Bittersweet tale of 2 amazing female pilots comes to TheatreWorks.
TheatreWorks play focuses on pilots Jerrie Cobb, Jackie Cochran
The idea for “They Promised Her the Moon,” a thrilling yet poetic play about two extraordinary pilots — the famous Jackie Cochran and the relatively obscure Jerrie Cobb — occurred to playwright Laurel Ollstein about 10 years ago. “The story found me,” Ollstein said by phone from the Redwood Shores offices of TheatreWorks Silicon Valley recently. “NASA had canceled a program to go to the moon, and I thought it would be so horrible to train for it, then not go. I was doing a story about a woman who had been in astronaut training. I started Googling, and found Jerrie Cobb. “I could not believe I had not heard of her. Nobody I knew, knew about her. I felt I had to write it, I felt compelled to tell the story. I went down a veritable rabbit hole of research.” “What incredible women these were,” she adds. Cochran, a setter of records and winner of airplane races, as well as the owner of a successful cosmetics company and the wife of a man with plenty of money, was pretty famous in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, at least in aviation circles. A beautiful woman, she was big and brassy and demanded attention. But Cobb, a petite beauty from Norman, Oklahoma, was focused only on flying. She learned to fly at age 12. From that moment, she kept her eyes on the sky, breaking through glass ceiling after glass ceiling as she competed in the male-dominated world. She was barnstorming at 16, earned her private pilot’s license at 17, and at 19 was teaching men how to fly. In her 20s, she set world records for speed, distance and absolute altitude. In the late 1950s, the United States decided to send men into space. Only men needed apply. Everybody knows about the Mercury 7, the first American astronauts. That didn’t sit well with Cochran, who put a lot of money into the Mercury 13, a privately funded, non-NASA program that put 13 women, including Cobb, through the same harsh training as the men. “Jerrie surpassed them,” Ollstein said. “She lasted in the isolation tank for 10 hours. The best the men did was four hours. “That’s where I started it (the play): Jerrie in the tank, and went from there.” Ollstein, who is also an actor, director and teacher, obtained a fellowship at the University of Oklahoma as playwright in residence, and wrote the first drafts of “They Promised Her the Moon” while there. “It was such a gift to be there,” said Ollstein, “surrounded by the accents, the people and the land.” The university is in Norman, Oklahoma, where Cobb was raised. “They Promised Her the Moon” opens with Cobb in that isolation tank, and the story introduces the audience to her as a young girl, and to Cobb’s restrictive, religious mother and her liberal-minded father. Cobb wrestles all her life with what her mom wanted her to be — a proper woman who can bake pies and capture a husband — and her love of flying, in which she is supported by her dad. Cobb and Cochran are the double beating hearts of this story, a tale about women who were told to stay home but who insisted on finding their own places in the world anyway. Cobb’s story, as told by Ollstein, is fully dramatic and moving. She never did go to space. The Russians sent Valentina Tereshkova into space in June 1963, and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982. Sally Ride was the first American woman in space, in 1983. By that time, Cobb was a bush pilot in the Amazon, supporting missionary work. She did that for 30 years, before moving to Florida, where she died in March 2019.