The Challenger disaster offers new insight into Jared Mezzocchi’s relationship with his mother in 73 Seconds (photo by Maria Baranova)
73 SECONDS
Lower Eastside Girls Club
402 East Eighth St. at Ave. D
Thursday – Monday through May 18, $70-$140
www.engardearts.org/73seconds
“You remember where you were when it happened,” Jared Mezzocchi says in his multimedia solo show 73 Seconds. “What do you do when there is no explosion?”
I remember exactly where I was when it happened — Mezzocchi is referring to the Challenger disaster, when the space shuttle carrying a crew of seven, including the first teacher in space, Christa McAuliffe, broke apart seventy-three seconds into its flight on January 28, 1986. I was picking up my sister from high school, sitting in the car, listening to the radio when the news hit.
We went straight home, and I watched for hours as Dan Rather talked and talked about solid rocket boosters and McAuliffe and CBS showed the explosion over and over again.
“The thing about explosions is that it’s something you can point at,” Obie-winning director, actor, playwright, associate professor, and designer Mezzocchi adds. “There’s before the explosion, the explosion, and then after the explosion. It happens quickly.”
In 73 Seconds — which takes place in an actual working planetarium at the Lower Eastside Girls Club — Mezzocchi turns his attention to his mother, Rosemary, a popular teacher who, at a restaurant celebrating his high school graduation, casually mentions that she once worked for NASA. The revelation blows the space-obsessed Mezzocchi’s mind, and it gets even more complicated when she describes her connection to the Challenger.
It is such a shock to his system that he wonders if it’s actually true, especially as his mother contracts Alzheimer’s. “What am I doing, memorializing someone who’s still alive?” he asks.
It’s territory he’s explored before: In his deeply personal 2021 virtual On the Beauty of Loss, Mezzocchi related the deaths of his father and grandfather.
Jared Mezzocchi integrates old technology into his new solo show (photo by Maria Baranova)
Mezzocchi shares his mother’s story — which can often get too intimate and explanatory, as if he’s speaking with his therapist instead of a theater audience — using a mix of technology, much based on what was available in the 1980s, including an overhead projector, cassette tapes, poorly composed family photographs, and scratchy audio. He occasionally projects the universe onto the planetarium dome, but not quite enough. The sound is by Ryan Gamblin, with lighting and video by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew and production design by Calvin Anderson.
Directed and co-created by the always inventive Aya Ogawa (The Nosebleed, Meat Suit, or the shitshow of motherhood), the narrative hits some bumpy snags — it’s by no means a smooth ride, but it does echo what appears to be going on inside Mezzocchi’s head as he deals with this surprising new family information, from small explosions to bigger ones — but it cleverly explores the never-ending, complex relationships between parents and children. It also answers some questions that Mezzocchi (The Wind and the Rain, Vietgone) raised in On the Beauty of Loss, when he races to the hospital after being told his father has been admitted there.
Ultimately, 73 Seconds is a touching experience, one that will have you thinking about your own relationship with your parents. It’s about how we grieve, the secrets we keep, and the connections we need to move forward.
And it’s another unique piece from En Grade Arts, which specializes in presenting work in unusual spaces, from a Brooklyn bar and New York City apartments to Brookfield Place and Hudson River Park — and now a surprise planetarium in an unexpected location.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]