With the performance a recent memory, I feel like it’s right that I reflect critically on the experience I’ve had as part of the writing of the show.

Up until now, I’ve had a pretty solidified idea of how traditional theatrical roles work. Playwrights write, directors direct and actors do what they’re told to and do their best not to get under anyone’s feet. Or maybe that’s just me. In any case, Changing Faces… was a very unusual show and thus warranted a very unusual approach to breaking the show in its early stages.

I would compare it most closely to the way that television is produced, especially on American networks: you have a showrunner, who determines the tone, style and overall direction of the show, then a room full of writers who work on the individual episodes from a treatment or show bible; drafts may be a group effort or the work of a sole contributor, but the showrunner will often have the responsibility of script editing or tweaking certain scenes or dialogue.

For my own part, whilst I took the role of writer, researcher and ultimately performer for at least two of the scenes I worked on, the principal scene I had the most input on was the scene I’ve referred to as “The Assassination Exhibition”. Inspired by the style of J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition – which focuses on a man recreating his own mental breakdown through a series of experimental pieces of performance art, seeded with blasphemous imagery of JFK, Marilyn Monroe, auto-crash victims and Ronald Reagan – I visualized the narrator, who I called the Assassination Enthusiast, as a lone figure who is morbidly obsessed with assassinations in a way that is a by-product of the information age.

This scene was originally intended to segue into the Columbine scene, although in the finished piece the order was reversed; however, the juxtaposition of the two is noteworthy. The protagonists of the Columbine sequence, portraying Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, are similarly disconnected and dehumanized figures, but unlike them the Enthusiast is an abstract concept rather than a fictionalized representation of a real-world individual. One of the difficulties in making the scene work was making the Enthusiast not simply namedrop or spout statistics at the audience, but give the impression of an obsessive fan whose choice and intensity of devotion borders on fetishism, who sees himself as, in R. Lee Ermey’s words, “a minister of death praying for war”. In a line that got cut, he refers to a quote by Hassan I-Sabbah, the founder of the historical League of Assassins: “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” I still see these elements as significant to the character: the root word of “fan” is fanatic, after all.

This is where Orson Welles’ “cuckoo clock” speech in The Third Man came in.

Welles made the addition because he felt that Harry Lime, up until this point, had been a character known mostly by his reputation and that the scene required a moment that encapsulated his world-view; he felt that Lime needed to be a character that had depths beyond merely being a thug. All the best anti-heroes – Travis Bickle, Alex DeLarge, Patrick Bateman – have been sociopaths and unreliable narrators, but they have also had a certain amount of intelligence and charisma. There is something seductive about the villain in all cultures that makes us both despise and root for them.

In the short film Five Minutes Mr Welles, Vincent D’onofrio reimagines the moments leading up to this moment in cinema; in addition to directing and co-writing, D’onofrio reprises his role of Welles from Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, which also features an apocryphal meeting between Edward D. Wood Jr. (Johnny Depp), arguably the worst director in Hollywood history at that time, and his idol Welles, the man who directed Citizen Kane at the age of 26.

D’onofrio’s Welles describes Lime as an “evil pope”, not an atheist but someone antithetical to everything that the protagonist holds sacred, someone who acknowledges the evil that he is doing, and yet still does not care. That disconnect was what I needed – the Enthusiast is not a robot or subject to uncontrollable urges; he genuinely believes that his role in life, or at least the one he aspires to, is that of the bringer of death. His final line, as well as being a mangling of a William Burroughs quote – “when you cut into the present, the future leaks out” – which I managed to drill into the group, reflects his belief that the assassin has an integral part to play in creating history: “When you fire burning hot metal into the present, the future splinters into fragments.”

The overall process of writing for the show, as well as performing roles in it, has been a lot more improvisational than I originally thought it would be. Because many of the scenes and characters I wrote or worked on – the Assassin, Winston Churchill, the opening Moon landing sequence – are based more around conventional monologues than typical multimedia works, I found that getting the right balance of dialogue, action and visual dynamic took a lot of getting used to. If I had to summarise my methodology and goals for the piece as a whole, my best analogy would be the following quote from the film Performance:-

“The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.”

Whether or not we achieved madness, I sincerely believe our work reflects the quixotic nature of reality and the media, a glimpse behind the curtain into the realms of what could have been.

Appendices

Due to the sheer volume of material that I produced for this blog but have had to trim, I’ve compiled significant posts deleted for length on my Tumblr.

1. http://raggedyadams.tumblr.com/post/119694999916/burroughs-variation-1-on-futurism
2. http://raggedyadams.tumblr.com/post/119695883896/burroughs-variations-a-cut-up-cacophany-of
3. http://raggedyadams.tumblr.com/post/119694788686/jg-ballards-the-assassination-of-john-fitzgerald
4. http://raggedyadams.tumblr.com/post/119693797876/american-gods-belief-source
5. http://raggedyadams.tumblr.com/post/119693676026/notes-on-a-conspiracy-unused-scene-draft
6. http://raggedyadams.tumblr.com/post/119693574736/cutting-into-the-present-rough-unused-scene
7. http://raggedyadams.tumblr.com/post/119693036286/adams-dream

Works cited

– Alamut (Bartol novel) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 2015. Alamut (Bartol novel) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. [ONLINE] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alamut_(Bartol_novel)#Cultural_impact. [Accessed 25 May 2015].
– Ballard, J.G. (2002) The Atrocity Exhibition (Flamingo Modern Classics). Annotated Edition Edition. Flamingo.
– Cut-Ups William S. Burroughs – YouTube. 2015. Cut-Ups William S. Burroughs – YouTube. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc2yU7OUMcI. [Accessed 25 May 2015].
– Ed Wood Jr Meets Orson Welles – YouTube. 2015. Ed Wood Jr Meets Orson Welles – YouTube. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H9A9zTorrw. [Accessed 25 May 2015].
– Five Minutes Mr. Welles – Vincent D’Onofrio – YouTube. 2015. Five Minutes Mr. Welles – Vincent D’Onofrio – YouTube. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-4PPr3r_r0. [Accessed 25 May 2015].
– full metal jacket intro monologue – YouTube. 2015. full metal jacket intro monologue – YouTube. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71Lft6EQh-Y. [Accessed 25 May 2015].
– Performance (1970) – Quotes – TCM.com. 2015. Performance (1970) – Quotes – TCM.com. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/86516/Performance/quotes.html. [Accessed 25 May 2015].