Off Broadway: The Secret Lives of Flight Attendants

Wickets


It seems as if flight attendants — or at least their much-mythologized ancestors, stewardesses — are enjoying a resurgence in the popular imagination.

A few months back, Scott wrote about the “golden age of air travel” vibe evident in the Broadway revival “Boeing Boeing,” suggesting the performance taps into “a feeling many travelers share these days — nostalgia for the good ol’ days when flying was an uncrowded, enjoyable, adventurous dress-up luxury.”

Today, the New York Times reviews a new piece of theater set in the dimly remembered past of air travel, albeit from another perspective. Entitled “Wickets,” the play is based on a 1977 piece by Maria Irene Fornes, and besides the fact that it’s staged aboard a 1970s-style airline, I can decipher very little about what it’s actually about from the Times’s writeup:

How many airline passengers have sought to pass the seemingly endless hours by imagining the secret lives of stewardesses? What do these women think about, cry about, dream about beneath their impenetrable makeup masks? Where do their minds travel while they smilingly dole out salted nuts? ..

“Wickets” is at its most effective when hovering deftly in this in-between state (insert flying metaphor here), simultaneously operating as madcap farce, probing emotional exploration and feminist critique. Brisk and loopy dialogue exchanges are shot through with swirling power plays and familiar but not-quite-identifiable tensions.

The play’s Web site explains it in English:

Set inside an airplane, the entire theater becomes the stage with high flying action that takes place all around the audience,–in the aisles, galleys and lavatories of a trans-Atlantic flight. Immersed in an identity crisis, eight 1970’s stewardesses find themselves split between the private self and the public persona in this radical adaptation of Fornes’ mystery play. Wicket Air Flight 1971 takes off just prior to the crest of the 2nd Wave of feminism and lands squarely in our present day struggles in the workplace.

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