posted 01-21-2004 08:44 AM               

Years after aliens destroyed his home and killed his wife in Independence Day, Bill Pullman is fascinated by space.

The actor came to Denver last week to work with visiting playwright Constance Congdon and the first-year students at the National Theatre Conservatory on a new theater piece, "Expedition 6." ...

"I had been tracking in the back pages of the newspaper the fact that after Columbia there were three guys stranded on the space station," Pullman says while eating a take- out salad during a rehearsal break.

He read that opponents of the United States saw the destruction of Columbia, which carried on board the first Israeli astronaut, as a sign that "the United States was no longer favored by the gods," he says. And he decided to raise questions through theater as to the value of the space program and what amount of death was acceptable.

"Part of the reason nobody heard about (the stranded astronauts) is it was important for NASA that it wasn't exceptional," he says. "The space program works with a principle of acceptable risk and acceptable loss."

posted 07-26-2006 09:44 AM               

[Bill Pullman]'s in Baltimore to fine-tune "Expedition 6," the play that he has written and is directing about three astronauts, two Americans and one Russian, who were stranded on the International Space Station in 2003. (The play still is being developed, but the public is invited to attend two open rehearsals this weekend.) ...

After the shuttle Columbia exploded on Feb. 1, 2003, killing all seven crew members, space missions were halted temporarily. Americans Kenneth Bowersox and Donald Pettit and Russian cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin were forced to spend an additional two months orbiting 240 miles above Earth.

When they did attempt re-entry in a tiny Russian Soyuz spacecraft in May 2003, the crew lost radio control with aeronautics officials for 90 minutes and landed nearly 290 miles off course, in the steppes of Kazakhstan. ...

Until Expedition 6, Pullman never had written a play, but he was captivated by the plight of the trio and their eventual rescue.

"This story never got the attention it deserved," he says. "On March 20, 2003, the war started, and for months afterward, everything else that happened in the world was sort of buried in the back of the paper." ...

Pullman instantly realized the potential of actors on trapezes for dramatizing a story about space exploration, and he and McCray Rincon joined forces. Expedition 6 incorporates excerpts from such sources as the Quran, newspaper interviews with the astronauts, speeches by Osama bin Laden and NASA reports, and it features recent graduates of the theater training program.

As Pullman read and wrote and thought, the rescue of the three explorers gradually formed into a metaphor. The two Americans and one Russian were alone, adrift and tremendously vulnerable. Their plight symbolized the fragility of the very notion of international brotherhood. Every time that year that Pullman picked up a newspaper, he was struck by the ease with which that ideal could be shattered.

"What we have in mind is to take Expedition 6 to 10 cities with connections with the aerospace industry," Pullman says. "We'd also like to have ancillary activities going on around it: lectures and panel discussions, a real Chautauqua kind of a thing," he says, referring to an educational movement that flourished throughout the United States in the early 20th century.

posted 07-24-2007 03:23 PM               

Expedition 6

Magic Theatre
Building D, Fort Mason Center
San Francisco, CA 94123

Sept. 8 to Oct. 7, 2007

A world premiere theatre event created and directed by Bill Pullman in association with the Chabot Space & Science Center.

This original and theatrical docu-drama explores the political and personal life-and-death crisis of two American astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut stranded on Expedition 6, the International Space Station, after the Columbia Shuttle disaster of 2003 during the build-up to the Invasion of Iraq. Creator and director Pullman uses a company of eight actors and five low-flying trapezes in this imaginative, stylized new work.

Single tickets will go on sale August 1, 2007.

posted 09-20-2007 04:45 AM               

'Expedition 6': Actor Bill Pullman's theatrical space odyssey

Ask the average person what the connection is between Bill Pullman and space exploration and you're likely to hear references to the sci-fi movies he has starred in, such as "Spaceballs" or "Independence Day." But the actor and director has much more invested now in the recent history of spaceflight as his own creation, the theatrical production "Expedition 6" has opened for a month engagement at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco.

Pullman recently sat down with collectSPACE to discuss his play, the lessons it is meant to convey to its audience and the appreciation he has come to inherit through it.