‘Moon’ reminds us of place in cosmos
“Who circles whom after all?”
That’s the question posed by the Moon (Isa Musni) itself in Mugwumpin’s “In Event of Moon Disaster. Such is the thrilling, destabilizing magic of the production that you might genuinely doubt, for an instant or two, the Earth’s position both beneath your feet and within the cosmos.
The ensemble-created show, which opened Friday, Jan. 5, at Z Below after a two-year development period, grew from very high-stakes doubt — doubt that, thankfully, wasn’t borne out — chronicled in a fascinating bit of historical ephemera: the 1969 speech, written by William Safire, that President Richard Nixon would have
delivered had the Apollo 11 astronauts not returned from the moon.
In devising its own scenario of moon explorers (Soren Santos and Stephanie DeMott), ground control and waiting spouses (Erin Mei-Ling Stuart, Don Wood and Nayeli Rodriguez), as well as the Moon herself (Musni, in a striking costume of an oversize, pockmarked orb of a moon head atop a gleaming white dress), Mugwumpin sows from the germ of that specific, historical moment of doubt, a kind of everexpanding dread. If you were an astronaut on a lunar mission that went awry, how would you spend your waning hours after your team, your country and your planet abandoned you? If you were a spouse back home, how would you sculpt your dawning widowhood? How would any of us cope in the event of more earthbound but still, to the sufferer, cosmic disasters — “economic collapse,” “a bicycle accident,” “falling out of love”?
Not all is foreboding, though. Director Natalie Greene has a gentle touch, offering moments of levity, sweetness and sheer beauty: cozy, almost campfire renditions of REM’s “Man on the Moon” and Jenny Lewis’ “The Voyager”; dreamy movement sequences by Musni as Moon in which her very stride seems to engirdle a whole orbit.
If you’re the sort of audience member who rolls your eyes at the ever-increasing use of video projection in live performance, Wolfgang Lancelot Wachalovsky and Darl Andrew Packard’s inventive contribution to “In Event of Moon Disaster” epitomizes how the device can not just add to but be essential to a work of theater. Projecting onto translucent scrim allows for mesmerizing interactions among image onscreen and live performer and lights behind it. Displaying live feed of the audience onto one of the theater’s walls makes you frantically look around for a camera — a destabilizing effect that cleverly evokes antigravity. (And we’re on the move, too, from a standing sequence in the theater’s lobby, to standing or sitting on the perimeter of Z Below’s stage, to perching on stools center stage, the action unfolding on four sides around us.)
Some segments, especially at the outset, lack definition or fail to make a contribution the show seemingly couldn’t live without. It’s hard to tell if the piece is even starting, a device Mugwumpin has used to better effect in past work, but here the uncertainty arises from lines delivered at weirdly low volume, or with the kind of unsteadiness that’s not clearly a part of character.
But those lapses pass quickly in favor of the show’s overriding feeling, which is childlike awe of both the heavens themselves and humankind’s sometimes macho, sometimes doomed, but always inquisitive pursuit of them.