Director's Notes: 173 - The Hundred Year Play (Patreon)

I was brushing my teeth when I had the idea for a novel. What about the story of a play that is designed to be exactly a hundred years long? I liked the idea, but also I have way too many projects going at any one time. I knew, even as I had the idea, that I would never have the time to write a novel like that.

The beauty of a show like Night Vale is that any story can be a Night Vale story, if you hold it right. So immediately I decided to take this idea for a novel that would remain forever unwritten and instead put it into the world of Night Vale, where it could flourish and grow and be built upon in future episodes. Every idea that we write into the show is a seed that can eventually reappear in all sorts of unexpected ways. The show grows with us, which is what keeps it from being boring to write. I never know what new shape it will take, any more than any of the listeners do.

This episode is, in some ways, a celebration of live theater, which is a tough subject. Those of us who work in live theater are unable to do our jobs right now, and we may not be able to do our jobs for a very long time. Many theaters will close forever. People will leave the industry and never return. It will take years before theater returns to where it was six months ago.

I’ve worked in a lot of forms of media, but my heart belongs to theater. A live performance is like no other kind of art. It celebrates the imperfect. There is no way to do it over and over until you get the perfect take or draft. Whatever happens on the stage for that audience on that night is what happened. Live performance celebrates community. At its best, it takes the energy of the audience and redirects it back toward them, reminding them that they are a group of people living together on this world.

Images of the apocalypse often point to live performance as one of the few things we’ll still have in the after. The novel Station Eleven, which is about a flu pandemic apocalypse, follows a traveling theater company as they move through the wasteland, doing the same work that performers always have. Hell even Fury Road had that guitar player. 

So what to do with an apocalypse that specifically makes live performance impossible? I don’t know. None of us were preparing for that. 

Theater will be back. It has outlived every dark in our history. But this dark will be a tough one.

Speaking of which, we are doing streams of Night Vale live shows, and I’ve been very happy with how they’ve been working out. Our next one will be a new live rewrite of the classic Sandstorm episodes that introduce the character of Kevin. That will be here on September 24: https://noonchorus.com/welcome-to-night-vale/

It’s not quite the same as gathering together in a theater and seeing what kind of alchemy between performer and audience might happen that night, but hey, you don’t have to wear real pants when watching it, so there’s that.

-Joseph