FD-350 clipping: Minneapolis Tribune feature package on Cooper mythology and the Cricket Theater play, 4/8/79

Legend of a hijacker comes to Cricket Theater

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By Mike Steele Staff Writer.

On Thanksgiving Eve 1971, a mild-mannered man using the name D.B. Cooper hijacked a Northwest Airlines 727 and, somewhere south of Seattle, parachuted out clutching $200,000 in $20 bills. He hasn't been seen since.

It was a great mystery and Cooper became something of a folk hero. Songs were written about his dazzling escapade and D.B. Cooper took his place alongside Robin Hood, [guess: Jean] Lafitte and all three musketeers.

Almost overlooked during the episode, however, was a letter received by several newspapers a month after the hijacking. It was written by a man who claimed to be Cooper. The letter said it can be modern days Robin Hood. Unfortunately I do have only 14 months to live. He took the money, he wrote, "to gain a few fast grains of peace of mind."

One who didn't overlook the letter was playwright John Orlock. "I was fascinated by that letter," explained the 33-year-old writer, "especially a part where he wrote about living a life of agony, turmoil, hate and more hate. It was a beautiful piece of writing, straightforward and simple, the kind of letter a D.B. Cooper would have written. Let's face it, the hijacking was one of the great acts of imagination of our time, the idea of taking the money and leaving the airplane up there.

"I clipped that letter and put it in my files for a few years. I was thinking about it during that time, however, and it kept coming out in my mind as a musical, a small cabaret musical. Then five years ago we performed a rough draft of it in a workshop at Penn State where I was teaching. It only had five songs and only two or three of those original scenes remain today."

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[guess: But he] has worked and reworked [illegible] since, and last year "The D.B. Cooper Project" was done in a reading during the Cricket Theater's late night works-in-progress series. It worked well enough that the Cricket is presenting it on its main stage beginning Friday through May 5, under Lou Salerni's direction.

The play, like most of Orlock's to date, will be a comic drama. It won't be the big, metaphorical statement he'll be after but, as he put it, "just people in a situation, a look at what happens when interesting characters are placed in a situation that will knock them around. I never start a play saying, 'I want to say this.' It's deadly. What really makes me cringe is when a playwright uses the title of the play as a metaphor in the play, you know, here comes the Streetcar Named Desire. I look for character and let metaphors find themselves through them."

Orlock's characters tend to be based on historical fact, then shot through with the writer's imagination. His "indulgences in the Louisville Har[lem]," one of last year's hits at the [illegible]

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lock's plays to date it is the way he begins with logical, historical situa- tions and lets those situations zoom through logic right off the wall, often into surprisingly tender emotions.

"The humor is so important," said Orlock, "in terms of holding an audi- ence. If you can make them laugh they'll follow you anywhere, right through logic into areas you could never get them to follow you normal- ly. You simply can't bore an audi- ence and move them too. I'm learn- ing that more and more, how to hold an audience and how I can turn that back in on itself or into a different level[illegible]

[illegible]he pulls his comedy from many styles. "I've been watching Abbott and Costello lately," he said. "It's just absolutely primal, basic materi- al, beautifully built. The 'Who's on First?' sketch is to comedy what Bach is to music. I also watch old television series, like Sgt. Bilko. It was well written formally and just needs a content injection. And I love Moliere.

"What I'm after is situational com- edy, the kind that builds from char- acters to the point where the audi- ence finally says 'Oh, no, he isn't really going to do that!' It takes a bit more time to build those situations as opposed to just joke humor, but it's so much richer."

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[guess: John] Orlock[illegible] Cricket, featured a mesmerist from the International Institute of Science and Populism. The mesmerist, it turned out, was mute and had to be accompanied by a friend who said all his words for him though the ideas behind the words, we were as- sured, were the mesmerist's.

He has also written plays about a man who played the organ in a Bos- ton subway station and about the Golden Girl, the first female baton twirler to march with a college marching band. His latest play, re- cently given in the Cricket's works- in-progress series, "Revolution of the Heavenly Orbs," is about a 12th-cen- tury French cathedral builder.

If there's one thing that typifies Or-

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Orlock also wrote the 11 songs in this, his first musical. In fact, in th[illegible]

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Camille Gifford and Don Amendolia in the Cricket Theater's produc- tion of "The D. B. Cooper Project."

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[illegible] est tradition of musical theater, h[ad] just completed the final one [a] week or so before opening.

[illegible partial line]

"I have a background in piano," he [said], "but I haven't composed much. I did do some small film scores and some commercial work, but not much. The one song last year in 'Louisville Harem' was my first theater song. I don't think I can really describe my style. I look for theater music, songs that are scenes in themselves. I like a lot of early Kurt Weill music, but I'm still exploring. This piece is scored for two pianos, harp, and either percussion or strings. Not sure yet. I had a tuba in there first, but when the harp came in [I] dropped it. The harp was an amazing instrument, perfect, ethereal flying music."

Orlock is a native of Philadelphia and has taught at both Penn State and Boston University. He set out to become an actor and director but about nine years ago took a playwriting course that showed him to be a writer of some skill. He soon won a Shubert Playwriting award to study at Penn State, where he wrote his first full-length play.

"I felt the great satisfaction of hearing an audience respond," he said, "and found out how nice that could be. I wrote only off and on for a while but I was getting more and more reinforcement and finally in late 1973, when I began 'D.B. Cooper,' I made the commitment to playwriting."

He came to Minneapolis in 1975 because he was tired of teaching and had heard the theater scene was promising. He and his wife loaded up a U-Haul and breezed into Minneapolis on Labor Day. He spent the first year selling calculators at Dayton's, by day, teaching theater at the Guild of Performing Arts at night. He wrote and directed a few shows there and finally, a year ago, was named a playwright-in-residence at the Playwrights' Lab.

"It is a very, very useful program," he said. "I'm still involved with it. It's an opportunity to take good [actors] and [a] director and say 'All right, I'd like to present this work.' And then work on it and see how it plays. Out of the Lab work I can hear the piece, rewrite it and work it out. I still like to work this way. The Cricket's works-in-progress series has worked out the same way. It's a very nice way to bring a play along."

Starting next fall, Orlock will become the Cricket's literary manager in charge of reading new, scripts, helping with play selection and, of course, writing.

"Above all," he said, "it will be a steady salary. I'll phase out most of my teaching and be able to concentrate on professional theater. In fact, until they asked me to take that position I had seriously thought about going back to college teaching, just to put bread on the table. I wasn't too happy with those prospects. Believe me, it feels much better to be in the theater."

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