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An evening-length play, Heavenly Fools Premiered at MGSA Playwrights Festival in New Jersey, October 2023 Written by Amanda Horowitz Directed by Dara Malina Made in collaboration with Rutgers BFA acting company and stage-design students. HEAVENLY FOOLS SET in a barren coastal town. Those that live here full-year-round either enjoy the extremity of weather and solitude or they work at the prestigious college at the center of town. There are young people and old people and everyone is lonely. Just along the coastline, there is a fish restaurant called Heavenly Fools. It feels like a diner on a wooden ship, swinging like a pirate ship carnival ride between tacky and earthy. The smell of fish guts and salty rime is baked into the air. The restaurant feels out of joint, both in-sync and wildly out of sync with time. In this world, there is a lot of stillness, but the rumble of the ocean, ship horns from the middle of the sea, and groans of everyday appliances churn and call upon those who listen. NOTE ON (KAIROS) TIME the weather, cyclical time, fated timing. An unsettling of time. Time is something that returns and folds into itself. Rather than moving chronologically forward, it’s a quantitative account for time (i.e.: feeling, concentration, and intensity). Kairos is also at the Greek root of the word weather or atmosphere. This play cycles between spring, summer, and fall. NOTE ON TONE (SHIFTS) We find ourselves on the horizon: The thing that is not yet imagined. This is indicated with light and sound only. The horizon is not visualized, it is felt through performance, and as a feeling that all the characters hold within themselves. There are shifts in this play when leaning into melodrama is important. The embodiment of the genre, the yearning for elsewhere and a mystical strangeness. There is a sense of a someplace else, a place yet imagined at the edge of this world. Perhaps all the characters are dipping into and out of this other place, perhaps they are not ready to go, perhaps they’ve been waiting there for a very long time. |