Flight presents the story of Wilbur and Orville Wright, from their childhood in Dayton, Ohio, to their printing press then bike shop to the invention of the airplane. Bill Hand wrote the script and directs the musical.
“Flight is the story of the Wright brothers from childhood to how they came about their invention, and at the same time it looks at the culture of the period,” Hand said. “You get to hear a lot of the music of the period, see a lot of the lifestyle that went on at that time, and meet some of the people that the Wrights were heavily involved with.”
Through its music, dialogue and bare bones sets, Flight plants the audience firmly in the times of the Wright Brothers and into their relationship with each other and those who supported them – like their sister Catherine.
“Their sister Catherine actually became more famous than the brothers did because she was the life of the party. You have these two guys who are wallflowers going around the world,” Hand said. “Well, Catherine went around the world with them, and people began to pay more attention to her in the end.”
Also a prominent character is Lawrence Dunbar.
“He's a young African American gentleman, probably the only one in Dayton just about. But he was a good friend of the Wrights,” Hand said. “He became the poet laureate of Ohio and there's a museum in Dayton dedicated to him, as well as one dedicated to the Wright brothers.”
Dunbar first wrote the line “I know why the caged bird sings,” used later by Maya Angelou.
“There's a parallel here. Laurence Dunbar, this young African American man, was very popular in town because when you're the only one, and yet, as a black man he had so much to overcome in order to claim his name,” Hand said. “The Wright brothers are these guys who had so much to overcome, you'd never have thought they were going to do it. There’s parallel of those two.”
Flight is the second collaboration between writer Bill Hand and musician Simon Spalding. Spalding wrote the music for the show. He says it offers a glimpse into the creative minds of the Wright brothers.
“I found it interesting reading Wilbur Wright's notes on bird's flight – how amazingly detailed they are and how unbelievably perceptive he was,” Spalding said. Reading Wilbur's notes on bird flight makes me think of him as being that kind of creative genius that gets hold of a subject or an idea and just lives it.”
Orville on the other hand was more of the mechanical engineer, who explored other things while working on the airplane.
“I remember going to the Air and Space Museum and seeing his mandolin and thinking “Oh, he played the mandolin, that's nice.” He had it with him in the Kitty Hawk. I assumed that he must have already played the mandolin before they went from running a a bike manufacturing shop to inventing the airplane, but no. Orville actually took up the mandolin after they were already well into the development of powered flight,” Spalding said.
In writing the music, Spalding aimed to stay as close as possible to the music style of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
“I tried to choose songs that were very popular at the time, but that haven't been done to death ever since, but that will strike modern ears as being fresh and maybe new – such as ‘Come Take a Trip in My Airship’ and ‘I Don't Want to Play in Your Yard,’” Spalding said.
They also wrote original songs for the musical. One scene takes place before a fireplace, where, for many nights, the brothers would sit and argue.
“They would argue into the night about different points on flying, not agreeing on anything. And I'm looking at all this and thinking ‘How do we present that story?’ Just the whole concept they're arguing about, I don't have any clue what they're talking about when I read it,” Hand said. “So, what we did, we put in a song called the 'Blah Blah Song.’ The lyrics are ‘blah, blah blah blah, blah, blah.’ They're sitting there yelling at each other that to get the idea of all this intellectual stuff for getting across.”
The musical is a production of the North Carolina History Theatre, a nascent venture Hand launched in 2021.
“We focus on teaching, here's what history is about, and let's put the history on a stage because that's a more interesting way to tell it, and you're going to remember it”
Flight opens today at Orringer Auditorium at Craven Community College in New Bern. It runs this weekend and next.
