On Stage: Performing Arts at our Oneonta Campuses by Rachel Frick Cardelle

Democracy, Mars and Line Dancing Come Together in ‘The Alleged Children of Darkness’

If you were to imagine a world 30 years in the future, what would this country look like? Playwright Dan O’Neil did just that in his play, “The Alleged Children of Darkness,” premiering at the SUNY Oneonta theatre February 28 through March 5 and directed by Andrew Kahl. Do you care about democracy? Do you think about issues of “self” versus “other,” and where community comes into that relationship? Do you love line dancing to Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song”? If so, you should make it a point to see the first live production of “The Alleged Children of Darkness.”

Part of the excitement around this show lies in the fact that it has never been seen performed before. The director, writer, actors and crew are workshopping the play as they rehearse, figuring out what works and tweaking (and in some cases rewriting) what needs to be changed. After watching a rehearsal where Dan, Drew, and the actors and crew workshopped the end of the play, I spent an hour interviewing Dan, endeavoring to understand the show from the playwright’s perspective.

After reading the play, I had been struck by some of the parallels between what the play predicts will happen in the future to community and American democracy—and conversations I have heard in our own community—and what has been happening in the federal government over the past month. I began by asking Dan how he would describe the play.

“I would describe [the play] as an attempt at a big blockbuster, dystopian world-building story… it’s always been a popular genre, the dystopian future thing, and I’ve always been drawn to it. It’s pretty hard to do on stage effectively… I started [writing] it in 2018 and I was just like, ‘Let’s see if I can do it.’ … I just started building this 30-years-in-the-future world. I created the astronaut—the Mars man—who could come back and encounter a new world 30 years later. And I also set the conditions for myself, what if it doesn’t get better? I think we make an assumption sometimes that the future will be better. What if the future is legitimately worse? How can we play out the fractures in our institutions, push them 30 years further?”

The play, Dan told me, is about three things: loneliness, belief and democracy. Many of the characters in the play address the topic of loneliness, either directly or indirectly. One, Rae, has become part of a movement, “One Ness,” that believes, as Rae explains, “The culture that survives—the collective that survives, has gotta be able to radically sacrifice at the individual level.”

Which means that at no point will Rae refer to the self or others as “I,” “you” or “them,” but always “this one,” “that one,” “all ones.” And Rae never uses a screen. Rae’s partner believes the movement is a cult and this tension drives them apart.

“Apparently we are in a loneliness epidemic right now,” Dan explained as we discussed the theme. “Which is largely due to our technology and our technology habits and our new ways of communicating with each other, many of which are not personal. And so I hope that this focus and how these characters are dealing with loneliness and technology will be interesting for the audience.”

The play’s story also addresses the topic of democracy and how that may look in the future.

“I’m trying to create a productive space to consider democracy without even necessarily saying it’s the best system. I believe that it [is] the best governance system that humans have come up with at this juncture. But we can’t say for sure that’s going to be true in 30 years… I didn’t realize until I was older how much of an experiment this [American democracy] is and how fragile the experiment is. When you’re younger you just think of it as something that you have no control over. You were born into a democratic society, and it will always be that way. You don’t really question it very much. Then eventually you look at it and you’re like, oh, it’s actually quite fragile and through history it has been attempted over and over again and failed every time and so, like, are we different? Are we the same? Those are the types of questions I would hope an audience would consider, but not feel they’re being lectured at… also be entertained! Because we don’t want to just show up and do work!”

As we talked, I had to ask Dan about a couple of things that he wrote into the play as being possible in the next 30 years, but which have actually happened in real life recently. I began by asking if he had written about the shutting down of large federal agencies before it happened this month.

“Yeah! I can take a little bit of pride in the predictive knowledge! But I’m not making it happen! And the other thing that happened two years after I wrote [the play] is they ran out of hurricane names. The whole first scene was like a sequence of how hurricanes get names, which means they have to get to a certain point of destructiveness. At that juncture [when I had written the play initially] we had never gone through the whole list that they had made for any one year. Two years later we got through the whole list, and they had to start going to alpha mega like [I wrote] in the play. So that was a little trippy for me!”

I had been intrigued by watching Dan workshop his writing with the director and actors. He had rewritten the last scene of the play, as it hadn’t been working in previous rehearsals. I asked him about that and how it impacted his writing to have his play acted out in front of him.

“So the voices of the actors get in your brain. This is why certain writers work with the same actors over and over and over again, because you begin to understand cadence, approach, you can almost write as though you’re already in their mind. This is different in the sense that I don’t know these actors yet, but I’m getting to know them and a lot of the things that they are doing with this language will remain, like I will probably in the next draft be listening as closely to their voice as to the voice of the character in my head. [As a writer] you can hear it differently than your own voice, but you’re not putting on a huge dialect or something. You’re listening for this other voice which your brain is making for you, but then once it is actually manifested on stage by actual people, that voice usually takes the place of the voice you were hearing before. So, their voices will be in this play now; they will have played a part in pushing it to the newer, deeper level of humanity, which we’re definitely trying to write as writers, but it’s hard on the page. You can’t fully do it. You need them.”

It is easy to imagine writing as a solitary activity. But when I read the acknowledgements in many books, often the author will thank those people—family members, friends, writing group members—who gave feedback on early drafts. So Dan’s acknowledgement of the role these actors have in shaping his scriptwriting makes sense. He had previously heard this play done at table reads—when actors sit around a table and read through the entire script aloud—and I asked him what he had learned seeing his play in production rather than at a table read. And his response, dear reader, is where you come in.

“I’m probably going to learn the most from when there’s an audience, because that’s the thing you just can’t simulate. It’s a terrifying thing, honestly. I’ve been at a production, at performances of plays that I wrote, and really felt that ‘clinking in’ of the audience, where their attention…you can just sort of feel the energy in the room, when people are invested and focused on what’s happening. And you can also feel—and this is the terrifying part—that dissipation, where people check out, because maybe it’s not your night… there’s so many factors that can happen, but it’s the ultimate test! Before that, you can feel it’s working, but you can’t pretend like you don’t know what it is, you can’t forget what you wrote. You try to just look at what the actors are doing and treat every piece of information as new, but you can’t, because you know it. So it’s encountering people who are seeing it for the first time that is the final test to see if it’s doing any of the things that you thought it is doing. So that’s where I’m going to learn the most.”

Listening to Dan, I was reminded once again how wonderfully spoiled we are in this region. The wealth that we have of artists, writers and performing arts venues is far beyond most rural areas. In this case, we have the opportunity to see an entertaining, thought-provoking play, knowing the author will also be watching and valuing our response as he thinks about potential rewrites. I’ve no idea what the trajectory of this play is, where else it will be performed after having its debut here in Oneonta. Other universities? Local theatres? Off-Broadway? Or even what other forms it will take. Television series? Movie?

What I do know is that the play has left me thinking about loneliness and community, and where our democracy is headed. I know that this script will forever have the imprint of Oneonta’s community upon it. And I know that I really want to learn Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song” line dance!

“The Alleged Children of Darkness,” directed by Andrew Kahl, plays at SUNY Oneonta’s Hamblin Theatre February 28 through March 1 at 7:30 p.m., March 2at 2 p.m. and March 4-5 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets go on sale February 17; free with a SUNY Oneonta student ID and $5.00 for general admission.

Next up: Hartwick College offers “Snap!” a play by Sarah Burry directed by Barbara Kahl, March 5–8 at 8 p.m.

Rachel Frick Cardelle covers performing arts at SUNY Oneonta and Hartwick College.