-5

THE CEILING



The original idea of THE ROOF I had was this: a group of people who don't fit in with their peers, outcasts, castoffs, start meeting together on a roof of a parking garage to have discussions. At some point someone muses that wouldn't it be nice if the rest of the world just went away while they were on the roof. It's just a passing thought of misanthropy but then eventually something happens over the course of the play; looking back at the idea now, the way to make it work would be to make the characters science nerds who have possible world ending technology. Remember the fears around the time that the Large Hadron Collider was first being turned on? They muse about turning on this new tech and it killing everyone else on earth. They are motivated by anger and fear but essentially harmless; all bark and no bite when it comes down to it. Over time, it just becomes a joke they make on the roof--telling each other that they're the only ones left, imagining but not really wishing for the worst possible outcome of this invention. Eventually, the technology does get activated and I saw the ending of the play as similar to the endings of Inception and eXistenZ where the characters wonder if they are still just playing a game of make believe or if they've really just ended other life on earth. The last line could be, Is this real?

I'm not sure how conscious I was of it at the time but thinking back on this idea, I'm inclined to say I was inspired to come up with this idea by an Andrew Hudgins poem about the racism in his family. In "Magic Button," he writes about his uncle drawing a circle in the dirt with a stick and asking Andrew if he would push this button. What does the hypothetical button do? It makes black people disappear. While the characters of THE ROOF aren't racially motivated in their hope to make all people disappear, they are equally ripe for ridicule. The ending of the play was like one of those moral Twilight Zone episodes, where the characters actually end up in horrible realizations of their selfish dreams only to find themselves damned by the very thing they so recently wished for. Alongside black people, Hudgins's uncle imagines disappearing black stereotypes of "loud music, dope, and welfare." The Twilight Zone style ending of this poem could be that the uncle does press the button only to find America itself to disappear, having been built from black labor. I think the characters changed because a) I find it hard to write characters without making them more relatable over time and because b) I don't really feel like mocking scientists is the smartest thing to do in this time. The closest I'll come is Bill and Sarah laughing about Richard Dawkins's atheism.

When I got around to actually writing THE ROOF, we were in the wake of a pandemic where there are real fears about the number of people dying. It seemed to make the most sense to just set the play during an unclear time of general panic--a war, a pandemic, battles with biological weapons, something along these lines. Having considered this and come up with the idea of the call, it would of course be at one of the times that the call goes off that the characters could wonder if everyone else was dead. I see 5 as more laying the groundwork for some future scene that considers this more poetically. Depending on which choice you made in 5, you may not have even read the characters talking about how they could be the only ones left. That said, I do imagine the logical thing to do in reading the play here would be to read all options presented to you. 🤷 I'll point here to Steven Soderbergh's Mosaic as a version of this--it's an HBO television show that also exists as a phone app where you can watch clips or episodes in an interactive order. When you finish certain episodes in the app you have a choice of where you go next and this creates occasion branching narratives. In THE ROOF, 5 is the first true branching narrative--it's another reason to take a break from writing. I need to figure out how the choice in 5 colors the rest of the play, or if it does at all.

What was a weird experience was writing this scene in the play and shortly thereafter having symptoms of what I believe is coronavirus. Yup, I haven't gotten tested yet, but I think I got the dreaded disease. That wasn't the weird part, though it has been a frightening thing to think about; the weird part was trying to communicate with a friend that I recently interacted with. We largely followed social distancing guidelines and wore masks but I still wanted to let him know that I feel like I have the virus and could have given it to him. I called, I texted, and I got no answer. It wasn't so much that this was a surprise in itself, because he'll go through periods of time where he isn't very communicative. The weird thing was the thought I had: he already has the disease and it's killed him. It's not a rational thought and nothing I really spent much time considering, but it made me think that life was imitating art in a fashion. Here it was me and not my characters imagining my role in some form of deadly experiment. I was happy to finally reach him and hear he has no symptoms but I am now left wondering, not if I have triggered a world ending event with some piece of scientific techno-brilliance, but rather if I have inadvertently passed on this crazy disease. Perhaps the weirdest part of the coronavirus is the way that the lack of symptoms at any given time is not particularly useful information to have about someone. The fact that it impacts people so differently from one victim to the next adds to the reality that symptoms are not immediately and usually come only a few days after exposure. Hell, it's possible I don't even have it! I'm looking into testing but I'm not sure I can get a test any day soon which is frustrating.

Branching narratives can go one of two ways: either you do a butterfly effect type of story where the choice that is made to split the narrative is the only change between the two options or you do the probably easier thing that I've done here. You just write the story going two different ways and act like these are inspired by the choice being made. I knew I wanted the characters to do the opposite of what the reader does in this scene. So if you react, they ignore; if you ignore, they react. It's funny, though, if you react in the scene it requires a lot for you to do when you aren't actually an actor in the play. You don't have a script; I made a whole card to get around that! While writing this scene, I did the thing I did in "Waiting for Gadot;" I explained away not knowing how to write a play and the general bad writing by saying I was providing technological ways to bring new ideas to theatre. It's so dumb, I know! That said (you can laugh), I did imagine something like what happens in Donnie Darko. Jake Gyllenhaal sees a path form in front of him in the movie, which is a way of expressing movement in time and shows where he will be going in the future. This could be used in THE ROOF, if the technology were readily available to give audience members what amounts to a Google Glass type of VR glasses that could actually show this path ahead of them. The inner thoughts of the audience character here could be a part of the viewing experience if, for example, they were played on a recording in a earpiece given to the audience (or maybe even played on a device that people could bluetooth pair with their AirPods?). Like I said, it's all really dumb, but I think it's conceivable.

The less conceivable thing is the corpse with the moving mouth. How the hell are you going to make that? I don't know. I can go on about some form of camera or device charting mouth movements of Bruce on the roof and relaying these down to the dead dummy on the floor and some type of animatronics there to mirror his mouth movements as he speaks, but I'm not trying to even imply that I know what I'm talking about. I was actually inspired to create this scene by a recurring visual in the second episode of The Haunting of Hill House where something dead seems briefly alive due to mouth motions of a certain type. (I don't want to give it away completely!) I was also inspired to go this route more generally by William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition which I am planning to reread in prep for another writing project. (It feels so weird to think that I'm actually writing again and considering different story ideas and everything. Actually doing art.) If I remember correctly, Gibson has a lot of augmented reality in Pattern Recognition that, while essentially set in the early 21st century, was still years away from us now. Maybe I misread the prose or simply don't know what we are capable of creating, but hey, I took this idea that it's okay to write as if the tech is a bit ahead of where it is now. There's nothing wrong with your realism bordering on science fiction. (Then again, if Gibson was saying that, he was doing so as one of the most influential writers of science fiction in the last forty years. The guy coined the term, "hyperspace," what have you done lately?) So if my play isn't exactly performable as is, I'm okay with that. Like I've said before, I think it would be very cool to see a real theatre person come up with ways to stage it and direct it. That person isn't me.

If you don't know what Sarah is talking about when she mentions "rape deniers," she is quoting an unfortunate representative in Congress. It's a bit removed from the initial discussion the senator was having about abortion, but I think the way the remark stayed in the culture, the way it will be remembered, is more similar to how I present it here. That's at least the way it's stuck with me and to be honest when someone says something as horrible and ridiculous as this I don't mind if the quote gets misrepresented a bit.

Andrew shows up again. I thought this was a funny touch. It's like if you think about all the particulars while watching The Sixth Sense from the beginning, you'll possibly figure out the twist but why would you? Andrew never left the roof and all these scenes have been basically continuous for a while so he's still up there. I know I had forgotten about him 😅. Okay, I think that's about it for now. I'll talk to you Wednesday but I'm not sure what about yet. You'll just have to come by to see!