When I wrote about my first visit to the Loveland Stage Company, I spoke of the guilt I felt for taking so long to take in a play there. The same sort of guilt surrounds my first time attending a Mason Community Players production. MCP is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year which means it is six years older than LSC. I suppose I could feel extra guilty for ignoring the Mason group even longer than the Loveland group but, although I’ve lived near Mason, I have never actually lived in Mason so feeling equal levels of guilt regarding my being late to the party at both theaters seems more or less OK.

But I also feel another kind of guilt regarding this review. I have no special or early access to plays so my infrequent reviews of them are often near or even after the end of their run when few or no performances remain. I always feel a little guilty about that. That feeling increases when the production is one I want to recommend because it’s extra good or somehow unique. All that is true of Above the Sand meaning I really feel guilty about the timing of this review.

Producing any play is an accomplishment. There are certainly some particular challenges in doing it with amateurs and volunteers and doing a musical must add even more. Performers need to be able to sing and maybe dance a bit, and musicians are needed to accompany them. Community theater productions will never be a match for well-financed Broadway companies but their audiences don’t expect them to be. When a community theater company produces a successful Broadway musical it can benefit from having one or more professional productions as examples without getting dinged for not having Barbra Streisand or Gregory Hines in the cast. The production I attended Thursday night had all of the listed challenges without one of the aids. Amateurs and volunteers did indeed sing and dance accompanied by offstage volunteers playing instruments but they were not copying from anyone. This was the world premiere of Above the Sand so there was no previous production to provide an example. This gang didn’t need one.

The premiere run ended on Saturday. Not knowing how long online information will remain available, I’ve taken the liberty of copying this short description from the Mason Players’ website:

Above the Sand is written and composed by MCP member Tom Davis. It tells of the challenges and triumphs of Wilbur and Orville Wright as they bring the power of flight to the world. The story takes the audience on a journey from a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Washington, D.C., and Paris, France. Above the Sand is a piece of local history that has affected life around the world. It shines a light on the struggles of those who dream an idea into reality, then ultimately triumph.

As mentioned, any community theater production requires a lot of effort, and a musical production even more. That effort is not wasted with the script Tom Davis has created. With spoken words and lyrics, it touches all key points of the Wrights’ achievement. It avoids sounding like either a science or history lesson while being a little bit of both.

I’m always intrigued by how a single stage of limited size gets used to tell stories involving multiple locations that are sometimes huge spaces. That is another challenge that this production encounters and handles quite well despite not having a Broadway-sized budget. By flipping panels, hanging pictures, and swapping some furniture, the action moves between sand dunes, living rooms, workshops, France, England, and more. In a program note, director Lara Gonzalez talks of collaborating and creating “throughout the rehearsal process”. Much of the collaboration naturally involved Gonzalez and Davis but I’d be surprised if there wasn’t at least one idea contributed by every cast and crew member.

I’ll give a shout out to the actors portraying the Wright siblings although every member of the cast of nearly twenty turned in wonderful performances. Corey Meyer (Wilbur) has the least experience of the three younger Wrights although I certainly would not have known that without a program. Nico Morello (Orville) and Eva Bower (Katharine) have both been on stage quite a bit. I had sort of mentally tagged Eva as the most polished of the cast and learned that I could be right when I read that she was first on stage at age 9.

I have no idea what, if anything, comes next for Above the Sand. I know of no plans for future performances but I sure hope that there will be some. I was entertained Thursday night, and exposed to a little science and history too. I don’t believe any of the science or history facts were really new to me but some of the emotion was. I’ve read numerous articles and books about the Wright brothers and their early flights. I’ve watched more than a few documentaries too. None of them conveyed the sense of awe from the world at large that I witnessed Thursday night. Maybe it came from the music. Or maybe it came from the personal involvement that a live performance requires. At some level, I know I have considered that the existence of powered flight changed the basic way that an awful lot of people looked at the world but it had never registered as strongly with me as it did in that theater. Before December 1903, many people had considered it impossible; others thought it merely quite difficult. The first group was now indisputably proven wrong. The second group was proven right and no longer had to guess at just how difficult it was. It took some time for the news to circle the globe and even more time for some people to accept it but that did not alter the fact. Somehow a group of people singing about something they were witnessing offstage drove that home better than any words on a page or images on a screen. Hooray for music. Hooray for live theater. Hooray for man’s ability to progress and to be amazed at his own progress.