As much as I would love to politicize the Twilight Zone, I will resist enjoyment and resign myself to an objective analysis. Objectively speaking: Twilight Zone is REALLY political. In the same way that Ibsen, expressionism, and early American novelists (I'm thinking Melville, Poe) were political. Man v. The Fucking Machine, baby!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_at_20%2C000_Feet
Follow that link to find a significantly better critique of the American Dream than Arthur Miller's. Same with this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Stop_at_Willoughby
That's not to knock Miller, exactly. I just think he puts a tragic energy on stage that does very little to help anyone. The biting irony of TZ is something that sticks. It provides just as much justifiable angst, but proposes that it can be expressed in a world still good enough for mystery.
I cited these two episodes because they're about the overworked rube, sold on the Dream: the Alienated. I believe this represents both the audience and subject matter of my own work, which is the spiritual purgation of audience and subject. The audience is anyone who happens to be around who has not experienced this catharsis but is working towards it through the material. My performers and myself are the audience in this sense.
And here I would propose that my work is the re-establishment of the fourth wall, but with the audience on the inside. I then apply the art of horror as a tool toward some futile end, like taking back the human soul.
I don't know; I'm getting tired. We'll return to all this, soon.
FRANCO
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This establishes what we all already knew in our deepeset hearts:
Twlight Zone is perhaps one of the five finest moments in dramatic history.
(Others: First performance of "Ubu Roi", The birth of Jack Smith, this one time people had sex instead of making theater, Beckett writing "Happy Days" [it's not his best, but I hear he really had a ball writing it, so that's pretty cool])
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