August Schulenberg is the artistic director for the award winning Flux Theatre Ensemble. Their production of Ajax in Iraq, won the 2012 New York Innovative Theatre Award for Oustanding Revival. Schulenberg is a playwright as well, and his most recent work, DIENDE, was produced through the BFG Collective at the Secret Theatre.

The Play's the Thing

So, this post is supposed to be about the “practical issues involved in writing and staging science fiction.” This might seem neither an odd question to ask nor a difficult one to answer. After all, the theatre where I am a creative partner, Flux Theatre Ensemble, has frequently staged plays that might fall under a generous definition of science fiction—six out of our fourteen plays. As a playwright, I’ve written seven full-length plays that might fit comfortably into the genre. 

Yet we have not considered ourselves a science fiction theatre company or deliberately set out to stage science fiction plays. I have never thought, “I’m going to write a science fiction play now.” How can I answer a question about the practical issues of staging and writing sci-fi theatre when our relationship to the genre is so unconscious that we just call it theatre? Are the practical issues of sci-fi theatre really just the practical issue of theatre dressed in speculative drag?

Yes and no, and the difference comes in the media through which we tell our stories. Theatre is both a literal and symbolic act: that human body is really there, but pretends to be something else. This places theatre somewhere between the literal magic of film and the symbolic power of a book. The medium of theatre is the human body, and the imaginative acts it asks of its audience.

This realization is a simple one, and yet when you possess it fully (as you only sometimes do), it cannot but help but shake you (or at least it does me). The medium of theatre is the human body. What a thrilling, daunting thing. We are such stuff as these dreams are made on, and that means the realm of sci-fi theatre is linked to film and literature but made of fundamentally different stuff.

Our expectations must therefore be different. The need for strong storytelling unites book, film and play; it is the differing materials of the story where things get interesting. A sci-fi book is entirely ours to imagine, so much of the joy comes from making our mind’s-eye a camera leaping from the interior of our protagonist to the whole of the cosmos and back again in the blink of a sentence. A sci-fi film, on the other hand, is quite the opposite. The camera and the editors do all that work for us; our imaginations have no room within the frame because they’re simply not needed. The joy then comes from imagining the world outside of the frame, and this may be why sci-fi films are so powerful at generating fan fiction and costumed world-building; the entry point for our imaginations comes outside of the story.

With theatre, then, it is with the human body that our imaginations find their primary point of engagement. Sci-fi theatre that tries to conjure the imaginative ask of a book or the detailed tell of a film will fail: That is not where its fundamental strength lies. Great sci-fi theatre lives in the power of a real human body reacting in real time to the imaginative pressures of speculative fiction.

Take, for example, Mac Rogers’ The Honeycomb Trilogy. One of the great thrills in each of these three plays is watching an alien mind inhabit a human body. I think of Jason Howard’s magnificent struggle to be human in Advance Man; the surprise of human pleasures shared between Jason and Cotton Wright in Blast Radius; Erin Jerazol’s all-too-human grief in Sovereign. These are moments that could work in a book or film but mean something different when we imagine an alien life in the real body before us.

With Flux’s production of DEINDE, the same principle held true. We tried to evoke a feeling of the future without getting bogged down in future-ish gadgets and costumes. We depended on the audience to color in those lines, because the focus needed to be on the human experience: How looping into DEINDE changed, little by little, every single aspect of that experience until the characters were, for better and worse, an entirely different thing. Mac’s violence with Bobby, and connection to Jenni, mean something different when you are in the same room with them, watching real bodies undergo imagined transformations.

When sci-fi plays attempts to equal the imaginative ask of a novel or the detailed literalness of a film, they may find a way (I like to believe there are no limits to what stories theatre can tell) but they will lead the audience away from the visceral heart of what theatre does. Begin with the human body in real time: How will your story change what that body means? Then let every staging choice emerge from that, and you will have a truly powerful sci-fi play on your hands. Or, as we call it in Flux, a play.

It's Like Living in the Future

I don't know about other people, but I have a fairly eclectic selection of reading material lying around the house. Probably the oddest is the IEEE Spectrum (the journal for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). Oddly, it's where I found my first sf performance for critical review. Christian Denisart's Robots. You find sf theatre in some weird places.

This morning over coffee I perused the latest issue. Okay, mostly I look at the pictures and occasionally understand an article (well, really a sentence or two from an article), but what snagged my attention was an advertisement on the first page. It was for Dassault Systems, a company that creates software platforms. The photo depicted a woman walking down a flight of white marble stairs--think futuristic Danish modern. What was sf about it was the bionic prosthesis that enabled her to do so. The copy read: "If we can help people who have a damaged skeleton, could they walk again? A robotic skeleton--a dream our software could bring to life. How long before bionic humans are fact, not science fiction?" Harkening back to the last post here, Mac Rogers quoted Karen Joy Fowler. I think that the above ad copy further supports her assertion that sf is the new realism.

I think that we can all pretty much agree with that assessment for the most part. We are currently living in our own future, and our narratives are slowly but surely coming to reflect that fact. Unfortunately, theatre still seems a bit mired in the realism of the past. In conversations with dramaturg Carrie J. Cole, we've lamented the fact that the training system for theatre professionals, still largely reliant on universities, still insists on training almost exclusively in realistic techniques. Designers, given the reliance on more and more sophisticated technology, have it a bit better, but are their skills really being pushed if producers and professionals are still mired in a theatre that no longer really reflects the culture in which we live. Even if and when sf becomes a greater part of performance, have we produced artists capable of rising to the challenge of staging it?

Even critics like myself, trained in traditional theatre practices (and I'm talking critics NOT reviewers) are going to need to start making connections beyond their usual purview if they are going to fairly and correctly represent what they're looking at in addition to helping to move the art forward.

As Jennifer Parker-Starbuck wrote in her book Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance (2011), "Enmeshed with technologic languages in performance, abject bodies can predict future bodies, future questions, future abilities" (60). While she was specifically examining the abject, one could easily replace "abject bodies" with "technologic bodies" or "science fictional bodies." Bodies not unlike the woman depicted in the advertisement. In order to do this, I think that as artists, critics, and educators we may need to reassess ourselves and look for new platforms ourselves. Our software is a little out of date.

"Actually, we've already made first contact . . ."

Mac Rogers is a Brooklyn based playwright and co-founder of Gideon Productions. His science fiction plays have won multiple awards and garnered high praise from critics and fellow artists. The first play in his most most recent work, The Honeycomb Trilogy (Advance Man, Blast Radius, Sovereign), won Outstanding Premiere Production of a Play for the 2012 New York Innovative Theatre Awards.

“Not that theater doesn't deal in big decisions, but ... an alien invasion? Really?” [http://www.nypost.com/p/blogs/theater/science_fiction_triple_feature_kKNXQ2Cn28zQIYnrhVFzRL]

Here’s my thing: It’s not that this sentence popped up in a review of Sovereign, the third installment of my science fiction trilogy for the stage… it’s that it took until the third part for a single reviewer to express incredulity at the idea of a play about an extraterrestrial takeover of the Earth. All three parts of The Honeycomb Trilogy were reviewed by several critics apiece when my company presented them over the first 7 months of this year. We had almost 40 reviews [http://www.gideonth.com/reviews/] over the course of three plays, many from what they call “mainstream” publications – some good, some bad, some middling – but we only had one review that questioned, and even then only briefly, whether an alien invasion was an appropriate subject for a play.

Let’s talk about audience: I’ll admit that a few folks expressed some gentle amusement when I told them what the Trilogy was about, but most didn’t. When I talked to people after performances or in the days after they saw one of the shows, the pattern was the same:  whether they liked or disliked it, nobody for a second acted as if theater should not include stories about giant insects taking over the world. Everyone just assessed it as a play, like any other. My previous foray into SF playwriting, Universal Robots, had the legitimacy imprimatur of starting its life as an adaptation of Karel Capek’s classic R.U.R., but The Honeycomb Trilogy had no
respectable uncle to lean on: it was a full-on bug-eyed aliens epic for live theater, and no one had any problem taking it seriously.

You can see this blossoming of stage sci-fi happening all over. In my particular neck of the New York City indie theater woods, it was the Vampire Cowboys Theater Company [http://www.vampirecowboys.com/] that broke this ground. Their shows, nearly all written by Qui Nguyen and directed by Robert Ross Parker, contained zombies, ninjas, aliens, superheroes, sentient robots, and inter-dimensional beings, all brought to the stage with an intricate craftsmanship and care that made them indelible. Vampire Cowboy shows are often comic, but I wouldn’t call them parody; Nguyen and Parker always create a consistent internal logic to their universes and demand that we care about their characters and take them for who they are, living or undead.

There’s a sense among many of my colleagues that Vampire Cowboys emboldened us. We wanted to tell these sorts of stories, but had some sense that we weren’t “allowed.” The idea of great theater a lot of American students are exposed to early on is actually kind of a narrow vein: your basic O’Neill, Miller, Williams, Mamet. I got Churchill and Kushner and Jean Claude van Itallie later, but only after the big respectable pillars had made their initial mark on me. (There was Shakespeare in there too, of course, but I remember being taught to think of Hamlet’s father and the ghost of Banquo and Ariel as metaphors or projections or whatever, not as actual frikkin’ supernatural beings I was supposed to invest in.) The message that comes across is that great plays are basically realistic, sad stories of thwarted dreamers/everymen feebly struggling against the economic and societal structures holding them down – and no robots allowed. I don’t deny the greatness of these playwrights, but they only represent a sliver of what’s possible in theater. Among a lot of folks I know, Qui and Robert’s success said to us, “Go ahead, throw a robot in there. No one’s gonna laugh at you. Not if you do it right.”

The point I’m making is this: we don’t need to be embarrassed anymore. We don’t need to be sheepish about this. A huge number of the theater artists and theater critics working now grew up in a culture permeated by genre and speculative fiction stories, and many of us understand that the repurposing of popular genre motifs for the stage doesn’t have to mean Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark. Nobody pointed and laughed at August Schulenberg’s superb AI-enhanced humans thriller DEINDE; NYTheatre called it “one of the smartest, sharpest, and most important new plays of the theatre season.” Nobody mocked Edward Einhorn’s stage adaptation of Ursula Le Guinn’s The Lathe of Heaven; Theater Mania praised its “admirable simplicity” and “enchantment.” Indeed, the Mad Ones’ [http://madone.wordpress.com/] brilliant Samuel and Alasdair: A History of the Robot War became a full-on (and much-deserved) critical darling earlier this year despite one of the pulpiest titles imaginable.

And I’m only citing reviews really as a snapshot of a more widely emerging consensus throughout the theater community: Science fiction theater isn’t fighting to be born, to be recognized. We’re already here. We’re already doing this. This is already a tradition. Sure, it’ll be a while before a lot of bigger theaters will be programming science fiction, but believe me, they’re going to catch up with us. I think they have to if they want to tell stories about who we are now. As sometime SF novelist Karen Joy Fowler told io9.com a couple years ago, “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.” [http://io9.com/5285084/4-authors-we-wish-would-return-to-science-fiction?skyline=true&s=x]

Our seat is very much at the table. I think we’ve reached a stage where we can set aside fighting for legitimacy and simply do our work: tell our stories, hone our techniques, and share our information. That’s a big part of what “Performing Science Fiction” is for. Jen Gunnels will bring in a number of SF theater practitioners to post their own thoughts and hard-learned lessons here (and I hope she’ll have me back at some point to share some of the lessons I’ve learned writing and producing SF theater as well). It’ll be great to have this blog here. We’ll all get to see each other at work; we’ll know how many more of us are out there, bringing these stories to life on stage all over the world. We’re here now. We’re “allowed.”