My friend, Molly Catron, and I met for lunch yesterday in Abingdon and then went to the Barter Theatre to see and hear "Blue Sky Boys." I didn't know what to expect as I'd never heard of this play and didn't see it during the Abingdon Highlands Festival when it auditioned last summer. I thought maybe it was about the man from Big Stone Gap who wrote the book about his adolescent activities of building rockets years ago.
I was delighted to discover that it was about the first NASA project of putting a man on the moon before the end of the 1960's. I was a teensy, teensy part of that project in that my ex-husband, when we were still married, worked for a sub-contractor of NASA's and actually had an office on the Houston space center grounds. One of our neighbors was a Flight Controller for the lunar landing and was one of the oft-televised cheering men applauding and passing out cigars. Another connection is that my ex did analysis of the first photos that were sent back from the moon and wrote a paper that he presented at a conference in York, England in 1973 which garnered a trip to Europe for us.
Now some stories involving a lot of science can be very dull. However, the playwright, Deborah Brevoort, handled that by including ten roles for imaginary characters, i.e. Buck Rogers, Icarus, Apollo, Galileo, the Red Baron, and even Snoopy.
The total number of 14 characters are played by seven actors, all male. The interaction of the real with the imagined leads to a good many laughs, and the play is fast-moving and highly entertaining.
We here in Southwest Virginia are so lucky to have the Barter, a professional theatre and the State Theatre of Virginia, so handy. One thing I wish for is that ticket prices would not be so high. The matinee ticket I bought yesterday cost $29 which included a $2 discount because I'm a Triple A member. In the past I've bought six or twelve tickets called a "Passbook" for the season which brings the price down to a little less than $20 for a matinee. The opportunity to buy passbooks ends in April and this April I had other things on my mind and the opportunity passed by. So I will be selective about what I see. I passed up "Annie" because I've seen it before and will not go to see anything with Elvis or rock and roll, because I'm just not a fan.
But Molly and I plan to see "Violet" next Thursday--it looks really good!
