For a playwright with a work in progress, Bill Pullman draws a pretty large crowd at Theatre Project. But that may be because he’s better known as President Whitmore, who saved the day when the world was besieged by aliens. His 40-minute preview of his Expedition 6--a rehearsal of the first act of the play, which debuts in its entirety this week--is barely finished when he gets surrounded by a small swarm of autograph seekers. One woman holds up an Artscape fan for him to sign. Another woman opens a ring binder with pen drawings of him--without the gray beard and thick glasses that make him a little hard to recognize. He poses for a string of digital photographs.
Pullman has acted in 40 or so movies to date--Independence Day, Lost Highway, and The Serpent and the Rainbow among them--but theater is where Pullman started and, if Expedition 6 is any indication, from where he never really left. He got his master’s degree in directing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1980, and he has been on and off Broadway for the last two decades. And while talking about his latest project in Theatre Project’s auditorium before an afternoon rehearsal, he sounds like he’s still working on his thesis.
"I was at the University Massachusetts in the ’70s, and the theater has continued to investigate a lot of different modalities, probably more so now than then," Pullman says. "The uses of trapeze and physical events are trying to produce experiences that are more poetic physically. I mean, in New York, with a play called De La Guarda, the audience got rained on."
Expedition 6 has the hallmarks of cutting-edge theater--it is intricately choreographed, it incorporates found text, and the crew of actors slip in and out of roles. "Most of this is Bill’s vision," says co-director Jennifer Rincon. "At first it was going to be a one-man show, but we found eight amazing actors--all from the National Theatre Conservatory--who could physically handle the role. They’re almost Cirque du Soleil quality. And we’ve been working with them for two years."
The basic plot involves a near-disaster in outer space. Expedition 6 came to fruition about three years ago, shortly after problems at the International Space Station caused two American astronauts and one Russian to make a perilous descent into the deserts of Kazakhstan using an improvised landing craft. But more than the lives of the three astronauts was at stake--the story of Expedition 6 weaves what goes on aboard the space station together with accounts of what was occurring on the ground, where the world’s attention was focused on the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
For Pullman, the two realities were constantly in tension, and part of the same story. "Apollo 13 never really did that," he says, referring to Expedition 6’s most immediate comparison. "Its mission was to tell an adventurous tale of a few very dedicated individuals who are in crisis. I wanted to take the framework of individuals in crisis and see it from a political perspective, a global perspective, a galaxy perspective. It’s hard to do with film--it feels pretentious. Metaphor doesn’t really work well in film. In theater you need metaphor in order to make the theater mean anything. The theater collects people together to reflect about our times, and this piece is going to be more useful to a live body of individuals who are going to be walking away talking about something they’ve experienced together."
One of his eight characters makes the point succinctly in the play: Our ability to succeed was being taken for granted. " That was part of the self-criticism that NASA had," Pullman says, "Just when you think you’re comfortable with your self-analysis, you realize that you have to watch out."
The play’s surreal, weightless quality gives the impression of a time and place when that was beginning to unravel. When Expedition 6 opens, the space shuttle Columbia has just blown up on re-entry. The U.S. is initiating its Iraq invasion, which was supposed to take about a month to complete. And in the space station, three men need to be rescued.
That strange confluence of disasters and events propels the story. As it progresses, the three astronauts move into the space station and zero gravity begins to take hold. Most of the eight actors begin to circulate and move around the stage using trapezes. And from the perspective of the space station, Earth’s February 2003 events feel removed but oddly connected.
For Pullman, it was an experience he and many other Americans shared. "I remember that time myself," he says. "They were getting ready to invade Iraq. The consensus was that after a month or so in Iraq things would die down. And when the Columbia blew up, I didn’t even tell my children about it. I wasn’t all that involved really, just wondering, Is this really happening? I didn’t know what it meant. You had to bury yourself into the paper and read the news every day, and you kept trying to put things together and get a perspective on it."
Most of the play’s language is found text excerpted from political statements, news comments, recorded conversations, and other sources. In addition to the astronauts, Donald Rumsfeld and Osama bin Laden make contributions to Pullman’s script. In fact, Pullman isn’t sure that he wants to be called the playwright. At points he refers to himself as the play’s creator, but even that word is a little off for him. "‘Conceived and devised by’ might be a little more accurate," he says. And the more he worked, the more involved he became with a collaborative team of producers and actors.
His cast’s acrobatic actors all have their theater degrees now. "They’re all moving to New York and starting their career-making endeavors," Pullman says. "As always, you cross your fingers that when you have everything in place the actors are available. So it’s good we’re catching them now and not two years down the road."
But it’s a team he hopes to stick with. As they start to set up for the rehearsal, Pullman is again besieged, this time from his production team. And he looks perfectly at home with it. "There’s nothing as humbling as being onstage," he says. "It gets small really quickly. You’re centered. It’s collaborative at its best."
Latest MP3s
