In celebration of tonight’s event at Booksmith, where the cool performance troupe “Literary Clown Foolery” will be performing a canto from my new play-in-progress Zeus (commissioned for next year’s San Francisco Olympians Festival), I thought I’d put together a quick resource page about the play, to share the process and some of the ideas behind it.
I’m adapting Sophocles’ “Ode to Man” and mashing it up with a bunch of contemporary Top 40 pop songs for the backbone of the play’s text. Here’s a quote from my Zeus page about why:
“Have you ever watched people falling in real love on a real date at a McDonalds? It happens every day. You can see this everywhere– this human tenacity, this ability to make real life happen in a plastic landscape. This is, to me, part of what Sophocles is talking about when he talks about what humans do– we yoke the beasts to carry our burdens, we flip the bird at the gods, and we take any landscape and make it into what we need.”
The remix play is the most exciting format I can think of for telling a story about the relationship between Zeus, humanity, and nature, and I have kind of a lot to say about why. Check out videos of the original sources, and some more info on what I’m making and what’s in my brain about it, on the new page for my Zeus play.