Lunacy
Lunacy supposedly shows “the other side of The Right Stuff.” Weaver-Francisco describes her Women’s Theatre Project commission as “a full-length play based on the 13 women who trained for the space program in the 1960s and were abruptly dropped before having a chance to go into space.” Only it isn’t about the so-called Mercury 13. The women themselves appear in only one fleeting and absurd hallucinatory sequence: wearing black gowns and “Miss NASA” sashes, they merely introduce themselves and announce their readiness for space flight.
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It’s a fact that these women, who passed the same tests as male astronaut candidates and in many cases bested them, became a mere footnote–if that–in space history. Still, Weaver-Francisco gives more stage time to John Glenn, the best known of the Mercury 7, than she does to these women, who were denied the chance to orbit the earth when the navy abruptly canceled their training program in 1961, just months after it started.
Rather than reclaiming women’s history with specific information about what it was like to be in this early program for female astronauts or giving us anything more than a cliched sense of the disappointment the Mercury 13 might have experienced, Weaver-Francisco revisits the tried-and-true feminist theme that we must learn from and appreciate our elders and their fight for progress.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Imma Curl.
