the man who fell to
earth
by Douglas Messerli
Paul Sand (writer and director) The Pilot Who Crashed the Party / Odyssey Theatre, April 28, 2022
Comedian, actor, and
playwright Paul Sand’s most recent play, The Pilot Who Crashed the
Party—which received its premier workshop performance last evening, April
29, at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles—might be best described as an odd mix
of the absurdist-like work of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (undergoing
a Broadway revival even as I write) and a late Edward Albee play such as Me
Myself and I.
Like Wilder’s world, Sand presents us a gathering of individuals who, like most of us today after two years of a pandemic disease and a war in Ukraine, may soon find that we have “come through”—the phrase that D. H. Lawrence uses to describe his and his lovers’ psychological and emotional survival—a number of individual crises; but in surviving, each of them are now focusing very much on Albee’s “me myself and I,” fixated on their superficial lives despite their closely knit little society.
The
occasion of their rainy night celebration is the 50th birthday of Sally
(Jacqueline Wright) who is hosting the event in her Santa Monica Mountains
home. With her is her housemate/companion Daniel (Lee Boek), best friends movie
actor Laura (Megan Rippey) and Laura’s ex-husband, a bisexual gadfly Ilo (Irish
Giron), and their friend Valerie (Debra Lane) who seems to be in charge of the
meal and celebratory cake. Sally has hired a violinist (Yennie Lam) to
accompany the evening meal and after dinner games, at which point the audience
enters into their presence.
The
game they appear to be playing as the work begins is a kind of live-version of
the old board game Clue, in which the celebrants must guess which
of their party has just killed one of their guests, in this case Ilo playing
the dead man, a knife in his back as he sits dead at the dinner table.
This
is clearly Daniel’s forte as he picks up an almost invisible
thread from the oriental carpet, examines it, and traces it back to the red tab
of a Band-Aid which Sally has placed upon her finger after cutting herself on
the knife. But before they can truly close the case, the dead man announces
that he simply has to go to pee, rises, and closes down the game.
Once
more the night has become a rather dreary one, despite their clever talk and
games, since the rainstorm seems to be one of those that descends upon the city
only once every other decade. The creek below the mountain upon which Sally’s
house sits has already overflowed its banks and turned into a torrent of mud,
and the houselights are blinking of and on.
And
as if a heavenly force had determined that very night to punish this little
Sodom, the large-windowed villa is buzzed by a small airplane several times
before crashing into the house, a wing landing upon the very dinner table where
moments early they were all gathered. A moment later the pilot, dazed and
confused knocks on their door. At the very moment of the crash they also lose
their lighting and the use of their single telephone, cellphone reception in
the mountains being unavailable.
Before
he can ever explain who he is, the young man (Sol Mason) collapses, as the
startled houseguests and their hosts carry him off to a bedroom and Sally
rushes to read her medical encyclopedia about remedies for brain hemorrhages.
Fortunately,
the young aviator awakens to explain that his name is Anthony but that he can
remember nothing else. He knows the names for objects and their purpose, but
can’t recall whether or not he has a home or in it a worried wife. He seems to
be convinced that it was his car that crashed into the house, not an airplane,
particularly since he has never flown as far as he recalls and, as Erica Jong
explains it, has a fear of flying.
Realizing
that with the storm none of them will be able to leave that night, Sally
assigns the bedrooms to each guest, and arranges that they alternate a watch
over their incredible guest.
That
quirky plot device allows them each to get better acquainted with their
handsome guest, as one by one they tell him their histories accompanied by the
dramatic musical renditions of the hired girl, who herself attempts to follow
the pilot around and charm him a bit like a gypsy violinist in a Hungarian
restaurant.
Their
stories, obviously, also help us to get to know the characters better, although
it quickly becomes apparent that the tales they tell, even though they appear
to be autobiographical, reveal more about the inner imaginations of these
figures than their true lives.
Sally,
for example, tells him a long yarn of a romantic adventure she has had in a
small Brazilian town with a gaucho, replete with a white horse and a large
silver buckle circling his denim pants. The tale sounds more like the kind of
narrative one might hear on the famed Brazilian TV soap operas, so popular in
South America, more than a real-life experience. But it is certainly
entertaining and perfect for actor Wright’s flair for the theatricalization of
the old kind of melodramatic thee-a-ter!! She quickly
becomes convinced that the unknown guest, like her, is a true romantic,
suggesting—when they later play the game of “guessing the guest’s name”— that
he has to an “ Erik.”
Down
to earth opera singer Valerie believes it must be Bart, while Ilo, who keeps
the young man entertained with stories of his and Laura’s travels through Italy
where, he claims, they served as lovers to a wealthy polyamorous couple,
insists that their guest is obviously gay, even if he hasn’t yet come out of
the closet.
Laura insists that, like herself, he is deeply suffering inside,
having been tortured by having lost, as she has 2 ½ times, someone whom she/he
deeply loved.
But
Daniel, who disappears throughout much of this play, has the strangest theory
as to the origin of the young man. He insists that he is a threat to them all,
having come to kill them; and, confronting the young man, he claims to not only
know who he is but why he has been sent, which he maintains is from an FBI or
CIA cell, knowledge he has gleaned from having served in Peru and other spots
where spies have trained and been assigned. He knows, so he claims, because he
himself has served just such a role, and now they have sent someone to get rid
of him.
His
paranoia becomes so overwhelming that ultimately he pulls a gun on the stranger
threatening to kill him, the pilot saved only when Daniel’s friends restrain
him and take away the gun.
As
morning finally arrives and the storm abates, the pilot’s wife, Bess (Caroline
Quigley) arrives to claim her errant husband, who she insists has long been a
reckless adventurer, wrecking several airplanes and disappearing for months at
a time. But he is also a well-known orthodontist with boys and a large dog at
home. The moment he sees his wife, the Pilot remembers everything of his
basically banal life—except for his adventurous moments of course. And he now
has no memory of his amorous adventures that night with Sally.
The
couple leave behind the stunned party guests, hardly believing the truth about
the pilot who has so seemingly altered their own lives, Sally is particularly
shocked. So disappointed with truth, they can hardly imagine that the woman
really was his wife, that he has kids and a large dog home awaiting him. And
then...well they now can’t find Daniel. Where could he have gotten to? They
check out the entire house, the garage, and from the large window they search
the landscape below without finding him. Maybe Daniel was not as paranoid as it
seems. Perhaps Daniel was right?
If
the play begins sounding a bit like Wilder mixed with Albee, by the end we
perceive that it is perhaps much closer to an earlier “absurdist-like” play of
the 20th century, a work that, as the darkness of World War I began to settle
over a frivolous European world, would eventually change everything, creating
the angst and chaos that helped, in turn, bank the flames for World War II and
its aftermath. That play, George Bernard Shaw’s great comedic drama, Heartbreak
House (1920), spoke of a heartbreak very different from the kind of
which Valerie speaks, of a universal devastation of the soul the likes of which
we are confronting still today.
We doubt the disappearance of one seemingly mad man from the
Santa Monica Mountains will have much effect outside of this mad household, but
symbolically it expresses just how little it takes to spark terror among allies
when one recalls that it simply took the assassination of the Archduke Franz
Ferdinand Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne by a Bosnian
Serb student, Gavrilo Pincip—the Duke journeying through Sarajevo,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, recently annexed by Austria-Hungry—to bring about the War
that killed 15 to 24 million people, although perhaps a quarter of the
imprisoned soldiers may have been killed by the flu pandemic of 1918.
And
what if Daniel is truly a CIA spy, the pilot an interloper sent to get rid of
him? It doesn’t take much for madness to embrace any individual, as these
birthday celebrants make clear, particularly when people begin to remake others
over in their own images of themselves.
Sand’s play perhaps needs a little tightening of its various
entanglements, and maybe another director or Sand himself will be able to
energize his other performers to balance the mercurial performance of Wright;
as it is she tends to dominate a work in which the other talented actors seem
waiting their turn to shine. Finally, as wonderfully frightening as the rain,
lightning, and thunder is upon the stage, it needs to be tuned down just a
little so that we can fully hear the witty script.
But
these are minor quibbles about a play that is quite remarkable otherwise. I
think this would also make a perfect film or TV drama.
Los Angeles, April 30,
2022
Reprinted from USTheater,
Opera, and Performance (April 2022).
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