VISION

“Author Agatha Christie vanished for eleven days in 1926; that same year, evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson vanished for three weeks. Amelia Earhart disappeared during her 1937 round-the-world flight. Amelia was never seen again; Agatha and Aimee never spoke of what happened during their disappearances.” – written by Rob Hartmann and seen on the title page of the Vanishing Point script.

So why this play now? America is fascinated with celebrity. Today’s pop culture surrounds daily doses of gossip, paparazzi and tweeting. We strive to know everything that is being said about celebrities and we watch their every move. Consequently, every famed individual is living under a constant microscope of scrutiny that they must reconcile for themselves. When we do not have the facts about our favorite star, we fantasize what their lives might be. Their mysteries consume us as we strive to live vicariously through them to add adventure, spectacle and mystery into our lives. Their successes give us permission to dream big and hope; their failures reinforce that they are actually human. Their lives seem transparent to us. We even seem to own a bit of them. Interestingly enough, by the virtue of the internet and YouTube, we share the identical struggle that celebrities face to maintain agency of our lives. In this age of information overload, every person is a minor celebrity.

Layering the history of women’s civil rights issues as the propeller to our women celebrities’ struggle, against the background of post-industrial revolution when the mechanical advancements were forging communication ahead at breakneck speed, I hope to deconstruct Vanishing Point’s model of exploded fame in the late 20’s. (MM will talk now about background of Communications and Women’s rights) I want the audience to be engaged in a personal reflection of the their own everyday information over-exposure. Some questions I intend to explore are: How do we reconcile the events in our lives with the perception of our “press”? What is our identity’s vanishing point? How, then, do we reclaim agency of our lives?

Vanishing Point shows us that we can “rewrite” our own history in order to reinvest in ourselves and create the magic in our lives instead of being disillusioned by it. When humans do this, we climb to new heights. We soar.