“entertaining, informative, and consistently engaging.“
Julia Newbould
4.5 shooting stars
KXT Broadway
Play runs from 15th -30th March
Focusing on the women in the space race
Four years in the making, Mercury Poisoning has arrived at KXT in a highly polished state. The writing is tight, the acting is sublime, and the play itself succeeds in its ambition of three protagonists across different stories coming together as one.
Playwright Madeleine Stedman is clearly someone to watch. This is her third play but the first one to be formally staged. Her first play Shortcuts was performed for the Shopfront Theatre in 2019 and focused on true crime. In 2020, her play April Marlow’s Abortion was due to be staged Downstairs at Belvoir but was a victim of covid shutdowns.
Mercury Poisoning was workshopped at Shopfront Theatre, ATYP, and KXT – and the finished play has really come together in a more polished state than some of Sydney’s main theatres.
A lot of research was undertaken to bring the stories of both the US and the Russian cosmonauts to the stage. However, Stedman says the research is fun to do when it’s a topic you’re passionate about.
She was not always so enthusiastic about the space race. It happened only after she visited Florida with her partner who wanted to see a rocket launch which was scuppered. This left her with extra time to Google and wonder why a world that sent the first men to space in 1961 could not manage to continue this for womankind. The first woman in space was Valentina Tereshkova aboard Vostok 6 in 1963, but the second was not until a generation later – Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982.
Visiting the Kennedy Space Center, Stedman realised that there were women in space programs but their stories had not been told. She also found that the Soviet program had beaten the US at every turn except for the moon landing – and this was something else that had not been focused on. This made up two of the branches of the story that she wove together.
The stories were also inspired by Stedman’s grandmother and her generation – “there was such potential and wonder but a limiting of their potential,” Stedman said.
The title comes from the space program itself. Project Mercury was the US’s first human space program, and the Mercury 13 were 13 American women who were part of the privately-funded program run by NASA physician William Randolph Lovelace which aimed to test women for spaceflight. However, the Mercury 13 name was only given retrospectively. At the time they were just known as fellow lady astronaut trainees.
The setting of the play in the 1960s brought the play into the Barbie era for me. This was the exact time when Barbie was showing young girls, they could be astronauts, doctors, scientists, etc. And we saw how that turned out in the movie – cue America Ferrara’s speech – “… Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong.”
Four stories intertwine in Mercury Poisoning, which focuses on the plight of three women wanting to succeed – and be first in their chosen paths. The play uses a mix of real people and composites of real people to tell the stories.
First there is Molly Marshall (Teodora Matovic), who wants to be the first woman (US) in space. Then there is the Russian Valeria “Chaika” Tereshkova (Violette Ayad) who becomes the first woman in space. The women were determined to fulfil their ambitions and achieved all the same criteria as the men, but the men would not accept them as equals and kept them out of the space race.
“It is inconceivable to me that the world of outer space should be restricted to men only like some sort of stag club,” Janey Hunt says in the play. The words are verbatim on her real testimony from the Congressional hearings on discrimination in the space programs).
While the Russians allowed a woman in space, when Chaika returned, she was treated like a token female astronaut, and was returned into the female construct of wifedom and motherhood.
And finally, there is Nicole Grace (Shawnee Jones), a cabaret singer who wants to be a successful actress or singer who makes white people see her as a star. To inject extra levity into the script, there is a Star Trek-like spoof with Nicole as lead. Nicole’s character was built around Stedman’s love for Star Trek. Stedman’s mum told her it was a really big deal to have a coloured actress in such a big role at that time.
It was groundbreaking and added to the theme of the play that children need to see someone like them in these roles to open their minds to the opportunities in their own futures.
“It is in those unexpected avenues that you are disarmed enough to change your brain chemistry to say there is something going on here. It’s a universal experience that each generation needs to have – an icon in fiction,” Stedman said.
Jack Richardson plays the male lead in the Trekkie spoof. He also doubles as Yuri Gagarin – as well as part of the ensemble which shows his dexterity.
He was not alone in the ability to switch between accents and roles. Each actor plays multiple parts and Charlotte Saluzsincky and Sarah Jane Starr are outstanding as US cosmonauts.
One of the most interesting characters for me was the former fighter pilot Jackie Cochran (played by Melissa Jones). She was a woman who felt she fought hard to get where she was and wasn’t going to help lift those behind her. She was one of the women that Madeleine Albright (former US secretary of State) referred to as having a “special place in hell”. I recognise these types from the many who worked in the banking world when I was there. Women who happily looked at themselves as being role models for other women – just not advocates or actual supporters.
The costumes, choreography and lighting all added to a slick production. Clever choreography saw Molly lifted by several other members of the cast to represent her in a float tank to acclimatise to the idea of space. In another scene, it is Chaika who is lifted to show her floating in space.
The play was entertaining, informative, and consistently engaging.
Stedman is currently working on another play slated for November at Flight Path Theatre. It’s centred around two former best friends in their 50s and 60s who meet after many years apart.
Julia Newbould, Theatre Now
