On March 17, playwright Andi Lee Carter, Brooklyn artist and transgender/non-binary expert, and composer Henco Espag, Music Director of the Lesbian and Gay Big Apple Symphonic Band and Judson Memorial Church, presented the premiere of their concise new play-with-music “OPPY: A Mars Rover Story,” about NASA, space, science, and machinery, and humanity, gender, and love. “OPPY” runs at Judson through March 21 and I attended the first of its eight in-person, masked, and socially distant performances, with limited audience size. Temperatures were taken as we entered.
“OPPY” concerns NASA Mars rover Opportunity, whose official mission is to search for water, take photos of the colorful desert that is Mars to relay to Earth, and examine rock samples. Amiable OPPY’s personal mission is the search for sister rover, Spirit, who preceded OPPY to Mars. As guided by director Mika Kauffman and creators Carter and Espag, DeShawn Jenkins, appealingly glittery, silvery, graceful, and androgynous, as OPPY, brings out the sensitivity, the heart, behind the scientific exploration.
Encounters with the no-nonsense, all-business Spirit do not go well, but do lead to OPPY’s climactic tour-de-force scena of dancing, jumping, emoting, yearning, considering gender, and stripping off the shiny metal to reveal the feeling being beneath.
Before the first night, I attended a rehearsal of “OPPY” on March 8. Two things the performance had that the rehearsal didn’t were the vivid projections, on the one hand, of the bleak Martian landscape and the stars, including the Gemini constellation, Castor and Pollux, and on the other, amplification, a mixed blessing, which didn’t necessarily enhance comprehension of Carter’s text. [This seems to have been constructive criticism for, as Espag wrote to me later in an email, "We did a new overhaul of the sound for yesterday’s performance, moved the audience back and added monitors to shut off some of the boomy speakers by the altar."]
Espag, at the Petrof piano, conributes an evocative rumbling prelude and, later, ethereal music of the spheres. He plays some set musical motifs and improvises variations on them, as he told me, so, in each performance, the music is somewhat different. Parker Wallis provides the voice of NASA,
Remaining repetitions of “OPPY,” at this writing, run from March 19 to 21, live at 7 p.m., live and live-streamed at 8 p.m. There is nudity in the 7 p.m. performances, not in the 8 p.m. ones. Tickets, priced at $20 each, are available from Brown Paper Tickets. Go to https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/4811467 for tickets for the in-person shows or https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/4825403 for the livestream online shows.