I couldn’t believe my eyes when he walked through the door. Of all the theatres in Los Angeles, the great playwright Harrison Daniels had chosen to visit ours. It felt like a dream.
Squeals of delight erupted through the company when he offered to direct us in his latest play. He had just finished writing it.
Copies of the play were distributed and everyone retreated to their own space to start reading Moonlit Reverie.
An hour later I put the hideous thing down, shuddering. It was an abomination. The opening scene, in which a young boy is beheaded and eaten by a classmate, was the least disgusting scene in the play. The degradations and perversions deepened from there.
What made Moonlit Reverie so disturbing, though, was the craftsmanship with which it was written. It was art. The creation of something so unnerving, so utterly wrong, required a deep insight into humanity. It took an almost supernatural knowledge of everything the human heart holds dear. Then it took a complete rejection of those things.
As I reflected on the play’s confusing ending, I was able to place a sense of déjà vu I had gotten while reading.
The last time I had felt like this was when I was 14. I was sitting in church, still a believer then. The pastor had delivered a sermon about the devil and the eternal torment that awaited those who rejected Jesus, conjuring a powerful religious dread in me that I had successfully repressed for years.
Moonlit Reverie had brought it roaring back.
Opening night arrived a month later, the first showing exclusively made up of Harrison’s friends.
As I made my first entrance on stage, I was nearly shocked into flubbing a line. Every single audience member had on an animal mask of one type or another. My skin crawled.
Worse, they were responding in unison to lines in the play. It was like being back at church, a twisted Lord’s Prayer being recited.
As the scene went on, I realized that the audience participation was completing the play. Surreal, nightmarish lines of dialogue that hadn’t made sense on their own took on dreadful, nigh-unfathomable connotations when paired with the audience contributions.
The scene ended and I hurried backstage, looking for any familiar face.
“Karen!” I shouted, grabbing her. She wore a huge grin. “Wha-” I trailed off as I realized she was chattering mindlessly, eyes rolled back in her head.
I sat down, crying.
Gradually, my sobs turned to laughter. Something (someone) powerful was making everything clear for me.
Moonlit Reverie had felt like a religious text because that’s exactly what it was. Harrison Daniels had been used as a prophet, and not by God.
I wiped my face and stood up. I smiled gratefully at the man standing next to me, holding heavy nails and hammers. Gone were the plastic toys of yesterday’s rehearsal. The man smiled back.
My crucifixion scene was coming up, and we were doing it right this time.
Submitted June 23, 2018 at 11:15AM by movieman94 https://ift.tt/2yCYVc4
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