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].

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B48LAjXTFSy9Unh1NGRJbThrcFU/view?usp=sharing

“Stop me if you’ve heard this one. So an arch-duke, two presidents and a member of the Beatles walk into a bar…”

“This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.
Without me, my rifle is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will…
My rifle and I know that what counts in war is not the rounds we fire, the noise of our burst, nor the smoke we make. We know that it is the hits that count. We will hit…
My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its sights and its barrel. I will keep my rifle clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become part of each other. We will…
Before God, I swear this creed. My rifle and I are the defenders of my country. We are the masters of our enemy. We are the saviors of my life.
So be it, until victory is America’s and there is no enemy, but peace!”

“That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody’s whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that being alive is a crock of shit. That reminds of a joke: Lincoln was shot by a two-bit actor exercising his right to bear arms.”

“Some families, especially in politics, are soaked in blood. Two brothers, both ambitious and populist, both murdered by radicalised mutants – one a Soviet defector, the other an Arab extremist. Same as it ever was.”

“People always ask if I’ve ever seen any of my victims. Look down there. Would you really feel any pity at all if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped moving, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax. It’s the only way to save money nowadays.”

“Do any of you people know who Charles Whitman was? None of you knows? Charles Whitman killed twelve people from a twenty-eight-storey observation tower at the University of Texas, from distances up to four hundred yards. Anybody know who Lee Harvey Oswald was? Ah, I see some of you know who he was. And do you know how far away he was? Two hundred and fifty feet! He was two hundred and fifty feet away and shooting at a moving target. Oswald got off three rounds with an Italian Carcano bolt action rifle in only six seconds, and scored two hits, including a head shot! Do any of you people know where these individuals learned how to shoot? The United States Marine Corps. These individuals showed what one motivated marine and his rifle can do!”

In a note he left behind after he was shot dead, Charles Whitman asked for an autopsy to be performed on him to determine if there was a physiological influence on his behaviour. They found a tumour the size of a pecan in his brain. Opinions still vary as to whether or not it was directly responsible for his mental health issues.

“Ask not what you can do for your country… ask what your country is doing to you.”

“I heard a new CIA joke recently: how can you be sure the CIA wasn’t involved in the Kennedy assassinations?”
“I don’t know – how can we be sure?”
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”

The archduke is a tricky one. He was killed by a 19 year old student radical who was armed by a secret society made up of Serbian military. He was tried in a kangaroo court, left to rot in prison and eventually he was re-buried as a hero for aiding the Slavs to throw off the shackles of Habsburg empire. Even assassins can be venerated as martyrs and saints. Even arms dealers have a patron saint in Catholicism.”

“Nobody really thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, so why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat. I talk about the suckers and the meat-puppets. It’s the same thing. They have their five year plans, and so have I. But I still do believe in God, old man. I believe in God and Mercy and all that. But the dead are happier dead. They don’t miss much here, poor devils. What do you believe in?”

“Oh, don’t be so gloomy. After all, it’s not that awful. Remember what the fellow said. In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

“Nothing is true, everything is permitted. Hassan I-Sabbah said that. Who says video games never taught anybody anything useful? The Romans knew it too, when they butchered Caesar, and the CIA and KGB, and Gavrilo Princip, and Whitman and Oswald and Booth and Sirhan Sirhan and yes, even that fat sonofabitch Chapman with his copy of Catcher in the Rye in one hand and a 38 special in the other. So did Valerie Sonaris and Sara Jane Moore and Lynette Fromme and John Hinkley – even those who try and fail understand that once you shoot burning hot metal into the present, the future splinters into fragments.”

[tape-rewinding, press start]

Greatest Futurist. He told us… He said meeting of Microsoft kids. Meeting of Microsoft kids. Like, this high-school ― Charles Lee Lesher, Shadow on the to clearly see where you are, and moment, then realize: “I can’t. Then realize: “I can’t.” Kat shakes see the future yet. See the future yet. We don’t hear government… no cancer… hover-boards. Government… no cancer… hover-boards.” “Go further. What’s Imagination? “Go further. What’s Imagination?” “Sounds like a Japanese game show. A Japanese game show.” have only risk management. Have only risk management. The spinning of on what we already know, and we because our present is too volatile. Present is too volatile. We Strange “I foresee death by culture shock. Death by culture shock.” long and there will be many setbacks. Will be many setbacks. “To be a futurist, in pursuit of the good future after that? Good future after that?” “Spaceships. Party Imagination runs out. Party Imagination runs out. But it makes sense, you’re a science fiction writer. A science fiction writer.” Okay: “World on Mars. Okay: “World on Mars.” “Further.” “Star Trek. ” “Further.” “Star Trek. Transporters. You nobody listens to the future. Listens to the future. The future is all around us, but we don’t he is. We don’t he is. That’s why he’s the world’s trip thing, but it was very exclusive. It was very exclusive. Moon “”Have you ever played Maximum Happy the given moment’s scenarios. The given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.” ― The good future. ― The good future. No nuclear bombs. Pretend ― Woody Allen “We have no future her head. No future her head. “It’s really hard. And that’s, Dr Gustav Y. That’s, Dr Gustav Y. Svante. Nobody knows who Kat straightens her shoulders. Kat straightens her shoulders. “Okay, we’re going century. “Okay, we’re going century.”” ― Robin Sloan, Mr. ― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour can go anywhere. 24-Hour can go anywhere.” “Further.” “I pause a of failure has never been this high. Never been this high.” face continually turned upstream, waiting for the right? Waiting for the right? We probably just imagine things based tell it. Things based tell it.”” ― Bruce Sterling, Love is that? Sterling, Love is that? What could possibly come after that? Possibly come after that? We met the world’s greatest Futurist there. World’s greatest Futurist there. Bookstore “Once, I went to this little run out of analogies in the thirty-first that the future was already here, but it or see it, so we can’t then wonder how to make that better. To make that better.” ― Warren Ellis “The road ahead is to play. Ahead is to play. To start, imagine the future. Start, imagine the future. Future to come. To improve reality is improving reality, is not to have your what, a thousand years? What, a thousand years? What comes after Success is not assured… but the price. Assured… but the price.

[tape-stop]