Theater Review: Stage magic takes wing in ‘Fly’

On a sparsely dressed set framed by large, cloud-painted geometric shapes, three actors and a dancer have just finished rehearsing an early scene from “Fly,” opening Sunday, Jan. 31, at the Pasadena Playhouse.

Co-produced by the Playhouse and New Jersey-based Crossroads Theatre Co., “Fly” is based on the highly decorated World War II-era Tuskegee Airmen, the first African Americans to become Army Air Corps fighter pilots.

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The Tuskegee Airmen “preceded the Civil Rights movement, preceded Rosa Parks, Emmett Till, Dr. King,” said Ricardo Khan, the play’s director and co-writer (with Trey Ellis), and the founder and former artistic director of Crossroads, one of the country’s leading African-American theater companies. In the segregated 1940s, Khan said, “they were breaking ground in a way that hadn’t been done before.”

“It’s a story that needs to be told,” he said to the small audience of media representatives and other guests who had been invited to watch the rehearsal, “because there are so many negative stories being told nowadays that divide us.”

During the scene, three young pilots (played by Brooks Brantly, Damian Thompson and Terrell Wheeler) clash as they meet for the first time at the Tuskegee airfield in Alabama where they will be trained. Each comes from a different background — the West Indies, Iowa, Chicago — and each has his own motivation for being there, not yet realizing that they will have to learn to act as a team and depend on one another for success and survival.

“Sometimes we think that the challenge is somebody overpowering us, or keeping us out of the room,” Khan said by phone the next day. “In this situation, they have to overcome not just offstage enemies, the antagonists, but the fact that their egos are getting in the way.”

The emotions that the characters can’t always freely express as members of the Army and as black men in a discriminatory world, are interpreted wordlessly through another character: Tap Griot, played by seasoned tap dancer Omar Edwards.

“The men are so confined by their situation,” Khan said. “And they’re young, so they have stuff just boiling and bubbling up, and they have to get that out.” Tap Griot, he explained, is “a nonrealistic character … a contemporary Greek chorus, if you will, who bridges the worlds for us. His tap is his dialogue.”

(Edwards said later that his role in “Fly” “allows me to be me. You want to find meaning in everything you do.” The character of Tap Griot, he said, “is an opportunity to paint, to create, with my feet. It’s improvisation. Every night I can approach it a little differently.”)

Among those watching the rehearsal was Joan Williams, a notably stylish and youthful 83-year-old and the widow of Robert Williams, co-writer and co-producer of “The Tuskegee Airmen,” the 1995 award-winning HBO film based on his own experiences as a decorated black fighter pilot who flew 50 combat missions yet faced discrimination in the country he had helped to defend.

Her husband, said Joan Williams, had spent decades trying to interest film studios in the story of the pilots whose heroic actions during the war went unrecognized at home. When he died in 1997, his dream had been “fulfilled,” she said. And while “Fly” is not her husband’s own story, Williams is glad that theater audiences, too, are being exposed to this long-overlooked piece of history.

“It is important for this story to keep moving forward … for new generations of young people,” and for all people, black or white, she said. “It’s not just an African-American story. It’s an American story.”

“I’m just grateful for the opportunity to do this play when some of the [Tuskegee Airmen] are still around,” Khan said. “The legacy that they leave to their widows and their families — and for all of us as Americans — is one that can never be disputed, and should always be lifted up as a shining example of all that we can do if we put our minds to it — in spite of adversity, in spite of doors that seem to be closed.”

“Fly” was originally commissioned by the Lincoln Center Institute, and performed in 2005 before an audience of educators and students. The world premiere of a full-length production took place in 2009 at Crossroads.

When the play first began to come together, Khan noted, “there was no ‘Red Tails’ [the 2012 Lucasfilm production based on the fighter pilots] in the movie theaters, and in fact, when I started working on this, the Tuskegee Airmen had not yet received their Congressional Medals of Honor.” (The Medals were awarded in 2007.)

Trey Ellis came to the project several years after working with Robert Williams as a co-writer on the HBO film script; Khan’s first awareness of the Tuskegee Airmen, he said, was an “eye-opening” vintage photograph of some of the pilots in uniform.

He didn’t know who the men were, “and I was amazed that I didn’t know. I was just so impressed by the fact that they were black men, proud and sharp, and you could see the spirit that represented everything they did in their pursuit of excellence.”

Khan said that Tuskegee squadron commander Roscoe C. Brown, now 93, and the play’s adviser “from the beginning,” told him that if Khan was “really interested in doing this right,” he should come to the next reunion of the Tuskegee pilots, “and just go around and listen to their stories and take notes. Those notes,” Khan said, “became the foundation of the play.”

Described by the New York Times in 2009 as “a superior piece of theatrical synergy,” “Fly” has a wall-less set, designed by Beowulf Boritt. Projections are used to “give you the feeling of flight, of being in the sky, being in your own world of emotion,” Khan said, and there are minimal props and furniture. “In one scene, a chair can be a sofa. In another it can be a plane. A trunk could turn into a store counter.

“A lot of times,” he added, “people look at theater as this thing that puts a room on stage and then people walk into the room and talk. I very much want people of all ages to turn on to the beauty and magic of theater — the kind of theater that doesn’t give you everything, but requires your imagination, requires you to be part of the dialogue.

“If anything,” Khan said, “the two things that I want from the play itself are, one, for people to experience this incredible story; and two, for them to experience the power and magic of live performance.”

“Fly” will play through Feb. 21 at the Pasadena Playhouse before going on to New York’s New Victory Theater for its off-Broadway premiere in March, and a subsequent “homecoming” run at Crossroads in April.

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What: “Fly”

Where: Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena.

When: Opens 7 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 31. Runs 8 p.m. Tuesday through Friday; 4 and 8 p.m. Saturday; 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday. (No 7 p.m. performance Feb. 7.) Ends Feb. 21.

Tickets: $25 to $77; premium seating, $125.

More info: (626) 356-7529, pasadenaplayhouse.org

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LYNNE HEFFLEY writes about theater and culture for Marquee.