Prism, Mirror, Lens

[redbird]

Went last night to see Bellona, Destroyer of Cities, a play loosely based on Samuel Delany's novel Dhalgren. (The program refers to Jay Scheib as "Director/Adapter/Media Designer.") It captures a lot of the feel of the book, as best as I can recall not having read it in about 15 years; papersky, who had reread it on the train Friday, agreed but pointed out that by making the Kid female, the director dropped/lost a lot of the queer stuff, and changed the power dynamics. It also has much less science fiction than the original—though one of the omissions Papersky noted, holograph projectors, seem a lot less science fictional now than when the book was written. (No, we can't do that yet, but holograms in certain places are now completely ordinary.)

The play contains a lot of both sex and violence, shown and discussed. They drive a fair amount of the plot. Neither is presented/intended as titillating here, unlike much other work. Scheib (and Delany, and the actors) isn't trying to shock us with sex, either: it's a part of life, and a fairly large part of these characters' lives in a chaotic city somewhere near the edge of reality. As in Dhalgren, people's connection to and disconnection from reality is a significant part of the point.

The action was in a series of rooms, not all visible from the audience--it depended on where you were sitting, but no matter where, you'd see some some of it on a video monitor instead of directly. My partner pointed out that the video displays were a mix of live images of the stage with some pre-recorded bits. They also used video/projection effects to show the two moons.

Pieces of the dialogue are taken directly from the book, including the very beginning and end, and the bit where the Kid asks someone's opinion of her poetry. I think Dhalgren has gone on my to-(re)read pile, though maybe Triton and/or Heavenly Breakfast. And I want to make another try at Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. (We own all of these, but they may wait behind the current library books.)

The play was at The Kitchen, which is on 19th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues; there's not much else around there other than housing, but PNH remembered a diner a couple of blocks up Tenth Avenue, which proved perfectly happy to rearrange tables in their outdoor seating area and bring us drinks and snacks. The waiter was very cheerful, a bit apologetic when he thought he'd made a mistake (I asked for herb tea after we'd been there quite a while, and he thought I was reminding him of a forgotten order) and when he found they were out of one kind of pie.

[edited to add a bit about the use of visual effects]

Comments

[voidampersand]

I very much wanted to see this play, but am on the wrong side of the continent. What is it about Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand? I confess I haven't read it, but I've read most of his SF/F and haven't bounced off of any of it yet. A lot of people tell me they bounced off Dhalgren, but I was engrossed by it.

[inkedheart]

That's so intriguing! And having tried to write a few sci-fi plays, I can understand their dropping some of that aspect from the adaptation. Even in what sounds like a really technologically adept production, you're asking a lot more of your audience than a TV show or a movie.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

A train ride long enough to read Dhalgren in must be one epic train-ride. I knew Amtrak could be slow, but not that slow.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Reading a long book on a train means:
1) the train was slow
2) the reader was fast
3) the train went a long way
4) starting the book at home or in the station and only reading part of it on the train, yet saying, "when I read it on the train yesterday," to emphasize how recently or enthusiastically one had read it.

I can't speak to 1, 2, or 4 in this situation. But we are talking about the train from Montreal to New York City.

[avram]

The Amtrak ride from Montreal to NYC runs about 12 hours.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That is
1) Longer than I thought it'd be
2) Nowhere near long enough for me, at least, to allocate to read Dhalgren

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

This is Jo we're talking about. She has superpowers.

If you actually want to estimate my reading speed

[papersky.livejournal.com]

It's 11 hours. I also napped a bit, did a sudoku, played Tetris from time to time, and looked out of the window and thought. I was 85 pages in when I left home, and had about ten pages left when I got into Penn Station.

If we had sensibly fast trains on that route, like the Acela, or a standard European intercity train, I wouldn't have had time to finish it.

_Dhalgren_ is really long. For comparison, on the way home I read: 1) Poul Anderson's _The High Crusade_, 2) Geoff Ryman's _Lust_, 3) A chunk of the Strahan's Year's Best SF (6 stories), 4) 3 chapters of Vikram Seth's _A Suitable Boy_. And I napped a bit and looked out of the window a bit.

Re: If you actually want to estimate my reading speed

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I once re-read a Poul Anderson novel of similar length to The High Crusade while doing laundry at a hotel. The book fit in my trouser pocket, it lasted almost exactly as long as the laundry cycle, and it was more interesting to read than watching clothes dry. Why can't they make good books that short any more?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the review. We were all curious.