Voice compares A New Theory of Vision to Tom Stoppard & William Gibson...

In an interesting turn of events, Garret Eisler from the Voice compares tags A New Theory of Vision as "Stoppardian Banter meets William Gibson mindfuck." It's a great tag and rather flattering... of course not one we can post on our site as is (hence we use most-discreet asterisks). Stoppard is a heroic playwright and Gibson a great genius as well. Wow.

So come see this play! It's like spending an afternoon at the West End Theatre in Cyberspace...

the critics... new philosophy... hope...

We got widely varied critical response to A NEW THEORY OF VISION; the first critic gave us an unabashed rave and said, there's all this philosophical background in the play, perhaps a bit too much, but since it does reflect on the action, you have to sort of let it wash over you and then it all makes sense, even if you're not a philogeek. Another, our only pan, said, there's all this character and plot stuff but not enough of the actual philosophy these guys are talking about. Finally, there was a balanced review that complained s/he wanted to hear the philosophy too. So that's two critics who complained they wanted to have the philosophical content of Lee's books spelt out.

Well, I'm not adding these explicitly to the play. It feels talky enough in the parts where it talks about the de minima aspects of Berkeley's philosophy that directly impact the play (a total of 2 minutes of stage time, max, and even though these support the action moment to moment, some might feel even these to be part of an extra credit assignment).

So perhaps we need to prepare a companion to the play that explicates the exact philosophies about which Lee wrote in his two books? Now, it must be said the philosophy is actually at the heart of the play's action. Thus if you observe the play's action, you can deduce all the philosophy you need, right there in front of you. This is perhaps an arrogant statement. Because if the smart people who write our theatre criticism can't pick this stuff up from the action of the play, how can we simpler minded people?

(There's an implicit criticism of criticism building here, I can feel it... but I won't spoil the ending of this essay by stating it there, so let's briefly state it here. Critics often take upon themselves the "duty" to "represent" the audience, but they often use a simplified model of who the audience is, and judge a work by how "clear" it is to that simple-minded artificial audience model. But it's self-deception. Audiences are far smarter than critics think they are, and sometimes, far smarter than the critics themselves.)

So. A warning. If you proceed there will be spoilers. And thanks for sticking with this, thus far.

Lee's first book, A New Theory of Vision was essentially a simplification and popularization of the works of Berkeley and the idealists, updated for a more telepresent world such as existed in the late 1980s, when his book would have come out. The parts of the materialist/idealist philosophy that would have made the most stir in the popular mind - the book was, after all, a massive best-seller - would have been those that talked about the increasing virtualization of who we were. Extended we were, as McLuhan would have said, by our creations - the telephone, television, and the PC network - we learned to project and virtualize our identities to match their representations over the various wire protocols of these extensions.

So we would have first developed a "voice or sound-heavy" set of identity contexts to serve as representations of ourselves over the telephone (which is a two-way medium - one-to-one) and for radio (which is a broadcast medium - one to many); a visual-and-sound set of identity contexts to represent us over the airwaves. These would eventually evolve to no longer being literal attempts to represent us. They would begin that way. But identity as communicated and compressed over these media would become first shadow representations of our selves, then gradually the representations would diverge as we accommodated ourselves to the medium, until eventually we had created at least one, perhaps many separate representations of ourselves to adapt to each medium.

Shadow identities, each containing part of our own experience and the contexts made real and appropriate for each medium and tuned to the audience each medium brought. So to each person with whom you conversed on the telephone, you created a different identity. It began as a set of sounds that resembled your voice, but gradually it evolved to become a new voice. Likewise, on TV or the radio, you created new visual and audio aspects of yourself.

Note in the play how the characters identities are somewhat malleable. Not in a MAN = MAN way (cf. Brecht) but rather in a postmodern way - their decisions and actions and the "selves" we see of them are adapted to the medium in which they present these selves. These represent the world as Lee saw it in his best-selling book.

Lee's new book, also probably destined to be a best-seller, The Book of Reality, takes this much further, in fact all the way into the world Erich inhabits. On the path to writing the book based on Erich's online world, Lee is in fact creating signifiers that led him inexorably to the realizations he has at the end of the original act-break, where his mind begins to loop in on itself - when both he and we - SEE and HEAR his self-perceived crime, that he didn't prevent a suicidal person, whom he loved very much, from committing suicide. The realization he makes - and which is wrong - is that the self is actually an illusion. That there is no contiguous set of ideas upon which any person is based. That we are chaotic stews of ideas constantly attempting to summarize and interpret and re-spew endless chaotic casseroles of matter and energy that surround us, and of which we are also constructed.

This can lead to a depairing, nihilist worldview which in fact represents exactly Jane's. We would then all want to kill ourselves, since what's the point of existence if you're a temporary process that observes temporary processes, and even your observations themselves are captured in a boiling cauldron of sense information which in itself is destined to change and be corrupted by chaos?

But the other assertion The Book of Reality makes is there are constancies. That the only constants are the links between us. Two hands clasping each other. Words of comfort, and care. We are the forces, amidst the stew and spew, that wrenches the world back from chaos. We create the illusion of order, and it is in fact the illusion of order that is the fact of order. In a world where all is illusion, illusion is therefore fact. That it all is some sort of miracle worth experiencing is the main of it.

We're a *PICK* in BACK STAGE!

"thought-provoking...  

"a stunning Matt Steiner...

"smart video set by production designer George Allison...

"Director Cat Parker culls vibrant characterizations...

"skillfull character development by Ferrante...

"unexpectedly effective... !

Have a look at the article:

http://www.backstage.com/bso/news_reviews/nyc/review_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003953831

Don't miss this show... if you sit on the fence too long you'll miss out on tickets. We cannot extend this run.

So... PLEASE buy tickets from.

http://www.sanctuarytheatre.org

See you at the show... 

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25 Random Things about A New Theory of Vision

 25 Random Things about A New Theory of Vision (Sanctuary: Manifesto)

1. 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? 
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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?).
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. Talk, talk, It's only talk. Arguments, Agreements, Advice, Answers, Art, Announcements. When will they start doing theatre in this place?
12. 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? 
13. 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.
14. 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. 
15. What creature might be crawling from the slime? What sometime-notion might be rising from the dead?
16. 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.
17. 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?
18. 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.
19. 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.
20. 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.
21. 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. 
22. 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???"
23. 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. 
24. 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.
25. 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.

In the Brooklyn Rail: Susan Bernfield Interviews Bob Jude Ferrante

From: the Brooklyn Rail, Critical Perspectives on Art & Culture

On the occasion of the Sanctuary: Playwrights Theatre's production of his new play A New Theory of Vision, playwright Bob Jude Ferrante virtually connects with Susan Bernfield (fellow playwright, and Artistic Director of New Georges theater company), over our shifting sense of reality, its representation on stage, and the dual role of being a playwright involved in producing one's own work.

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2009/03/theater/bob-jude-ferrantes-new-theory-of-vision

Website secret...

Psst... here's a secret few people will notice. 

The postcard on the site for A New Theory of Vision  is peppered with hyperlinks. each going someplace with a skeleton key to the play. 

Screens, screens, screeeeeeens

The Production Designer for A New Theory of Vision is named George Allison. He took a new play that asked the impossible:

• Change location in a split second
  
• People change into different people; hair changes color, face changes, clothing changes instantly in front of the audience
• People have to disappear onstage
• Three worlds must be depicted and clearly delineated: The world of reality (Cara's world); the online world (Erich's world); the world inside the mind (Lee's world). 
• Other characters have to be able to enter these worlds and it needs to be clear when they do.

 And came up with a unique, never-tried-before-I-think-at-least concept: that we would use screens onstage and digital projection to handle everything. This in itself is not revolutionary; in fact projection is becoming commonplace downtown as it's a "cheap" way to do a set. However, what makes George's approach so unique, really, is that:

• The projections are malleable in their visual language. For example, there's a scene online where a man is unmasked and revealed to be a puppet controlled by a character. When he is unmasked, the script just called for a makeup convention that was previously used for that character to be used to indicate he was a puppet. But George's concept was that, when he is unmasked, the screens flash front & profile shots (like mugshots) of the puppeteer. Friggin brilliant. Says it all.
• Likewise, there's a scene where a character tells a lengthy story and we're not supposed to hear all the details. The designer is created a video sequence where images from the story flash by quickly;  as if the information is being "rapidly downloaded." 
• Last, not only are the scenic elements designed to "take" projection - the actors are as well. Because the actors' clothing - and even masks - are designed to allow projection right onto the performer as a canvas. We can "rebrand" a performer with a new identity in a flash. 
• Etc.

We bet you can't wait to see it? 

Good, that's what we were hoping you'd say!