Bard College Bard Digital Commons Senior Projects Spring 2019 Bard Undergraduate Senior Projects Spring 2019 a N.ew & P.owerful C.onspiracy Sam Harmann Bard College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2019 Part of the Other Theatre and Performance Studies Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Harmann, Sam, "a N.ew & P.owerful C.onspiracy" (2019). Senior Projects Spring 2019. 220. https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2019/220 This Open Access work is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been provided to you by Bard College's Stevenson Library with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this work in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, please contact [email protected]. a N.ew & P.owerful C.onspiracy Senior Project Submitted to The Division of the Arts of Bard College by Sam Harmann Annandale-on-Hudson, New York May 2019 Acknowledgements This project is dedicated to Nancy and Daniel Benoit and to anyone who’s ever made something out of nothing. Thank you to the intrepid cast; Lin Barnett, Nat Currey, Leor Miller, Paul Nicholson, Avis Zane, and Perry Zhang, without your trust and dedication, this never could have happened. Thank you again to Lin for keeping a handle on things and for always having good advice. Thank you again to Leor for being a constant beam of light in the darkness and for lending me some stuff. Thank you to Elise Alexander for assisting with sound and for being a part of my life. Thank you to Ori Carlin for helping build the wrestling ring and for drinking the milk. Thank you to Jordon Soper for taking photos and video of the project and for your friendship for the past four years. Thank you to my grandma for thinking that I’m the best. Thank you to Langston Barrett for their support, and to the rest of the LHS 50s Hallway Kids for holding it down at home. Thank you to Jessica Winingham for teaching me about theatre. Thank you to Eric Meyer for teaching me about writing. Thank you to the Theatre Artists Guild for their financial support. Thank you to Phoebe Hiltermann & the Surrealist Training Circus for the wrestling mats. Thank you to Erica Kaufman for the opportunities you’ve given me since first semester FYSEM. Thank you to Jack Ferver for your resolute guidance and encouragement. Thank you to Miriam Felton-Dansky for your breadth of knowledge and for making me want to know more about theatre when little else did. Thank you to Jonathan Rosenberg for Theatre Making and for being realistic. Thank you to Gideon Lester for your counsel throughout my time in the Bard Theatre and Performance program. And thank you to my entire family, my mom, my dad, Miles, Declan, Kerry, Ryanne, and Manchester, for loving me unconditionally. Table of Contents Violence & the Value of a Human Life . 1 Pro Wrestling . 7 The Synthesis . 19 Appendix . 31 The Script . 31 Scene List . 49 Deleted Scenes . 50 Production Photos . 59 Program . 62 References . 64 1 Violence & the Value of a Human Life We like to think that we would never kill a person. Well, maybe we just would like to believe that, and there are conditions under which even the most rational and peaceable among us would defer to what could be called an instinct: “I guess I would kill someone if …” If what? Is a threat to your own life an acceptable condition under which to pivot and renege a committed stance against violence? The entire span of human existence has been underpinned, and in turn structurally guaranteed, by a continual effort to coax whatever extra life-giving and -saving systems we can out of our environment. Our trophies were spirituality, medicine, and an inequitable global distribution of the generous life expectancies and low infant mortality rates that we now enjoy in the United States. Most 21st-century scenarios of massive loss of life pale in comparison to atrocities committed in the Middle Ages, like those orchestrated by Vlad Țepeș, the 15th- century voivode of the state of Wallachia in present-day Romania.1 One particular massacre that earned a significant amount of late-medieval media coverage was inflicted on Ottoman Turks in Bulgaria in 1462 as the Ottoman Empire gained territory in the Balkans. Vlad detailed the marathon crusade against encroaching Ottoman control in a letter, stating that he led a Wallachian army to “[kill] 23,884 Turks without counting those whom we burned in homes or the Turks whose heads were cut by our soldiers.”2 1 And variously known as Vlad Dracul III, or ‘Vlad the Impaler.’ 2 Florescu, Radu R., and Raymond T. McNally. Dracula, Prince of Many Faces: His Life and His Times. N.p.: Little, Brown, 2009. 2 Vlad is speaking specifically about the number of Turkish Bulgarian denizens who were killed by impalement by himself and his army – an act that, even under circumstances of territorial expansion, was undeniably excessive in the scope of its violence. He also took the time to specify that “At Giurgiu there were 6,414 victims; at Eni Sala, 1,350; at Durostor 6,840; at Orsova, 343; at Hârsova, 840; at Marotin, 210; at Turtucaia, 630; at Turnu, Batin, and Novograd, 384; at Sistov, 410; at Nicopolis and Ghighen, 1,138; at Rahova, 1,460.”3 This is all to say that, in his meticulous dedication to inflicting huge swaths of devastation, Vlad Dracul III did nothing if not his part to earn his name’s enduring association with monstrousness. 1462 was a different time, but not so different that impalement wasn’t still considered a barbaric act – and the recent invention of the printing press made records of his crimes, accompanied by sensationally gruesome woodcut depictions, medieval best-sellers (Figure 1). And yet, despite the magnitude of Vlad’s crimes, they feel distant. At least for a non-historian like myself, the cultural memory of events that occurred prior to, say, the Industrial Revolution, and our imaginary worlds drawn from the outlandish allure of the same long-ago time periods have a tendency to de-stratify and amalgamate into one, slightly fantastical history. We get a more detailed, if not imprecise, depiction of the ancient world and the Middle Ages from contemporary television and movies than historical records could ever offer – weathered glyphs engraved in Greek urns and friezes, even crudely-inked illustrations of the impalement of thousands of Hungarian Turks, become inseparable in our minds from images of Gary Oldman and Gerard Butler 3 Florescu & McNally, Dracula. 3 in full battle dress, their digital visages and the words that come out of them high- definitioned to a crisp into our imaginations of what the world was like ‘back then.’ Figure 1. A German woodcut from 1499 depicting Vlad Dracul III dining among impaled corpses. (Markus Ayrer, Vlad Dracul III Pamphlet, 1499, via Medievalists.net) ‘Back then,’ untimely deaths were a standard occurrence. We can almost understand the moral reconciliation of the impalement of 23,000 Turks in Bulgaria when considering how more than one-third of infants born in the Middle Ages died before reaching the age of five.4 But over one hundred million casualties in World Wars I and II, including the Holocaust and the other mass-murder atrocities that occurred during the wars, made the 20th century a contender for the deadliest in history. The industrialized world launched a silent campaign for the value of human life. The Vietnam War soon 4 Scott, Robert A. “Life in the Middle Ages.” In Miracle Cures: Saints, Pilgrimage, and the Healing Powers of Belief. p. 9-11. University of California Press, 2011. 4 became the first U.S. conflict that would be broadcast on television, only for the news media to become a top target of President Richard Nixon’s ire – exposing the general public to the documented fragility and cruelty of life and death was deemed not just inappropriate, but dangerous to those calling the ill-advised shots for fear of civil disillusionment and unrest. The idea of the general public bearing witness to the atrocities committed in Vietnam threatened massive political revolt. For the sake of the continuation of the productive machinations of capitalism, the ruling class has to give the impression that they believe that life is sacred, precious, and revered – so no war on TV. In the 21st-century United States, we barely see or engage with the most violent conflicts that happen in the world today. The perceived value of human life has ballooned since then – an early death no longer a given, we regard life as precious now, especially in our comfortable Western bubble of low mortality rates. Murder-by-war is becoming more impersonal: drone strikes and strategically detonated explosive devices have taken the place of massive ranks of horse-mounted soldiers charging at one another. The serial killers of Victorian England wouldn’t last a week with our advances in forensic technology. We’re spoiled in America; an international military conflict hasn’t taken place here in more than two hundred years, and if one U.S. soldier dies in a military operation, it is guaranteed to make national news. And forget about impalement – if Americans were victims of a mass impalement, the reaction would be felt around the world.