Meteor Girl (Astra)

Sidra Rausch wrote Meteor Girl, her biggest hit as a playwright and lyricist, in the evocative surroundings of the Cosmos Club, a private, Washington, D.C. social club for those distinguished in science, literature, the arts, or other areas, and an ironically male-dominated environment for the writing of a play about a female superhero whose superpowers are love and intuition.

The idea for Meteor Girl originated from a conversation Rausch had with Betty Friedan at a benefit dinner for the Source Theatre. Friedan, who noted that most people don’t know the difference between Supergirl and Wonder Woman, encouraged Rausch to create a third female comic book heroine. Rausch was never sure that Friedan would approve of the resulting Meteor Girl, which Rausch characterized as pretty soft-core feminism. “Comic books, with their stock characters and their ‘Bang! Crash! Splat!,’ are really the commedia dell’ arte of America,” said Rausch. “If the heroines are admired for their beauty, so much the better. It’s the comics, y’know.”

Meteor Girl was first produced at La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in New York City, in March 1997.

This “Comic Book Opera for the 21st Century” was later reimagined as Astra: The Super Heroine Manga Musical, which Rausch wrote in collaboration with Jerry Robinson, Bob Kane's 1940s Batman comic book series co-creator. Robinson explained, “I was giving a talk about Batman on Cape Cod—I think it was the late ’80s. Afterwards, Sidra Rausch came up to me—she would later become a dear friend—and said something like ‘How do you feel about feminism?’ Very in-your-face question. From there, it became our summer project. We got absorbed writing the songs and script together.”*

Astra was debuted by Washington Women in Theatre as part of the Capital Fringe Festival at The Warehouse Theater in Washington, DC, in July 2007.

Astra was developed into a graphic novel, which was a hit in Japan and was later published in the U.S.

“Astra is a parody of how an outsider would witness [typical 1990s propaganda - Boris Yeltsin, the capitalist Americans],” said Robinson in 2007. “Part tongue in cheek, part romance. A political satire…When Sidra and I first wrote the musical, this is what we wanted to epitomize. The depths of the Cold War, the American tensions with the USSR. And funny enough, now it’s all coming back again.”*

*Quotes from Jerry Robinson are from Erin Zimmer’s July 2007 article for Washingtonian, “Jerry Robinson On Astra: The Super Heroine Manga Musical.”