Certain criminal cases hit a nerve in the collective consciousness, even if it’s hard to understand their exact appeal; once the lurid fog of media attention has dissipated, we are often left with the merely tawdry facts of a case, and painfully little insight. This is presumably why South Australian playwright Rebecca Weston decided to investigate the case of NASA astronaut Lisa Nowak, the woman who drove from Houston to Orlando to confront her ex-lover’s lover armed with a wig, dark glasses, a trench coat and some duct tape. To give us some insight, some context and humanity to what would otherwise remain a journalistic oddity.
Drive is a three-hander that feels like a monologue. The central character is a version of Nowak (Lizzy Falkland), one that attempts not so much to explain her situation as to explicate some kind of meaning from it. The other characters (Ashton Malcolm and Christopher Pitman) only exist to supplement or contrast Lisa’s mental states; without her, they’d have no reason to exist. All of which leaves a lot in the hands of the actor playing her.
There are three central platforms on which Drive plays out: the domestic, the cosmic and the world of the open road, the one Nowak sped down in pursuit of her target. And Weston makes much of the separation of these worlds. By setting them up in contrast, she hopes to make drama from the clashes and the emotional squeezing of these worlds. But they remain stubbornly isolationist; meaning from one perspective fails to seep into the others, so the chance for the audience to draw connections and associations never really materialises.
The play isn’t helped by Sasha Zahra’s direction, which swings from the plodding to the overdetermined. The performances, even Falkland’s, are either flat and monotonous or garish and cartoonish. Ashton Malcolm plays the new lover as a bimbotic void, and Christopher Pitman demonstrates little of the charisma that would make him a likely catch in this love triangle. Falkland struggles with the accent, and gives so little warmth and roundedness to the portrait of this woman on the edge, that it’s difficult to muster much sympathy.
What is notable about this production is the excellence of the design. It starts with Ian Moorhead’s sound, which suggests the dissociative isolation of space travel, and links that with the loneliness of the road. Meg Wilson’s set, with its mirror ball and large convex plastic spheres, is eerily suggestive of a ship, but also a retro-futuristic nightclub somewhere on the road to Orlando. Her lighting, under the mentorship of Christopher Petridis, is sharp and inventive, with the red, white and blue of Americana washing over the playing space. There must be something in the water, because design in this country – particularly in the independent sector – is punching well above its weight.
When you go to a play like this, which takes a real case and attempts to elucidate and unpick it in a theatrical context, you have to feel you’ve learnt something more than you could from a well-written newspaper article. Drive doesn’t really succeed; there isn’t enough insight into the character, and the larger issues – about the pressures on women to balance ambition with femininity – are poorly articulated. The most fascinating aspect of the story, that dark fetishism suggested in the objects Nowak packed, is totally ignored. For a work that aims to peer beneath the surface of this strange case, it’s a pity that the best thing about it is how good it looks.