Fringe Festival 2017!

Director Ben Rock and actor Eric Curtis Johnson
(Rumfoord) Photo: Scott Golden
our knowledge. It’s kind of meta.
Why Sirens?
Vonnegut’s stuff is smart, spare and
straightforward. t’s not owery or wordy.
He has a very specific authorial voice
terse and dry, brutally sarcastic and fun.
Of course in the case of The Sirens of
Titan, it’s an outrageous story. There’s a
lot of wackiness and humor. He takes
a crap all over everything that is sacred
and couches hard truth in delicious,
ironic narrative science fiction that’s
full of weird aliens and robots. You’re
allowed to laugh. And the laugh disarms
you a bit. But then the philosophy sinks
in. This appealed to the adolescent in me
then and now and I saw the message as
one of humanism and people exercising
free will within a deterministic universe.
The sirens in ancient Greece called to
sailors with beautiful songs from the
island and made them wreck their ships.
What Vonnegut is referencing there
is that Malachi, the protagonist of the
book, who is rich by birth, is promised
at the beginning that he’s going to end
up on Titan, the Moon of Saturn and he’s
going to meet these beautiful women.
He’s shown a picture that entrances
F14
visit footlights.click
him. When he gets there, however, it’s
just a statue. Nothing is real. Malachi is
a guy on a pathway seeking these allimportant,
all-consuming things. When
he finds them he realies none of them
are what they were supposed to be.
And he bears a terrible responsibility
for everything that’s happened along the
way.
How did you discover the play even
existed?
In 1991 I was living in Orlando. There
was a theater there called Theatre
Downtown run by Frank Hilgenberg.
Frank told me he came from the Organic
Theatre and had worked for Stuart
Gordon as a 19-year-old horror fan. Of
course, Stuart Gordon’s name meant the
world to me because of Re-Animator
and I couldn’t have been more excited.
Shortly thereafter, Frank saw me reading
a Vonnegut book and says, “Oh we did
a Vonnegut adaptation of The Sirens of
Titan.”
I was just starting college. I didn’t know
how to track something like that down.
And there was no internet. So filed that
away until four years ago when I was
working on Taste with Stuart.
Stuart didn’t have a copy so that started
me on a little quest. I went from archive
to archive and finally landed in a
specific archive at the Chicago Public
Library that housed all the Organic
scripts. I got permission from Stuart. But
I also needed to get permission from the
Vonnegut Estate.
The Vonnegut Estate has been
instrumental in helping us set this up.
The executor of the estate Don Farber,
Kurt Vonnegut’s actual lawyer, then in
his 90’s, agreed to let me get it as long as
we could get a copy to them. They didn’t
have one.
(Cont’d on page F1 6 )