You are looking at a pitch-black stage. You cannot see it yet, but Joel Burrows is sitting in a tattered armchair on the set’s left side. Mark Rogers, Katie, and a moose are sitting on a leather couch in the centre. After a moment, the lights suddenly illuminate the space. Joel adjusts his chair and begins speaking.
JOEL
MARK
JOEL
MARK
JOEL
Katie smiles and waves her hand once as a greeting.
KATIE
Hey.
JOEL
MOOSE
BrrGrrrr!!!
JOEL
Right. I should quickly outline the plot, you’re absolutely right. At the start of A Christmas Special, Katie here is having a rough-as-guts summer. Her mum has checked out, she’s working multiple jobs, and for some reason, her younger sister, Alice, claims that she’s a New York cop named John. Katie summarises her predicament on the second page when she says:
KATIE
It’s hard enough, hard enough, packing lunch for a six year old, let alone packing lunch for a John?
JOEL
Nevertheless, her life then gets even worse when one of her jobs – she’s a mall elf – orders in this real live moose. This is a terrible idea. And not just because the mall should have ordered a reindeer or a life-size cut-out instead. You see, this moose is no ordinary moose. The day of its debut, it kills almost everyone in the town, destroys the entire hospital, and traps Katie with three other people in the apocalyptic wasteland it’s created.
I know right? It just, really ramps up there in that last sentence, doesn’t it? But anyway, I’m really proud of this play. I think it’s funny, it has great characters, and it’s shaping up to be an engaging romp. However, since the coronavirus happened, I’ve noticed that some parts that I wrote ages ago well, they feel different. I’ve realised that what The Moose symbolises has maybe shifted.
But before we deep dive into all that, Mark, have you felt like your writing has changed, or the meaning of your play has changed, since COVID-19 became a thing? Has the coronavirus impacted how you’re writing up Superheroes?
MARK
Yeah, I think it kind of depends.
JOEL
Huh. So it has, yet it somehow hasn’t? What do ya mean?
MARK
Because I guess there’s a couple of different modes of writing, right? There is stuff which is more generative, where I’m in the imaginative space of the characters I guess, or the world of it. And I’m kind of just following my nose a little bit. And that might be generating new scenes, or I might have an instinct of like, “Okay, I’m going to write a scene.”
JOEL
Right.
MARK
Know what I mean? There’s those two different writing brains for me. The more analytical one and a generative one. And I think that the analytical one is where I could foresee, or imagine, being more affected by the external context of it all.
JOEL
Oh, okay. You’ve been so inside Superheroes, just writing scenes for it, that you haven’t analysed it through a COVID-19 lens. It hasn’t affected your play’s alterations so far, but that could change if you switched gears.
MARK
JOEL
Hmm, that’s really interesting. Because I’m in the analytical mode right now. Well, I’m for sure going to go back, generate some more scenes for this play, but I needed to take a step back before I do so.
MOOSE
BrrGrrrr!
JOEL
Right, you’re absolutely right, let’s talk symbolism.
When I started writing this play two years ago, The Moose wasn’t an alien or a supernatural being. And it still isn’t. It’s meant to be a force that symbolises life-changing disasters, in all of their forms. Katie is even asked, at the end of the play, how she survived this killer moose. So on page 69 she goes:
Katie stands up and walks into the centre of the stage.
KATIE
Look Janet. If you’re looking for a magic bullet or a great quote you’re, you’re going to have to ask somebody else. My answer is like how people say the secret to their six pack is a good diet. My answer is routine. It’s just scheduling, plain and simple.
What? Eat your breakfast at the same time, Janet. It’ll amaze you. My grandmother, she survived the Blitz, did you know that? My grandfather, he survived a drought. They. Those things. I often wonder how different those things are from living with a moose.
JOEL
Thanks Katie.
Katie flicks Joel a little thumbs-up as she runs to sit down.
JOEL
Well, now that I’m living in a pandemic, I’m not sure how true this thesis actually is, but that isn’t the point. The point is that The Moose is meant to represent the big, tragic events that can impact our day-to-day lives.
However, The Moose now has some very big COVID-19 energy. It goes through Port Benji like a disease and physically isolates everyone still there from the rest of the world, trapping them in the town. This animal even overwhelms the local hospital and destroys it. And when Katie asks her comrades on page 31:
KATIE
What do you both think our routine’s gonna be?
JOEL
It just feels a little bit different now. Yeah, if someone was to watch this play tomorrow, they may leave thinking it was in partly written in response to the crisis.
And, well, I’m just not sure if that’s something I want. I’m unsure if I should grow this play into a work that’s deliberate COVID commentary, or if I should prune these references back. Because at the moment, it just feels messy, like it’s out of control and— and— I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.
Now Mark, it may be a tad obvious that I’m at a bit of a loss here, so I was wondering if you could help me out a bit. I’m like— Yeah, I’m not expecting for you to solve this problem or tell me what to do with my story, but I’d be really grateful for some advice anyway, you know. Are there any questions I could ask myself, or things that I could reflect on? How can I come to a decision about whether or not The Moose should be a COVID-19 metaphor?
MARK
I think the questions that you should be asking yourself are, “What do I want to say with this work?” You know, or, “What is this work trying to do to its audience? What’s its argument?”
JOEL
Right.
MARK
“What’s its compass? What’s it heading towards?”
JOEL
Right.
MARK
In a way, this coronavirus moment maybe gives you an opportunity to think about what the compass of the work is.
JOEL
Yeah, I think— I think that the coronavirus actually kind of overwhelmed me here and made my compass go haywire. And I actually reckon I got disorientated on a bunch of different fronts – COVID put almost everything into disarray. I think like most people, the uncertainty, the isolation, and the scope of this problem really messed with my wellbeing. And it still does sometimes. So, when I started thinking about the work, amidst this chaos, I didn’t know where I wanted it to sit. It just felt so, big. It felt like it had to be all or nothing, a Rona play or a play that ignores it entirely.
But when you asked me those questions, I had this gut feeling? As I said earlier, The Moose is meant to represent all big, bad, life-changing events. I don’t want to change that. But that being said, the coronavirus is a big, bad, life-changing event so, to a certain degree, The Moose now has to symbolise the coronavirus. Alright, I just have to make it abundantly clear to the audience that, yes, The Moose is a COVID metaphor, but that’s not all it is. The Moose is a flood. The Moose is a car crash. The Moose is a global financial crisis.
MOOSE
BrrrGGrrr!
JOEL
And I think that I can sprinkle some metaphors throughout this work that communicate this point. Maybe, in one scene, The Moose smashes through the supermarket stealing all of the toilet paper. But a few scenes later, The Moose has eaten and destroyed most of the crops on the outskirts of town, making the soil go barren.
MARK
Yeah, I think that’s really interesting Joel. That sounds great.
JOEL
Yeah?
MARK
The game for you is to shift us around what we think The Moose is enough that we never really land on one: it gets to be all of them. Do you know what I mean?
JOEL
Mmm. Yeah.
MARK
Yeah.
JOEL
Well uh, thanks Mark. That was— I didn’t expect to like, actually leave this chat with a plan, so I’m kind of just reeling here, thanks. Um, I’d also like to thank Katie and The Moose for just everything. This event literally couldn’t have happened without them.
MOOSE
BrrGrr!!
Katie does the peace sign as she gets out her phone, realises that would be rude, and quickly puts it back in her pocket.
JOEL
But yeah, unfortunately, we’ve just about ran out the clock here so yeah, so there’s no time for an audience Q&A.
But before we all go, thank you so much for coming to this theatre inside of your mind, I really appreciate it. It was just the best getting to talk you about how COVID has affected my play, and being able to untangle some stuff. And hopefully, I can one day meet you in a real, physical, full capacity, safe theatre. Yeah, hopefully that day can happen quite soon.
Joel, Mark, Katie, and The Moose all stand up. The humans smile, bow in unison, and the whole stage fades back to black.