Flying in the Face of Reason

The smorgasbord of sight and sound that is 1000 Airplanes on the Roof will leave your senses reeling; your psyche will stagger about, striving to bring sanity to bear against a sensual overload, trying to assimilate the hyper-real unreality of the wondrous ravings of a lunatic. As the house lights return you to the world of the mundane, you will struggle to breathe and to re-learn the ability to function without music and light pushing you, oppressing you, uplifting you.

1000 Airplanes on the Roof

At the Emerson Majestic Theater

219 Tremont St. Boston (T-Boylston)

Tonight, tomorrow night and Sunday

1000 Airplanes on the Roof is the story of a mentally ill woman's attempt to reconcile her own view of the world--rife with dissolving buildings, alien super-intelligence, and time travel--with the everyday world society is attempting to impose upon her. We sympathize with "M" (Betsy Aidem), as she conjures up our own fears of losing the ability to trust our senses and expresses our own desires to be accepted by society without having to compromise with it.

The music of 1000 Airplanes, composed by Philip Glass and performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble, drives the production. It powers and parallels M's changes in mood, fluctuates and pulses as M's tenuous grip on reality weakens, strengthens, weakens again, and eventually disappears entirely. M rants and raves about the sound, "THE SOUND," which attacks her soul, tearing her away from the reality she hopes and fears to embrace and pulling her toward an alternate reality she simultaneously loves and abhors.

The show opens with music, a buzzing and humming so powerful you may wonder if Glass actually commissioned 1000 airplanes to land on the roof of the theater. The music intensifies; the walls shake. No longer do you hear the music, you feel it rattling your rib cage, shaking your elbows, your knees, your thighs. Harmonies become distorted, and as they change, they disrupt the rhythm of your heartbeat. A hint of melody develops, disappears, reappears; it is the theme to E.T., except it appears to have been rewritten by someone under the influence of LSD. M appears onstage and the music subordinates itself to the patterns of her monologue, but only temporarily--it frequently rears up, roaring, driving M deeper into the depths of her insanity.

David Henry Hwang, whose Tony award-winning M. Butterfly is still on Broadway, wrote 1000 Airplanes on the Roof and remains true to Glass's experimental use of time and changing rhythm. At one point M, sinking hopelessly into madness, cries out "Time is a lottery!"--a lottery that pays off only delusion. Hwang also plays with the notion of illusion being more powerful than reality, continuing with a theme he develops in M. Butterfly. Like M. Butterfly, 1000 Airplanes on the Roof is in many ways a study of what happens to the human spirit when all conventions and beliefs are stripped away, leaving the soul unprotected and forced to face a mocking reality.

The use of light, too, heightens the audience's sense that M has been cast adrift. Jerome Sirlin's innovative set makes use of a multitude of opaque and translucent screens upon which are projected images as diverse as primeval forests, alien spacecraft and New York City brownstones. The shifting patterns of light chase M around and dance with her in a malevolent pas de deux, whimsically trapping her and letting her go as her mood shifts from hope to despair. The light and sound join forces to overwhelm M, sometimes leaving her a helpless lump on the floor.

All this may give you the impression that M is nothing more than a hopeless space cadet, but she's really not. She is an intelligent, warm, funny, sensitive woman who, above all else, wants to be loved and wants to be able to control the visions haunting her. She wants someone to be with her, to help her face the slings and arrows of her outrageous fortune, but she finds herself "always alone with what I fear most--the sound of my memories."

For all her emotional wanderings, M is more like us than we wish to accept. In a final, passionate attempt to synthesize her internal world with the external world she is not quite ready to believe in, she declares that she needs someone to understand her, to guide her through her mental morass. She calls out in a desperate, plaintive voice, "We all hope, looking into the eyes of another, to find an answer."

Perhaps Hwang and Glass's visionary view does not provide us with the answer we are looking for, but a night with M and 1000 Airplanes on the Roof can guide us to explore the depths of our passions and help us to overcome the limits of our reason.