Theater Review: "Flight" - A Staged Reading

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 19 May 2011 05:00

Written by Marion DS Dreyfus

Written by Jacqueline Wolf-Enrione
Directed by Peter Von Berg
Read by Tony Newfield, Elizabeth Keefe, Stephen Innocenzi, Michael Citriniti, Leslie Alexander, Sherry Skinker

Interweaving research, news history, fact-based hypotheses and conjecture, playwright Jackie Wolf-Enrione has created an entertaining, multivariate drama with great drafts of adventure, suspense, romance -- even dawning horror -- from the inexplicable explosion of an American aircraft in the mid-1990s. Flight 800 "exploded" for no discernible reason.

While opinions vary as to causology, the playwright has stitched together a plausible theoretical rationale that suggests malfeasance by government -- a reasonable option -- or foreign malign influence, an even more likely scenario.

Pilot error? Testing misadventure? Secret government experiments? Foreign influence? Terror misfire? Deliberate missile strike? We are taken along the ride of the doughty protagonist-reporter as she penetrates the baffles and barriers erected to keep John Q Public from discovering which of these caused the explosion.

Like a charged lift from a Tom Clancy novel, Wolf-Enrione peoples her script with a determined, incredibly persistent investigative journalist, sundry government functionaries, a host of witnesses and electrifying ‘ordinary people’ (pained parents, mourning children) who are, fortunately for audiences, cleverer and more articulate than average folks are. The script is a constant delight, witty repartée alternating with probing dialogue that advances the process of unpacking what looks to be a gigantic cover-up.

Where the artist picks up from the factual evidences available (all too fleetingly to the public-at-large), and adds her own strong military and journalistic suppositions, is aligned with the kind of story-making of All the President’s Men (1976), The Insider (1999) and similar ratiocinative entrées.

Wolf’s familiarity with military jargon, technical explosives and weaponry is impressive, handled with terse deftness by her dramatis personae, many of whom -- like Leon Panetta and others from that era to this -- are real government appointees of the past through to the present.

She also serves up a slim, useful romance to swing the audience acclimated to love pairings into narratives of this type -- first, realms of buddy commitment, and then love. But the focus is scarcely deflected beyond the emerging themes of whitewashing and cover-up on a dark, uncomfortably splashy level.

Ironically, with such tales becoming daily fodder, SEALS downing the terror mastermind in Abbottabad, and Christian ministers predicting the end of the world within the month from unpremeditated end-of-the-world "earthquakes," Wolf-Enrione is not bandying the fanciful or rhetorical.

We are quite likely being served similar unreconstructed schemes and ploys on a daily basis, the which might emerge into ‛transparency‛ only a decade or more hence. Or maybe never.

Wolf-Enrione has crafted a provocative, plausible and nagging theoretical device that reminds us never to sit back and just nod our heads in bovine acquiescence to events that strike us as peculiar, illogical, irrational or possibly dangerous. Even if some government flack mumbles on a stack of affidavits what he thinks we are liable to accept.

The scaffolding Wolf-Enrione builds upon, while not yet in its ultimate crystallization, is all too real. It is up to the viewer to discern and decide what he or she can see beyond the bureaucratic persiflage that cloaks so much of what citizens are perhaps entitled to.

Marion DS Dreyfus
©2011

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