Creating This "War"

What do you get when you mash up No Exit with A Company of Wayward Saints and The Complete Works of Shakespeare Abridged? As it turns out, you get this play.

It all started with storytelling. Not the play alone, but also the mythology behind the Trojan War. This is what people did before TVs and internet chatrooms and Adam Sandler movies. They told stories. And so, when I decided I wanted to write a play for young adults about the story of Troy, I wanted to start with the basics, with the storytelling. Thus, the play was born not to be a factual account of the details in Homer, but a story, told to an audience.

And who would be the storytellers? The ones who could skew it with bias the most, of course!  Eris, Aphrodite, Helen, and Paris, four figures who arguably caused the war, were chosen as the characters for the play. After all, who really started the whole mess? And I do think that "mess" is the appropriate word. While many of the stories in the canon of Greek mythology (some included in this play) are comical in nature, the take-home lesson of the Iliad is always that, in the end, war is nothing but a mess. A great, big, bloody, less-than-honorable mess. And the bloodier the examinations of the war became, the more I realized that this was not destined to be a play for young adults, but a play for mature audiences.

This isn't because I think that children can't handle the realities of war.  The fact of the matter is that many are living them. This was because the bloodier the second half of the play became, the darker the comedy of the first act had to be, in order to balance the scales.  What can I say?  I believed that this play was in need of feng shui.

-Jessica Puller, Playwright
The Trojan War; or, How One Bad Apple Spoiled the World 

Adapting Frankenstein

I can’t believe that Mary Godwin (Shelley) was only 18 when she conceived this story.  Not only that, but the basic idea and form behind it came over the course of a very abbreviated period.  I think people lived faster in her time.

I think the origins of it as, perhaps, a piece intended for reading aloud come through clearly in the structure of the book.  The way she divides the narrative is a precursor to the modern dividing up of storylines to keep readers’ interest.  She doesn’t go as far as we do now, but the idea is there.

The creature gets such a bad rap!  He really is a modern day Job, although this time, he knows exactly who to blame and is free to seek and demand not only an explanation but redress.  But really, how could he know any better?  Is his lack of inherent moral knowledge a statement about the quality of his soul or lack of one or does it reflect on mankind itself that devoid of acculturation we would be no better?  I love that the book makes me think of these things and go back and forth on the issue.