Harry Hamlin, Stefanie Powers play sets of siblings in Delaware Theatre Company show

A sunflower yellow plane appears to have crashed on the stage of the Delaware Theatre Company.

The mangled Piper Cub is the focal point of "One November Yankee," a play that opens Wednesday, Oct. 23, and follows three sets of estranged siblings who are unrelated, but connected in different ways to the crash. 

All three sets are played by television and movie stars Harry Hamlin ("L.A. Law," "Clash of the Titans") and Stefanie Powers ("Hart to Hart"). They've been in town for a few weeks working with author and director Joshua Ravetch.

Both Hamlin and Powers say they were attracted by the originality of the piece, which is told from different points of view that shift through time and from sibling set to sibling set.

"That's what attracts me," says Powers, whose revival of "Applause" played the Hotel du Pont in 1996. "Every time I've mentioned it to people in the business, they've all been very curious to see it."

Where did the idea come from?

Ravetch says a variety of things influenced the play.

One was working with studying with and then working with famed acting teacher Stella Adler. They went to see four plays in her last year of life. At one, she turned to Ravetch and said, "Promise me you'll never put a play in a living room. It's so boring. Everyone comes from a living room to the theater and they're in the living room."

A pilot himself, he had been interested in writing a play about flight. Powers also is a pilot, and Hamlin was studying to get his license when "L.A. Law" came along and consumed his life.

Then Ravetch, who attended a lot of modern art openings in Los Angeles, went to one that featured a box of Kleenex on a pedestal in a white room. He thought it was ridiculous, even more so when he found out later that the janitor kept throwing away the tissues.

Somewhere in there, he came up with the idea of having a crashed plane on stage, making an audience think they are going to see a play about the crash, but it's really an art sculpture based on a real crash. 

During his research, he said he found out that there have been about 100 planes that have disappeared without a trace in the last 50 years. 

The play needed characters, but Ravetch didn't want a romantic one and came up with the idea of using squabbling siblings.

The first set — a male artist creating the crash sculpture for a gallery his sister works at, setting off a juxtaposition between art, commerce and technology. The second set — siblings who were piloting that plane. And the third — siblings hiking in the woods who come across the crash year after it's happened.

Finally, Ravetch said, he also sees the plane as an allegory for America. 

"It really all became about the journey of these people and the journey of America," Ravetch said. "How advanced we are in one way and how we're crumbling in another."

How Harry Hamlin got involved

He sent Hamlin a copy of the play when it was going to be produced in California with Loretta Swit.

Hamlin's agents didn't pass it along for a while, partly because it wasn't going to pay anything, and he was already busy, with an Emmy nomination for guest appearances on "Mad Men" among his 20 films and 52 television series. 

When Hamlin finally got the script by email on a Friday night, he read it all in one sitting.

"I've never seen anything like it," he said.

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And when Hamlin couldn't find a phone number for Ravetch that night, Hamlin tracked him down through LinkedIn.

Ravetch still wanted him, but the first preview was in eight days.

"That's a lot of dialogue to learn," Hamlin said. "I don't know how I did that." 

The Los Angeles Times would go on to call it a “haunting and poetic” piece that “unfolds like theatrical origami.” 

How Stefanie Powers got involved

Powers, whose 50-year career started on stage as a ballet dancer, met Ravetch when the late Robert Forster, who died Oct. 11 from brain cancer, took her to a play reading eight years ago at Ravetch's house.

The actress and playwright then realized that Ravetch's father had been her junior high English teacher. That was partly because the father had followed her career of 24 motion pictures, 27 mini-series, dozens of TV guest appearances and plays such as "How the Other Half Loves," "Sabrina Fair," "A View from the Bridge" and musicals such as "Oliver!" and "Annie Get Your Gun."

When Ravetch decided to bring the play to Delaware Theatre Company, before it moves on to New York City, he asked Powers to be in the show.

"It's always interesting to challenge yourself, and in the theater rather than film or television because it always has a beginning, a middle and an end every night, eight times a week," she said.

Powers vividly remembers her first visit to Wilmington, particularly the American furniture she saw on a trip to Winterthur Museum, Gardens and Library, which she hopes to visit again.

What the actors find meaningful

Both actors really like the humor of the show, and there's a lot of it, they say.

Powers find the journey of the sets of siblings the most compelling part of the show.

While she sees a focus on inspiration and the collision of commerce, technology and art, "I don't think that supersedes the emotions, what transpired between two people," she said.

She believes the audience will go away thinking about their own relationships with their siblings. She's thought a lot about her late brother.

Hamlin really likes playing the relationships in the show but is particularly arrested by the allusions to America and the social and political issues quaking across the country.

FLU SEASON: Flu is everywhere. You ought to get a flu shot.

"I even say it in the play: 'This is debris,'" Hamlin said. "It's basically us, America as a once-great society that's crashing and burning as we speak. We need to get back to America as a great society."

He says that more a comment on the government than on politics.

"When I grew up as a kid putting my hand over my heart in a pledge of allegiance, I had a great deal of pride in this country," he said. "I don't have that sense anymore because of some decisions that have been made in my lifetime."

If the country thinks of itself as an exception — and he does — "We want to get back to firing on all cylinders again."

How did the play get to Delaware?

One of Ravetch's works, "Go Figure!" about ice skating champion Randy Gardner has already played at the Delaware Theater Company and a four-show workshop reading of his new piece, "Naked," about supermodel Beverly Johnson will come in January.

"Go Figure!" including Gardner's stories about learning he was adopted, that his birth mother was raped, the skating world and Garder's eventual coming out, including performances by skating partner Tai Babilonia and star Dorothy Hamill.

"Naked" follows what happened when Johnson, the first black woman on the cover of Vogue magazine and the first black supermodel, told the world that she, too, had been drugged by Bill Cosby.

If you go

WHAT: "One November Yankee" by Joshua Ravetch

WHERE:  200 Water St., Wilmington

WHEN: Wednesday, Oct. 23 - Nov. 10

Tickets $35-$70 at DelawareTheatre.org or through box office at 302-594-1100

Contact Betsy Price at beprice@delawareonline.com or (302) 324-2884.