Up, Up and Away: The Trippy Tales Behind ‘Flying Over Sunset’
The New York Times
How’s this for an unlikely idea for a musical? Three 1950s celebrities, including Cary Grant, experimenting with LSD. Together. It happened, sort of.
When James Lapine read an excerpt from Sylvia Jukes Morris’s masterly biography of Clare Boothe Luce, he saw the makings of a play. Dubbed “The Woman of the Century” during her illustrious lifetime, the complicated Mrs. Luce had been a socialite, a madly accomplished writer (“The Women”), the ambassador to Italy, a Republican member of Congress, and the wife of Henry Luce, the founder of Time, Life and Fortune magazines.
Though she died in 1987 and is likely remembered by very few, a surprising bit of her history was enough to grab Lapine’s attention — and somewhat circuitously get him to the Vivian Beaumont Theater, where his new, risky and idiosyncratic musical “Flying Over Sunset” is in previews for a Dec. 13 opening at Lincoln Center Theater.
Under the guidance of her friend, the writer and spiritualist Gerald Heard, Mrs. Luce became an aficionada of LSD. You read that right. A straight East Coast power figure, the stylish 50-something indulged in the hallucinogenic drug years before Timothy Leary discovered it at Harvard. A discontented seeker, she tried it at a vulnerable time in her life; according to the biography, she used acid again and again, persuading her husband, her priest and her lovers to partake frequently over the course of six years.
