He Ate the Sun

Play #69 - He Ate the Sun by Sheila Callaghan

Oh Sheila… so poetic, so inscrutable! How do I love thee! He Ate the Sun is a set of variations involving Woman, Man, Boy, and a park bench. There are fifteen scenes in which the characters display various behaviors and relationships, repeating lines and themes and ideas and motions. Seeds are planted and uprooted. There are so many possibilities around these people. Whether reading the paper or running or slow dancing or circling each other or discussing the boy who ate the sun or the man who ate the moon…  maybe the Man and Woman are married, maybe she is having an affair with the boy… maybe none of that is true. The sun and the moon are gravitational forces keeping these people orbiting each other.

One thing that I find kind of cool about this script is the stipulation that there are to be no blackouts. That poses an interesting challenge in the staging. I imagine a sort of freeze and rapid rewind - an active representation of the ongoing gravitational pull that holds these three people in their orbit.