High Flying

As anyone who's seen Broadway's Tony Award-winning M. Butterfly knows, playwright David Henry Hwang's theatrical turf is the drama of otherness, of racial and sexual difference. With his latest work, 1000 Airplanes on the Roof, a science-fiction music-drama collaboration with composer Philip Glass and set designer Jerome Sirlin (at the Beacon Theater December 15 through 20), Hwang shows that his brilliance for portraying the otherworldliness of humans is not limited to earth. Originally intended to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Orson Welles's The War of the Worlds broadcast, the oneperson show (starring, on alternate nights, Jodi Long and Patrick O'Connell) is the story of a neurotic New Yorker struggling to remember the night he lost his date and wound up on an alien spaceship. "Few of us have been abducted by U.F.O.'s,'' says Hwang, "but a lot of us have gone through things we can't communicate to other people, and then wonder if we're crazy. . ." or whether we had the experience at all. 1000 Airplanes takes you there.

CRAIG BROMBERG