Scotto Moore on Putting Sci-Fi on the Stage

“When I Come To My Senses, I’m Alive” by Scotto Moore opens Friday, April 23, at Annex Theatre. Photo: Ian Johnston.

Scotto Moore, a playwright and member of the Annex Theatre company, won accolades for his 2008 original play, interlace [falling star], a sci-fi epic on Gnostic themes. Tomorrow, his new play, When I Come to My Sense, I’m Alive! opens at Annex. The SunBreak asked Moore to speak about why he brings the high-tech world of sci-fi to the low-tech world of the fringe theatre stage.

I’ve been a science fiction fanatic since I was a child, and I’ve been working in theatre about as long, so it’s been pretty natural for my playwriting to veer heavily into science fiction. The last play I wrote for Annex, interlace [falling star], was an epic fusion of science fiction and fantasy, with demigods and archangels sharing the stage with lifelike robots and telepathic cops. For that show, we used abstract staging and a rich soundscape to help create an infinitely tall skyscraper in the center of the multiverse where you could imagine yourself living or working–or in the case of our heroine, Andrea Change, transforming into a being of divine wisdom.

When I started writing When I Come To My Senses, I’m Alive!, I very much wanted to tell a strictly science-fiction story, a technologically plausible (up to a point) kind of story. And I wanted to tell a story about down-to-earth characters that were very much like people I know. When I Come To My Senses, I’m Alive! focuses on the relationship between two DIY inventors, Annique and Micky, who create a method for podcasting human emotions; they develop a base of fans who download Annique’s “emoticlips” and use hobby-built playback receivers to experience recorded versions of Annique’s actual feelings. As the story opens, the project of “charting the emotional genome,” as Annique refers to it, has started to tip past the point of simply being an engineering project, toward being more of an entertainment project—a development Micky’s not too sure about.  

---

But the story takes its biggest sci-fi leap by presuming that introducing digital emotions to the Internet might cause botnets to attain a kind of consciousness. That led to the fun theatrical challenge of figuring out how to use actors to dramatize events happening deep within the Internet, and how to personalize a relationship between Annique and her unexpected progeny, all within a realistic presentational style. Another big challenge was striking a balance between realistic use of jargon versus overburdening the story with too much technical exposition. Even in the last week of rehearsal, I’ve been making cuts and edits with that in mind.

---

The play is set “five minutes into the future,” so to speak—it’s the present day, with the exception of one invention that is just a little bit beyond what’s currently possible. It’s rooted in real advances in brain-computer interfaces, however, the kind of technology that allows people to use brain wave entrainment to type messages on a keyboard, for instance. We were very fortunate to work with a costumer, Rebecca Grabman, who specializes in interactive, wearable computing; she designed and implemented the electronics and controlling software to power the various helmets and headgear that the characters use for recording and playing back “emoticlips” in the play. The DIY aesthetic embodied by the play’s characters is reflected in how these costumes and props were brought to life in the production. 

Annex Theatre has a long history of producing low-budget, high-imagination, original theatre, and we’re on a bit of a science fiction streak right now: our last main stage, Alecto Issue #1, both satirized and celebrated the superhero tale, and our summer main stage, “Her Mother Was Imagination,” is shaping up as a post-apocalyptic tale. When I Come To My Senses, I’m Alive! is a technologically speculative tale, asking questions about how technology might transform the human experience. Annex seems to be an apt laboratory for telling all these disparate types of sci-fi stories.