Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
Marblehead, Massachusetts: Underwords Press, 2014; $24.95 tpb; 470 pages
Geek Theater cleverly inverts the campus put-down of drama students to christen a theatrical movement. According to editors Jen Gunnels (on staff here at the New York Review of Science Fiction) and Erin Underwood, science fiction and fantasy have proliferated onstage over the last decade. Their goal in compiling Geek Theater, it seems, is to bring together a diaspora of theater artists and sf/f writers into a loose community.
The freshness of the contents supports the editors’ assertion that geek theater is a contemporary phenomenon. If anything, it suggests they’re underplaying the trend’s vitality, as the fifteen scripts in Geek Theater are of remarkably recent vintage. A majority were given full productions, staged readings, or festival premieres in 2013 or 2014; the oldest (John Kessel’s Faustfeathers) is an outlier from 1994.
In this respect, Geek Theater mounts a wholly convincing argument as the collection is remarkable for its variety as well as quality. The first work, Jeanne Beckwith’s Mission to Mars, is a scrap of hard sf: ten real-time minutes in a capsule orbiting the Red Planet. By contrast, the full-length Thunderbird at the Next World Theatre by Andrea Hairston elliptically recounts a rescue of mythic avatars from a post-apocalyptic cityscape. Professional playwrights share the anthology with hard-working sf/f authors; female writers are well represented, and so are female characters (racial diversity less so, although it’s present).
The only significant shortcoming—ruefully admitted in the anthology’s introduction—is that Geek Theater includes only plays that have been produced in America. That’s too bad, but the cultural focus does advance the book’s thesis of a geek-theater movement. A crosscheck of the notes before each play suggests that the movement HQ is the Flux Theater Ensemble in New York City. Meanwhile, across the country, Los Angeles has also staged several pieces of geek theater and hosts Sci-Fest, a one-act sf play festival.
The anthology might be epitomized by Crystal Skillman’s Geek! although that play itself deals only indirectly with sf/f. Instead, Skillman stages this mock epic at a comic book convention and depicts with fond generosity the obsessive nature of fandom. With cosplay as a major theme, the play shows how sf/f goes hand-in-hand with theatricality. And though Geek! is a comedic lark with plenty of opportunities for special effects (including a giant, squeaking muppet), like all of the scripts in Geek Theater, it delves into emotional themes of loss and remembering.
Geek Theater finds internal coherence in those twin themes, which run through most of the plays included. Many of the scripts deal with new technology, often related to consciousness. Characters upload into cloned bodies (Chie-Hoon Lee’s For the Living) or back their memory up on hard drives (The Promise of Space by James Patrick Kelly), or they enhance their intellects with computers (deinde by August Schulenburg). The exemplary work in this regard is Cecil Castellucci’s The Long and the Short of Long Term Memory, which has a neurologist working on forgetting, to eliminate his grief, while his corporate funders want photographic memory in pill form.
Meanwhile, in one work of fantasy, the undead view the living with calm, philosophical detachment, to the chagrin of the living (James Morrow’s The Zombies of Montrose); in another, the dead propose a work program in the tone of a racketeer offering protection (Consider the Services of the Departed, by F. Brett Cox); a third conceives of memory as curse and forgetting as a mercy (Rapunzel’s Haircut, also by Castellucci). Throughout the anthology, memory and forgetting return like a fugue with death and loss providing counterpoint.
Above all, however, Geek Theater showcases high-quality scriptwriting. The jewel of the anthology is Universal Robots by Mac Rogers, and it’s simply brilliant. It’s a parallel play set in a parallel universe where a robot army defends Czechoslovakia from Nazi annexation. Rogers has adapted the seminal geek-theater work, R.U.R., a Czech expressionist drama that famously coined the term “robot.” He follows the 1921 original by Karel Čapek, in which artificial workers revolt against humanity. But the plot here springs ingeniously from Čapek’s own social and political life in Prague, especially his friendship with the new country’s first president. It addresses humanitarian militarism, genocide, and terrorism; wrestles with government funding for science; offers a fascinating take on genderqueer identity; and presents class struggle with a slight feminist slant. Rogers, in a stunning act of dramaturgy, fuses these themes into a unified and engrossing drama. Readers of Geek Theater will also note the play’s meta-debate on how to address real-world issues in a fantastical tradition.
Although Universal Robots stands above the rest, it’s not a freak or aberration. Adam Szymkowicz’s Hearts Like Fists offers a delightful screwball romance between a vigilante and a mad scientist with a dark undercurrent about love and sanity. In The Clockwork Comrade, Carlos Hernandez relates a Brechtian parable about time, work, and Cuba with a sentient clock for a protagonist. James Patrick Kelly’s The Promise of Space considers how space exploration might affect a marriage, a moving tale that would’ve fit well in a 1950s sf digest. The anthology’s last entry, Dog Act by Liz Duffy Adams, is a dizzying performance of linguistic complexity set in a post-apocalyptic landscape.
For fans of sf/f, Geek Theater might introduce a new medium for consideration and experimentation. Play scripts engage a different part of the imagination than prose. They require the reader to visualize a stage, characters, and movement that words describe. Casting a favorite performer in one role or another can be helpful; so is picturing the stage as a blank box. Reading scripts exercises the mind’s eye, while the quality and generic interest of Geek Theater may make it especially inviting.
Geek Theater also offers great opportunities for theater geeks. Here are a set of 15 scripts of varying lengths and a diversity of tones with great roles and plenty of occasions for creative effects. There is a sense of potential in these scripts, as well as the energy of new ideas and innovative approaches. If it is a theatrical movement, geek theater is headed in an exciting direction. Geek Theater is a collection of smart plays, almost uniformly well-written and clever, funny when they aim to be, socially conscious, and aesthetically daring.
Aaron Grunfeld lives in Brooklyn.
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