Brilliant! That is the only word to describe Fly by Trey Ellis @ Ricardo Khan, recently at the Marx Theatre at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park.
The story of the Tuskegee airmen, black pilots during World War II, is wonderfully inventive in terms of theater technique, featuring a master tap artist who creates the rhythm and movement of the entire production, and 5 screens of flight photos, most from that era and from those flights. The pilots sitting on chairs that they quite literally turned into cockpits with their bodies and their movements.
The racism of those times was on full display, as were the painful experiences of the pilots, before and during the training and war. The pilots were real people, not cutouts, from many backgrounds in American black culture. The white trainer and his assistant can still be found, unfortunately.
This was a brilliant theater experience. Thanks, Playhouse!