Playwright: Andrew Burden Swanson. At: Jackalope Theatre Company, Broadway Armory, 5917 N. Broadway. Tickets: www.jackalopetheatre.org; $15-$20. Runs through: June 20
I'm old enough to remember the original astronauts such as John Glenn, Wally Schirra, Neil Armstrong and Tom Hanks. I watched the 1969 moon landing on TV into the wee hours with my sister and Marna Martin ( "The Last Lady of Song" ). Almost from that famous day, conspiracy theorists have posited that the United States' several moon landings were film fakes. This world premiere riffs on that outrageous idea. It's not a comedy of jokes, so it tries to be a farcebut fails to pull it off.
If you were President Richard Nixon ( six months in office in July 1969 ) and NASA officialdom concocted a fake moon landing, would you send a team of incompetents with neither scientific nor cinematic experience to England to make a moon movie? Would you put Donald Rumsfeld ( then heading the Office of Economic Opportunity for Nixon ) in charge? The answers are "No" and "No," and yet this is precisely what playwright Andrew Burden Swanson does. Even as comedy it's not credible because Swanson never explains why Rumsfeld is in charge. Sure, Rummy embodied U.S. arrogance as defense secretary following 9/11 but, even so, Swanson is being lazy by choosing what he thinks is an easy target.
What follows is something I've written in dozens of reviews for more than 40 years. Sometimes I feel like Cecil Adams in The Reader, "fighting ignorance since 1973 ( it's taking longer than we thought )." Farce only works if you have highly probable people doing highly improbable things. It does not work if you begin with silly people doing silly things, which is Swanson's first mistake. Rumsfeld and his CIA-like U.S. claque are arrogant and thuggish from the get-go, which isn't at all funny.
Then, there are too many characters, which means there is no payoff in the plot for their presence, and often their actions are without sufficient explanation. Swanson shifts focus repeatedly between Rumsfeld ( Scot West ), a hastily summoned young NASA scientist ( Will Kiley ) andhere's the reason they are in EnglandStanley Kubrick ( Malcolm Callan ), who spends the first two-thirds of the play incognito.
Only in the closing 20 minutes does Lunacy achieve moments of true farce when a police inspector ( J. B. Pierson ) interrupts the clandestine film shoot and everyone behaves improbably to fool him. They behave improbably because, by this point, all have something at stake, and that's another central tenet of farce. The lead characters must have something to hide or a scheme to pull off, and each falsehood leads them deeper into the comic morass.
Not to belabor the point, but this is uninspired Lunacy. Swanson still might do something with the play, if so inclined, but this version would have been better as a workshop.