Mohonk Mountain Stage Company presents John Mighton's HALF LIFE at Unison Arts
by M.R. Smith
The structure of Half Life is a series of dreamlike vignettes: scenes
fade into blackness, or are abruptly interrupted. When asked how he
developed this form for the play, Mighton pleads serendipity. “I
didn’t know what to do with all this material until I just remembered
randomly one day that people tend to forget stories at parties. As
soon as I wrote the monologue that opens the play I realized I had
a form for the rest of the piece. I could just let the stories tell
themselves and then fall away whenever they needed to.”
“The whole play is about entropy and our fight against loss
of memory, loss of order, I think one of the things that prevent us
from diving into life is quite often our memories… it takes
a lot of mental discipline to control our memories. We all have very
deep memories of things that have shaped us that are almost impossible
to let go of, and that will stop us from taking risks, changing careers,
or even reinventing ourselves. We’ll think, ‘I don’t
have that ability, no I wasn’t born with that gift,’ so
we don’t do certain things.”
Without the visual distractions of staging and lighting, Mighton’s
text will get full attention from the MMSC cast and attentive audience.
Still, when asked about the relevance of this theatrical format, Crawfis
asserts, “It’s a basic human need, storytelling. It isn’t
going to go away. There’s a special nature to a room full of
people, sitting in the same place, sharing the same energy, all focused
on a single idea. That isn’t going to be replaced by YouTube.”
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