25 Random Things about A New Theory of Vision (Sanctuary: Manifesto)
- What is the sound of memory? How does imagination smell? What flashing color best represents ideas as they form? What can grow in the fertile loam of the mind? Can the manifestations of the senses themselves be defined by sensory input? Does a picture summarize vision?
- It is not possible to have fun in the theatre. Seats are too uncomfortable. Acting too mannered. Sets are too shoddy; lights too bright. Darkness too pervasive; humor too droll; tragedy too lachrymose. It is not possible to have fun in the theatre. But it's possible to have a blast.
- First Confession: The germ of the idea for the play A NEW THEORY OF VISION originated in a story I wrote at 19, while living in Exeter, England. There really was a girl named Jane, however she didn't kill jump off a bridge. Instead, she was sort of indifferent as people sometimes are, and probably completely without real volition happened to break my heart. SO at the time, I believe I just wanted her to jump off a bridge, and had her do it in the story. Amazing how vindictive we writers can be. You can sort of definitively punish someone who upsets you, and if you're lucky that fictionalized punishment is long-lived. The story was published a short time after, in a forgotten literary journal.
- A drama should last two or fewer minutes; comedy three. Anything longer and we run the risk of wearing out thin patiences, and we can't afford to do that to our subscriber base. O wait... we don't have a subscriber base; o that's good news. (When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose - ah, how does it feel?).
- The next great threshold of research in performance: To technologize the audience; to find a way to automate them, or to downsize. And finally, to ultimately provoke: perhaps there is a way to fire them; because if you need an audience, you're somehow weak. Or perhaps, to engage them so they are no longer audience, but in some way participants. So theatre regains its original nature, a participatory celebration, where the audience can contribute - if not performance, perhaps tribute: an eyelash, a layer of skin cells, a skein of nerves.
- If you want to have fun in the theatre, put on your goggles and shut everyone out. Theatre is isolation in a space of mutual communion; theatre takes place only in the mind.
- Tom Stoppard said writing a play was the best way to argue with himself. That's fine long as you don't lose those arguments. The trick is to bury the argument into something that saves itself for later. You don't want the experience to argue with itself. The experience must seem to agree with itself. Then, after the audience leaves the theatre, the argument can form in their minds and they can draw rhetorical blood over dessert and coffee.
- Some rather ego-maniacal among us think of humans as like unto Gods on this Earth. The present crises notwithstanding. But just remember: It’s a God eat God world out there.
- Behold a new theory of vision to refresh our aching eyes. Behold the story of how our minds become. Behold the pang of something you lost a long time ago and can't live without. Behold the open blue sky beckoning you to realize what a human mind can do. Behold the thick glass wall that smashes down and tells you what a human mind can't do.
- Using a low-voltage electric current, run through every seat in the theater, and near undetectable to the human nervous system, we devised a peer network that enables us to tap into and manifest the dreams of every spectator. Plus version 2.0 of this network will install local software in the brain of every spectator to allow them to exist simultaneously in a world of their own mutual devising. It's the ultimate in audience passiveness/participation/pleasuring. It could lead to new consumer products and tie-ins as well. Imagine an ad superimposed on the inside of your eyelids as you sleep.
- Talk, talk, It's only talk. Arguments, Agreements, Advice, Answers, Art, Announcements. When will they start doing theatre in this place?
- Second Confession: There really is a bridge upon which there's this house in Exeter, and the house was indeed rotting away and abandoned. However (more confession) it's not, as the play states, Polsloe Bridge Station but is instead some nondescript trestle stuck somewhere just outside town. And of course it's possible, since that was 26 years ago, that the nondescript trestle has somehow disappeared, or that the house has finally been razed. But I doubt it. These things have a tendency to stick around, don't they?
- Lose the masks, Noxzema the makeup. Wipe that smile from your face, wipe those features too; wear a white featureless mask and no hair; then allow yourself to be stamped with an identity someone else wanted to put there. When you remove a mask, make sure there is no makeup underneath. No warpaint.
- Third confession: Already about 8 weeks before opening I started working on a string quartet (well Richard Schechner said theatre was becoming the string quartet, so now the string quartet is becoming theatre). The quartet would incorporate two movements roughly similar to the structure of the play, whose acts already had the subtitles I - Duets and Trios II - Grosse Fuga. So the quartet would be a two-movement work that featured thematic play between dual instruments in the first movement and a great fugue of all elements building in canons, inversions, rondos until all voices came together as one voice.
- What creature might be crawling from the slime? What sometime-notion might be rising from the dead?
- Berkeley posited an existence where illusions were fed to willing minds; where minds met each other on a bare Adobe Flash stage. And we moved in deterministic circles according to our ActionScript. We bitblt ourselves in space, our surfaces replacing themselves over our backgrounds, maintaining our Z-Order so we don't become obfuscated by the world and its things.
- We seem to have friends we only party with, friends to whom we bare ourselves, friends with whom we have only a few tenuous threads in common, friends that we only know through work or while searching for work. Are we coming to a place where we can no longer have a single definition for the word "friend?" Wait, is this really a new thing?
- The new hallucinogens are called theatre. The new antidepressants are called theatre. The new soporifics are called theatre. The new antibiotics are not called anti-theatre.
- Fourth confession: Age of six, Grandpa Giudice took me to a Broadway show, for which he was conducting the orchestra. I met Robert Goulet backstage. That was the trauma that planted the sand in my oyster. No, Robert Goulet was a perfect gentleman.
- A New Theory of Vision is dedicated to 1234567890 Day. At 6:31 pm EST on Friday Feb 13, the Unix time will be 1234567890 - exactly that many seconds since the beginning of Unix time (Jan 1 1970). Another example of consummate perfection - time becomes not the tick that holds the reference points for memory, not the inexorable march toward terminus, not the scythe, but a simple point progression between items in a set made finite by its need to be defined by the conscious mind. There is no time if there is nobody to measure its passing.
- Old is the new new. New is the old old. We are constantly renewed as each new technology washes over us. We adapt, accept, incorporate the new into our beings, until there is nothing left of the original us, until our core existence is diluted by each new model that impedes on our spiritual brand. And yet somehow that new self, whose cells have been completely replaced, still holds the same form as we originally had.
- Fifth confession: I never know what I'm really doing when writing a new play. Which is weird because I spend so much time reading plays and studying their structure. I like to think that the process of writing a play has become one of unconscious competence, where it's just the play's dialog, structure and sensorium are somehow flowing out of me and at some level what is being done is clear. But it's never like that. It's always, despite whatever process I think I'm using, a start-and-stop that consciously makes me feel incompetent. As a result, the act of composing a play is mostly an exercise in insecurity. "Is it bad? Did that work for you? Really???"
- Watching the actors in A NEW THEORY OF VISION as they are absorbed, sucked into the digital projections, not merely surrounded by technical objects but actually obscured by them, one realizes that we now live in a time where many of us exist to each other only via technology. On the new "social networks" we reconnect with hundreds, even thousands of people who inhabited past parts of our lives, and also ghostly remnants of others whom we have never met but perhaps have something in common. We develop an online self - and some of us develop many of these - that serves as the butler to our new telepresence. It's only the keylight - that remnant of an older generation of technology - that restores the actors' faces and bodies to us.
- There's some talk about "levels" in our work on this piece. The piece specifies three "modes" of presentation. Each mode represents a means we have of mapping terms of our increasingly expanding sense of reality. There is the mode of what we call reality or sensorium. That is the most direct and manipulable aspect. We can pick things up, break them, burn them, make them, by manipulating them directly. They have smell (fresh cut wood), taste (a savory sauce), etc. The second level is the mind; where we have mapped these real things into categories, unities and from these ideas. This is the realm where we can start to be deceived, but that realm is still personal - nobody is truly in anyone's mind yet. Then there is the third space - this shared mental space where all our thoughts are beginning to drift around, the world of the online. This world we are still defining.
- Although the play doesn't explicitly talk about work itself, the context of work is all-important. 200 years ago you farmed or made clothing or hewed wooden tables, holding the tools and working the materials yourself. 100 years ago we compartmentalized our activities into fragments, and did these tasks in increasingly automated and centralized ways. Now many of us work with tools that have no tactile reality - only pictures as tools - and we manipulate these using proxy tools that are nearly transparent to us (the keyboard, the mouse, the touch-screen). About the only work that hasn't changed fundamentally in nature is the telling of stories, and the stage. We still stand up on a platform, and we tell stories to each other, and despite the increasing technological nature of that stage, fundamentally we can still consider ourselves telling stories, around a campfire, person to person. And you have to love the basic, primitive nature of that.
