Posing As People: Three Stories, Three Plays

Science fiction is rare in theatrical form, but with Posing As People, three unforgettable sci-fi stories by Orson Scott Card are adapted into powerful stage plays by three different writers. “Clap Hands and Sing” shows us a lonely—but rich and powerful—old man who has only one wish before he dies: To go back in time and take an opportunity for love that he once let slip by. But what will it do to the young girl who used to love him? “Lifeloop” pretends to be reality TV twenty-four hours a day. In fact, they’re really actors. But when your character is you, without any break, how exactly do you have a “real” life? And how can a fellow actor tell you that he loves you, when that’s what the script also calls for him to say? “Sepulchre of Songs” is about a heartbreakingly lovely girl who lost her arms and legs many years ago, and now yearns to be free, not just of the rest home where she lives, but of her body. So is the alien being who wants to trade places with her real or the product of her own imagination? And can her therapist’s growing love for her keep her from fleeing—either into space or the dark recesses of her own mind? Read by Eric Artell, Scott Brick, Emily Janice Card, Sara Ellis, Kirby Heybourne, Kelly Lohman, Stefan Rudnicki, Lara Schwartzberg, and Victoria Von Roth, the original cast of the stage production, September 21, 2004 at the Whitefire Theatre Los Angeles directed by Orson Scott Card.