Thanks to the talent and focused dedication of the two actors, the director, and the production and theater staff, “The Other Two Men” was the first play in The Players’ Ring (Portsmouth, New Hampshire, USA) annual summer Late Night (new play) Series‘ 15 year history to receive a review  (you can also read a preview review here);  it was a success in a long-running, beloved Late Night Series well-populated with established playwrights (see the rest of the series here!);  and the unusual genre of science fiction went over well with theater audiences.  (I was in the lobby after each show and instead a grappling with an unfamiliar concepts the audiences:  1) enthused about the actors, 2) asked when they could see the play again.)

 

What was it all about?

 

My play “The Other Two Men” is part of a local 30-year tradition of doing ambitious small-cast science fiction in regional black box theaters. This play is set 800 years in the future in a colonized Milky Way galaxy. In this production, historians on an established colony world decide to clone two of their four planetary founders in order to solve the problem of what went wrong in their lives. These clones are raised in strict historical recreations of their 300-years-gone-by North America hometowns and are given the same military training as their originals.

This play is about the day the two young men meet.
They find themselves locked in one room until they solve an unspecified problem about the past. Some things go wrong … historians on this colony planet have only cloned two of the four founding figures; the clones have figured out they are duplicates of famous long-dead men and everyone around them is an actor in a living history museum; and they’re two unique new people – not their original, heroic progenitors.
This is a story about free will and predestination – what can and cannot be planned. It’s also a story about what is us and what has been pre-programmed by our circumstances. I’ve been writing about these characters for two years and I’m exited to bring them – and their unique problem – to the New Hampshire Players’ Ring Late Night Readings Series under the direction of Tomer Oz (not the martial arts expert on IMDB — the New Hampshire director/actor who is currently playing the electric moral center of the Ring’s current production of Rajiv Joseph‘s  Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo).

“The Other Two Men” started as a short story. This play stands on its own but it can be viewed alongside my 18-story series featuring these characters that will be published in Black Denim Lit over the next few years. Three of the stories have already appeared: “This is Not a Love Story”, “Searching”, and “Planet 50”. Two other stories will follow this year. All of my work is interconnected: each work stands on its own but each piece adds depth and nuance to the others. Those who see this play will know things about these characters that no one knows – and I am thrilled to contribute (in a very small way) to the area’s unique heritage of live science fiction.

 

I’d particularly like to thank M. Marguerite Mathews & Greg Gathers, the Artistic Directors of Pontine Theatre, for their encouragement; the insightful actor/writer Alex Pease and the Generic Theater (NH) for their guidance and good advice at the reading last November.)

-Lisa Shapter