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.

           

Robots (2010) Review

Because material needs to be widely disseminated, and people may not always be aware of what has come before, occasionally I will re-publish pertinent reviews from past science fiction performances. 

This review was originally published in the New York Review of Science Fiction, March 2010, vol 22, no 7, issue 259. It's actually the one that started it all for me.

Robots, directed and conceived by Christian Denisart. Produced by Le Voyage Extraordinaire, Branch
Worcham. Laurence Iseli. 2009. Reviewed by Jen Gunnels
*
Once upon a time there was a man with three robots . . . I first read about the play Robots in the July 2009 issue of the IEEE Spectrum, which is not the usual venue for theatre reviews. Robots, however, actually has robots as members of the cast, so I can understand why engineers might get excited about theater in this instance. Unfortunately, all they published was a single photo and less than a paragraph, which only mentioned the engineering involved. Director? Theater? Actors? What-ever. Did you see the robots? The play has real robots! The thought of mechanical as opposed to human cast members was sufficiently intriguing to prompt further investigation into the production. For my efforts, I was rewarded with a recording of the original performance courtesy of the director.

Robots, produced by Le Voyage Extraordinaire, premiered at the Théâtre Barnabe in Servion, Switzerland on May 1, 2009. Billed as a musical (and it is, but in an unconventional sense), the play follows three days in the life of the Man (played by the American actor Branch Worsham), who has one last chance to connect to the world of flesh and blood outside his apartment. He has contentedly relied upon his creations, three robot companions, to meet his every need until he has the chance to meet with the Woman (Laurence Iseli). The actors do not speak, and the absence of verbal language makes the play ideal for international touring and for conveying a modern technological tale à la the Brothers Grimm. While the story itself contains an element of Pygmalion and Galatea, there is no happy ending, and the robot Galatea remains a machine.



The set and costumes, designed by Gilbert Maire and Cécile Collet respectively, add to the fairytale quality by suggesting neither modern nor Victorian elements. Think of Jules Verne meets IKEA by way of Frankenstein’s lab. It works well, and the aesthetic is very much intentional. The creator/director of Robots, Christian Denisart, has been a fan of Jules Verne since childhood, which explains both the concept behind the stage design and the name of his production company. Surrounding the whole is the vast pipe organ of the Théâtre Barnabe. The organ provides the music throughout the play, acting as a Greek chorus, commenting on both the action and the emotions of the characters. The music, composed by Lee Maddeford, has elements of the carnivalesque in its calliope sound, but the repetitious themes of certain scenes are more reminiscent of a Phillip Glass score. Because of the total lack of spoken dialogue and the extensive use of music, the production might be considered a dance piece but not in a traditional sense. Choreographers Corinne Rochet & Nicholas Pettit have created a subtle blend of mime and modern dance.

The action opens with the incongruous juxtaposition of Igor, the robotic butler, carrying a candle. The candlelight reflecting off the metal gives an unsettling feeling due to the disjointed image. Simultaneously, there is a sense of the impersonal, in the metallic sheen of the robot, and the intimate, in the soft candlelight. Such juxtapositions occur throughout the play, creating a subtle sense of estrangement. While Igor goes about the start of an average day, Bruno, a cross between a dog, a roomba, and a large MP3 player, circles

about underfoot. Within the first act, Worsham brilliantly portrays a quiet, gentle man with harmless quirky behaviors. His ritualized, repetitive behavior, such as placing a hand on his head and turning in a circle every time he comes to a certain place on the stairs, creates an extremely likeable if pitiable character.

A letter announces the arrival of the Woman. A flurry of activity replaces the Man’s sedate routine as he rehearses exactly what will happen during his meeting with the Woman. When she arrives, bit by bit, things begin to go wrong, as she fails to behave according to his script. His pride and joy, the robots he has created, make the Woman uneasy at first. Her lack of comfort comes through in the dismissive and
disrespectful (perhaps even cruel) behavior with which she treats them. Granted, they are robots and as such have no feelings to injure, but it is evident that they are in some respects extensions of the Man. Such actions seem especially callous since the Man’s pride in his creations and his desire to please her are so evident.

The first act sets the tone for the two systems of communication in progress—the spontaneous and socially intuitive (Woman) and the rehearsed and predetermined (Man)—and both miss their marks. The Man cannot relate to the spontaneous behavior of the Woman (nor to her greater interest in him and not the robots), and the Woman cannot appreciate the difficulty of interaction for the Man. The first date falls apart with regret for the outcome on both sides and with no sense that a happy resolution is possible.

The second act follows the aftermath of the initial, and disastrous, meeting between the Man and the Woman. He cannot cope with the unpredictable nature of human relations after the easy predictability of programmed robots. Reluctantly, he returns to a canvas-covered object upstage in his laboratory workspace. Unveiled, the audience sees the outline of a sophisticated robot, Leila, reminiscent of Maria in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. The countenance of the robot is refined and resembles the Woman seen in Act I, but her torso is constructed of panels, like a tailor’s mannequin, with large wheels for feet. Then it/she opens her eyes. The delicacy and grace of movement is amazing and disconcerting. She is so very obviously a robot, intentionally unfinished and mechanical, and yet the movement, the gestures are so human. The two then act out the idealized meeting as planned by the Man.

The initial focus remains on Leila—her movement and design are riveting—but as the act continues, she simply becomes another character. During part of the scene, the Man and Leila dance, mimicking what the Man had intended for the Woman. While this robotic substituion is slightly disturbing, Worsham brings a sweet charm to the situation. At the end of their dance, the Man and Leila move downstage and center. The Man breathes hard, chest moving up and down after his exertions. Then I noticed the action of the robot, and the play once again twisted back to uncanny and disturbing, the Dancer’s chest moved in time with the Man’s, as if it too were breathing hard. No, this play did not leave me completely comfortable. In the final act, the Man once again faces the Woman, this time without his robots. He comes to a decision and resolutely sends Igor and Bruno off stage. He then tries to interact with the Woman. At one point, he is distracted, and the Woman, left to her own curiosity, finds Leila. Her reactions of shock, disgust, and jealousy alienate her from any meaningful interaction with the Man. She destroys the robot, leading to the final tragedy of her own accidental death and the symbolic death of the Man’s hopes of being able to relate to humans.

In an interview with Denisart on October 29, 2009, with his agent Marc Lambelet assisting with interpreting, I had the opportunity to learn more about the conception of the play in addition to the challenges associated with directing three robots. I asked what first prompted the production concept, and Denisart replied:

Ten years ago, I saw on TV a robot balancing from branch to branch. It looked elegant and quick and not what I expected Igor meets the Woman at the door from a robot. I loved robots but didn’t know that technologyhad advanced enough to do this. That’s what made me feel it
was possible to put robots on stage. I went to François Junod with [a] written synopsis of the play and asked if this was possible. [Junod] said that is was possible and was interested in the project.

When he first thought about the play and started writing eight years ago, Denisart only wanted to address the questions of what our relationships with technology could be, not necessarily to comment on them or to create a message. He made it clear to me that he does love technology, and he regards the relationship between human and robot with suspicion. He feels that we are following a dangerous path in this respect:

I read something that said for $1,800 you can take a threedimensional picture of someone’s face, record their voice, and you get a simulation of that person. At the end of the article, it said you can bring it to [the] homes of others, and they can just have you there all day. I found this disturbing. Understand that I like and am extremely interested in technology, but I am concerned about its social impact.

For the engineering junkies, I will return to the robots. They were developed by François Junod of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and the Swiss corporation Bluebotics built the three very distinct robots for the production. They interact with the actors and are in themselves characters within the story, each representing a different type of robot. Igor, the butler, represents the services of industrial robots, while Bruno encompasses those elements of robotics and computers which entertain. Leila, the dancer, moves and acts in such a way that I must use the word embodies—it, she, embodies the efforts of robotics to mirror the human. Each robot uses “a laser-based guidance system and a scheme that uses something like a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) protocol for controlling the humanoids’ every move” (IEEE Spectrum 21). In going to François Junod, Denisart got an erotic sensuality from Leila that one would not necessarily associate with robotic movement. Junod is extremely well-known for making meticulously life-like mechanical figures, making possible the subtle gestures required for Leila.

Of course, acting with the robots produced its own difficulties. Because the robots cannot produce readable emotions, the actors must carry all the emotive aspect of the performance. Essentially, they must act to produce both their own characters and those of the robots. Worsham and Iseli do an astounding job in both respects. Additionally, the workshop and rehearsal phase of the production produced some unexpected hitches. Most robots have sensors which allow them to avoid contact with objects. The workshops revealed
that these security systems put in to avoid contact had to be removed. Staging a dance while one partner is assiduously trying to avoid theother is fairly difficult. Programmers needed to examine how to help the robots differentiate between good and bad contact. Additionally, robots are required to do repetitive activity for long periods of time. They will sometimes break down, and while that is not an issue when fetching objects in warehouses, on stage there can be no stops. Such unusual needs presented the programmers with challenges they would not necessarily have encountered in more traditional industrial situations.

The project as a whole interested Junod for several reasons. First, he wanted to examine the challenge in creating technology that can be utilized without extensive training. In addition to usage, robotics in particular has an issue involving appearance. Denisart explained:

Should the robot look humanoid or should it be a cube? Are these assets or frightening things? Designers must reflect on this in making the machine. When the robot is fast, is this good, scary, or worrying? These were issues that were very much of interest in developing the robots. How the audience reacted was good information for [Junod] in research. The play was a kind of laboratory for experimentation.

Science and technology are not foreign subjects to the stage. Going back to the automatons of the early ninteenth century, public display of technology and devices was often theatrical in nature. Thomas Edison made plans to but never did create an artificial woman. She reappears, however, as the character Halavy in the French novel L’Ève future (The New Eve) (1886) by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. Throughout the late nineteenth century, the theater came to rely heavily upon an overt use of technology and current popular science in creating the lavish realism required in staging plays. Actor/ director/dramatist William Gillette (1853—1937) was known for his love of gadgetry, which often featured in his popular portrayals of Sherlock Holmes. The most extreme usage of technology within the theatre may be the 1902 Theatre Royal production of Ben Hur with its onstage chariot race complete with 16 live horses and a complex series of treadmills and revolving panoramic background giving the illusion of motion. Within the last two decades, several plays, such as Breaking the Code (1986) (Turing biography), Arcadia (1993) (mathematical biology), Copenhagen (1998) (the wartime meeting between Heisenburg and Bohr), Proof (2000) (Fermat’s theorem), Fermat’s Last Tango (2000) (a musical concerning Fermat’s theorem), and Now Then Again (2001) (quantum physics) have utilized aspectsof science. However, these plays tend to address the people behind the science or use science as a plot device and not necessarily to explore
the impact of the science itself upon the human. Now Then Again intriguingly sets out to record a theory of quantum mechanics in a dramatic form. According to the introduction of the play written by John G. Cramer, himself a renowned physicist, the play uses as a metaphor the depiction of “quantum events as a handshake between the future and the past through the medium of quantum waves that travel in both time directions.” Penny Penniston uses the theory for both the plot and the dramatic structure of the play. While Penniston’s work comes closest to showing how a theory would work in a human situation, it does not intentionally set out to measure audience reception of the theory. In addressing the audience perception of the robots in the piece, Robots essentially becomes a laboratory for direct feedback, something not always available to researchers.

Overall, the play is a beautifully crafted piece. My only complaint would be that the action occasionally drags due to robotics. The robots can only move so fast, and this cannot be rectified in any way other than through engineering. Having realized this, Denisart and the actors have attempted to incorporate the slower motion of the robotsinto the movement of the play as a whole with some success. Other audience members have mentioned this difficulty, but it is not so great that it detracts from the impact of the whole. I am delighted that Denisart gave me the opportunity to see a full recording of the show. Snippets of the play can be viewed at the website for Le Voyage Extraordinaire <www.lesvoyagesextraordinaires.ch/ robots/index_angl.php>. Nothing, however, can really substitute for the energy of a live performance. The robots and the story are simple yet sophisticated. Both convey elements of technology, its use, its representation, and its reception, all of which are pertinent. Perhaps more importantly, this play marks the level of cooperation and collaboration between two seemingly disparate fields. The project helped generate innovations in robotic programming, outlining new problems and their solutions. It also serves as a real world laboratory allowing a more general population to voice opinions on robotic design. Frankly, this play needs to be seen in the United States. I
can’t afford a ticket to Switzerland, even if the play does have real robots.

How do I get the bad taste out of my brain?

Where to even begin? I was really excited to see Science Fiction and the Theatre by Ralph Willingham, and then I read it. To say that I was mildly appalled and disappointed would be a severe understatement. Granted, this book was published in 1994 at the height of big musicals, and more tellingly, on the tail of theatre's attempts in the late 80s to be seen as a scholarly discipline on equal if apologetic footing with literature. Unfortunately, even taking these two elements into account, it perpetuates a series of misunderstandings about both the theatre (though it was in fact written by a theatre scholar) and science fiction.

By now I hope I’ve managed to start erasing the academic myths regarding sf and performance on both sides of the disciplinary fence. With little existing material on the subject however, it’s disturbing to have this book as the near sole representative of scholarship and criticism on the subject. Specifically, it furthers stereotypes concerning both performance and science fiction as larger wholes. To thoroughly cover all that is wrong in this text would be impossible and possibly result in an aneurysm for me.

But a few of the more outrageous and absurd assertions need to be shared:

• “In this chapter, which outlines the history of science fiction drama, we shall see that two principal factors have kept the genre in the background of dramaturgy: the theatre’s persistently frivolous treatment of science, and the inability of science fiction theatre to develop the cult following that has been the lifeblood of science fiction prose.” (10)
• “ Despite these signs that science fiction is welcome on today’s stage, the most reliable gauge of what has actually been accomplished is still the original scripted play” (33). 
• “In summary, most of the existing science fiction scripts seem superficial in comparison with the achievements of the genre’s narratives. They lack the imaginative depth, complexity of plot, variety of characters and action and, most important, the universally humanistic concerns that characterize great science fiction” (34). 
• "Science fiction is a particularly ripe source of comic material. Because the genre’s literature has so few basic premises, they have become worn and clichéd with excessive use.. . .A comic approach can eliminate the staging problems that tend to crop up in science fiction” (102).

No. Just no.

And yes, he sort of just ignores production design as a contributing element of science fiction for any performance. This pretty much eliminates re-examinations of canonical material with an sf lens.

Willingham has also failed to see a paradox in his argument. He states that sf theatre isn't commercially successful, thus the lack of it. The dangerous implication being that theatre is only successful if it’s commercially viable. In terms of sf  in the past (and people should feel free to correct me here) the more commercially successful the more denigrated it is because that means it's "popular." This has changed over the years and is not necessarily true of the sf tradition in the US and certainly doesn't reflect it at all in places other than the US. Willingham omits even an acknowledgement that the tradition of sf is vastly different overseas--one not grounded in the much denigrated pulp tradition--nor does he acknowledge a very different model for performance in Europe.

These are just a few of the more egregious statements made. If anything, this book manages to insult both sf and theatre alike. This tells me that more material needs to be placed out there for practitioners and scholars alike.

I need a tequila shot for my intellect just to get that taste out of there.

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.”

And so it begins . . .

After the explosion of interest in the Facebook group, Forum for Science Fiction in the Theatre, what might possibly come next? Well, a blog seems natural. I envisioned the forum as a place for artists to learn about projects and performances as well as problem solve and idea swap. All very suitable for Facebook, but I think there's a larger element to the conversation as does my colleague and collaborator, dramaturg Carrie J. Cole. A blog on performing science fiction can become a place to dissect and examine these projects and performances and perhaps come to understand how and why sf works (or doesn't) when applied to performance.

This space is certainly a place to discuss theatre, sure, but we also want to explore how sf is performed in a broader sense--not just the confines of the stage. If you have an idea, pitch it to us. We intend to include guest bloggers so that the artists and critics can engage in something they rarely have--a conversation (Blasphemy!). Ideally, a guest blogger would take the opportunity to examine a topic. Because performance is envisioned as a broad spectrum of possible activities here, the blog should include literary authors (Gasp!) and real scientists (For the love of God, hide the children!).

Because, let's face it, performance is messy and complicated and contradictory and ephemeral. We also love it, because . . . well, it's pretty obvious we're not getting rich. So roll up your sleeves and and plunge your hands into some performative goo. If you don't get dirty, you haven't done anything worth looking at.