‘Innovation Nation’ brings bright ideas to the stage
When Orville and Wilbur Wright, Henry Ford, and Rosa Parks take the stage at Zoellner Arts Center Friday (March 8) evening, they won’t be made of marble or entombed in some crusty old textbook.
Instead, they and other inventors and innovators will be portrayed as the young people they once were, striving to bring their ideas to fruition long before their names became household words.
The show, “The Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation — Live!”, gets its title from the two-time Emmy Award-winning CBS television show, hosted by Mo Rocca. That show takes viewers around the globe with news segments and interviews with people who are inventing and innovating in ways that make the world a better place.
Bill Massolia, the creator, director and producer for the stage version of Innovation Nation, said he wanted to have that same entertaining and inspiring vibe from the TV show to convey — in a live theater performance — the stories of famous figures.
“We all know the accomplishments that the Wright brothers made and we all know the accomplishments that Thomas Edison made and Henry Ford made and Rosa Parks, what she did,” he said. “They were curious young people, they weren’t afraid to break the rules or challenge the rules, they weren’t afraid to work together to try and problemsolve.
“We definitely portray everyone early in their careers to try and give young people an idea that they could be just like one of these people.”
Massolia draws the distinction between inventions and innovations.
“An invention is something new and different,” he says. “An innovation is when someone takes something new and different and figures out ways to widely adapt it or have it adapted beyond the invention, that moves the technology or idea forward beyond the original invention.”
So, the Wright Brothers were the first in flight in
1903 but major innovations in flying were developed in the 1950s and 1960s to enable astronauts to take trips to space in the first manned space flights.
One vignette in the show stars innovator Rosa Parks.
Parks, an African-American, was arrested after she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, AL bus to a white man in 1955 and was arrested under the South’s Jim Crow laws. Her act of civil disobedience sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The boycott ended more than a year later when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation on buses was illegal.
“She would be considered an innovator of social justice,” Massolia says. “She helped launch the Civil Rights Movement and then other people sort of took that and moved it forward.”
Also in the show are stories about the suffragettes and other pioneers in women’s rights.
So, for example, in addition to talking about the Wright Brothers, the show looks at early women pilots, including Bessie Coleman, who in 1922 became the first African American woman to earn a pilot’s license. After flying schools in the United States refused to teach her, Coleman moved to France and earned her license in seven months. She specialized in stunt flying.
There are six actors, three men and three women, including two hosts who walk the audience through vignettes in “Innovation Nation.” The others play a variety of characters.
“You see these stories come to life in different ways,” Massolia said. “We’re dramatizing what they talk about in the television show.”
The performance — which runs about 50 minutes with no intermission — probably works best for children ages thirdgrade through middle school, Massolia said. The actors in the live show have some interactions with the audience, asking questions such as: Who invented the popsicle? Answer: An 11-year-old boy.
Produced by Griffin Theatre company in Chicago, the live show resulted from a meeting that an agent for Griffin had with representatives of The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI, which works with Litton Entertainment, an independent production company, to create the show on CBS.
“They were looking to expand the reach of the television show,” Massolia said. “Our agent brought the idea of turning the television show into a live stage version.”
The museum staff were involved with creating the content for the theater show and making sure it was historically accurate and reflective of the TV show.
It didn’t take much convincing for Deborah Sacarakis, artistic director at Zoellner, to want to bring the live show to Bethlehem. She’s a big fan of the television show.
“Innovation Nation’ always knocks my socks off,” she says. Sacarakis can rattle off chapter and verse about inventions in different episodes. She was enamored of one in which a young man developed a smart phone app that helps coaches figure out if a player involved in a rough play might have suffered a concussion. In another segment, the show profiled a group do engineers who had figured out a way to 3D print bridges.
“They were printing bridges for pedestrian and bike traffic but they think they can do it for larger spans,” she says. “It gives you some idea of how people are using their intellect, their field of discipline to create things I would never have imagined.”
Prior to the live show at Zoellner, Brian Slocum, managing director of the Lehigh University Design Labs will give a free lobby show starting at 6 p.m. on the university’s approach to encouraging inventions and innovations.
He is “going to talk about how the university is incentivizing students to think innovatively, think creatively,” Sacarakis says.
For school groups, “Innovation Nation” will be performed at 10 a.m. Thursday, March 7 and Friday, March 8 at Zoellner.
The show has been touring around the country since September, playing in such states as Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada.
The Griffin Theatre Company has done other shows that are primarily geared toward school children. Griffin did an adaptation of the popular Andrew Clements book for young readers “Frindle” and another show called “Letters Home” about the men and women who fought in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The stage show tells the history of the wars as seen through the eyes of soldiers.
clarimer@mcall.com Twitter @clarimer 610-778-7993