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800 Words: The Transmigration of Philip K. Dick
Live Girls
November 3, 2007
The writer Philip K. Dick was an enormously intelligent and complex man, consumed with creating literary realities from
abstractions about the very nature of reality, divinity and the multiple possibilities of simultaneous planes of existence.
He was also hermetic, obsessive, driven to write and emotionally distorted by vast quantities of drugs and the conflicts of
his own contrary moralities. Within the arcane world of Science Fiction he was highly regarded and his stories became the
framework for popular films like "Blade Runner", "Total Recall" and "The Minority Report." Even
that was a contradiction, since his original stories remained bound to the genre market, and his efforts at mainstream novels
were largely ignored. He died of a series of strokes at the age of 54.
In "800 words: The Transmigration of Philip K. Dick" playwright Victoria Stewart has created an appropriately
complex, twisted and brilliantly perplexing portrait of the inner and outer life of the writer. This is an idea driven play,
as Dick was certainly an idea driven man, and by the end of the performance it's difficult to decide which is stronger or
more destructive, the drive or the ideas. This was not an especially nice man, and his grip on any sort of commonplace reality
is tenuous at best, but he is also a creative artist capable of building universes from the star-stuff of pure imagination.
Alone as he must have felt in his study, there were other people in his world, and the multiple failures with his wives and
friends and lovers make his cat seem like the most natural creature in the world to talk to. Only this particular cat talks
back.
Philip K. Dick had an epiphany, a revelation, in 1974 with a spiritual entity he termed VALIS, or a Vast Active Living
Intelligence System. He referred to the event as 2-3-74, denoting February and March of 1974. The remainder of his creative
life was related to and directed toward an understanding of this experience. He wrote an immense, unfinished theoretical document
called "The Exegesis" which documented his unending explorations. In the second act of this play that work becomes
a hallucinatory snowstorm of pages burying him and everyone in his life, both real and imagined.
This production overcomes the problem of presenting an essentially literary story by being continuously theatrical, and
director Jess Smith keeps the action tight and compelling, even when the play meanders a bit in the second act. Characters
who are blatantly artificial may be invented, but they may also be entirely real, albeit filtered through Dick's imagination.
The cat, performed by a puppet at the end of the arm of a black-costumed actor, is both animated and humanized, both animal
and persona. His last wife achieves her irrefutable reality through sheer consistency, his phantom twin sister through her
persistence, a stream of increasingly young women through the increasingly fantastic, and friends and colleagues are transmuted
into thugs and spies.
Effective as the supporting characters in this production were, it was Shawn Belyea as Philip K. Dick who anchored every
moment of the play. This was a beautifully crafted, passionately embodied performance, and the actor's ability to make us
feel the internal completeness of the writer's life was marvelous. Mr. Belyea owned this room, as Dick owned his study, and
he resided in the man’s gifted, troubled and constantly searching mind with no less conviction. His variations of
tone and mood and pace, his connections with people who alternately comforted and tormented him, his insistence on the importance
of both his craft and his ideas made his personal drama engrossing. The ways in which he allowed us to see the failed and
broken parts of the man were touching but never sentimental. This was an uncompromising man who wanted absolutes that were
not final answers, and ambiguities that would stay put. That makes for really, really interesting theatre. "800 Words"
is as ambitious as the writer was himself, and probably more successful.
Live Girls has given this show an excellent production, the acting and directing admirably serve the play, and if you’re
looking for a show that steps outside the usual, comfortable bounds of perception, then this is the show to see.
Jerry Kraft
www.SeattleActor.com
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