Posthuman Blues

Here's the official blog of Canadian actress Kris Lee McBride, who's set to play the lead role in "Doing Time," my debut cyberpunk women-in-prison play for Semaphore Theatre. I'll consider my job a success if I can give Kris and her colleagues something authentically interesting to say and do -- not as easy to pull off in 2007 as in the mid-90s, when I wrote the short-story* upon which "Doing Time" is loosely based.





Modern audiences have seen "The Matrix." They're hip to cyberpunk's principal literary devices: virtual reality, Gibsonian mind-machine interfaces and, to a lesser degree, Kurzweilian mind-uploading. So I don't expect to wow theater-goers with extended discussions about the ethical ramifications of, say, hooking an inmate's brain up to a VR in order to render her amnesiac and make her think thousands of years have passed when, in truth, only seconds have elapsed . . . except, in a vaguely embarrassing way, I do. (After all, how many existential science fiction plays have you seen?)

(Actually, an idea just came to me. The audience will first meet Kris as she thumbs listlessly through a paperback copy of Philip K. Dick's "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch." Somebody will get it.)

*To be found in the mercifully out-of-print collection "Illumined Black."