities to what's happening in today's cultural climate.
"I think it has a lot of parallels to our current age," Montgomery says. "We're dealing with a foreign enemy that creates a lot of fear like they were then."
Is terrorism the new communism? The play "If This Had Been A Real Emergency," by Susan Hickey, draws the comparison.
In the play, two pre-teen girls, one living in 1962, the other in 2007, have a conversation. The topic turns to what's troubling their country during their respective eras.
"As the two girls are relating back and forth, you can see what their parents have instilled in them — racism and bigotry and just this general fear," says the play's director, Jackie Tisinai. "And as they're talking back and forth, you see they don't really know what they're talking about. They're just parroting their parents.
"What the playwright is saying is, 'No, this is a real emergency. We're handing down racism. Fear of the unknown.'"
"Deep Beep-Beep" isn't all "gloom doom-doom," though. The evening of short plays opens with a farcical peek into the White House bedroom the evening Sputnik is launched from Soviet soil.
In playwright Rob Gerlach's "SPUT-NIGHT," First Lady Mamie Eisenhower keeps fielding phone calls from panicked government officials, but refuses to wake her sleeping husband, "Ike," because he needs his rest.
When TCL commissioned the plays in its Sputnik project, the theater company gave the writers license to come up with whatever inspired them. Gerlach, born in 1938, was always struck by Mamie Eisenhower.
"She was a lot of fun," Gerlach says. "She always dressed in pink and had cute little bangs. She was an interesting character."
Having Gerlach, a New York-based playwright and actor with Broadway credits, on board the project is a coup for TCL. Gerlach has family in Lafayette and became acquainted with the local theater company when TCL produced his whodunit farce "Something's Afoot" two years ago.
Gerlach says he was drawn to the project because of its subject matter, and also for the opportunity to write in the short form.
TCL is no stranger to producing ambitious projects that involve new 10-minute plays inspired by the same topic, written by different authors. The theater company commissioned a dozen short plays in 2005 for its "Frankenstein Experiment," then included them as part of its 2006 season.
For "Deep Beep-Beep," Montgomery enlisted eight playwrights with whom she was familiar, and who she thought would bring different styles to the project.
The other playwrights whose work appears in "Deep Beep-Beep" include Front Range writers Nora Douglass, David McClinton and John Thornberry, David Golden, from Seattle and C.P. Stancich, from Tacoma, Wash.
Four of the plays from "Deep Beep-Beep" will be staged beginning at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Fiske Planetarium on the University of Colorado campus. (All eight will be performed together at Lafayette's Mary Miller Theater Oct. 12 through 27.)
The Fiske show comes on the heels of lectures on Thursday and Friday evening by Keith Gleason, manager at Sommers-Bausch Observatory at CU, about Sputnik and how the Space Age helped turn Boulder into a hub for space science research.
While Sputnik created fear during its orbit, it also prompted lots of positive things, Montgomery notes. She sees parallels between the Sputnik era and today, but she sees differences, too. Sputnik left a sense of positive anticipation in its wake. Montgomery doesn't sense much of that these days.
"I think in the late '50s there was a lot of hope that was kind of a counterpoint to the fear," she says. "The space program kind of expressed that hope for Americans. That was a glorious time when we were exploring how to send a man to the moon. That just embodied all the positive things about America — a sense of adventure, courage, that sort of thing.
"And we don't have that same sense of hope today. We have all the fear, which is just kind of paralyzing, but I don't seem the same gesture of hope that emerged out of Sputnik."
Contact Camera Theater Critic Mark Collins at 303-473-1369 or BDCTheater@comcast.net.