Holding the Vasty Fields of Space: Mac Rogers’s Honeycomb Trilogy

I presented this paper at the 34th International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando, Florida this March. This year's theme--Translations, Adaptations, and Audiences--made me think about the difficulties inherent in sf theatre and how one might get around these by using Mac Rogers' very successful Honeycomb Trilogy as a case study. My intention is to expand this into a formal scholarly article, so, yes, I do realize that I cut corners here so that my talk comes in under twenty minutes. For those of you interested in attending next year, go to www.iafa.org.

            Translation or adaptation implies a conversion—either between two languages or two different media. In the past, a majority of sf for the stage has been a matter of adapting an sf short story or novel for live performance, severely compressing the narrative, and attempting to physically represent sweeping descriptive passages. One to one conversions tend to fail or do poorly (there is an occasional success), largely because many sf authors do not have experience writing for the stage, many playwrights haven’t read much in the way of sf, and a lack of understanding that theatre is not simply another literary form. Certainly the script can be viewed as literary, but that’s the extent of the similarity. Theatre is a braided series of information channels; the script is only one of these and not always the most informative.

            I would like to explore the potential in viewing translation and adaptation for the stage as the successful deployment and situating of “production strategies” as outlined by Tobin Nelhaus. In doing so, both sf and performance can be viewed on equal footing regardless of medium, and notions of genre, slippery at best in defining either subject, can be chucked out the airlock. In particular, the Honeycomb Trilogy by Mac Rogers illustrates a different understanding of adaptation and translation from this perspective—one dealing in more complicated definitions of theatrical modes or styles. Tobin Nelhaus, a theatre historian and performance theorist, has posited that attempting to describe types of theatre as genres, modes, or styles is futile—any definitions become unwieldy and slippery ultimately muddying rather than clarifying analysis—sharing much in common with the attempts to define science fiction and fantasy. His approach is grounded in critical realism and looks at production strategies as a defining rubric. Production strategies, in a nutshell, encompass all the materials and techniques of a production. The practices tend to cohere into a recognizable system within and across productions. Specifically, Nelhaus states that “Performance strategies [. . .] are approaches to enacting agency by means of theater, conjoining the performer’s imagination, intentionality, and embodiment toward direct or indirect dialogue with an audience” (68). In each of his plays, Rogers employs a sequence of different strategies which move backward chronologically through theatrical modalities and performance strategies. This movement within the trilogy reflects and orders the ideas being explored, and each style forms a framework for the stage narrative. This creates a new performance strategy that not only utilizes sf, but also makes it a necessary, if unconscious element for current performance strategies across other forms of performance.

            Rogers’ trilogy, comprised of the plays Advance Man, Blast Radius, and Sovereign, premiered in the first half of 2012 at the Secret Theatre in Long Island City, New York. The three plays follow members of the Cooke family and their involvement with an alien take-over of Earth. Rogers employs performance strategies from realism, pastoral comedy, and Greek tragedy one for each play. For the sake of time, my explanations and definitions of the production strategies will be exceedingly reductive.

The story arc begins pre-invasion in the home of astronaut Bill Cooke. Ronnie and Abbie, his daughter and son, don’t know that the first Mars mission, headed by their father, was the initial step in a secret plan to move Earth’s elite population off-planet to survive imminent environmental collapse.  No one knows that on Mars the astronauts found the last survivors of a telepathic insectoid race escaping their own dying planet. Conor, a member of the mission, links his mind with one of the aliens. A compact ensuring mutual survival is made: the aliens will take over Earth and transform it to an agrarian world halting environmental collapse in exchange for human aid in the survival of their own species. The link, however, breaks down, destroying Conor’s mind and leaving the alien consciousness trapped in a human body. The astronauts return with thirteen larval honeycombs—nests—that will serve as telepathic hubs.

            Ronnie and Abbie are teens when their father returns from the mission bringing Conor, who “officially” suffered a stroke, with him. Amelia, their mother, teaches Conor to walk and speak again. Abbie, sensitive and artistic, becomes close to Conor, and Ronnie, the rebellious older sister, protects them both, and by the end of Advance Man, Conor’s true identity is revealed. The alien hatching is nearly stopped by a Ronnie who holds the mission team at gunpoint. However, the switch is thrown by the one person she can’t harm—her brother. The alien takeover is swift and anyone who resists is killed. All technology is destroyed along with the nuclear family structure, and humans now work on communal farms.

Advance Man borrows heavily from realism. The play resembles what Ibsen might have done if he wrote a first contact play instead of A Doll’s House. Realism as a theatrical mode and practice grew out of the work of Auguste Comte and Emile Zola, both of whom touted scientific method as the way to truth and progress. Sociology was given particular primacy of place, and social issues were examined by observing their effect on the individual within society. Large issues came to be addressed via Zola’s belief in the writer as social pathologist, exposing social ills. These ideals have much in common with sf’s employment of novums to the larger questions it typically addresses. As a result, the ideas of realism are not anathema to the presentation of sf on stage.

Today, however, realism has come to mean a specific production methodology wherein reality is reproduced in three dimensions on the stage. Sf was thought to be impossible to stage because the ideas expressed were much larger than the individual and that the props and setting—usually what is pointed toward in world building—were impossible to recreate without decent into camp or parody.

Rogers backtracks to what Nelhaus would point to as the more “traditional” genesis of realism by examining the effect of a larger, outside impact on the family. Like Ibsen, Rogers looks at a larger problem—environmental collapse and political maneuvering—making “ideology the cause of problems and suggested the need to change it” (Brockett 430). The genesis for the events and choices in Rogers’s play find an impetus in the ideologies and practices which brought on the problems facing the planet. Without these there would have been no mission to Mars, and no reason for the astronauts to make radical changes for what they believe is the better. The application of the production mode in this instance is successful because the realism need not apply to the aliens—they act as decision prompting catalysts. Realism as a production mode is necessary from the position of reflecting the scientific content of the argument—yes, the planet will collapse if something isn’t done and does a single individual have the right to make that decision.

Bridging the gap between the first and second plays, Rogers wrote mini-messages (webisodes) which could be accessed with smart devices by reading a matrix barcode in the program. The two brief broadcasts by Bill Cooke document the takeover and aftermath of the alien conversion. The use of technology as a narrative device does two things. First, it heightens the realism begun in Advance Man by telling us the story in, for current society, a realistic manner—social networks and YouTube. In the first, Cooke, seen with his wife, tells others to stop resisting the takeover, while in the second Cook, without his wife for unknown reasons, seems deeply saddened and more than a little paranoid. He appears to have a level of regret for the results but stands by his decision for the planet. Second, the large social networks have complicated the notion of “local.” This served to make the play simultaneously local and global in pulling the audience into the play’s world. The alternate media served the sf-nal elements, enriching them, and created a heightened level of realism wherein the individual not only reflects but communicates with the larger world. This also allowed the trilogy to move from the production strategies of realism—the truth in the individual within society—to a larger realm (technology’s relation to society) and a subsequently different production strategy.

The second play, Blast Radius, continues the action twelve years later. Ronnie is the leader of the human resistance and Abbie, her brother, is the human ambassador to the Honeycomb. He and Conor have become lovers but grow apart as Conor embraces his new humanity while Abbie longs to become a part of the Honeycomb. The resistance stumbles on a weapon to use against the aliens: water contaminated by the aliens’ glandular runoff, or Bugwater. Harmless on its own, when ingested by a human, it causes a massive explosion destroying everything within a 10-pace radius.

            Abbie persuades the Honeycomb that they can only end the resistance by forcibly transitioning alien minds into every human. Conor, horrified, teaches Ronnie how to defeat the aliens by destroying the telepathic nest. Ronnie gathers 51 suicide bombers to take down a Honeycomb, Conor and Ronnie’s husband, Peck, are among the first to give their lives. Humans begin to take back the planet, and Ronnie holds Abbie prisoner—protecting him, as she had promised Conor, and preventing him from warning the other nests. He escapes, too late to turn the tide, and Ronnie persuades hundreds to sacrifice their lives.

The world of Blast Radius is one in which technology and books have been eradicated along with the nuclear family. Modern medicine is unknown. People are not allowed to marry, and pregnant women are sequestered and their babies taken at birth to be raised without parents.

What has been created is a sort of post-apocalyptic, post-invasion pastoral society in which the typically bucolic pastoral setting has become a more nightmarish truth. Rogers, therefore, utilizes the production strategies inherent in the pastoral comedy—twisting this into something grimmer. Typically, pastoral comedies were written by urban authors lauding the unspoiled nature of the country life. These explorations were often couched as arguments between nature versus art or country versus city. The performance strategies focused on the truth as a “blank page”—much in keeping with Rousseau—that humankind is better closer to the natural world.

Rogers’ take on the pastoral is particularly dark. The saving of the planet has happened but at what cost? Women and their babies die in childbirth without medical treatment. Conor’s simple enjoyment of an illegal book cannot be shared. The play reveals our technology as culturally ingrained, expanding our capabilities in some ways and severely hobbling us in others. Blast Radius, with its bleak look at the pastoral life indicates an utter impossibility to return to nature in any absolute sense. What we get is not the urbane glorification of nature versus art but a mirror that shows us how little we understand of the “natural” life—much like the unrealistic and idealized portrayals of country life in traditional pastoral comedies.

Twenty years later, in Sovereign, the aliens are few in number and on the run, and the humans have begun to rebuild. Ronnie is now governor of a settlement. Abbie and the human-alien hybrid that carries his child have been caught along with the last Honeycomb queen. Abbie is put on trial for attempted genocide, creating a precedent for the extermination of an entire race. In order to save her brother and do what she feels she must to protect humanity, Ronnie orders the last queen burned alive. In the chaos, she helps her brother escape knowing that she’ll be facing trial for genocide. She attempts to kill herself using the last of the Bugwater, but Abbie prevents her, and the two go into permanent hiding.

            Sovereign reaches back to Greek production strategies. Greek tragedy—to be exceedingly reductive—was highly communal and served complex ritual purposes for the community. Derived from commonly known myths and legends, the plays would typically debate notions of the individual versus the will of the gods or the individual versus the State—as is the case with Sovereign. Of the extant playwrights whose work as survived, Rogers’ most closely resembles that of Euripedes, who would often favor more psychological and domestic subjects for his plays. Production strategies emphasized nature and man’s place within it as being very small (as evidenced by the theatre architecture of the time) and truth was found in the law of the gods not that of man. To think otherwise exhibited hubris and invited destruction.

            Sovereign examines the hubris of both Ronnie and Abbie—each so very certain that they, like their father, know what is best for everyone. Their actions throughout the trilogy have condemned each of them. Abbie has been on the run and now stands trial for the attempted xenocide of humanity. However, he cannot be executed as no law currently exists in any settlement preventing xenocide—attempted or otherwise. The trial ensures that Ronnie and her staff create an ad hoc law, but in doing so, Abbie ensures the survival of the last Honeycomb queen. Ronnie’s conflicts are multiple: law or family, law or vengeance, past versus present, old culture versus new. The character is caught with a series of choices which damn her no matter what she chooses, and the rule of law and the new culture she helped create through the resistance has no further use for her. The backward order of the plays’ multiple production strategies provides the psychological background—individual and cultural—necessary for the subsequent happenings in each play. Ronnie’s and Abbie’s choices in Sovereign are made more powerful through the realism and pastoral elements of the first and second parts of the trilogy.

            The various production strategies used in the Honeycomb Trilogy heighten the underlying issues within the plays as well as between them. This was not a conscious intent on Rogers’ part, so why examine the work in this way? Nelhaus points out that, production strategies hold cultural intent—it’s the way performance narrative is done based on socio-cultural norms. We’re unaware that we do it because it appears natural. At best, an artist is looking for a way to express an internal feeling concerning external stimuli, and they will gravitate toward producing a method, influenced by any number of external factors, which best expresses that. This end result may or may not spark new production methodologies.

            Nelhaus notes that production shifts occur in conjunction with radical shifts in modes of communication. Sf author David Brin expands this to include any technology that enhances memory, perception, and attention. The new surfeit of information becomes overwhelming sparking crises that require new ways of looking at the socio-cultural continuum. Art can specifically be a way to anticipate and produce self-reflexive discourse on the crises. In a Google Talk given in 2007 with Brin, artist Sheldon Brown discusses art in these conditions but it easily applies to performance.

            In general, theatre as an art form has always operated as a snapshot of the human condition for a particular cultural moment. Within that snapshot, we are granted a view of the tension between the individual and society by examining the universal through the particular. Most scholars in performance readily agree on this. Brown shows how culture, like technology, has reached Moore’s Law condition, leading to a singularity where progress is nearly instantaneous, in turn changing how art and culture make meaning. What Brown points out, and is seen in Rogers’ work, is that, because cultural forms operate in social space, they allow us to debate and gain competency with the new influx of information. As a result, performance has become multi-modal with its aesthetic and conceptual interests across multiple forms.

What much of sf theatre is doing, consciously or not, is not simply an application of new technologies, but also new applications of older production strategies to foreground current socio-cultural issues and crises. This new way to examine translation and adaptation can open up stage narrative by ameliorating a one to one conversion and instead open a larger continuum for the examination of technological crises without being locked into a particular representation of it. Instead performance can examine the translation and adaptation of the production strategies and how they translate and adapt the critical socio-cultural issues for the audience in a reciprocal exploration.

Bibliography

Advance Man. By Mac Rogers. Dir. Jordana Williams. Perf. Sean Williams, Kristen Vaughn, Jason Howard, Becky Byers, and David Rosenblatt. BFG Collective. The Secret Theatre, Long Island City, NY. 15 January, 2012. Performance.

Blast Radius. By Mac Rogers. Dir. Jordana Williams. Perf. Becky Byers, Jason Howard, and David Rosenblatt. BFG Collective. The Secret Theatre, Long Island City, NY. 1 April, 2012. Performance.

Brockett, Oscar G. History of the Theatre. 7^th edition.  Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1995. Print.

Delany, Samuel R. “About 5,750 Words.” The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (1977). Revised Edition. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009. 1-15. Print.

Gunnels, Jen.  “Advance Man.” Rev. of Advance Man, by Mac Rogers. BFG Collective, The Secret Theatre, Long Island City, NY. The New York Review of Science Fiction. V24, no7, issue 283. March 2012. Review. Print.

--. “Blast Radius.” Rev. of Blast Radius, by Mac Rogers. BFG Collective, The Secret Theatre, Long Island City, NY. The New York Review of Science Fiction. V24, no7, issue 286. June, 2012. Review. Print.

--. “Sovereign.” Rev. of Sovereign, by Mac Rogers. BFG Collective, The Secret Theatre, Long Island City, NY. The New York Review of Science Fiction. Xxxxxxxxxxxxxx . Review. Print. (CHECK THIS).

Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Murphy, Patrick D. ed. Staging the Impossible: The Fantastic Mode in Modern Drama. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. Print.

Rogers, Mac. Advance Man. Unpublished play. PDF file.

--. Blast Radius. Unpublished play. PDF file.

--Sovereign. Unpublished play. PDF file.

Suvin, Darko. “Estrangement and Cognition.” Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction. James Gunn and Matthew Candelaria, eds. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2005. 23-35. Print.

Remshardt, Ralf. Staging the Savage God: The Grotesque in Performance. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. Print.

Sovereign. By Mac Rogers. Dir. Jordana Williams. Perf. Hanna Cheek, Stephen Heskett, Matt Golden, Medina Senghore, and Erin Jerozal. BFG Collective. The Secret Theatre, Long Island City, NY. 16 June 2012.