Young Philly playwrights take the reins with Orbiter 3

In 1999, Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones set out to circle the globe nonstop in a tiny balloon — 16 feet tall and seven feet in diameter. They completed their journey in 19 days and 21 hours using mostly air currents, with only an hour’s worth of gas left after they landed.

“Instead of ‘next time I should take more fuel,’” playwright Mary Tuomanen said of Piccard’s dilemma, he thought, “‘next time I’ll take no fuel [because] then I won’t be terrorized about the fuel gauge.’”

Tuomanen is one of six Philadelphia playwrights forming Orbiter 3, a playwright collective akin to the Obie Award-winning 13P, a New York-based group that produced a specific number of plays and then disbanded rather than producing plays at a theater. The Philly group chose their name because Piccard’s TED Talk about his balloon mission — the balloon was called "Orbiter 3" — resonated with them.

“Part of the hope, part of [our] experiment will be how can we make an alternative model that doesn’t depend on the old fuel, that won’t depend on limited resources?” Tuomanen added.

The mission

“There are some organizations that produce new plays, but not so much by local writers, and there are some local writers being produced, but not necessarily at the level we’d like to see,” said founding member Maura Krause of the impetus for Orbiter 3.

Part of the problem for early career playwrights, the group agreed, is that it’s a big risk for a theater to take on an unknown playwright, which may stifle the creative process.

“I think playwrights end up developing their plays to try and attract the attention of big fish,” fellow founder Emma Goidel said. That means trying to “fit into a mold” of what large theaters have already done, “rather than making whatever might pop into their imagination.”

The model

The idea was hatched in February 2014, the website launched mid-May, and the group got started in October.

In a nutshell, Orbiter 3 is a short-term production company that will be mounting six plays, each one written by a member of the group. The venues will be chosen based off the plays themselves, and the marketing and financing will also be done by the six founders, including Emily Acker, James Ijames, and Douglas Williams.

But they’ve also left an open slot for a playwright who will be welcomed into the group in 2016, for a needed “burst of change,” Krause explained.

When it comes to ticketing, the group picked an alternative, affordable model that has so far appealed to young theatergoers. Those who want to see the plays can buy an Orbiter 3 membership, which will include a ticket all six plays over the next three years. But there are only 200 memberships available, with three-tiered pricing based on when you buy. The first 50 memberships are $20, the next 100 memberships are $30, and the last 50 memberships are $50.

Since the group’s launch party on November 17, they have only 65 memberships left, but these are at various price points, since some people chose to purchase the more expensive tickets.

The first play

Orbiter 3 will debut its first play — IJames’s Moon Man Walk — in summer of 2015.

“It’s about a young man who loses his mother very suddenly [and is] discovering who his father is,” said Ijames. “As a child, his mother always told him his father was stranded on the moon and that’s why he wasn’t there.”

Moon Man Walk’s protagonist pieces together who his father is and why he wasn’t around growing up, and falls in love in the process.

“I love romantic comedies, and I love space,” Ijames said of his work.

To learn more about Orbiter 3 or to purchase a membership, visit www.orbiter3.org.