Showing revision 11
by Tod Machover
(transcribed by memetic alchemy)
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Valis - Track 1
Valis - Track 2
Valis - Track 3
Valis - Track 4
Valis - Track 5
Valis - Track 6
Valis - Track 7
Valis - Track 8Valis- Track 9.mp3 dupe of track 8
Valis - Track 10
- more to come soon! Tracks- 11-22
Part I
The stage area is empty and dimly lit as the audience is seated.
On the stage is a complex web of video monitors and projection surfaces. They are arranged in fragmented fashion closer to the public, and more symmetrically towards the back of the scenic area. Some are arranged vertically in the form of walls or towers. Others form patterns on the stage itself. Most of the decor in VALIS and certain narrative elements are displayed on these projection surfaces.
Also on the stage are various items for Horselover Fat's Southern California apartment. Most prominent is a writing table, strewn with papers.
In place of the traditional orchestra pit is a long, narrow, recessed area that contains all of the sound and visual control equipment for the opera, and is visible to the audience. The conducter (who also plays Mini) is seated in the exact center of this space. Two separate recessed, yet not connected, holes contain a grand piano (stage right) and a percussion installation (stage left).
Lights Dim to total blackness. A few seconds of absolute silence...
1. Explosion and Overture
Big crash of images and music. Intense pink strobe-like light. This is accompanied by flashing, fleeting images of colors and abstract designs on many small projection surfaces. Images pass too quickly to be legible. Crescendo to great intensity. Light and images shatter into fragments.
After-image of pink light; like phosphene activity.. almost blinding.
Horselover Fat is in center of stage with a pink laser beam piercing him through the head.
While Fat remains center stage, basically immobile, the Overture begins. Delicate variations of lighting, first in sombre tones, and then with increasing intensity until the final pedal tone of the Overture.
2. First Narrative
During this text, Horselover Fat is seen performing several simple everyday activities (eating, smoking, etc.). Mostly, he is writing, first slowly and then with more intensity. At first the musical accompaniment comes from the loudspeakers.
Phil (recorded voice-off... no face visible): Horselover Fat's nervous breakdown began the day he got the phone call from Gloria asking if had any Nembutals. He asked her why she wanted them and she said that she intended to kill herself. She was calling everyone she knew. By now she had fifty of them, but she needed thirty or forty more, to be on the safe side.
At once Horselover Fat leaped to the conclusion that this was her way of asking for help. It had been Fat's delusion for years that he could help people. His psychiatrist once told him that to get well he would have to do two things- : Get off dope (which he hadn't done) and to stop trying to help people (he still tried to help people).
During this opening narrative, a silent image of Gloria on the telephone appears suddenly on a video monitor, and then disappears in a slow fade.
Phil (recorded voice-off): He had no sleeping pills of any sort. He never did any sleeping pills. He did uppers. So giving Gloria sleeping pills by which she could kill herself was beyond his power. He wouldn't have done it if he could. As a matter of fact he had no Nembutals.
At Fat's first live speech, the lights come on abruptly to illuminate the two musicians. Their live music accompanies Fat's interjection.
Horselover Fat (live on stage; lighting changes to emphasize that the "real" Fat is speaking for the first time): I have ten.
Phil (recorded voice-off): That's when Fat began to go nuts.
At the time he didn't know it, but he had been drawn into an unspeakable psychological game. What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
I'm by profession a science fiction writer. I deal in fantasies. My life is a fantasy. Nevertheless, Gloria Knudsen lies in a box in Modesto, California. Everything happens to my friend Horselover Fat. He's the one who got zapped, one night in 1974, with a pink laser light that communicated to him incredible things.
So Fat started keeping a journal, an "exegesis" he called it. His encounter with God was all there on the pages in his own handwriting... Fat's handwriting, not God's.
- to be continued