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We would like to thank Mac Rogers for his insightful and heart-felt blogs last week.
Next week's guest blogger will be Soomi Kim.
Soomi Kim is an actor/multidisciplinary artist. She performs with several companies and artists including Ex.p girl, Big Time Action Theater and composer/choreographer Grisha Coleman as as well as creating and producing her own original work. In October 2008 her original play Lee/gendary (based on the life of Bruce Lee- written by Derek Nguyen and directed by Suzi Takahashi) ran for 3 weeks at HERE Arts Center’s mainstage. This production (which Kim created, produced and starred in as Bruce Lee) garnered 6 IT Awards nominations and received the award for 2009 Outstanding Production of a Play, Outstanding director (Suzi Takahashi) and Outstanding featured actress (Constance Parng). Lee/gendary was also presented at the First National Asian American Theater Festival (FNAATF) held in New York City in 2007. She enjoys the process of collaboration and is interested in work that blurs boundaries, disciplines and genres. Her movement style is a powerful hybrid of dance, martial arts and acrobatics. Currently she is developing a new dance theater piece titled Dictee based on Korean American writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's seminal work of poetry. Soomi is also a competitive gymnastics coach and choreographer. She is a Circle in the Square Professional Training program graduate and 2008 Urban Artist Initiative grant recipient. She is currently performing in a fight play ("fightsical") called Last Life (directed by Timothy Haskell of Big Action Theater) at the Ohio Theater. Ex.p girls' Paris Syndrome will premiere at HERE Arts Center June 2010.
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Showing posts with label Mac Rogers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mac Rogers. Show all posts
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Friday, March 5, 2010
Big Dreams, Right?
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Contributed by Guest Blogger of the week, Mac Rogers.
Well, as per usual, big dreams, right? I had this grandiose scheme of writing a brilliant five-part series for my week as an IT blogger, but of course, with a full-time job, opening one show (first preview went great!), prepping for a major benefit (ten years, people!), and trying to talk to my fiancé every once in a while, I didn’t quite pull it off. So the question becomes what to make my last blog post about.
I have my own blog, but I haven’t written on it in quite some time. I’ve had a chronic, possibly terminal case of what I’ve called “blog choke,” where it wasn’t that I couldn’t come up with anything to write about, but had a nervous nelly meltdown at the idea of making it public. Sometimes I’ve thought the posts were too rushed to be of value, sometimes I thought that maybe they were only substantial in my head and would prove to be pointless and baffling upon public contact, and sometimes I was scared of getting into a fight. Whatever the excuse, I choked every time.
The last time I wrote a blog post that was of any public interest was back in May 2008. The post, “The Safe Zone,” addressed the issues of civility in the theatrosphere and the idea of publicly sharing artistic processes online. This post, and the many wonderful comments that people made on it, started me on a thought process, but it wasn’t until I read and considered James Comtois’s marvelous series on self-producing Off-Off-Broadway that I had started to conceive of how I could possibly return to blogging.
Look, obviously I’m thin-skinned. And I get mad easily, particularly at what I see as insincere behavior. All too often, I feel as though people utilize worthy content – subjects that go to the heart of theater today, and theater into the future – as truncheons with which to bash each other. The point is not the content of the conversation, the content’s a MacGuffin. The point is the bashing. And I don’t write this from a perspective of superiority. I write it because I’ve done it as much or more as anyone else.
There’s no point in asking people to be more civil. It makes them want to be less civil. The theatrosphere can’t go back. It’s big and bad and mean, now, like all the other ‘oshperes. Only the strong will survive. I didn’t survive, because I wasn’t one of the strong.
Why is it worth using my last day on Full of IT to write about this subject? Kinda meta, isn’t it? Blogging about blogging? Well, here’s my justification: this is a blog. A blog devoted to writing about theater, particularly low-budget, independent theater, from a number of perspectives. I’d like to make an argument for the venue itself as being something worthwhile, with a reason to exist. I talked with Adam Szymcowicz on his site about how hard it is to share a site- and event- specific live art form like theater in an online forum, but we have to try. This is our best way to reach each other.
Back to James Comtois’s series. I was talking to my longtime colleague Sean Williams about the admiring and uncontroversial response it elicited, and Sean pointed out, “See, Jimmy didn’t write, ‘Here’s how to do it.’ He wrote, ‘Here’s what we did. Here’s what worked and what didn’t. Here’s what we learned.’” Exactly. James didn’t present himself as some all-knowing oracle here to school the rest of us snots, he presented himself as a struggling, learning, practicing producer of theater, trying stuff and seeing how it works. This encourages a reaction not of, “You’re wrong, you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re serving your secret agenda, and I hate you!” but more of “Oh, seriously, you tried that? I always wondered what would happen if you tried that. I on the other hand tried this, and here’s what happened as a result.”
I feel like theater blogging is at its most successful when it’s tied to practice, in some form or another. That doesn’t have to mean playwriting or producing or even the creation of a single play. That can mean the ongoing maintenance of a theater company, that can mean advocacy, that can mean political organization, that can mean any number of things, as long as its some sort of theater-related activity taking place outside of cyberspace. It seems to me that many of the most brutal and least productive fights take place over theory, what each of us thinks all the others should be doing. It’s hard to build on that, because while you’re talking about one-person’s-utopia/another-person’s-hell, it doesn’t exist yet. So there’s no material to work with, no research to share. So the fights have to run on fumes, and without content to burn, personalities and lovingly nursed grudges take over.
The best online theater writing, it seems to me, is almost more like reporting (though of course not impartial): “Here’s what I’m doing to make my utopia come true. Here’s how it’s going. How’s it going at your end?” That doesn’t mean all nicey-nice for wimps like me. A real high-water mark of this form has to be Travis Bedard’s three-part post-mortem of the Cambiare Productions mounting of Orestes:
Deep Well of Forgetting
Food Chain Orestes
What We Have Here is Orestes Post Mortem
These aren’t mean-spirited at all, but they are tough-minded, and certainly must have led Travis into some difficult conversations, but maybe also a more refined artistic process in the future.
Of course we will always need to be able to use blogs for grand theories, manifestoes, and the like. Big dreams, right? I’m not saying those should disappear. But I think the path to a heartier, more sustainable theatrosphere not teetering on personal animosity and blood-feuds lies in using our online venues to talk about what we’re doing (or what we did), why we’re doing it, and how it’s working out. I haven’t done that much myself, even on this blog this week, but I’d like another crack at it. This is how we share the evolution of the art form with each other. None of us is smart enough to figure it out on our own.
Thanks again Shay, Morgan, and the IT Gang.
x
Contributed by Guest Blogger of the week, Mac Rogers.
Well, as per usual, big dreams, right? I had this grandiose scheme of writing a brilliant five-part series for my week as an IT blogger, but of course, with a full-time job, opening one show (first preview went great!), prepping for a major benefit (ten years, people!), and trying to talk to my fiancé every once in a while, I didn’t quite pull it off. So the question becomes what to make my last blog post about.
I have my own blog, but I haven’t written on it in quite some time. I’ve had a chronic, possibly terminal case of what I’ve called “blog choke,” where it wasn’t that I couldn’t come up with anything to write about, but had a nervous nelly meltdown at the idea of making it public. Sometimes I’ve thought the posts were too rushed to be of value, sometimes I thought that maybe they were only substantial in my head and would prove to be pointless and baffling upon public contact, and sometimes I was scared of getting into a fight. Whatever the excuse, I choked every time.
The last time I wrote a blog post that was of any public interest was back in May 2008. The post, “The Safe Zone,” addressed the issues of civility in the theatrosphere and the idea of publicly sharing artistic processes online. This post, and the many wonderful comments that people made on it, started me on a thought process, but it wasn’t until I read and considered James Comtois’s marvelous series on self-producing Off-Off-Broadway that I had started to conceive of how I could possibly return to blogging.
Look, obviously I’m thin-skinned. And I get mad easily, particularly at what I see as insincere behavior. All too often, I feel as though people utilize worthy content – subjects that go to the heart of theater today, and theater into the future – as truncheons with which to bash each other. The point is not the content of the conversation, the content’s a MacGuffin. The point is the bashing. And I don’t write this from a perspective of superiority. I write it because I’ve done it as much or more as anyone else.
There’s no point in asking people to be more civil. It makes them want to be less civil. The theatrosphere can’t go back. It’s big and bad and mean, now, like all the other ‘oshperes. Only the strong will survive. I didn’t survive, because I wasn’t one of the strong.
Why is it worth using my last day on Full of IT to write about this subject? Kinda meta, isn’t it? Blogging about blogging? Well, here’s my justification: this is a blog. A blog devoted to writing about theater, particularly low-budget, independent theater, from a number of perspectives. I’d like to make an argument for the venue itself as being something worthwhile, with a reason to exist. I talked with Adam Szymcowicz on his site about how hard it is to share a site- and event- specific live art form like theater in an online forum, but we have to try. This is our best way to reach each other.
Back to James Comtois’s series. I was talking to my longtime colleague Sean Williams about the admiring and uncontroversial response it elicited, and Sean pointed out, “See, Jimmy didn’t write, ‘Here’s how to do it.’ He wrote, ‘Here’s what we did. Here’s what worked and what didn’t. Here’s what we learned.’” Exactly. James didn’t present himself as some all-knowing oracle here to school the rest of us snots, he presented himself as a struggling, learning, practicing producer of theater, trying stuff and seeing how it works. This encourages a reaction not of, “You’re wrong, you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re serving your secret agenda, and I hate you!” but more of “Oh, seriously, you tried that? I always wondered what would happen if you tried that. I on the other hand tried this, and here’s what happened as a result.”
I feel like theater blogging is at its most successful when it’s tied to practice, in some form or another. That doesn’t have to mean playwriting or producing or even the creation of a single play. That can mean the ongoing maintenance of a theater company, that can mean advocacy, that can mean political organization, that can mean any number of things, as long as its some sort of theater-related activity taking place outside of cyberspace. It seems to me that many of the most brutal and least productive fights take place over theory, what each of us thinks all the others should be doing. It’s hard to build on that, because while you’re talking about one-person’s-utopia/another-person’s-hell, it doesn’t exist yet. So there’s no material to work with, no research to share. So the fights have to run on fumes, and without content to burn, personalities and lovingly nursed grudges take over.
The best online theater writing, it seems to me, is almost more like reporting (though of course not impartial): “Here’s what I’m doing to make my utopia come true. Here’s how it’s going. How’s it going at your end?” That doesn’t mean all nicey-nice for wimps like me. A real high-water mark of this form has to be Travis Bedard’s three-part post-mortem of the Cambiare Productions mounting of Orestes:
Deep Well of Forgetting
Food Chain Orestes
What We Have Here is Orestes Post Mortem
These aren’t mean-spirited at all, but they are tough-minded, and certainly must have led Travis into some difficult conversations, but maybe also a more refined artistic process in the future.
Of course we will always need to be able to use blogs for grand theories, manifestoes, and the like. Big dreams, right? I’m not saying those should disappear. But I think the path to a heartier, more sustainable theatrosphere not teetering on personal animosity and blood-feuds lies in using our online venues to talk about what we’re doing (or what we did), why we’re doing it, and how it’s working out. I haven’t done that much myself, even on this blog this week, but I’d like another crack at it. This is how we share the evolution of the art form with each other. None of us is smart enough to figure it out on our own.
Thanks again Shay, Morgan, and the IT Gang.
x
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Angry Gods & Monster Wars
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Contributed by Guest Blogger of the week, Mac Rogers.
So on Tuesday I tried to make a case for science fiction as a legitimate genre for theater. But obviously that’s all theory. How are we supposed to actually do it? We’re New York independent theater! We don’t have a robot to piss in!
Well, good, we should talk about the practical. That’s more or less the definition of theater to me. It’s all practical: “How are we going to make that happen? They’re gonna be watching us while we do it.” This is all pretty prominently in my head right now, as the Red Fern Theater Company prepares to open an anthology of science fiction one-acts entitled +30NYC , which includes pieces by Bekah Brunstetter, Victor I. Cazares, Christine Evans, Michael John Garcés, Ashlin Halfnight, Tommy Smith, and yours truly.
Two of the theater companies I follow the closest do a lot of genre theater. The brains behind Nosedive Productions, for example, are brilliant at achieving impossible effects. Last year, wincing in shame, I gave them a play that involved people eating the flesh off a severed head, and they figured out how do it! Vampire Cowboys have a different approach, which I also love: they let the strings show. Fight Girl Battle World, I remember, had an outer space tool of some sort floating around in zero gravity, but they made sure we could see the metal pole holding it up from offstage. In this way, they create effects that mimic the movies, but make sure that we can see how they’re achieving them, which 1) is awesome and hilarious, and 2) conjures cinematic associations while remaining defiantly theatrical.
As a writer-producer, I design my scripts so they can be produced on a budget without losing impact. (I design them that way; I’m not saying the design always works.) With science fiction, you have to give the story a good think-through to figure out how it would best be realized in theatrical terms.
In 2007 and then again in 2009, I wrote and produced a science fiction play called Universal Robots. The story presented major challenges. It spanned many decades, involved the invention of robots, and the eventual robot conquest of the Earth. I knew it wasn’t a question of just writing the story, handing it off to some producers, and swanning off humming a careless tune. I would be one of the producers. There was no escape.
The play that was my original inspiration, Karel Capek’s R.U.R., mostly relied on expository dialogue to explain the earthshaking events that took place between scenes. I decided to not so much fix that as feature it: I created a narrator, who could explain the bits we needed explained without having to shoe-horn them into conversation between the other characters, who had no reason to be explaining the plot to each other.
But who was the narrator? This is a hangup I have. If someone is talking to the audience, I want to know why. I want them to be a character. I want them to have a reason to be talking to us. So I brooded a bit more, and then I thought: what if she’s a robot? What if she’s telling us the story of the robot conquest? Because this (and this is when you know you’ve hit on a winner, ‘cause it starts solving multiple problems for you) addressed the problem of how to end a play that closes with all the humans in the whole world getting killed.
And then it hit me: hubris. Capek’s play fell squarely into the whole Greek/Icarus/golem/Frankenstein tradition of human aspiring to God-hood and getting smacked down for it. I wasn’t trying to mimic that particular moral framework, but the associations involved – the chorus, the ritualistic aspect, the religious dimensions – pointed me squarely in the direction of greek tragedy, and toward that crucial realization:
The whole play would be about a theatrical presentation by a troupe of robots after the extermination of the human race, led by the narrator. A presentation that had spiritual significance to the presenters – a confession, an expiation. It would start and end with a chorus, and in between it would tell the story of strivers who tried to be Gods. The answer of how to present a science fiction epic on stage, unsurprisingly, was to be found in Greek tragedy – in a genre of theater. One of the oldest.
It was the best idea I ever had, and it wasn’t my idea. I didn’t come up with anything new. I combined a bunch of very old, tried and true ingredients with a sprinkle of my own seasoning on top. Human beings have been presenting fantastical stories as long as there has been theater. Angry gods, monsters, war. The long night of revelations in a living room is what we often associate with theater, but it’s a more recent invention. There are other options. And science fiction is a natural fit with ritualistic, symbolic, hyper-experiential theater that defined the earliest incarnations of the form.
My subsequent play, Viral, was more Karen Fowler-style “we’re already living in a science fiction world” science-fiction. It involved a group of characters who come to engage with each other about as intimately as people can – but they never would have met were it not for methods of online communication and expression that barely existed a decade ago.
It made more sense to realize that story as your standard-issue living room play. I wanted everything to feel as ordinary as possible so that the extraordinary parts would really jump out. In my original draft, the first five or six pages took place in the virtual world of chat-rooms where the characters meet, but the director, Jordana Williams, sensibly convinced me to junk it. We simply had the characters on the couch in the living room, typing to the stranger who would change their lives, who stood apart in a separate light. Simple, elegant, and the audience, who spent much of their daily lives online, clicked into the concept instantly. The scene played solidly for suspense and laughs every time. Again, science fiction is never about gadgets or aliens, but how we, as human beings, adapt to them, and reveal ourselves through that adaptation.
Speaking of aliens… I’m writing a couple plays right now, but the one that’s falling into place the fastest? I must be losing my mind. It’s a trilogy of plays about an extraterrestrial invasion of the Earth. I must be off my frickin’ rocker. I’ll tell you this, though. My number one guideline in writing these scripts? This is not a movie. This is not a miniseries. This is a piece of live theater. And that informs every choice.
x
Contributed by Guest Blogger of the week, Mac Rogers.
So on Tuesday I tried to make a case for science fiction as a legitimate genre for theater. But obviously that’s all theory. How are we supposed to actually do it? We’re New York independent theater! We don’t have a robot to piss in!
Well, good, we should talk about the practical. That’s more or less the definition of theater to me. It’s all practical: “How are we going to make that happen? They’re gonna be watching us while we do it.” This is all pretty prominently in my head right now, as the Red Fern Theater Company prepares to open an anthology of science fiction one-acts entitled +30NYC , which includes pieces by Bekah Brunstetter, Victor I. Cazares, Christine Evans, Michael John Garcés, Ashlin Halfnight, Tommy Smith, and yours truly.
Two of the theater companies I follow the closest do a lot of genre theater. The brains behind Nosedive Productions, for example, are brilliant at achieving impossible effects. Last year, wincing in shame, I gave them a play that involved people eating the flesh off a severed head, and they figured out how do it! Vampire Cowboys have a different approach, which I also love: they let the strings show. Fight Girl Battle World, I remember, had an outer space tool of some sort floating around in zero gravity, but they made sure we could see the metal pole holding it up from offstage. In this way, they create effects that mimic the movies, but make sure that we can see how they’re achieving them, which 1) is awesome and hilarious, and 2) conjures cinematic associations while remaining defiantly theatrical.
As a writer-producer, I design my scripts so they can be produced on a budget without losing impact. (I design them that way; I’m not saying the design always works.) With science fiction, you have to give the story a good think-through to figure out how it would best be realized in theatrical terms.
In 2007 and then again in 2009, I wrote and produced a science fiction play called Universal Robots. The story presented major challenges. It spanned many decades, involved the invention of robots, and the eventual robot conquest of the Earth. I knew it wasn’t a question of just writing the story, handing it off to some producers, and swanning off humming a careless tune. I would be one of the producers. There was no escape.
The play that was my original inspiration, Karel Capek’s R.U.R., mostly relied on expository dialogue to explain the earthshaking events that took place between scenes. I decided to not so much fix that as feature it: I created a narrator, who could explain the bits we needed explained without having to shoe-horn them into conversation between the other characters, who had no reason to be explaining the plot to each other.
But who was the narrator? This is a hangup I have. If someone is talking to the audience, I want to know why. I want them to be a character. I want them to have a reason to be talking to us. So I brooded a bit more, and then I thought: what if she’s a robot? What if she’s telling us the story of the robot conquest? Because this (and this is when you know you’ve hit on a winner, ‘cause it starts solving multiple problems for you) addressed the problem of how to end a play that closes with all the humans in the whole world getting killed.
And then it hit me: hubris. Capek’s play fell squarely into the whole Greek/Icarus/golem/Frankenstein tradition of human aspiring to God-hood and getting smacked down for it. I wasn’t trying to mimic that particular moral framework, but the associations involved – the chorus, the ritualistic aspect, the religious dimensions – pointed me squarely in the direction of greek tragedy, and toward that crucial realization:
The whole play would be about a theatrical presentation by a troupe of robots after the extermination of the human race, led by the narrator. A presentation that had spiritual significance to the presenters – a confession, an expiation. It would start and end with a chorus, and in between it would tell the story of strivers who tried to be Gods. The answer of how to present a science fiction epic on stage, unsurprisingly, was to be found in Greek tragedy – in a genre of theater. One of the oldest.
It was the best idea I ever had, and it wasn’t my idea. I didn’t come up with anything new. I combined a bunch of very old, tried and true ingredients with a sprinkle of my own seasoning on top. Human beings have been presenting fantastical stories as long as there has been theater. Angry gods, monsters, war. The long night of revelations in a living room is what we often associate with theater, but it’s a more recent invention. There are other options. And science fiction is a natural fit with ritualistic, symbolic, hyper-experiential theater that defined the earliest incarnations of the form.
My subsequent play, Viral, was more Karen Fowler-style “we’re already living in a science fiction world” science-fiction. It involved a group of characters who come to engage with each other about as intimately as people can – but they never would have met were it not for methods of online communication and expression that barely existed a decade ago.
It made more sense to realize that story as your standard-issue living room play. I wanted everything to feel as ordinary as possible so that the extraordinary parts would really jump out. In my original draft, the first five or six pages took place in the virtual world of chat-rooms where the characters meet, but the director, Jordana Williams, sensibly convinced me to junk it. We simply had the characters on the couch in the living room, typing to the stranger who would change their lives, who stood apart in a separate light. Simple, elegant, and the audience, who spent much of their daily lives online, clicked into the concept instantly. The scene played solidly for suspense and laughs every time. Again, science fiction is never about gadgets or aliens, but how we, as human beings, adapt to them, and reveal ourselves through that adaptation.
Speaking of aliens… I’m writing a couple plays right now, but the one that’s falling into place the fastest? I must be losing my mind. It’s a trilogy of plays about an extraterrestrial invasion of the Earth. I must be off my frickin’ rocker. I’ll tell you this, though. My number one guideline in writing these scripts? This is not a movie. This is not a miniseries. This is a piece of live theater. And that informs every choice.
x
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
We All Live in a Science Fiction Novel
x
Contributed by Guest Blogger of the week, Mac Rogers.
First of all, I would like to say that I'm grateful to Shay Gines, Morgan Tachco, and the rest of the IT crew for inviting me to write on “Full of IT” this week. Let me kick off with a subject that's near and dear to my heart. A few weeks ago, 99 Seats pointed out a conversation on the Guardian blog asking why there isn’t more science fiction in theater.
Last year, the invaluable Charlie Jane Anders of io9.com wrote an article on novelists who had started off as science fiction authors and then moved on to that weird, indefinable genre we call literary fiction. Anders and io9 asked them if they had left science fiction for good, and Karen Joy Fowler (Sarah Canary, The Jane Austen Book Club) responded with this marvelous quote:
“In the last couple of weeks I've read about toxoplasma — the parasite that alters our behavior until we're simply pawns in the paws of housepet cats; a woman in India found guilty of murdering her fiancé based on her brain scan; a site on the internet where for a monthly fee a computer will pray for you ceaselessly. Stan Robinson says we all live in a science fiction novel now and it's clearly true. So I truly believe that science fiction is realism now and literary realism is a nostalgic literature about a place where we once lived, but no longer do.”
I think that’s fantastic and spot-on, and an invaluable consideration for makers of theater. The Guardian piece raises the concern that’s most often associated with science fiction theater – How can we realize the spaceships and the lasers and the hovercars and the bug-eyed aliens on our limited budgets? – and of course, they’re thinking of West End and moderately budgeted London companies. That consideration goes quadruple for those of us making plays for a few thousand bucks a show, if that. But to me, that concern misses what is centrally valuable about science fiction as a genre of storytelling, not to mention what is centrally valuable about theater as a venue for storytelling.
What distinguishes science fiction from other genres, it seems to me, is its approach to the exploration of ideas and character. We’re used to action movies and thrillers set in universes with science fiction trappings (Star Wars, Alien, and everything that has issued forth from these), but genuine speculative fiction, to me, has to ask: What if we were who we are – what if we kept on being who we are, human beings who fear loneliness, want orgasms, stress about money, crave power, abuse our bodies with bad food and alcohol, stumble across odd moments of grace – and then something game-changing but entirely possible happens?
Technology escalates and offers us an advantage we couldn’t have before? We encounter an extraterrestrial species? But we’re still who we are. Not: how does something catastrophic change us? But rather: given who we are, at our cores, how do we react to catastrophic change? How do we adapt what is immutable about us to a frightening or exhilarating new context?
That’s the key. Science fiction does what any form of storytelling (when well-implemented) does: it gives us a way into looking at ourselves, both our communities and our individual hidden lives, by adding a paradigm-shifting catalyst. It’s like that substance on forensic police procedurals they spray on crime scenes to make the blood glow. Revolutionary technology or aliens are the spray. The blood is us.
I think theater is a superb venue for these sorts of stories. Sure, we can’t provide the liquid metal or the Prawns or the photon torpedoes or the Daleks (and the last thing theater should be doing is competing with film or television to realize the same effects), but what that means is that we spend less time with the catalyst and throw more of our attention to the people affected – how they are altered and how they stay the same.
No one’s expecting a play to wow them every two minutes with a computer generated effect, but sadly, in general, people are expecting plays to bore them to tears with long dark nights of the soul, secrets coming out between lovers and families, small tragedies and revelations in living rooms, discussed at great length while no one’s allowed to go to the bathroom. Science fiction makes stories a lot more fun for two reasons: 1) robots and aliens just make everything cooler, obviously, and 2), as Fowler noted, science fiction is how we’re already living. We interface with technology on a daily basis in ways we didn’t imagine a few years ago. More of our public and private lives take place in front of computer screens. We have virtual/international communities to add to our local ones. We live under the threat of chemical and biological agents that didn’t exist a decade ago. Science fiction a genre that is looked down on by a lot of people, but it might be the most relevant genre of the day.
This has gotten a bit long, so tomorrow I’ll write about some practical applications of science fiction on stage, and then Thursday and Friday I’ll move on to some other subjects.
x
Contributed by Guest Blogger of the week, Mac Rogers.
First of all, I would like to say that I'm grateful to Shay Gines, Morgan Tachco, and the rest of the IT crew for inviting me to write on “Full of IT” this week. Let me kick off with a subject that's near and dear to my heart. A few weeks ago, 99 Seats pointed out a conversation on the Guardian blog asking why there isn’t more science fiction in theater.
Last year, the invaluable Charlie Jane Anders of io9.com wrote an article on novelists who had started off as science fiction authors and then moved on to that weird, indefinable genre we call literary fiction. Anders and io9 asked them if they had left science fiction for good, and Karen Joy Fowler (Sarah Canary, The Jane Austen Book Club) responded with this marvelous quote:
“In the last couple of weeks I've read about toxoplasma — the parasite that alters our behavior until we're simply pawns in the paws of housepet cats; a woman in India found guilty of murdering her fiancé based on her brain scan; a site on the internet where for a monthly fee a computer will pray for you ceaselessly. Stan Robinson says we all live in a science fiction novel now and it's clearly true. So I truly believe that science fiction is realism now and literary realism is a nostalgic literature about a place where we once lived, but no longer do.”
I think that’s fantastic and spot-on, and an invaluable consideration for makers of theater. The Guardian piece raises the concern that’s most often associated with science fiction theater – How can we realize the spaceships and the lasers and the hovercars and the bug-eyed aliens on our limited budgets? – and of course, they’re thinking of West End and moderately budgeted London companies. That consideration goes quadruple for those of us making plays for a few thousand bucks a show, if that. But to me, that concern misses what is centrally valuable about science fiction as a genre of storytelling, not to mention what is centrally valuable about theater as a venue for storytelling.
What distinguishes science fiction from other genres, it seems to me, is its approach to the exploration of ideas and character. We’re used to action movies and thrillers set in universes with science fiction trappings (Star Wars, Alien, and everything that has issued forth from these), but genuine speculative fiction, to me, has to ask: What if we were who we are – what if we kept on being who we are, human beings who fear loneliness, want orgasms, stress about money, crave power, abuse our bodies with bad food and alcohol, stumble across odd moments of grace – and then something game-changing but entirely possible happens?
Technology escalates and offers us an advantage we couldn’t have before? We encounter an extraterrestrial species? But we’re still who we are. Not: how does something catastrophic change us? But rather: given who we are, at our cores, how do we react to catastrophic change? How do we adapt what is immutable about us to a frightening or exhilarating new context?
That’s the key. Science fiction does what any form of storytelling (when well-implemented) does: it gives us a way into looking at ourselves, both our communities and our individual hidden lives, by adding a paradigm-shifting catalyst. It’s like that substance on forensic police procedurals they spray on crime scenes to make the blood glow. Revolutionary technology or aliens are the spray. The blood is us.
I think theater is a superb venue for these sorts of stories. Sure, we can’t provide the liquid metal or the Prawns or the photon torpedoes or the Daleks (and the last thing theater should be doing is competing with film or television to realize the same effects), but what that means is that we spend less time with the catalyst and throw more of our attention to the people affected – how they are altered and how they stay the same.
No one’s expecting a play to wow them every two minutes with a computer generated effect, but sadly, in general, people are expecting plays to bore them to tears with long dark nights of the soul, secrets coming out between lovers and families, small tragedies and revelations in living rooms, discussed at great length while no one’s allowed to go to the bathroom. Science fiction makes stories a lot more fun for two reasons: 1) robots and aliens just make everything cooler, obviously, and 2), as Fowler noted, science fiction is how we’re already living. We interface with technology on a daily basis in ways we didn’t imagine a few years ago. More of our public and private lives take place in front of computer screens. We have virtual/international communities to add to our local ones. We live under the threat of chemical and biological agents that didn’t exist a decade ago. Science fiction a genre that is looked down on by a lot of people, but it might be the most relevant genre of the day.
This has gotten a bit long, so tomorrow I’ll write about some practical applications of science fiction on stage, and then Thursday and Friday I’ll move on to some other subjects.
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Monday, March 1, 2010
Guest Blogger of the Week: Mac Rogers
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We would like to thank Desiree Burch for being such a great guest blogger last week. She brings a unique and titillating perspective to creating performance art.
We are very happy to announce next week's guest blogger, Mac Rogers.
Mac Rogers is a playwright and a performer based in Brooklyn. He has been making Off-Off-Broadway theater since he assistant-directed a production of CYMBELINE at the Looking Glass Theater in 1997. With his company Gideon Productions (co-founded with Sean Williams and Jordana Williams), Mac wrote and produced the plays VIRAL (winner of Outstanding Play at the New York International Fringe Festival), HAIL SATAN (winner of Outstanding Playwriting at FringeNYC), THE LUCRETIA JONES MYSTERIES, THE SECOND STRING, and DIRTY JUANITA. Mac's play UNIVERSAL ROBOTS, co-produced by Manhattantheatresource and Gideon, won the New York Independent Theater Bloggers Award for Best Off-Off-Broadway Play and earned four nominations for IT Awards in 2009. Mac regularly collaborates with two independent theater companies enjoying ten-year anniversaries this year, Nosedive Productions and Manhattantheatresource. As an actor, Mac's favorite role to date has been the titular lead in Nosedive's THE ADVENTURES OF NERVOUS-BOY by James Comtois, for which he earned a nomination from the IT Awards. Mac lives with his fiance Sandy in a converted auto-body shop in Brooklyn, not far from the Brick Theater and the Vampire Cowboys Battle Ranch.
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We would like to thank Desiree Burch for being such a great guest blogger last week. She brings a unique and titillating perspective to creating performance art.
We are very happy to announce next week's guest blogger, Mac Rogers.
Mac Rogers is a playwright and a performer based in Brooklyn. He has been making Off-Off-Broadway theater since he assistant-directed a production of CYMBELINE at the Looking Glass Theater in 1997. With his company Gideon Productions (co-founded with Sean Williams and Jordana Williams), Mac wrote and produced the plays VIRAL (winner of Outstanding Play at the New York International Fringe Festival), HAIL SATAN (winner of Outstanding Playwriting at FringeNYC), THE LUCRETIA JONES MYSTERIES, THE SECOND STRING, and DIRTY JUANITA. Mac's play UNIVERSAL ROBOTS, co-produced by Manhattantheatresource and Gideon, won the New York Independent Theater Bloggers Award for Best Off-Off-Broadway Play and earned four nominations for IT Awards in 2009. Mac regularly collaborates with two independent theater companies enjoying ten-year anniversaries this year, Nosedive Productions and Manhattantheatresource. As an actor, Mac's favorite role to date has been the titular lead in Nosedive's THE ADVENTURES OF NERVOUS-BOY by James Comtois, for which he earned a nomination from the IT Awards. Mac lives with his fiance Sandy in a converted auto-body shop in Brooklyn, not far from the Brick Theater and the Vampire Cowboys Battle Ranch.
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