FD-350 clipping, Minneapolis Star 4/16/79: "The Cricket's 'D.B. Cooper' is leap into rare experience"

FD-350 (Rev. 12-5-78)

(Mount Clipping in Space Below)

(Indicate page, name of newspaper, city and state.) 3C STAR Mpls. MN Date: 4-16-79 Edition: Evening

Title: D.B. COOPER

Character: or Classification: Submitting Office: MINNEAPOLIS

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The Cricket's 'D.B. Cooper' is leap into rare experience

Jane Murray and Don Amendolia in 'D.B. Cooper'

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164-73-610 SEARCHED SERIALIZED FBI — MINNEAP

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"The D.B. Cooper Project," in its premiere production at the Cricket Theatre, is a work of unique dramatic imagination that boggles most conventional assessments. Even when John Orlock's "musical fantasy" goes amiss, it still continues to add up small points toward an impressive theatrical and emotional totality. The very concept is enough to make most of us shake our prosaic heads. Many playwrights could come up with some grabby story ideas about D.B. Cooper, the pseudonym for the 1971 hijacker who parachuted from an airliner over Washington state and disappeared into legend with $200,000 in as yet unrecovered ransom money. But a drama that deals only with his pre-heist humdrum? A life so mud-fence, all-American unremarkable? Wholly without any large gestures or commanding characters? And interspersed with poignant or funny little songs? I can only ask you to accept on faith that Orlock's oft-beat idea somehow works: It is grabby precisely because it does not try to grab, or pander to our dramatic expectations. Wisely keeping it small, almost the seed of an idea, the author has created something able to grow and spread in any direction our own imaginations are able to follow. Orlock took his text from a letter signed "D.B. Cooper" that was sent to several newspapers a month after the crime. The writer (whoever he was) denied being a professional criminal ("I never even got a parking ticket") but said: "I am no modern day Robin Hood," and added, "Unfortunately, I do have only 14 months to live." The letter speaks of a life that had been filled with "agony, turmoil, hate and more hate" and explains that the extorted money "was to gain a few fast grains of peace of mind." It is the person who would have written such a letter that fascinates Orlock. Happily, he was not influenced by the sensational mythologizing of the crime in constructing his imagined character. His chief interest centers on what, in terms of ordinary American life, some average man would regard as "agony, turmoil and hate," what he might consider "peace of mind" in facing an early death, even what image of a "Robin Hood" he felt honor-bound to reject. So, we start with the drably mundane figure of Aaron Tarkus, who runs a failing gas station in Camden, N.J., is unhappily and childlessly married to someone from high school and has no emotional, social or intellectual life outside weekend TV football with 1 two nonentity buddies. Orlock's amusing and original "Indulgences in the Louisville Har-

em" was a hit last season at the Cricket, but this new play, by triumphing over its very imperfections, reveals a growing depth, sensitivity and awareness that true drama is created inside characters and to the degree that they are given functional human reality and dimensions. It is these qualities that confer interest and a strangely urgent significance on the unpromising Aaron Tarkus and his dreary associations--not as some latent superman but as a Joe Doakes whose hurts and hopes are as important to him as those of any towering dramatic characters. In the amazing hands of Don Amendolia, Aaron almost imperceptibly emerges from a negligible jerk (a whining commentary on the frauds and baubles of the American Dream) into something like epic pathos. He acquires odd stature, however misguided, in his determination finally to do at least,

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one thing right—even if it is too late and even if it is wrong. In the process, in extremity, we see the unrecognized (or defeated) better feelings and possibilities that had lain sadly fallow in him all along.

This sounds very heavy, but Or- lock and the Cricket crew drop it on us only after laying a deceptive groundwork, part frisky inconse- quence and part commonplace hu- man troubles.

Fred Thompson is Aaron's busi- ness partner and original "brains" of the hijack scheme to break them out of their circular hopelessness. Clive Rosengren is the other loud- mouthed boob, equally unlikely for such high enterprise.

Mildly surreal staging devices establish the fantasy tone: All the props (beer cans, eating utensils, "things") are twice life-size; the people wear ghastly bargain-base- ment garments in clashing colors and patterns; revolving backdrop panels inject them into changing

times and places.

I found the music only sporadi- cally effective. "Betty's Waltz," sung by Jane Murray, broke my heart as Aaron's wife mourned dead love over a box of face pow- der—the long-ago last gift he had given her—"bought on sale." "This Is My Sister" is delightful comic patter, the roommate complaints of sexy Camille Gifford and "plain- Jane" Dolores Noah—unwittingly involved with the hijack plotters.

Too many of the numbers, how-

ever, seemed irrelevant padding, and not interesting enough as sepa- rate songs. Perhaps intentionally (to avoid slick "musical" lyri- cism?), most were played in the wrong key for individual singers, making the voices unmelodious and words often unintelligible.

But, a gritty truth and deeply moving humanity cut through both the usefully distancing whimsy and the unneeded artifice to make "D.B. Cooper" a rare theater expe- rience.

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