Opinionist: Wickets

There's always been a theatrical element to commuter air travel: flight attendants are actors pretending everything's simply delightful, passengers comprise a captive audience asked to suspend their disbelief in the airline industry, the pilot is the unseen director struggling to keep the evening aloft. Of course, one weak link in that analogy—as the passengers on flight 1549 were recently reminded—is that when the curtain rises on a flight, one hopes the show will be utterly devoid of drama. So it's a good thing that Wickets, a play performed for an audience seated inside a replica Boeing 747 cabin, gives its passengers exactly what they don't want at 35,000 feet: a little thrill, and something to think about.

The script for Wickets is largely appropriated from Fefu and Her Friends, written by Maria Irene Fornes in 1977; her savagely funny and somewhat inscrutable play concerns (sort of) a group of eight women gathered to prepare a theater education project in 1935. Fornes first staged "Fefu" in a Soho loft and, during the second act, divided the audience into four groups, ushering them between different rooms to watch interconnected scenes performed repeatedly for each group. In Wickets, directors Clove Galilee and Jenny Rogers have set the action on a 1971 flight from New York to Paris, back when flight attendants were called stewardesses. It's a brilliant concept, and one that gives the ensemble great freedom to explore Fornes's ideas about feminism and chauvinism in a theatrically fecund milieu, while staying true to the original's avant-garde essence.

Divided into first class, business class and coach, the audience/passengers watch the stewardesses act out their personal drama inches from their seats, fighting and embracing and dancing in the aisles all around them. Spectators familiar with "Fefu" will recognize most of the dialogue, which swerves from incisive to elusive throughout the bumpy flight. (Text is also lifted from such sources as Valerie Solanas's "S.C.U.M. Manifesto" and a 1969 3D porno The Stewardesses.) As Fefu, Lee Eddy finds an arresting tension between intimidating strength and brittle vulnerability, and the rest of the crew is infectiously fun as insecure and eager-to-please '70s-era stewardesses. An exception to the uniform giddiness is Maria Parra's riveting performance as the wheelchair-bound Julia; without Parra's dark-eyed gravitas, the show's dramatic nosedive from dizzy effervescence to harrowing turbulence might have felt forced—instead, it's inevitable.