After the 'Beep-Beep'

For short plays inspired by Sputnik's launch 50 years ago, sky is not the limit

By Lisa Bornstein, Rocky Mountain News
October 11, 2007

Fifty years ago this month, a beach-ball-size hunk of metal went into orbit. It was the starter's pistol for the space race, and its name was Sputnik.

The event that led children to crouch under their desks is considered the stuff of theater at Theater Company of Lafayette. But don't look for literal re-creations of the satellite launch in The Deep Beep-Beep: Short Plays Inspired by Sputnik.

"It has to be inspired by Sputnik. That doesn't mean it has to be about it," says Edith Weiss, one of eight playwrights who contributed 10- minute scripts to the project.

Her play, Dancing with the Jihad, tells of a contemporary dance instructor with a challenging student.

"She (the instructor) believes that dancing is an expression of your soul, of your being. It represents freeing, like flying," Weiss says. "She believes there is no student she cannot reach.

"Then she gets a woman in a burkha, whose husband wants her to have a dance lesson, and she tries to teach the woman the tango, with not such good results."

Not a direct correlation to Sputnik, but Weiss says she doesn't like to hit things directly on the head.

"I think that Sputnik led directly to the arms race, to the fact that after World War II, we were flush with confidence and money, and for the Russians to go and beat us into space was such a hit on our prestige. It kind of pulled the rug out from under people's feet," she says.

"That led me to the feeling of being No. 1 and thinking that you know what's best for other countries and going in with power and might and a lot of weapons and not a lot of knowledge."

Sort of like a dance teacher who is sure that the tango is the key to everyone's joy.

The Deep Beep-Beep is Theater Company of Lafayette's second short-play project, following The Frankenstein Experiment. Artistic director Madge Montgomery invited playwrights she thought would bring a wide range of perspectives.

"I started doing some research about Sputnik and realized that it was this really complex story and would probably generate some really interesting plays," Montgomery says.

"I'm almost as old as Sputnik, but I was born December of '57. I grew up at a time when the space program was very important, so that piqued my interest, because the space program represented this incredible optimism that I think existed during that time, that it seemed like such a pure expression of what was good about America."

Montgomery is directing two plays for the program. D'edushka Korolev, by C.P. Stancich, is named for Sergei Korolev, the father of the Soviet space program. Stancich's play imagines a 1957 baby boom created during the panic over Sputnik, and a resultant support group for those children.

"It's kind of a clever way to show the ways in which, first of all, the Cold War is truly over, because these people now regard the father of the Russian space program as their spiritual grandfather," Montgomery says. "They're Red Scare babies."

Montgomery also directs Chosen, by Nora Douglass, which looks at efforts by the U.S. to hire former Nazi scientists for the space program.

"This play deals with a German scientist who's been brought over to the United States and is completely out of place and out of sync," Montgomery says. "It's his conversation with the woman who helped get him out of Germany into the United States. It really evokes the war and that dark element that led up to Sputnik."

Not all the results of Sputnik were negative.

"It really changed the direction of science education, and it really caught people off-guard," Montgomery says. "It really felt like the United States was invincible and when Sputnik beat us to the punch on that, it was really shocking."