THE GENERAL BEAUTY OF THE CHILDREN, BY CRAIG JOSEPH
If you’ve been following Seat of the Pants for a while, you know that one thing we do to get our cast and production team on the same page is to collaboratively create a conceptual statement to guide our interpretation of a script. Though it’s written by the director, it comes out of conversations we have as a team around the table and discoveries that we make on our feet in the rehearsal room. Here’s a teaser of where we’ve landed for our production of THE CHILDREN, opening on October 24th!
What gives your play beauty?
ITS MYSTERY & SUSPENSE: The first 15 pages of this play left me with a sense of dread and unease; on the surface, it’s a normal conversation between old friends, but there was so much brewing under the pleasantries, so much left unspoken, that I felt consistently tense. That didn’t dissipate through the play and that’s what makes it so compelling. Audience members may know that something’s “off,” but they’re never quite sure what it is, who to believe, or what to think. And the play hints at answers, but never fully resolves all our questions, preferring to let multiple possibilities stand and let us navigate our way through them.
THE WAY IT NORMALIZES AGING: Despite Hazel’s insistence on staving off old age, the play itself insists on the dignity, vitality, usefulness, and significance of aging, mature adults (and specifically women). In fact, the more “childish” and “adolescent” they act, the more the play critiques them. We’re invited to see older characters as protagonists, heroes, and agents in a story that isn’t just about getting old.
What kind of play is it?
ECOLOGICAL THRILLER: A fourth character in the play is the dying world right outside the door of the cottage and a primary question is “will these characters be able to do anything to save it?” This not-so-distant, very plausible future ideally creates a sense of urgency, stakes, and maybe even culpability in audience members who recognize a context that asks all of us “what are you gonna do about it?”
DOMESTIC DRAMEDY: And yet, the characters in the play keep falling back into the intrigues of a love triangle, a marriage characterized by banter-and-picker, and a female camaraderie that is equal parts admiration and envy. Full of dry humor, heartbreak, and random kindness or cruelty, THIS play derails the characters from the more pressing story they need to be a part of.
What is it about?
It’s about three former nuclear scientists / friends who must navigate their shared personal histories to determine what – if anything – they ought to do to remedy a nuclear catastrophe that has happened at the plant where they once worked together.
It’s about the legacies that we leave. As we age and move toward death, do we look back at our lives and feel proud of what we’ve left in our wake, do we feel the need to go back and make things right, or do we just make peace with things as they are?
It’s about the tension between the things we want and desire personally and what we owe to the common good - be it our family, our community, or the world. What’s our responsibility to ourselves and others?
It’s about how – when it’s time for us to “grow up” and behave like adults – we’re all capable of regressing to the comforts, simplicities, tantrums, and self-centeredness of childhood.
Why is it necessary?
If you ask a random person what’s wrong with human beings or society today, you’ll get a variety of answers. “We’re too polarized.” “People are apathetic.” “We live in a culture of distraction that allows people to zone out or bury their heads in the sand instead of facing the problems of the world head on.” “Folks are so self-centered.” “There’s a lot of performative outrage, but when it comes to actually making change, people prefer comfort to sacrifice.”
You could utter any of these statements about the characters in this play, so the hope is that – as audiences watch the story unfold in an extreme situation – they’ll see these foibles at a safe distance and then begin to reflect upon where they evidence these same behaviors in their own lives when faced with crises. In that respect, perhaps this is a bit of a morality play.
What universal truths does it demonstrate?
The sins of the parents are visited out on the children.
Two’s company; three’s a crowd.
”To grow old is to move from passion to compassion.”
”Will we be scared to death or scared to life?”
The difficulty of letting go / the difficulty of knowing what’s right and then doing it
”Do not go gentle into that good night; rage against the dying of the light.”
What excites you as an artist and moves you as a person about the play?
1) I enjoyed this play so much when I read it and have been thinking about it for years. Several local companies have talked about producing it, but never have, so I’m thrilled we’re doing it.
2) This is a play that allows for multiple possibilities and realities and I love trying them all out with actors and discovering how many of them can live simultaneously onstage to enrich the audience experience, without being confusing.
3) Between my own arrival at half-century and my parents’ rapid again, I’m thinking a lot about questions of legacy - and contemplating how I want to “do” this next season of my life.
4) I love how this play feels like two different plays or genres that are battling with one another for control of the stage - and how that replicates the way that we do life. Our “better angels” care about serious things, discover significance, make the world better; our finite selves very easily get pulled into silly drama. Love the balance of comic and serious material in the story.
Governing Images/Metaphors
Robin riding his tractor too close to the edge of the crumbling cliff - replicates how some of the conversations feel in this play (careening close to either the truth or to calamity, but then suddenly pulling back); replicates the behavior of some of the characters, flirting with disaster - all of this has both a sense of danger and a sense of adventure - it’s fun & terrifying
Visual images of juxtaposed contemporary and antique next to each other - for example, a refrigerator and a cooler, an old-time radio and the more modern one - we should see the world before the disaster and after the disaster all in one space
The ringing bell under water - I think this is a symbol of life going on and persisting despite age, disaster, moral failures, defeat, and obsolescence.