Freebird Goes to Mars

Awarded Best Avant Garde show on Broadway at the United Solo Festival. Listed one of 5 boldest moments by LA Weekly.

Reviewed by Iris Mann
RECOMMENDED 

Rarely do 45 minutes fly by as quickly as they do in this solo show co-created (with director Ilana Gustafson) and performed by Betsy Moore. Her portrait of a middle-American working woman borders on the absurd while being eminently recognizable.

Moore introduces us to Betty, who is hosting a launch party prior to setting off on a space mission to Mars. She folds an American flag and packs up mementos from significant chapters in her life, which she proceeds to relate to the audience. We learn that she has had some six or seven husbands (she isn’t sure), is a mother, works at Walmart in a low-wage job, and is a possibly recovering alcoholic who was once in an institution. She doesn’t appear to have had many breaks, and this space voyage serves to symbolize the aspirations of this country’s poorer workers by giving one of them a serendipitous opportunity to break free of life’s limitations.

Laced with humor, the conversational text speaks volumes as it entertains. And Moore’s interpretation is delightfully authentic; it’s easy to identify with what she has to say. Her drawl, her timing, and her physicality hit just the right notes as her character unselfconsciously shares some of the most intimate details of her history. And her movement, which switches to balletic slow motion as Betsy becomes weightless in space, is beautifully rendered.

In her skillful staging, Gustafson makes inventive use of a compact space, employing rear projection and voiceover judiciously and to maximum effect.

In an apt metaphor for our government’s broken promises to the working class, Betty, enjoying herself on Mars, is told she must return to Earth because the president has cut the funding for the space program.

The show has had previous incarnations. It was presented at Son of Semele’s Solo Creation Festival in 2015; two years later, it was entered in New York’s 8^th Annual United Solo Theatre Festival, where it was named Best Avant-Garde Show. One hopes it has a further theatrical life.

Reviewed by Bill Raden

With Freebird Goes to Mars, Betsy Moore (with co-creator/director Alex Suha) adds another fierce and fearless portrait to a personal gallery of chameleon stage grotesques that includes the actress’s searing turn as Joan Volmer in last year’s Bill & Joan at Sacred Fools. This time out Moore, unrecognizable in pink glasses, a close-cropped blonde wig and unflattering house pants, plays the middle-aged Betty, a plain-speaking Walmart cashier as she packs up her belongings and a lifetime of memories for what will prove to be a very long trip.

 

As Betty wistfully reflects on her six husbands and her institutionalization for chronic alcoholism, the piece’s humanity and genuine fondness for its subject transcends mere satiric caricature. And just at the point where one begins to wonder where Moore and Suha can possibly take the piece to escape the pedestrian pull of its colorful but somewhat familiar subject, Freebird suddenly blasts off into a more poetic realm with a balletic coup de théâtre that, beyond saying it includes an inspired Stanley Kubrick homage, would be too much of a spoiler to describe.

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