1st
One Small Step
David Hasting’s One Small Step is a two-man show on the space race which is refreshingly inventive and exuberantly performed. The actors, bursting onto the stage with paper tube rockets and homemade sound effects, powered through the 55 minute performance with shared energy and verve. Affecting a playfulness which bordered between entertaining silliness and child-like whimsy, the play captured the sheer wonder of the entire enterprise of sending human beings into space through the use of simplistic props (a piece of cloth taken off a table turns into a projection screen which reflects the image of the moon, plastic buckets turns into helmets, and cardboard boxes turn into space packs), as well as its darker moments of pathos. Not particularly complex, the play is more or less a retelling of the events of the space race and doesn’t veer too much in delving into heavy themes to do with the Cold War, but it gives a sense of the almost manic audacious craziness that must have accompanied the quest by the two superpowers to have the first man step foot on the moon.
