The New York Review of Science Fiction
ISSUE #293 January 2013 Volume 25, No. 5 ISSN #1052-9438
ESSAYS
Mac Rogers, Jen Gunnels, and August Schulenberg: Three Pieces on Science Fiction Theatre
David G. Hartwell: 200 Significant Science Fiction Books by Women, 1984–2001
Henry Wessells: At the Sign of the Fanlight Window; or, H.P. Lovecraft, Bibliopole
REVIEWS
American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, edited by Gary K. Wolfe, reviewed by Arthur D. Hlavaty
Hearts Like Fists, written by Adam Szymkowicz, directed by Kelly O’Donnell, reviewed by Jen Gunnels
H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, read by William Roberts, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s Guest and Other Stories, read by Rupert Degas, reviewed by Peter Rawlik
Dan Abnett’s Pariah, reviewed by Alec Austin
Patricia McKillip’s Wonders of the Invisible World, reviewed by Joe Milicia
Robert Silverberg and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro’s When the Blue Shift Comes, reviewed by D. Douglas Fratz
PLUS
Plus: A birthday reverie on Chip Delany; the secret masters of everything; a Call for Papers; Photos: Holiday Parties, New York, December 2012/January 2013; screed; and an editorial.
Samuel R. Delany, Contributing Editor; Kris Dikeman and Avram Grumer, Managing Editors.
Alex Donald, Webmaster; David G. Hartwell, Reviews and Features Editor; Kevin J. Maroney, Publisher.
Staff: Ann Crimmins, Jen Gunnels, Lisa Padol, Eugene Reynolds, and Anne Zanoni.
Special thanks to Arthur D. Hlavaty, M’jit Raindancer-Stahl, and Eugene Surowitz.
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The New York Review of Science Fiction Readings
at the SoHo Gallery for Digital Art 18 Sullivan Street, just south of Houston
February 5th, 2013
Sarah McCarry
Paul Witcover
March 5th, 2013
The Great and Powerful ... (it's a surprise)
April 2nd
Our annual remembrance of a great writer (to be determined)
May 7th, 2013
Ron Hogan, Guest Curator
Watch this space for more details, or check out
Admission is a $5 donation. Doors open at 6:30, readings begin promptly at 7! All readings subject to change without notice.
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Three Pieces on Science Fiction Theatre
[We are delighted to present these three essays from the Performing Science Fiction web site, which is administered by NYRSF’s drama editor, Jen Gunnels.—the eds.]
Mac Rogers
“Actually, we’ve already made first contact. . . .”
Not that theater doesn't deal in big decisions, but . . . an alien invasion? Really?
—Elisabeth Vincentelli, “Science fiction, triple feature,” The New York Post, June 28, 2012
Here’s my thing: It’s not that this sentence popped up in a review of Sovereign, the third installment of my science fiction trilogy for the stage . . . it’s that it took until the third part for a single reviewer to express incredulity at the idea of a play about an extraterrestrial takeover of the Earth. All three parts of The Honeycomb Trilogy were reviewed by several critics apiece when my company presented them over the first 7 months of this 2012. We had almost 40 reviews
Let’s talk about audience: I’ll admit that a few folks expressed some gentle amusement when I told them what the Trilogy was about, but most didn’t. When I talked to people after performances or in the days after they saw one of the shows, the pattern was the same: whether they liked or disliked it, nobody for a second acted as if theater should not include stories about giant insects taking over the world. Everyone just assessed it as a play like any other. My previous foray into sf playwriting, Universal Robots, had the legitimacy imprimatur of starting its life as an adaptation of Karel Čapek’s classic R.U.R. But The Honeycomb Trilogy had no respectable uncle to lean on: it was a full-on, bug-eyed aliens epic for live theater, and no one had any problem taking it seriously.
You can see this blossoming of stage sf happening all over. In my particular neck of the New York City indie theater woods, it was the Vampire Cowboys Theater Company that broke this ground. Their shows, nearly all written by Qui Nguyen and directed by Robert Ross Parker, contained zombies, ninjas, aliens, superheroes, sentient robots, and inter-dimensional beings, all brought to the stage with an intricate craftsmanship and care that made them indelible. Vampire Cowboy shows are often comic, but I wouldn’t call them parody; Nguyen and Parker always create a consistent internal logic to their universes and demand that we care about their characters and take them for who they are, living or undead.
There’s a sense among many of my colleagues that Vampire Cowboys emboldened us. We wanted to tell these sorts of stories but had some sense that we weren’t “allowed.” The idea of great theater to which a lot of American students are exposed early on is actually kind of a narrow vein: your basic O’Neill, Miller, Williams, Mamet. I got Churchill and Kushner and Jean Claude van Itallie later, but only after the big respectable pillars had made their initial mark on me. There was Shakespeare in there too, of course, but I remember being taught to think of Hamlet’s father and the ghost of Banquo and Ariel as metaphors or projections or whatever, not as actual frikkin’ supernatural beings I was supposed to invest in. The message that comes across is that great plays are basically realistic, sad stories of thwarted dreamers/Everymen feebly struggling against the economic and societal structures holding them down—and no robots allowed. I don’t deny the greatness of these playwrights, but they only represent a sliver of what’s possible in theater. Among a lot of folks I know, Qui and Parker’s success said to us, “Go ahead, throw a robot in there. No one’s gonna laugh at you. Not if you do it right.”
The point I’m making is this: we don’t need to be embarrassed anymore. We don’t need to be sheepish about this. A huge number of the theater artists and theater critics working now grew up in a culture permeated by genre and speculative fiction stories, and many of us understand that the repurposing of popular genre motifs for the stage doesn’t have to mean Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Nobody pointed and laughed at August Schulenberg’s superb AI-enhanced humans thriller DEINDE; NYTheatre called it “one of the smartest, sharpest, and most important new plays of the theatre season.” Nobody mocked Edward Einhorn’s stage adaptation of Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven; Theater Mania praised its “admirable simplicity” and “enchantment.” Indeed, the Mad One’s brilliant Samuel and Alasdair: A History of the Robot War became a full-on (and much-deserved) critical darling ear
lier this year despite one of the pulpiest titles imaginable.
And I’m only citing reviews really as a snapshot of a more widely emerging consensus throughout the theater community: science fiction theater isn’t fighting to be born, to be recognized. We’re already here. We’re already doing this. This is already a tradition. Sure, it’ll be a while before a lot of bigger theaters will be programming science fiction, but believe me, they’re going to catch up with us. I think they have to if they want to tell stories about who we are now. As sometime sf novelist Karen Joy Fowler told io9.com a of couple years ago, “I truly believe that science fiction is realism now and literary realism is a nostalgic literature about a place where we once lived, but no longer do”
Our seat is very much at the table. I think we’ve reached a stage where we can set aside fighting for legitimacy and simply do our work: Tell our stories, hone our techniques, and share our information. We’ll all get to see each other at work; we’ll know how many more of us are out there, bringing these stories to life on stage all over the world. We’re here now. We’re “allowed.”
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Mac Rogers lives in Brooklyn and is the author ofThe Honeycomb Trilogy.
How Do I Get the Bad Taste out of my Brain?
Jen Gunnels
A Rant in Response to Ralph Willingham’s Science Fiction and the Theatre
Where to even begin? I was really excited to see Science Fiction and the Theatre by Ralph Willingham, and then I read it. To say that I was mildly appalled and disappointed would be a severe understatement. Granted, this book was published in 1994 at the height of big musicals and, more tellingly, on the tail of theatre’s attempts in the late ’80s to be seen as a scholarly discipline on equal, if apologetic, footing with literature. Unfortunately, even taking these elements into account, it perpetuates a series of misunderstandings about both the theatre (though it was in fact written by a theatre scholar) and science fiction.
The roots of this “anti-dramatic” or “anti-theatrical” bias trace back to the turn of the twentieth century and the separation of textual study from the practice of performance. We have, among others, Plato and T. S. Eliot to thank for the whole mess. Now, they are not wholly responsible. We can also thank Puritan distrust of theatre and the nineteenth century’s melodramatic stage offerings that stressed emotional over intellectual content in performances for a lack of intellectual respect. It’s all tangled and messy and complicated—as anything dealing with performance is—and laid out all quite nicely in The Antitheatrical Prejudice (1985) by Jonas Barish. In a nutshell, theatre, dealing in gesture and representation, is just not to be trusted since there’s a lack of the concrete and a reliance on interpretation (gasp!) which is organic and variable. It’s just not rigorous and has too many plastic factors involved to be a truly legitimate intellectual study. I mean, those artists over there are mucking around with the text, for Godot’s sake.
There have been inroads changing this perception over the decades, particularly in performance studies and most recently with the influx of research in cognitive studies and neuroscience. People like Tobin Nelhaus and Bruce McConachie are reexamining elements of performance and theatre history with these tools and creating new methodologies.
That isn’t to say that Willingham hasn’t made an honest and good attempt at a theatrical history of sf on the stage. His overviews of the various decades are relatively accurate given the monumental task of hunting down obscure and often unperformed (thus undocumented) material. He has undertaken a much needed and underappreciated task as a historian. I have a deep appreciation for the bibliography of plays that he complied. I sincerely doubt that I would have the patience to do the job.
With little existing material on the subject, however, it’s disturbing to have this book as the near sole representative of scholarship and criticism on the subject. Specifically, it furthers stereotypes concerning both performance and science fiction as larger wholes. To thoroughly cover all that is wrong in this text would be impossible and possibly result in an aneurysm for me.
But a few of the more outrageous and absurd assertions need to be shared:
In this chapter, which outlines the history of science fiction drama, we shall see that two principal factors have kept the genre in the background of dramaturgy: the theatre’s persistently frivolous treatment of science, and the inability of science fiction theatre to develop the cult following that has been the lifeblood of science fiction prose. (10)
Frankly, this statement insults theatre practitioners and sf readers and scholars alike. Intimating that theatre constantly treats science as something silly contains the implication that we theatre folk just can’t get our pretty little heads around the concepts. Material that is specifically “science” doesn’t always make good theatre, but the scientists behind it do. Breaking the Code (1986) certainly predates this text’s publication and is anything but a frivolous treatment of Alan Turing’s involvement in breaking the German Enigma code and the resultant foundation of computational science. Later plays such as Copenhagen (2000), about physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, continue that tradition. Nor do I think that sf prose’s readership constitutes a “cult,” at least not since the 1970s at the latest and certainly not today.
Despite these signs that science fiction is welcome on today’s stage, the most reliable gauge of what has actually been accomplished is still the original scripted play. (33)
Again, the literary bias puts its obnoxious snout in the air. First of all, plays achieve full realization in performance. The all important “holy” script is but one small and highly malleable element of the production. Second, it’s extremely difficult to get a play published even by a publishing house specializing in drama such as Samuel French. I’ve looked into trying to create an anthology of new sf plays that have been produced in the last four years, and I cannot find a publisher interested in taking it. There’s a bias in that it’s not a traditional piece of literature, nor will it likely become a money maker even as a textbook for scholars and students in the field.
A more reliable gauge for anything theatrical is production. Did it get produced? What was the critical reception? What was the audience reception? Let’s finally dispense with the ridiculous notion that the written text is everything. Theatre is not literature, nor should it be. It is an entirely different medium, predating the novel by several millennia, and as playwright Mac Rogers has said, “It’s more than earned your respect.”
In summary, most of the existing science fiction scripts seem superficial in comparison with the achievements of the genre’s narratives. They lack the imaginative depth, complexity of plot, variety of characters and action and, most important, the universally humanistic concerns that characterize great science fiction. (34)
Wait. What? Seriously? Isn’t the usual argument that sf is crap in these particulars as far as literature is concerned? Untrue, yes, but hasn’t that been the accusation of critics pointing at genre? There is great sf out there; I’ve read it and read of it. By the same token, there’s great sf theatre out there as well as an astonishing amount of utter drek. Given the offerings at the time of this book’s publication, there was scant sf theatre, but Willingham’s examples of Čapek’s R.U.R. (1922), Shaw’s Back to Methuselah (1922), Overmeyer’s On the Verge (1987), and Shepherd’s Tooth of the Crime (1972) belie his own argument. In any given medium or genre, there are a handful of truly remarkable works.
Science fiction is a particularly ripe source of comic material. Because the genre’s literature has so few basic premises, they have become worn and clichéd with excessive use. . . . A comic approach can eliminate the staging problems that tend to crop up in science fiction. (102)
WTF? No. Just no. Believe it or not, he also suggests that the solution to sf theatre is also to make it a musical. (At that point, I actually threw the book on the floor and stomped on it, screaming obscen
ities.) The issues are not that sf looks “fake” on stage or that it’s cliché. There have been amazing productions of lyric sensitivity, such as those plays by Mac Rogers and August Schulenburg. It’s a problem with both narrative and dramaturgy and always has been. Embracing the comedy can create wonderful, amusing productions. However, once again there is a basic contradiction. If the genre is so much more deep and profound than can be expressed by silly, shallow drama, then how is that possible if the genre is so “worn and clichéd”?
As a result of focusing solely on the “sacred” script, Willingham ignores innovative production design as a contributing element of science fiction for any performance. This pretty much eliminates reexaminations of canonical material with an sf lens. Redd Tale Theatre Company’s use of sf narrative frames for a reexamination of classic dramatic works, such as their riveting Macbeth influenced by Doctor Who or their brilliant melding of Medea and The X Files, would not qualify as sf theatre. According to any postmodern examination of performance, they do and rightly so.
Willingham has also failed to see a paradox in his argument. He states that sf theatre isn’t commercially successful, thus the lack of it. The dangerous implication is that theatre is only successful if it’s commercially viable. Here is where I usually make an argument against Broadway. Commercial Broadway theatre and its relatives in regional theatres in the U.S. represent a very, very, small percentage of professional theatre. Some of the best material is found off-off Broadway in the tiny experimental theatres in New York City. But even this isn’t fair since I would never consider New York to be the center of innovative theatrical productions, as this would ignore smaller theatres in this country and ignore Europe altogether. I’ll return to that in a moment.
NYRSF January 2013 Issue 293 Page 1