The Silentio Project

So here we are, a year later, working on the last play of this series -- I think of Barbarian at the Gates, Urmuz and The Happiness Machine as related stylistically -- called The Silentio Project. Slightly disappointed by the choice of the team behind Dr. Who, who decided to spell Lake Silencio with a "c" not a "t." What does Dr. Who have to do with my play? A lot, as it happens. Most of my soundtrack consists of Dr. Who songs. Also, this is my first attempt at sci-fi. But instead of shiny things and gadgets that twinkle and make funny little sounds, I decided to find inspiration for my technology in the past. Sci-fi is such a nostalgic genre. "The year was 2000 and we were all finally equal..." You know what I mean. All this nostalgia for things we've never had. All this looking back at a time of illusory, democratic harmony...so, as far as I'm concerned, a sci-fi set should be populated with objects from the past: old phones, old instruments, old souls. We took this concept pretty far: the characters' mail is brought by carrier pidgeons; every single "technical" maneuvre is, in fact, a simple, manual gesture; the complex extraction and classification of emotions (more about this later) is done by hand while the actual emotions (images drawn on parchment paper) are attached with clothes pins to a simple pulley system.  Ancient. Rudimentary. Awesome...and cheap (let's not forget there's no budget for this, as usual).

In terms of the idea itself, The Silentio Project evolved out of the last monologue in The Happiness Machine (hence the rather similar titles). There, Larry Tarkowsky spoke of a society of the future, "a little short on feeling," who tries to deal with an increasingly mad world. In Silentio, I decided to show the experiments that lead to the creation of such a society and so The Institute for the National Supression of Emotion through Combined Technologies (also known as I.N.S.E.C.T.) was born. The proportions of the Institute are problematic: the "campus" can be as big as a city or a planet. Nobody knows because nobody has ever been able to find an exit, "the end" of the Institute proper. Both INSECT's personnel and the "emotives" (the subjects INSECT experiments on) have never seen the light of day outside the cells and corridors that form their everyday landscape. That's all they know. Until two of the emotives rebel and take over the Institute in an attempt to save the last emotion...love (although in the context of the play it's not clear whether love is an emotion, a feeling or a chemical imbalance).

The emotives are under strict orders to watch a lot of old movies and programs on TV and learn the language and expressions of emotions presented there. Once they are familiar with several vocabularies (the language of noir, horror, musicals and romantic comedies), Dr. Tait, the director of the Institute, presents them with a scenario. They act it out as a play. When the line between reality and illusion is crossed and the emotives...emote, the scenario is paused and the respective emotions are extracted.

Thus INSECT learns more and more about the human soul, about what makes people tick, about where emotions are "localized" (we took a lot of liberties with the workings of the human body here) and they use everything they know to create a flat-lined, docile society no longer (they believe) prone to suicide.

That's the premise. Naturally, nothing goes according to plan. INSECT seems to have been abandoned by the very organization (the Regents) who ordered it into being. That's why everything falls apart: equipment, surveillance, morale, etc.

I'm still adding scenes, changing scenes, working on instinct. If The Happiness Machine was personal because of the death of my father which triggered the entire project, this play is personal because it comes from a place of extreme solitude. I've had a few health scares this year and, at the end of it all, I came to a conclusion I should have come to a long time ago: not only do we die alone, but we live alone as well. I don't mean that literally: of course we share our homes, our lives with other people, but inside, at the core of everything, we are alone. This came as a shock. The fact that the epiphany did not completely depress me proved equally shocking. If I had the money (will I ever have the money?) to stage this properly, the emotives would be kept inside giant glass cages so they would be able to see each other but not communicate. Torture: never to be able to say anything to the person next to you. That's the image at the heart of the play, that's what I've learned: that we can never really talk to anyone, explain our emotions to anyone because we're all wrapped inside our own perceptions, our own entitlements and righteous indignations...in other words, we all live inside our own giant glass cages. And nothing penetrates.

I hope The Silentio Project will communicate this, with the usual humor that my plays rely on. The point is to depress people while they're having a good laugh. It's a contradictory emotion I strive for because, as far as I'm concerned, it's the best definition of a human being that I could find. Where did I find it? In Kafka, of course: "To put it precisely, you're desperate. To put it still more precisely, you're very, very happy."

More later.