Sunday, September 8, 2019

This Mad Affair


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.

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