A Good Disclipline to Impose

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 25 June 2014.

As we have loosely used Aristotle's Poetics as a guide in our decision making, I'm beginning to think we should keep as many irrational elements outside the scope of the play as possible.

Obviously, this goes against much of what I've described in the "Epic Finale." Ideally--as with the jawless ghost and the subterranean beast--we shouldn't have to rely on big bucks from Hollywood to make our vision a reality; we should convey it through other means such as speech, like how Teiresias comes back to the square and explains how crazy the birds were acting as he was sitting on the seat of augury.

Showing the birds tearing each other apart would amount to something Aristotle would describe as being "beyond the scope of human understanding" and therefore not proper to drama. Euripides, by having a god (Dionysus) explain a few things at the beginning of The Bacchae, violates this principle.

To the greatest extent possible, I'd like deaths and all irrational elements occur either hidden from view or outside the scope of the drama. I think imagining our story as a play (musical would be fine too!) would be a good discipline to impose. Obviously, we are writing an epic or saga just as much as a drama, but, for both practical and artistic reasons, I think we should attempt to consciously limit ourselves in the special effects department.

Odysseus at the court of Alcinous by Francesco Hayez.

Having a frame story with someone telling those irrational/beyond-the-scope-of-human-understanding parts of the story--as Odysseus did in the court of King Alcinous--would be one way to accomplish this straddling of epic and tragic poetry. Blurring the lines between hallucination and reality--as in Death of a Salesman--would be yet another way.

Despite the story's expansiveness, I think we should come up with a way of unifying the plot and perhaps even condensing the amount of time that will have actually passed. Is there a 12-step program in which these stories are being told? Is it all happening in Arthur's mind while strapped to the stretcher headed down to the ECT room? Is it a series of letters that are read by Josie Lazarus, perhaps while we focus on her more down-to-earth drama (whatever that is)?

Bottom line, could we accomplish the scripting of this story observing the unities and using a minimum of what Aristotle would term "spectacle"?

Again, for both practical and artistic reasons, I think our pilot--even for a TV program--should be highly doable on stage.