Subject: (urth) This Week in Google Alerts: plays

From: Gwern Branwen <gwern at gwern.net>
Date: Mon, 05 May 2014 16:57:10 +0000

"Stage Review: 'Chronotony'; Connor Kizer’s play imagines all time as
a single moment"

> “I love thinking about time in a trippy way and what it means to be outside of time,” says Connor Kizer by way of introducing the ideas percolating through his new play, Chronotony, which debuts this week. Ask him what he means by “trippy” and you get an impromptu rundown of familiar late-20th-century writings that explore thinking about the experience of reality in different ways. The Wham City member, former Santa Dad, and writer/playwright starts with Madeleine L?Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, that great American young-adult gateway drug to nonlinear thinking. He says Douglas Adams? Mostly Harmless, the fifth book of The Hitchhicker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, encouraged him to consider how parallel universes might work. There was Robert Anton Wilson’s time-jumping and consciousness-expanding The Illuminatus! and Cosmic Trigger trilogies, and Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, which offered a primer on quantum mechanics? many-worlds ideas.
>
> ...That little addition has turned a short play about all of time at once into a curious experiential installation. Chronotony will run as a loop for three hours on both nights of its staging; audience members can come in and check it out anytime between 8 and 11 p.m., and stay as long as it takes to grasp what’s going on.
>
> This looping has brought wrinkles to the play that Kizer is enjoying. He acknowledges that his script is a tad confusing and that going through it multiple times adds clarity. He mentions that he’s a fan of American sci-fi author Gene Wolfe, whose The Book of the New Sun can be appreciated anew each time it’s read. “You learn so much stuff [about its world] from reading it, so you immediately go back and read it again,” Kizer says. “You start over and it’s a completely different book. We’re trying to do that with this play.”
>
> It’s an oddly enticing gambit, treating theater like a video/film in a gallery, with the added variable that the performers themselves aren’t simply acting, but like the Acme Corporation actors who performed Beckett’s Play for 12- and 24-hour stretches last year they’re involved in an endurance piece. Deviations from the script aren’t planned, but as anybody who has ever done piecework labor before knows, it’s nearly impossible to do the exact same thing over and over and over again. ...

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net