Everybody knows that Charles A. Lindbergh was an American hero. In 1927, he became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, lighting the flame that would lead to a century of commercial transatlantic aviation. He was on magazine covers and trading cards and he got a Wall Street tickertape parade (a big deal at the time); for a couple of years, “Lucky Lindy” was one of the most famous people on the planet. The world mourned with him when his infant son was kidnapped and murdered in 1932.
Turns out, Lindbergh was also kind of a jerk.
James Rayfield’s Charles Lindbergh: A Life in Flight premiered last month at the Tampa Fringe Festival. The one-man show stars actor Chris Jackson — and both playwright and performer say audiences were… well, surprised.
“There were a lot of people who said ‘Oh my God, I didn’t know any of this other history of the man,’” Rayfield reports. “They know about the flight across the Atlantic, they know about the kidnapping, but they don’t know about his political involvement later in his life. They don’t know about his attachments to eugenics and other ideas he had. And, of course, his Nazi sympathizing that went on during the lead-up to the war.”
Eugenics, the science of breeding out “undesirable” characteristics, was taken to extremes by the Nazis. Lindbergh was an anti-Semite who cottoned to the idea, and preached about the importance of genetics until the end of his days.
After Lindbergh’s death in 1974, it came to light that he had two mistresses in Germany, as well as three illegitimate children.
“To keep the one-man show interesting and engaging, I rely heavily on James Rayfield’s direction,” says Jackson, most recently seen in American Stage’s Strait of Gibraltar. “He has a very interesting way of presenting minimalistic theater that allows the audience’s imaginations to fill in the blanks.
“It’s not pedantic, it’s not elementary, and it makes the audience really have to engage in the story and suspend their disbelief, and let their minds start crafting the environment.
“And the main response we got from our first go-round, in Tampa, was that everybody was impressed that it was just one man, three chairs, a blanket and a podium. And it worked.”
Lindbergh was an early champion of the controversial “America First” isolationist movement, which draws unpleasant parallels between the aviator and the current president of the United States.
None of that was lost on Rayfield as he put pen to paper.
“With the rise of Trump, people began to take note of some of the language that he uses, and some of the causes that he espouses,” Rayfield explains. “And the more I read about Lindbergh, the more fascinated I was by his whole approach to ‘America First.’
“It wasn’t so much that we set out to debunk him. It was to present the complexity of this person.”
Charles Lindbergh: A Life in Flight | The Studio@620, 620 1st Ave. S., St. Petersburg | Wed.-Fri., June 20-22: 7:30 p.m. | $25; $20, members | Get tickets here.
