Stage Notes: Wickets

Maria Irene Fornes was one of the most important and prolific playwrights to come out of the early off-off-Broadway scene. Her work was clear, original and feminist, and it set the stage for many female playwrights who came after her. For Wickets, Clove Galilee and Jenny Rogers have taken one of Fornes’ plays, Fefu and Her Friends, about a conference of eight female academics discussing the role of women in the workplace, and have set it in a flying airplane. The audience will view the play as if they are in flight (complete with outside-the-window-at-30,000-feet video visuals) and the playing area will be the aisles, and other areas of the airliner. Although the eight female actors will be stewardesses and the play is set in 1971, the play’s focus, the split between a woman’s private self and her public persona, remains the same. I spoke by conference call with co-director Galilee and Rogers, who came up with the concept and did the adaptation.

OK, Clove, you first.

Clove Galilee: The play was first done in 1971, but it is set in 1935. Maria was writing about her mother’s generation and feminism.

Jenny Rogers: We, as conceivers, had trouble entering the piece because it was about 1930s-40s academics. We had no direct connection to that time. We wanted to make it contemporary and meaningful to modern audiences. We thought, “What if we did a 35-year break?” And that’s how we got to 1971.

CL: So we were looking back at our mothers’ generation.

Tell me about the title. Are we talking about croquet?

CG: They play croquet in the play, but also a “wicket” is a doorway, a passageway to another reality.

Tom Murrin: So how did you get the show on an airplane?

JR: I was drawing wickets in a line one day and I realized that they looked like the fuselage of an airplane. And simultaneously we had been looking for a 1971 location for this group of women to get together. What if they were stewardesses? This puts them together, and the world they worked in was an extension of that.

I love the idea that the audience will be on an airplane in flight.

JR: Being in the airplane allows you to divide the plane’s space: first class, coach and individual compartments.

CG: One of the revolutionary parts of the play when it was first done is that it was done in a loft in SoHo. The first act took place in the living room, and then the audience was divided and moved around to other rooms during the play.

JR: It’s an immersive environment. The audience walks right onto the plane, they don’t see the theater. It’s onsite-specific. They sit down like they are going on a plane trip for the entirety of the show. So there’s no division between the audience and the play space. Conceptually, that works well because there’s the blur between private and public, self and space. For a flight attendant that’s very ambiguous. Private and public space during a trip; for them, it’s the same.

3LD Art & Technology Center, 80 Greenwich St., (212) 352-3101. Jan. 2- 25. $30.

Photo from The New York Times