Fourth Planet

Or: The Long Way Ahead

A family picnic for the Garcia-Woods on a summer night. Guitar music, laughter, light misadventures, and then, like an asteroid it falls. Violet (Maria Tzompa) mother of two, loving wife, level headed doctor casually announces she’s applied for Fourth Planet Pioneers, a program designed to settle the first colonists of Mars. It is a mission of a life time, the chance to cast the seeds of humanity beyond our fragile home, a mission to further civilization. But it is a mission with no return trip. If Violet’s selected, and if she decides to go, she leaves her family behind. Forever.

The idea of being bound to ones family or ones dream is not a new one but playwright Dano Madden has set the scale of Fourth Planet at such cosmic proportions it is unmoored from comparison, it’s own private solar system orbiting Violet with far flung bodies of future colonists of mars and even other solar systems (Gerry Tzompa, Dakotah Brown, Jaime Nebeker, and Lex Gonzalez) blinking in and out of sight. For a long play, both in scope and playing time, Madden is able to glue scenes together that might not seem immediately linked prove, by the strength of their adhesive, to create a grander mosaic.

The question that drives the play is not in fact wether or not Violet will end up going to Mars (though that is no set and settled thing) but what is the fuel that is driving her fire? Why is she ready to sever herself from her family when she clearly loves them so much? In Madden’s hands Violet’s decision to set out to the stars is treated as perfectly natural, reflecting, in the illumination of director Kate Mueller, the struggle faced by many working women who are conditioned to put their family above their own pursuits. But while her goal is noble she goes about convincing her family in all the wrong ways infuriating, and understandable, and dramatically delicious (espcially Her slides from downplaying the major news to lashing at her family for not being “on her side” are further diluted when she takes up with a handsome Cosmonaut Konstantin Orlov (Noah Charles Moody of the wonderful awkward expression and meet-cute Russian rush).

Violet is a challenging role; while Madden’s script lays out a straight road for other actors to follow he gives Tzompa peaks and caverns to surmount and delve trusting in her skills to cross the terrain, and his faith is not misplaced. In the brittle flair ups with her sister Ana-Sofia (Lily Yasuda) and the frosty detents with her growing daughter Annie (Mueller, again) and the play with her imaginative son Lane (Andres Maldonado who provides much of the physical comedy on script and behind stand), Tzompa gives the reading a full breadth of emotion, from the points where she tries to hide her tears when speaking about the children she’d leave behind, clinically, to the program organizers, speaking truth but not wanting to be cut, to her sarcastic, panicked projections of worthlessness and fear she flashes around her like distracting camouflage, to her excellent report with her husband Joe (Gordon Reinhardt, who lays in deftly to the playwright’s sense of temperate anguish, trying to respect his wife’s wishes but not wanting to lose her forever) trying to let him convince her that she’s making a mistake and failing. In Tzompa’s own estimation we don’t like Violet but we get her deeply.

The flashes of the future Violet is helping to build, the young lovers and historians and dreamers, could use a little in the ways of fleshing out: to make them facets of a greater whole rather than flakes of an absent carving. But overall Madden has a superbly balanced play, one that keeps us waiting and second guessing ourselves as to who is right. I waited so long to find out the real reason for Violet’s desire to escape the bounds of gravity (metaphoric or otherwise) that I gobbled up the play at a rate sure to give me indigestion but the final answer is … satisfactory, and becomes more so deepening in color and thought after there is no more left to say. Massive in its cast size, spanning millennia, it’s hard to imagine how Fourth Planet would stand to its colossal hight onstage. But the power of Madden’s juggling of human hopes and human failings, placed on Tzompa’s articulation and the Garcia-Wood’s angry earnestness and fierce love, that the script shines bright as a rocket, a thing of wonder, here one minute, gone the next.