Strange Theater

My ideas certainly exceed the ability to produce them within the time frame: that is, within the alottment of a natural lifetime. Many of these ideas have fallen into the category of martyrologies. To these I have devoted most of my prose. But I have also been an enthusiast of science fiction and fantasy. Not particularly as it is being done these days, but in a former era, science fiction along the lines of the original Star Trek and the Marvel comic books of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, specifically The Fantastic Four; and the fantasy of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the films of Ray Harryhausen.

Since I have been a stickler for well-wrought prose, developing these stories in novels has proven to be time consuming. Therefore, I struck upon the idea of developing them as scripts. The screenplay or play format requires extreme economy of style. They contain only the salient elements necessary for storytelling. Despite the fact that dramaturgic literary efforts do not have much remunative future, I thought that with a minumum of time I could at least record the stories, with the possibility of greater development later.

There was a type of presentation of plays which was acceptable, it seemed to me; the plays we read in school, in English or Literature class: the plays of ancient Greek theater and even the productions of modern playwrights like Arthur Miller. I developed a few using the style employed by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore in their popular series of Greek tragedies for the University of Chicago Press in the 1950s.