Part 78, page 371

Transcript

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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, 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, "I am no modern day 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."

But he has worked and reworked it 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 Harem," one of last year's hits at the,

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