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.