Chicago Tribune: On July 19, 1989, United Airlines Flight 232, a DC-10 service, left Stapleton Airport in Denver bound for O'Hare International Airport with 296 souls on board. After a catastrophic hydraulic failure, the crew lost control of the rudderless jet, mostly, but still managed to crash land in the sunshine at Sioux (City) Gateway Airport in Iowa.
2 comments:
"This is not some kind of disaster exploitation, but an attempt at life lessons for the living." In a culture so obsessed with the gory details of past disasters, I feel like this is an important distinction to make in the artistic world. We can choose to evoke pity and horror from the audience, or to use the plain facts of disaster to bring about a heightened awareness of everyday life. This particular case study sounds intriguing in its juxtaposition between the large number who survived and the large number who did not, especially in an artistic sense. How does one write a play that accurately conveys the joy of life and the pain of leaving those joys behind, without becoming pandering and self-indulgent? A happy medium seems to be focusing on teaching the audience the importance of each moment, but in a subtle way through the actual past events. While this sounds nice in theory I would really like to be able to see the actual show, because I feel like this could also become just as trite if it focused too much on what it was trying to teach the audience instead of the concrete events.
As someone who flies (mostly 14 hour flights) very frequently, I have experienced my share of scary plane rides and as a result I am terrified of flying. I'm glad to see that a piece is created to make this real fear and risk that is so close yet so distant from us known to people who don't necessarily think about these things. I remember my plane ride back from spring break was going through very severe turbulences, but my friend sitting next to me did not understand why I was scared. Theatre allows you to experience emotions and contemplate about things that you might not necessarily experience/think about in real life. I've seen documentaries about specific plane crashes, so I definitely want to see this play and how it portrays the event, as well as what story it decides to tell. On a side note, I really appreciate how this piece is actually trying to create something that will teach us. So many horror films are made today are based on real events, which in doing so they give no respect to the real people who experienced these events and just use them to make money. It's nice to see that this play is actually likely do flight 232 justice.
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