March 2023
March 2023
Audio Drama scripts, Old play trailer, New play draft, New play poster
March! Progress on my historical script.
• Historical Audio Drama (Audio Drama Mini-Series, Writing)
• The Birthing Pit (Play, Hollywood Fringe Festival Trailer)
• The Sound of Many Oceans (Play, New draft + poster)
Historical Audio Drama (Audio Drama Mini-Series, Writing)
I’m about three scenes away from finishing the first full script of this series, started last September. Currently there are 58k words and five one-hour-ish episodes. May go to six, or may truncate a particular storyline, undecided. Beyond tightening and research confirmations, I still need to do a couple passes, such as one for 1940’s period slang, and one for the character voices, in which I‘ll remove each of the four main characters’ scenes from their separate episodes and collate them into detached documents to better track individual story arcs.
This project is a big deal for me— since the first novel I ever attempted, which I started writing back in High School, was also about the Atom Bomb. However, the focus in this series is entirely different, and not about the program itself, unlike that unfinished book.
I was naive, I guess, to think I could get the first episode of this audio drama underway before the release of the Nolan film this July. I’m thinking we’re bound to have certain scenes in common, though I’m also certain our cast of figures is not the same (for instance, Oppenheimer only appears at the end of my script). No doubt our perspectives on the history are also different, as my story is concerned with the ways we talk about the events leading to the end of the war.
You might say it engages with mediated history versus lived history. Apart from insidious historical variations done to serve ideological agendas— just the act of telling itself alters the history, regardless of intention. Like one of my college history professors said in her lecture on war movies, adding rousing (or somber, for that matter) orchestral music to scenes of dying soldiers irrevocably alters the history, no matter how accurate the events detailed.
One such aspect of this— the discrepancies in the historical record. Objective facts which different sources record in direct conflict to one another. Example:— one high-profile source claims Emperor Hirohito recorded only one take of what is known as The Jewel Voice Broadcast, the vinyl recording in which he accepted the Joint Declaration of the Allies. This source goes so far as to say, “only one take was needed.” However, other sources report they were in fact two takes, as the first was simply too quiet, and it was the second take, in fact, which was broadcast the next day, the first kept as backup. In addition, every account I’ve read about the safe-keeping of the Emperor’s phonograph message tracks the journey of two records from the Imperial Palace to the radio station, not one.
There are other head-scratchers, including if a particular person was in Japan or the United States on a given date. One person says this, another says that, and a third points out the first person mistook Person A for Person B. Yet most of the conflicting accounts I’ve been reading exist independent of one another, no dialogue between them, no acknowledgement of the discrepancies. So, in my script, I’m trying to give these oppositions co-existence, a dramatic, fluid history— in tension.
And to think, these events were only eighty years ago— with plenty of eye-witnesses.
My impetus for that first novel, and ultimately this mini-series, was learning about the Atom Bomb through Brian Moriarty’s Infocom text game Trinity.
The Digital Antiquarian, a site about video game history, provides an excellent analysis of the game within its historical context. By the way, I still have the “feelies,” as Infocom dubbed the extra bits included in the game-box. This includes a comic book, a cardboard sundial, and a map of the ‘Trinity ranch.’ Although the ranch is not a location in my script, here are a few images of that map.
I wrote a fan letter to Moriarty last year, and he was kind enough to respond.
Zerstöre nicht, was Du nicht erschaffen kannst.
Do not destroy what you cannot create.
— Leo Szilard, Hungarian-born U.S. physicist
The Birthing Pit (Play, Hollywood Fringe Festival Trailer)
In 2017 I wrote and directed my first play, The Birthing Pit, a Gothic Romance at the end of the American Revolutionary War.
I am grateful for this collaboration with actors Jensen Chambers and Maia Kazin. We made the above trailer after some early reviews were posted.
For this upload, I recently appended photos taken during our tech rehearsal, if you’d like to see those. Beth Scorzato was our stage manager.
This hour-long version of the play had five performances in the 2017 Hollywood Fringe Festival— so, half the duration, half the characters, and one of the songs— "Lowlands Away”— which you can hear a bit of in the trailer, as sung by Maia.
Read the full version of the play via New Play Exchange.
Hollywood Fringe Festival Synopsis:
They followed the blood. And the blood followed the gold. Fleeing a mysterious pestilence at the end of the American Revolutionary War, a Rhode Island couple journeys home from the Caribbean. But when tragedy strikes at sea, possibly from supernatural causes, can their love endure beyond the grave?
Starring • Jensen Chambers and Maia Kazin
Costumer • Elena Flores
Stage Manager • Beth Scorzato
Written and Directed by William J. Meyer
A Note On "Lowlands Away" //
The origins of the traditional song "Lowlands Away" are cloaked in mystery. Some consider it a ballad (sentimental and romantic), some a sailor shanty (sung at work), and others a sailor forebitter (sung at rest). The song has changed much over the years and its original lyrics are fragmented with many variations. Some say the 'lowlands' refer to Earthly geography. Others say— the realm of the dead.
The Sound of Many Oceans (Play, New draft + poster)
Alex believes a micro-circuitry device has been attached to his body to reshape his brain and prevent him from hearing the sound of oceans. His friend and Confidant Jules agrees to search his body.
Later, Advocate Jules interrogates Kelly, determined to uncover the secret location of an invisible, formless being of cryptic and dangerous power.
Did another draft, primarily wrangling the third act, and then backwards-seeded some plot points and characterizations.
Influences on this play include— my brain MRIs from several years ago, something I keep writing about— one of my Uncles serving in Vietnam— the penultimate episode of Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, which kinda devolves into Theatre of the Absurd— my isolation during the pandemic— all of it overshadowed by the concept of the Demiurge, something I first heard about in Peter Chung’s Æon Flux cartoon series. In my play, I go back to Plato’s dialogue Timaeus where he discusses this entity, represented in The Sound of Many Oceans as, perhaps, an internal manifestation— an agent of folie à trois, shared delusions— or, externally, perhaps— a malevolent power from outer space.
Or, perhaps, some combination.
Psychodysleptics are hallucinogens that induce dream-like perceptions, creating detached mental states laced with fixations on doom. For my play, I reasoned there are living, human Psychodysleptics. That is to say, people which emanate these hallucinogenic mental states, spreading psychological dread which gains more and more adherents as it disseminates— in other words, a fanciful sci-fi version of a demagogue.
A few notes on the poster— the coordinates you see also appear in the play, a plot point, indicating a real place on our planet Earth. CANIS, as you see on the woman’s jacket— this figures into the play in a few places. One, it’s an acronym for Cognitive Aural Neuromorphic Interconnected Systems, the clandestine group seeking the otherworldly power in the play. And another— the constellation Canis Major (The Great Dog), which could be said to be chasing the constellation Orion, the alleged point of origin of the mysterious power. The reel-to-reel machine— maybe it’s got the last known recording of the sound of the ocean.
Read the play via New Play Exchange.
Lastly, as far as what I’m reading now— few years back, my friend Amisha recommended Jung Ito’s Uzumaki. Picked it up from he library, going to give it a go—
Thanks for reading—
peace,
—william