[ssba]
The Woman Who Went To Space As A Man
Reviewed by Paul Birchall
Son of Semele Ensemble
Through November 18
There’s nothing like a literary trickster. Before Google, a writer could get away with inventing and reinventing his or her image to suit his or her career. One genius at this sort of thing was James Tiptree, Jr., the prolific mid-20th century science fiction author responsible for a career filled with ferocious, testosterone-driven stories and novellas. Tiptree was, in reality, female writer Alice Sheldon, a married former intelligence officer and psychologist. Her stories often artfully explored issues of gender identification and association, and her life was perhaps even more an embodiment of feminist intent and rebellion.
Sheldon’s life and her art are perfect material for a theatrical piece. If one were to meld her stories with her biography, the result could be mind-bending: Even if presented in a straightforward, unadorned fashion, the crazy facts and content should speak for themselves. Sadly, writer-director Maureen Husky’s rendering of Sheldon’s life story is a confusing mélange that combines messy performance art gimmicks with a numbing, Wikipedia-fact-style presentation of the author’s biography. While the subject matter is intrinsically interesting, what comes across is a hodgepodge that offers little sense of Tiptree/Sheldon’s genius.
The play opens with Sheldon (Betsy Moore) contemplating suicide, after the revelation that her painstakingly created pseudononymous persona has been “outed.” A beautiful alien creature in a lovely green dress (Megan Rippey) appears and advises Sheldon not to do it. She reflects on Sheldon’s life: Her mother (Anneliese Euler), a renowned travel writer, takes young Alice on a trip to Africa. Alice then goes to college and falls in love with her roommate Tass (Emma Zekes Green), but decides to join the CIA, during which tenure she meets and marries husband Ting (Alex Wells). She becomes an author and, to break into the sci fi biz, creates the persona of James Tiptree, Jr., who is played by a dapper, Remington Steel-esque rogue (James Ferraro).
Characters flow and drift across the stage, sometimes floating like they’re in outer space while other times moving in slow motion. Composer Yuval Ron provides some pretentiously atonal musical numbers; these seemingly are meant to sound like Phillip Glass atmospherics, but they are just confusing. Very little of the staging makes much sense and the stylized movements have the effect of reducing the work to prosaic clichés. Worse, the stale imagery distances us from any emotional connection to the material, which boils down to little more than a set of biographical facts better relayed by reading the writer’s biography.
Performances are adequate, though Huskey’s writing never imbues these fascinating people with the personality they need to shine. The more thankless roles are performed by the chorus, who are left with the unfortunate chore of rolling around the stage in slow motion, or crawling through designer Eli Smith’s mystifying set of clotheslines snaking about the stage like spider webs (there are no spiders in the production). It’s clear what Huskey is trying to do here, which is to present Sheldon as a feminist heroine — but this could easily have been done without this flatfooted surreal approach. One suspects Sheldon, a steadfastly matter-of-fact stylist, is likely to have found as disconnecting as we do.
Son of Semele Theater, 3301 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles; Tues. Nov 6 and 13 at 7:00 pm, Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m.; through November 18. (818)-841-5422 or www.sonofsemele.org. Running time: 95 minutes with no intermission.
