I
woke up this morning obsessed with this poem – to be completely honest, obsessed
with this stanza only, not the whole thing - and knew immediately that it was
going to make its way into The Loneliness Pill.
The
stream will cease to flow;
The
wind will cease to blow;
The
clouds will cease to fleet;
The
heart will cease to beat;
For
all things must die.
My
second realization was that next time I’m scheduled to teach a graduate playwriting
workshop, I must describe the method (the madness?) that has been the organizing
principle of my most recent plays: a combination of autobiography and ideas
that interest me at the time, against the background of what the naturalists
would have called “a slice of life,” a snapshot of my interactions with the
psychopathology of everyday life at the moment I realize that everyday
life is nothing but psychopathology.
In
other words: I’m writing The Loneliness Pill incorporating all the
research I’ve done on the subject (a kind of “follow the white rabbit” approach
to loneliness, psychiatry, and aging studies), but I’m creating characters
based on the people in my life, placed in circumstances I have, or wished I could
have, experienced.
After
not getting a dime in grant money for Fugue, I doubt it’s worth applying
for a grant to do The Loneliness Pill. Its meandering, purposefully
chaotic, simultaneous plot would not make much sense squeezed inside the tidy rubric
of any grant. Would the community benefit from knowing that almost half of the
world’s population under 25 considers itself lonely? Probably not. It’s not an
uplifting project (prospect), and I’m not proposing joyful or hopeful solutions.
What The Loneliness Pill does is present a state of affairs and ask
questions most of us would be reluctant to answer. Behind the collective mask
of well-being lies a dormant state of despair.
What’s
truly maddening about this play is the way I have to work on it. Consider this:
the cast consists of six people living in four different cities unable to get
together for rehearsals until the week of the play. I’m rehearsing weekly with the
three cast members who live in town. I’m using FaceTime to “rehearse” with one
of the silent characters responsible for all the choreography and the movement
scenes throughout the play. Her character is based on Sophia, the social
humanoid robot activated on Valentine’s day 2016. I’m having phone
conversations with the other silent character, the Big Pharma representative,
whose background phone calls and tweets affect the outcome of the loneliness pill’s
trials; and I’m using the occasional Saturday to rehearse with The
Revolutionary, whenever she can drive down from Houston to spend the day with
me.
Madness,
right? For previous productions, in addition to the weekly rehearsals, we’d
have two weeks of daily dress/tech rehearsals before the show. I have no tech
elements for The Loneliness Pill (lack of money or a theatre venue), and
everyone will be able to rehearse together for only three days before the show.
So: why am I doing this to myself…? Because I want to work with these people,
most of them past members of the Milena Group, who’ve been away for 10, 15 years;
because I want to see if I can do a play like this; because I see no point in
doing the same plays the same way for decades and calling it theatre. The
event, the immediate and continuous present the stage experience involves us in,
the communal, the extraordinary nature of theatre makes me think that I can pull
this off. We’ll see…
Since
The Loneliness Pill took a sci-fi turn with the introduction of Sophia
and Asimov’s plot in The Naked Sun, I’ve decided, as an homage to Blade
Runner, to have Sophia kill herself when she realizes that she cannot
experience the loneliness she is supposed to cure. Sophia comes with the pill
as the social element meant to enhance each test subject’s experience. She is
responsible for designing the best type of interaction for each type of loneliness
she encounters. I haven’t yet figured out how she’ll get disillusioned, but what
I do know is that she’ll realize that in not being able to experience
loneliness, she is alone. That’s when she decides to pull the plug and shut
herself down forever. And then…
The
stream will cease to flow;
The
wind will cease to blow;
The
clouds will cease to fleet;
The
heart will cease to beat;
For
all things must die…
In
isolation, in installments, fragmented and hesitant, work on The Loneliness
Pill has begun.
