some thoughts about season eight

A quick note: the following are some thoughts cobbled together for a media interview. I can't imagine that all (or even most) will make it into print.

YELLOW KINGS AND DARKER THINGS

...is, fundamentally, a double-bill of two shows; one produced by Tim Uren (The Repairer of Reputations), and one produced by myself (Quantum Suicide and Other Songs of Death).

QUANTUM SUICIDE AND OTHER SONGS OF DEATH

...is composed, primarily, from short stories composed by me from the second season of the Rockstar Storytellers (2008-2009). So the writing/directing challenge has been, for me, primarily one of taking a body of material developed for short solo performances and reconstructing them into a full-length show for multiple voices.

Upon reflection, the best description I can come up with for the show is to describe it as a kind of concept album: a collection of individual pieces that combine to elaborate upon a larger idea. The unifying theme is that of time and death; perhaps more succinctly, that of mortality. So, the first challenge was one of selection (which stories unite thematically); the second was one of arrangement. The stories have been broken down into smaller parts and re-arranged -- dropping threads to be picked up later in the performance, in an increasingly elaborate pattern of recurring storylines -- as well as having been re-written to sustain recurring images, phrases, and ideas. Perhaps particularly apropos, as one of the key themes of the show is the fragmentation of memory.

Beyond that, the challenge has been taking stories developed for a single voice and adapting them for two. In some cases that's quite literal -- simply breaking down conversations between multiple characters to create a kind of theatrical dialogue -- whereas in others, it's more expressionistic -- phrases begun by one performer are carried by another, and tossed back-and-forth in a more stream-of-consciousness style.

I've been fortunate in being able to collaborate with Elizabeth Byrd. She's the only other member of Maximum Verbosity -- other than myself -- to have been a member from its inception: she composed the music for our very first show, as well as having served as editor for every MV script. (In fact, we initially met as part of a storytelling troupe in the Minnesota Renaissance Festival well over a decade ago, so this serves as a kind of return to our earliest collaborations.) She's a classically-trained vocalist -- one who's capable of doing everything from opera to pop to jazz -- and while she doesn't *sing* in this show persay, she was absolutely my first choice as someone capable of handling some extremely heightened and stylized vocalizations.

REPAIRER OF REPUTATIONS

I can't speak nearly as eloquently on this subject -- my knowledge is limited to what I've read of the story. the script, and those few conversations that Tim and I have had about the material.

"The Repairer of Reputations" is a short story, composed in 1895, about the far-flung dystopian future of 1925. The author, Robert W. Chambers, was one whose work later inspire H.P. Lovecraft and other authors of pulp horror.

Tim was one of those authors who first persuaded me that genre fiction could work onstage -- particularly in light of the fact that the spoken-word community at the time tended to be dominated by comedy and autobiography. It was particularly striking to me to note, perusing the script, that Tim had jury-rigged many of the same solutions to adapting stories as I had -- the rapid shift between dialogue and prose, for one.

One of the major assertions within adaptation of the past several decades has been an acknowledgement of the fact that information can't be conveyed from one genre to another; critical story points have to be changed, in order to work either theatrically or cinematically. I don't necessarily disagree with this fundamental point; but I can't ignore the fact that the vast bulk of those changes seem to me to be little more than rationalization. In short, one of the reasons I love Tim is his willingness to simply ignore that convention; the assurance that authors before made their assertions for a reason, and that they're worth defending. And that those assertions maintain a surprising impact regardless.