Few recent books in theatre and performance studies could be described as “airplane reading,” but Scott Magelssen’s Performing Flight: From the Barnstormers to Space Tourism is a noteworthy exception, and not just for its subject matter. This nimble and engaging exploration of aviation and space travel as performance is a genuine page-turner, an innovative work of scholarship that is also absorbing enough to hold one’s attention for the duration of a transcontinental flight.

It is by now a commonplace in our field that virtually anything may be analyzed as performance. Yet the preponderance of performance studies scholarship tends to cluster at a few nodes along Richard Schechner’s infamous “broad spectrum”: the performing arts, popular entertainment, museums, and other tourist sites. While drawing on each of these discourses in a mixed-methods approach, Performing Flight pushes the envelope by bringing the as performance lens to bear on an activity that is at once commonplace and extraordinary: air travel, or to be more precise: “heavier-than-air, human-piloted flight (not hot-air balloons, dirigibles, or blimps, and not ‘unmanned’ space probes or remote-piloted drones)” (8). Drawing inspiration from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of “line of flight,” Magelssen delivers a reflexive exploration of “how aviation and space travel have been fundamentally connected to the images, gestures, narrative tropes, and performative acts that have shaped the enterprise of flight in the public perception and consciousness” (5). In charting new territory to be explored via the tools of performance studies, Performing Flight joins (and engages with) works such as Tracy Davis’s States of Emergency (2007), D.J. Hopkins, Shelley Orr, and Kim Solga’s Performance and the City (2016), and Sara Brady and Lindsey Mantoan’s Performance in a Militarized Culture (2018).

Performing Flight’s collection of case studies sketches a puddle-jumping itinerary across the last century of US aviation, from the barnstorming aerial entertainers popular in the 1920s to Cold War–era performances of pilots and astronauts to 21st-century phenomena such as space tourism and the memorialization of 9/11. Chapter 1, “‘Making Uncle Tom’s Cabin into a Hangar,’” considers aviation as a popular entertainment, with particular attention to Bessie Coleman, an African American “aviatrix” whose brief and tragic career nevertheless traced “lines of flight” for women and African Americans to follow. Through their presence in a predominantly white and male space, “They asserted resistance. Counterhegemony” (34). Chapter 2, “Hiroshima, the Enola Gay, and the Performance of the Atomic Age,” centers on perhaps the most infamous airplane in history, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. While the chapter briefly recounts the circumstances of the Enola Gay’s initial bombing run, Magelssen devotes his greatest attention to the plane’s afterlife as a case study in popular entertainment (its use in a 1976 air-show reenactment of the Hiroshima bombing) and museum studies (the controversy over the 1995 exhibition of the plane at the Smithsonian). The figure of Paul W. Tibbets, the real-life pilot of the Enola Gay and a child of the barnstorming era, links these first two chapters to the third, a consideration of the place that airline pilots play in the US-American imaginary. Magelssen explores this through an analysis of “The Pilot Voice,” described here as “relaxed and casual, extempore, generously saturated with leisurely pauses […] as if enjoying the folksy pleasure of wordsmithing while shooting the breeze with old acquaintances” (54). The common association of the “Pilot Voice” with famed test pilot Chuck Yeager leads naturally, if not inevitably, to a consideration of the US’s Cold War fascination with the figure of the astronaut (chapter 4, “Inventing the American Astronaut”). While NASA’s insistence that the first astronauts be white Protestant “family men” has been documented elsewhere, Magelssen examines all aspects of astronaut performance, from the fashion design of early space suits to the sometimes-scripted dialogue between astronauts in orbit and their ground-based interlocutors, showing how these factors were driven by the propaganda needs of the US government during the Cold War. In chapter 5, “The Space Tourist,” Magelssen considers the political and ecological implications of privatized space travel, and in the tradition of past scholars of tourist performance (and his own prior work in Living History Museums [2007] and Simming [2014]), engages in participant ethnography by narrating his own experience on a commercial zero-gravity flight. In considering “9/11, Flight, and Performance,” chapter 6 wrestles with how we as performance scholars make sense (or fail to make sense) of the hijackings of 11 September 2001. Resisting the idea of terrorism as performance, the chapter goes underground into the 9/11 museum at Ground Zero in New York to explore how we choose to memorialize four of the most infamous airplane flights in history. While acknowledging that he’s taken us on a dizzying ride, Magelssen saves some of his most trenchant observations for his conclusion, most notably that “the narratives of sublimity, of glory, of progress attending to the heavens and to the human art of plying them start to become more specious the closer to the heavens our technology brings us” (141).

If there is a significant critique of Performing Flight, it is that the range of case studies is perhaps too narrow. For example, while Magelssen’s stated aim to decenter the conventional master-narrative of US aviation, one that centers unproblematically on heroic white men, is understandable and praiseworthy, it is nevertheless somewhat jarring that in a book on the performance of flight, such celebrity aviators as Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh, and Howard Hughes get only passing mention, while the Wright Brothers are relegated to a single footnote. Helicopters—and their cultural significations in military, medical, policing, and/or journalistic milieux—are absent from consideration, as is the US Space Force, founded in 2019. This desire for more case studies, however, reflects less a shortcoming of the present volume and more a genuine interest in learning what the author might have to say about these topics.

Indeed, Magelssen’s authorial voice emerges as one of the highlights of Performing Flight. Though he draws inspiration from the “high theory” of Deleuze and Guattari, his analysis is firmly grounded in the primary research and thick description that characterized Simming. Disarming personal anecdotes (e.g., the author’s experience of seeing Air Force recruitment videos interspersed with the Saturday morning cartoons of his 1980s childhood) provide entry points to topics that might otherwise seem abstract or generic. We come away with the somewhat paradoxical impression that Magelssen has been honing his expertise in this subject for many years, and yet continues to be surprised and delighted by each new discovery.