A Case for Science Fiction...

Or, a thought on why we might consider how extremity of situation/imagination can bring us closer to the human element we are craving. From Yann Martel's Beatrice & Virgil.

..if I tell a story about a dentist from Bavaria or Saskatchewan, I have to deal with readers' notions about dentists and people from Bavaria or Saskatchewan, those preconceptions and stereotypes that lock people and stories into small boxes. But if it's a rhinoceros from Bavaria or Saskatchewan who is the dentist, then it's an entirely different matter. The reader pays closer attention, because he or she has no preconceptions about rhinoceros dentists -- from Bavaria or anywhere else. The reader's disbelief begins to lift, like a stage curtain. Now the story can unfold more easily. There's nothing like the unimaginable to make people believe.

I think we can consider the possibility of one or two big, imaginary ideas and how we can establish ideas as given truths quickly and undoubtedly in the early moments of the play. We have such a great opportunity with theater: there is a (hopefully) captive audience who are ready to believe what we tell/show them. This is what makes me hate the theater and love it at the same time. None of this is to say that the belief we hope the audience has is based on a replication of a variety of reality, rather that the world or scenario we present is unlikely enough to lodge them firmly in their imaginations from where they will, as Martel writes, pay attention to what is happening. Here we can think of the audiences' attention/imagination as a veil or window through which they watch Uncanny Valley; they enter the space, see the scenario exists outside the world/physics they know and expect, engage their imaginations in an unexpected way, and are then surprised (perhaps doubly so) to find a deep emotional engagement and attachment to what is happening. I think this is why we cry when Bambi's mother is shot.

I think the much discussed idea of how much science fiction to use or not use can be considered a detail oriented and aesthetic question. Are there beeps and protocols for two scenarios or 12? My question, and my hope, is we find a way to use fiction, may of a scientific bent, to create a bigger space for the imagination. This fiction may exist in script/text, situation, movement, relationship and is a huge possibility. I think we've just started to touch on it. Excited to dig in for more and to consider and create fictions we have yet to conceive.