As I watched James Lapines new musical, Flying Over Sunset, at the Vivian Beaumont, trying to summon some empathy with its subject matter, I started thinking through my own quite limited history with hallucinogens. Sunsetdirected by Lapine, who also wrote the book, with music by Tom Kitt, lyrics by Michael Korie, and choreography by Michelle Dorranceis the fictionalized story of three celebrities dropping LSD in the nineteen-fifties, searching for God knows what: tie-dyed enlightenment, perhaps, or an eased and possibly clarified relationship with the past, or maybe just simple fun. The writer Aldous Huxley (Harry Hadden-Paton), the actor-dancer Cary Grant (Tony Yazbeck), and the polymathic diplomat Clare Boothe Luce (Carmen Cusack) get together (theres no reason to believe that they did this in real life) and trip their extraordinary lives away (this, apparently, they all did), letting the audience see, often in fervent color and off-kilter motion, the troubled consciousnesses that vibrate beneath their well-maintained personas.

A long time ago, I munched on a few handfuls of fetid mushrooms and brought on personal crises of my own design. There werent many bright colors, but some theretofore unnoticed textural quirkson clothes, on faceswent wild with deep, scrutinizing, photographic detail. For many hours after those visual effects had faded, I haunted the hallways of my mind, regretting how many memories Id retained and neuroses Id cultivated. Mostly, I regretted eating the things at all. Nothing happened that Id want to put onstage; certainly, nobody sang.

While watching Sunset, I wondered whether its creative team had subjected themselves to some first-person experiential research when it came to LSD. (Lincoln Center Theatres in-house magazine features testimonials by the writers Deborah Kass, Francine Prose, and Gregory Botts on trips past; Lapine has spoken in interviews about his own youthful experiments.) Some of the productions other sources are made clear. In a composite scene early on, Aldous delivers a speech against the banning of his book Brave New World. Cary gives a press conference announcing his retirement from show biz, and defends Charlie Chaplin against charges that hes a Communist. Clare, DwightD. Eisenhowers nominee for Ambassador to Brazil, undergoes a rough confirmation hearing.

Part of the plays premiseor maybe its just what I wish it had managed to tease outis that LSD leads its users to a softer kind of questioning. Aldous and Clare are close friends of Gerald Heard (Robert Sella), a practitioner of the Hindu Vedanta philosophy and a forerunner of the consciousness movement, who serves as their guide while on the drug, always nudging them to sit cross-legged and chant as its effects gradually set in. Cary first hears about LSD from his wife, whos using it in her sessions with a Freudian analyst. In one scene, we see Cary bargain his way into the analysts sedate office, employing flattery, charm, and, before long, flat-out yelling, to get his hands on this stuff hes heard so much about.

Those two initial settingsspiritual and clinicalopen up two ways of thinking not only about the effects of LSD but also about the reasons that a desperate celebrity, rich but lost, might turn to it for answers. In Flying Over Sunset, though, all roads lead back to rote biography. Aldouss wife is sick and soon dies. Clares daughter has been killed in a car crash. Carys impending divorce has him ruminating on his tough childhood. As the characters trip onstage, these episodes and their central personaethe wife, the daughter, Carys young selfreappear over and over, with variations so slight that, often, they might as well not exist.

The presence of Gerald Heard made me think of J.D. Salingers God-obsessed Glasses, whose interest in the ancient Indian Vedas and Upanishads, and in Christ, made them vibrate with the kind of unself-conscious talk of higher things that might have done the likes of Aldous, Clare, and Carya morose bunch herea bit of good. But, instead of engaging one another in earnest conversation, the characters spend the majority of the show inside their own heads.

In recent years, Lincoln Center Theatre has presented two plays about the rocky terrain and the stubborn mysteries of the spiritual life: Tom Stoppards The Hard Problem, about consciousness and religious devotion; and Chris Urchs The Rolling Stone, about homophobic violence in a religious milieu in Uganda. Flying Over Sunset might have completed a kind of trilogy, but its insistence on one-to-one biographical causalitythis drug for that problemdesiccates its surface-level allusions to spirituality.

Perhaps thats why the show feels so earthbound despite its many references to flight. Sunset has a fairly formulaic approach to music: every dose gets its own song. The pattern is established from the start, when Aldous is in a drugstore with Gerald, sweating through the beginnings of a high that will continue through a mountain hike with his ailing wife. He gets fixated on a picture in a book: Botticellis The Return of Judith to Bethulia. The scenic designby Beowulf Boritt, perhaps the most consistently excellent part of the showshifts and the painting comes to life. Here comes Judith accompanied by her handmaiden, with the head of Holofernes in tow. That ecstatic visual idea gives way to a pretty but mostly conventional bel-canto number, through which we get the point that we keep on getting: Aldous is excited by what he can see under the influence, but haunted by the changing circumstances of his life.

Hadden-Paton is sympathetic as the nebbishy, intense Aldous, and Yazbecks tap-dance numbers with a young version of Cary (Atticus Ware) are the highlight of Dorrances choreography, which otherwise uses taps rudimentsfootsteps and their attendant natural rhythms, implicitly connected to the motions of the heartto establish a theme that never really makes it through the noise. Cusack sings well, but the effort is wasted on songs that sound like tropes.

One thing that I found mystifying was how un-weird the score ishere, as in few other musicals, there was a chance to dabble in abstraction and, even, atonality. Instead, the songs are fairly standard-sounding, give or take a fractured chord or two. If a drug musical cant sometimes sound weird or off-putting, which can? The closest Flying Over Sunset gets to true surreality is when Cary, a guy with mommy issues who is consumed with masculinity and its meanings, dons a body stocking and a cap and flails around, having become a facsimile of the phallus that possesses so much of his thought and his posture. The moment is brief, and the altogether too long two hours and forty minutes of the show roll on.

In an interview, Allen Ginsbergover whose work and person the idea of drug-induced inspiration has always hovereddenied the notion that there was any special relationship, positive or negative, between tripping and excellence in art. I think the myth put forward by the police that no creative work can be done under drugs is folly, he said. The myth that anybody who takes drugsll produce something interesting is equal folly. He did admit to having written the runic, nature-obsessed poem Wales Visitation under the influence of LSD:

What did I notice? Particulars! The vision of the great One is myriad smoke curls upward from ashtray, house fire burned low The night, still wet & moody black heaven starless upward in motion with wet wind.

The intensity that Flying Over Sunset tries to illustrate with its always capable and sometimes spectacular sets is seldom found in its dialogue or its songs. The play is based on a groovy idea, but it indulges in the myth that Ginsberg warned against: drugs alone dont make for interest. To reach across the gulf between stage and seat, inner experienceaddled, enhanced, or otherwiseneeds more upward motion, more of the stark feeling of wet wind. More particulars!

Read more:
The Bad Trip of Flying Over Sunset - The New Yorker