Rabbit/Moon

A New Play By Dwayne Blackaller and Matthew Cameron Clark

Or: The Long Hello.

WAH.

That is, in barest, measly notation, the sound of Peter John Still’s song of the moon and its memory. An Astronaut. Mission Specialist Will Lundon (Luke Massengill), on a mission to build upon the moon the largest receiver ever conceived, goes missing. His commander, Chandni Douglas (Roshni Shukla) sets out after him, alone on the cold, ashen surface. Lundon’s last received transmission mentions being lost in a paper forest, rising from the dust. And as the lights fade, the communications crackle and swing to the dark side of the moon. The Wah comes in: an ancient, bone-shaking thrum, a cry from the back of the throat and the depth of the soul as you are catapulted into the heart of a science fiction fairytale.

Wah is also an accurate depiction and or onomatopoetic expression of when you are returned to your closed and common orbit. Playwrights Dwayne Blackaller and Matthew Cameron Clark put the audience through an emotional pace demanding as the choreography they set for their highly talented cast. Seen from a purely technical standpoint, the show has a kind of poetry: the machines to simulate weightlessness where Engineer Todd Renard (Dakotah Brown), bounces in agony waiting for his team to come home, or the aerial hoop where Orbiter Pilot Nora Gibbons (Jaime Nebeker) hangs in confinement, shooting above the surface, able to see but not to help. Or the beauty of the spinning turntable that mimics Mission Control M Eduardo Conejo (Isreal López Reyes) set apart at his computer, spinning childhood vinyl into the dark, or how that prey circle just carries a body around, trapped on a small spinning object.

There is so much. Even now, as I type this, sparks of recognition connect in my mind. Echoes that rebound from one half of the play to the other, metaphors that seed and only will germinate weeks later. There are so many ideas, thoughts, actions, phases, and states tumbling through the air, like twenty objects, bright balls, fragile eggs, and gleaming knifes juggling from five separate sets of hands. You can lose things in that whirlwind. There is so much. There could be less.

We lose things. Like the solar storm that (but of course) frazzles the separate astronaut's radios and so plugs them in and out of connection some things come in stronger than others. The love story, for example. Entanglements of the heart, contingencies NASA has not prepared for, are what sent Will off into the darkness, and sent Chandni out to rescue him, landing them both a forest where woodland creatures peek behind impossible trees asking them to act out one of the oldest myths there is: the ur-tale of the rabbit in the moon, the story of love and of sacrifice. Shukla and Massengill both bring their hearts to the story (And what a romance! It pops you in the face like a fist! haHA!) but they are both… pinned; stretched and inflexible. Perhaps this is by the double reality of them running snazzily clad through a dream forest while simultaneously expressing the reality of wearing heavy space suits with dwindling oxygen supplies (which is a hard trick and loftily pulled off) or perhaps it is the ornate brocade of the language that weighs down their words.

Which is strange because the script, while jammed, is so beautiful throughout its length, and less itself to a performers passion. The digressions guild the story, filling its cracks like the gold, like the story of Kintsugi that Nora, an avid potter (a hands-on personality, which is just sublimely tragic for a woman who can do nothing) relates to Will in a strange moment of connection, or Conejo’s free-styling a rap to the lost Lundon (as doubtless spun by theater favorite Brian Quijada, proclaimed lord of the mouth) or Todd relating to the distant press the story of the Voyager’s Golden Record (also, interestingly, a love story), the far-flung hello from humanity to the universe, and explains their current mission, the planting of a massive spiral of receivers, is the link to that first question, the listening to see if anyone answers back. In the telling of these stories, and the reaching out to their lost teammates, both over radio and dream space, Nebeker and Brown were so passionate, so tender, so brimful of things unsaid, that I was confused for a time whether we didn’t have a love triangle (or possibly even a love rhombus?) to deal with.

There is so much to linguistically delight in, a verbal match to the visual poetry. The bright flashy banter between the astronauts and their MC (Reyes, smooth as warm butter and comforting as a mug of tea excels in this. He also, when donning his fairytale mask, adds a flutter to show the swift beat of lungs in a rabbits side, which is just a d*mned brilliant touch), their mask of efficiently flowing over fears as they reach out to the waiting world, the legend Chandni paints brush stroke by brush stroke. As science fiction it is well drawn, fleet of foot, speeding ahead setting our hearts to racing. As a fairytale, it lags, limps, getting there eventually but with more huffing and puffing, more wahing that we necessarily need.

And yet I have no suggestions on what should be jettisoned (nor is it my place to give them). Everything, the science, the myth, the opening of that heart and its slow failing due to lack of heat and oxygen all spiral round each other, glinting and reflected and sharing light in darkness. Patience is required some of the running, though it will lead to an animalistic hip-hop dance-off that is golden, but clumsy moments are only natural when your free-floating, and it takes time to get into space. You come out of the forest, around the far side of the moon back into the audience with Still’s thrum splitting your ribs like a hatchet of ancestral memory, exhausted, mind sloshing with possibilities, sorrows, joys, facts, and beats; feeling utterly poleaxed, yet regretting nothing.