!!Spoilers for people reading Book of the New Sun along with Shelved by Genre!!
A few weeks ago, Cameron Kunzelman reached out to me on behalf of Ranged Touch to ask if I could direct and produce an audio drama of a play that's within the text of The Book of the New Sun. I got that offer while in O'Hare airport, heading out of state for a 10-day trip, so while I accepted I had immediately put deadline pressure on myself. I think I'll make a series of posts here as a production diary.
"Dr. Talos' Play: Eschatology and Genesis" is the 24th chapter of The Claw of the Conciliator, the second volume of The Book of the New Sun. I had never read this book. It is, at this moment, still the only chapter I've read. But after spending two days transcribing it into a shareable document before casting, I feel a pretty good mastery of the text all the same, outside its context. (Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That's why I transcribe on company time.) The text is presented as a record of a performance put on by the characters of the novel. It's pre-modern in its structure; the way characters speak their motives outright, veiled meta-humor at being a play, all that stuff. If you've learned Shakespeare you've got it. It's dense and gives very little on-ramp to what's happening and why, but after reading over it a few times I've got my angle. I'm confident.
I've looked for people's perspectives on the chapter to see if my reading is on the right track, and this has been a mistake. Nearly all I'm finding is people treating it as a puzzle to solve. Or the inverse, using it as the key to decipher the rest of the work; which lines reference which future events in the novel, etc. Practically nothing about the play alone as itself (which makes sense because it isn't, only I happen to be treating it as if it is). One part was gratifying. The first page gives a 19+ character dramatis personae which shocked me. That's a lot of cast to find, schedule, and pay. But while reading I found it very easy to pare down to 7 actors playing dual or triple roles. Scenes rarely have more than 4 people on at once. Some of the lines become jokes when you know they reference a dual role. In the narrative it's done by a troupe of 5 and fans have puzzled out who plays who, and I got it exactly right, according to them, except I added two more actors. But that's still nice.
And having extra voices is one of the changes I've had to make with the move in medium. It's a selection from a novel, but I'm treating it as the play it purports to be. Plays are a visual medium. While Severian can play 4+ parts on stage by switching costume pieces, I don't want to tax my actors to have 4 distinct voices, or ask listeners to keep straight who Voice A is portraying at this moment. So most parts are dual roles, triple at most. The big change is how I'm handling stage directions.
The audience can't see action. The text has described it in Wolfe's words already. We're reading them out. Each character will serve as narrator for their own stage directions, as a form of aside. In those moments they will be dropping into 3rd person narration. All stage directions said aloud this way are given to the character who is acting in the moment. For example, the Second Soldier says “(He seizes Jahi)”, but Jahi, as the object of the action, does not. Imagine if a TV show’s audio description track for the visually impaired was divided between the cast, and it's a lot like that. This solution preserves as much of the original text as possible, while also allowing the listener to connect voice to character. Most character’s first lines are announcing their entrance by name, after all.
Next time: Casting!
