ARTicles vol. 2 i.3a: Suspensions of Disbelief

Daedalus made two sets of wings out of wax and feathers – one for himself and one for his son, Icarus. The artist warned his son not to fly too high, but Icarus paid no attention. He climbed so close to the sun that the wax on his wings melted, and he fell out of the sky. The myth threatened to become a reality in 1954, when British actor and technician Peter Foy pushed stage-flying beyond its limits by sending Mary Martin soaring up past the stage-lights in Jerome Robbins’ production of Peter Pan. Until that time, all Peter Pans had swung from a pulley, which reduced the range of their flight the higher they rose. As a result, the performers had trouble flying in sync with the music until Foy found a simple solution: He added another pulley to make “The Inter-Related Pendulum.” One drum controlled the range of the flight, giving the performer the freedom to span the breadth of a stage and even sweep out over the audience at any height. With this invention’s success, Foy bowed out of his acting career to dedicate himself to making performers fly with increasing versatility. He called the company Flying By Foy. Though flight is seen as a modern wonder, it is not a new phenomenon in theatre. Euripides’s Medea took off in her chariot in 431 B.C., soaring above Corinth after her rampage against Jason. As other playwrights followed suit, picking up their characters by crane, Antiphanes, a comic poet, mocked the tragedians’ use of the deus ex machina, hauling gods in by machine to tie up their plots: “[T]ragic poets lift up a machine as readily as a finger, when they haven’t anything more to say.” Martha Clarke will use Peter Foy’s innovations to explore A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This production’s flight director, David Hale, describes Flying By Foy’s system as a form of dance, and Peter Foy calls his technicians “airographers.” David Hale is working with Clarke to direct Midsummer’s fairies around the A.R.T.’s air space. The pair has worked together before, flying angels out over the audience in her 1985 production, The Garden of Earthly Delights. More recently, they made characters glide across the stage in Hans Christian Andersen, a play performed in San Francisco. Beyond lowering deities into a scene to fix its conflicts, Peter Foy’s machines let characters such as Peter Pan and the fairies stir up mischief in theatre spaces all over the world. Sarah McDonough is the A.R.T.’s Literary Intern.