db: Legend, Facts, Possibilities

db Education Packet by Jessica Dart, CoHo Artistic Fellow and Dramaturg

Reserve your tickets to the world premiere of db by Tommy Smith at CoHo January 13 – February 4.
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The Legend of D.B. Cooper

“(Cooper) comes off as a kind of curious Robin Hood. Taking from the rich, or at least the big and complex. It doesn’t matter whether he gives to the poor or not. The symbolism of the skyjack was one individual overcoming, for the time being anyway, technology, the corporation, the establishment, the system.” – from SKYJACK by Geoffrey Gray

For more than 45 years, amateur sleuths, conspiracy theorists, and the FBI have been intrigued by America’s only unsolved skyjacking and the person responsible for it: D.B. Cooper. Though the FBI announced they would no longer actively investigate the case as of July 2016, the legend of D.B. Cooper has endured thanks to the mystery that surrounds Cooper’s true identity and motivations, the love residents of the Pacific Northwest have for local legend/folklore, and the American obsession with the anti-hero. Despite dozens of theories and reported confessions, no one really knows who Cooper was. Did he die during his jump from the plane? Did he survive and casually reassume the identity of an average citizen? Could your 80-year-old neighbor be D.B. Cooper? Will we ever know for sure? And do we really want to know?

In many ways, Cooper is the ideal anti-hero –  a product of the challenging social, economic, and political climate of the late 1960s and early 19draper70s (see below)omar. Like the fictional characters Dexter Morgan (Dexter), Don Draper (Mad Men), Walter White (Breaking Bad), Nancy weeds-season-6[1]Botwin (Weeds), and Omar Little (The Wire), D.B. Cooper has come to symbolize audacity, rebellion, and counterculture despite the real trauma he caused others.

THE FACTS, or WHAT WE KNOW

THE POSSIBILITIES, or WHAT WE THINK WE KNOW, BUT PROBABLY NOT, BUT MAYBE…