Voices of Reason
The one and only character, a Playwright, engages the question: is he free to write his own play from his own thoughts, or is it already written piecemeal somewhere in the experiences, language, and habits stored in his memory? Is he a writer or simply a rememberer? This play is a comedic attempt to engage the notion of a mind and soul and demonstrate how obsessions of religion and self-continuity can both enhance and damage the fiction of self-ish-ness.
Through on-stage relationships and interaction with the unsuspecting audience, dramatic characters inside the Playwright’s mind come alive with voices all their own. The Playwright’s goal, to create the ‘one’ idea that will explain everything, turns into a mental rodeo that herds diverse ideas under a, or the, unifying theme. Stemming from various centuries and cultures, voices manipulate, spot, confuse and engage the writer and audience, producing the notion that a person has more than one identity and histories are plentiful rather than singular. Two antagonistic eternal voices that have pervaded western history eventually come to manipulate the author’s keyboard. Through ancient Greece, Medieval Europe, and modern day suburbia, these slapstick religious personalities commandeer the play to save themselves and religious structures threatened by irreverence, logic, satire, and apathy.
Slowly, the Playwright produces independent thoughts of love, family, and arbitrary actions that begin to release him from historical religious ties as he creates new potentials. A cataclysmic reaction from On High battles in favor a singular, repetitive existence. Approaching the deadline set by his editor, the author collides with his own cynical views of religion and has to make a choice: can a person outgrow the past and write his or her own work within a religiously-tainted history? Can the divine he, she or it survive as a voice among many? Or, is the notion of God with man forever? Can man think about his or her habits, the self and the world in ways other than they always have? Can the self and history of mankind, ultimately be, otherwise?