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.
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--.
“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
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PDF file.
--.
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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.
