Theater Online - New York Theater Reviews

One of the staff responsible for Wickets at the 3LD Technology Center said that Wickets would never be possible on Broadway. Good! -- Broadway would ruin the magic of the piece, of which there is a great deal.

Once the stewardess (yes, stewardess; we are the 1970s here) checks your ticket, you are escorted onto the plane, and this is where the genius of the 3LD Center kicks in. It is a plane. Credit must be given first and foremost to the set, lighting and sound designers Jenny Rogers, Burke Brown and Dean Parker, respectively, as the plane is rightly one of the stars of the show. It sounds like a plane, looks like a plane; it even smells like a plane. You are then waited on and entertained by eight stewardesses (though one is unfortunately in a wheelchair.) The one in charge, Fefu (Lee Eddy: excellent), asks for seatbelts to be fastened and begins reading instructions for takeoff. Fefu is tall, strong, handsome , capable -- and in a bad marriage with the Captain. As she reads, it becomes apparent that she is trying to contain a large nervous breakdown, and this identity crisis that she fights against is at the crux of the play.

Fefu is on a different plane (pardon the pun) from the other stewardesses, who do have questions about their own lives, loves, goals and dreams, but never as seriously as Fefu. When the Captain enters the cabin, Fefu shoots him, and he dies (at my feet, at this performance), horrifying the other stewardesses; then he gets up, dusts himself off and goes back into the cockpit. Fefu explains, "It's only a game." The gun is filled with blanks. Later, Fefu confesses that she shoots her husband with blanks to avoid shooting him for real. 

Wickets is adapted by Jenny Rogers from Maria Irene Fornes's Fefu and her Friends. The play has also been updated to 1971; Fornes was writing in the '70s but looking back on 1935. To my mind, Rogers made a smart choice to set it in 1971; before the women's movement was in full swing, before stewardesses were called flight attendants, before divorce became the norm. There are glimpses of this everywhere -- in the perky costumes (by Candace Knox), music (by JETLINER) ; and one of the stewardesses in my section was reading Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. The writing and construct of the play are funny, smart and sly. At one point, the plane is sectioned off, so the audience saw different parts of the same play. Then the stewardesses switched and visited every section, so everyone saw everything, whether in coach or first class. The cast was uniformly excellent, but standouts were Christianna Nelson's Emma: "Do you think about genitals all the time“", Kristen Rozanski's feral Sue: "Celibacy solves nothing!", and Katie Apicella's hilarious Christina, who could give Amy Sedaris a run for her money.

Some gripes: I don't think the Lear-like storm scene was necessary, and the stewardess in the wheelchair needs to be miked for that, as she was hard to understand. I would have liked more of the lure of feminism in the text (more Mystique, rather than mystic, phenomena) and the last 10 minutes made the play feel overlong. But these are small gripes: Wickets deserves to be seen, and by a large audience. In fact, with the price of Broadway tickets approaching that of the cost of air travel, a producer might want to fly the friendly skies...