“S P A C E” will bring more than a decade of work from co-creators L M Feldman and Larissa Lury to fruition when it opens at Central Square Theater on Thursday.
Thirteen years ago, Lury’s partner showed her an article about the Mercury 13 – the 13 Americans who were part of a research program to test and screen women for spaceflight from 1959 to 1960. When Lury and Feldman started working together, they realized the Mercury 13 weren’t the whole story.
The project has changed “dramatically” over time, Lury said. “We were really excited by Dr. Mae Jemison, the first woman of color to go to space, who started this program called the 100 Year Starship project.”
The 100 Year Starship is a collaborative research initiative between Nasa and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that aims to develop the needed technology to send a mission bearing humans to another star system within 100 years of its start in 2012. “By setting that concrete goal, you start to ask questions about how we live here together on Earth, what we prioritize, what we need,” Lury said. “By figuring out how to get there, you figure out how to actually live here.”
Feldman and Lury wanted to capture that idea by creating doubles of characters that bend space and time. Each cast member plays two or three characters, all real American pilots, aviators, astronauts and scientists, only some of whom are still alive. “Everyone in the play is either a Mercury 13 person or what we call the vanguards, who are working on the 100 Year Starship with Mae Jemison to figure out a better system,” Feldman said.
The play includes Bessie Coleman and Irene Leverton (Valencia Proctor); Christina Hernández and Jerri Sloan (Monica Risi), Jackie Cochran and Gene Nora Stumbough (Catharine K. Slusar), Sally Ride and Geraldyn Cobb (MK Tuomanen), Hazel Ying Lee, Wally Funk, Ivy Rieker (Hui Ying Wen), Jasmin Moghbeli and Jean Hixson (Mitra Sharif) and Mae Jemison and Jane Hart (Kaili Y. Turner).
“We get to gather this dream team of humans in a room to ask these questions and figure out what they mean for specific people over time,” Lury said. (They’re a “dream team” because of a collective skill set, but also because they come from different generations that could not be combined in real life.)
The play emphasizes the women’s impressive abilities, arguing that because of structural inequalities, they “have not been allowed the space to really explore all that potential energy,” Lury said.
They also explained that there are parallel space races being explored: the space race of the 1960s and “of the 2020s, with billionaires and the privatization of space,” Feldman said. “There’s an urgency to figure out how to do it in a way that has values that are equitable, inclusive, sustainable.”
But “S P A C E” does not aim not to deject or depress. “It doesn’t feel really heavy. It’s funny, it’s very physically active,” said Lury, who shares a background in acrobatics and circus with Feldman. “Not that there’s circus in the play, but the physicality is a huge part of the storytelling.” Feldman, a trapeze artist, asked “How is the body telling the story? How are bodies in space visually deepening and enriching what we’re sharing verbally?”
Feldman and Lury allowed the play to morph through collaboration with cast members. Working at Central Square Theater, they said they’ve felt supported to allow it to grow into its final form.
“We’ve had over 200 people work with us on this project at one point,” Lury said. “It’s one of those things that doesn’t feel like it would be possible with just our voices. Having a collective of different perspectives and different energies has really shaped what the project has become.”
“There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages that are not in the play anymore,” Feldman said. “I’m profoundly proud of where it is now.”
“S P A C E” is at the Central Square Theater, 450 Massachusetts Ave., Central Square, Cambridge, from Thursday through Feb. 23. Tickets start at $27 with discounts available for seniors and students.
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