Catalyst Collaborative at MIT: 20 Years of Great (and not so great) Theater
SPACE
Central Square Theater
January 30-February 23, 2025
This theater season marks the 20th anniversary of the Catalyst Collaborative @MIT, an endeavor to create and present theater that deepens public engagement with science, in conjunction with Central Square Theater (CST), located only a few blocks from MIT’s campus. Over the past two decades Catalyst Collaborative @MIT has commissioned five new plays and staged 35 productions, including ten world premieres.
The idea behind the collaboration is terrific; the execution is sometimes brilliant, sometimes clunky. The challenge with any art form that seeks both to engage and educate is how to balance the pedagogy with the entertainment. We are attending theater, not a lecture. We want to be immersed in a compelling story. Hopefully, we’ll be inspired. God forbid, we’re preached upon.
I’ve seen many Catalyst productions. The Women Who Mapped the Stars (2018), and Ada and Machine (2022) were extraordinary pieces of theater in which the science was beautifully woven into drama gripping as any Ibsen. Last season’s Beyond Words was a gem. Despite scant dramatic arc, the spirit was so uplifting, the staging so clever, and Jon Vellante’s parrot so engaging, the audience was swept away.
The current CST production, SPACE, is not as successful as those predecessors, though it has several redeeming qualities. The show is, broadly speaking, about mostly forgotten female aviators. More specifically, it focuses on the Mercury 13, female pilots circa 1960 who participated in a parallel series of (secret) tests to evaluate the potential of enlisting female astronauts.
Act One is mostly successful. Six women play various Mercury 13 participants. Catharine K. Slusar is terrific as Jackie Cochrane, the founder of World War II WASP’s, who underwrote the testing even as she was deemed too old for consideration. Oddly, the most dynamic actor in the play is the single male. Barlow Adamson plays JFK with great aplomb, as well as the NASA doctor, a Senator chairing secret hearings, and any other dick basically getting in the way of female empowerment. Like many an exposition play, there’s a whole lot of direct audience address, but it works fairly well because the direction is sharp, the lighting effective, and the sound design terrific. At several points, a trio of actors arrange themselves to actually become the various machines NASA puts the women through. This creates successful choreography while visually representing the women working together towards a common goal. Unfortunately, Act One ends when some bad man cancels the whole project, and the audience breaks for intermission with no idea where the play’s headed.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the playwright knows either. Because, frankly, Act Two is a muddle. It’s 2021, but there are flashbacks to 1962 and flash forwards to 2121. We are immersed in a One Hundred Year Space Exploration Project. We are going beyond the moon, beyond Mars, all the way to the stars! And, along the way we are going to completely overhaul society (i.e. capitalistic patriarchy). Everything that was sharp and interesting in Act One is now chaos. The choreography becomes frantic running. The dialogue degenerates into staccato shouts of “Fusion!’ “Fission!” “Forward!” that strip any rigor or nuance from science or sexual politics. The actors change identities and timeframes so often the audience has no idea who’s who or where’s where, but perhaps it doesn’t matter because we’ve long since ceased to care. Even Adamson’s spot-on impersonation of Trump can’t salvage the mess.
Not to worry. SPACE is not lost. There’s plenty of good stuff to salvage from this premiere. Hopefully, the LM Feldman and Larissa Lury, the writer/director/creators, will be brave enough to step aside from material they love perhaps too much, invite some seasoned theatrical talent to cut, edit, and refine the overlong, confusing piece into a unity that contains the energy and discipline that every strong and brave female aviator of the 1960’s had to possess.
