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I picked up a Dylan Thomas film-script in a used bookstore in the fall of 2008, and was really grabbed by it. My work for All Good Men began with the development of that film script to use as the root for an evening of dance/theater. After reading everything I could by Dylan (LOC, yeah you know me) I started typing up the script. My task was to take a 150+ scene film-script and translate it into something that could work on a stage, with dance.

The Doctor and the Devils is centrally concerned with the interaction between a medical professor/doctor and a group of people who dug up bodies to sell to the doctor for use in dissection in the academy. All of the characters are very complex, and the language is wonderful. I needed to simplify the plot, cut characters, and cut scene locations to make it viable on a stage. In performance it was 23 scenes (including eighteen scenes to recorded script, and five scenes to music.) Part of the process was figuring out where the dances would occur, and why. Dance is a very in-efficient replacement for language, but for handling the ineffable, its far more efficient than words. The dances expand and personalize the issues raised by the text in a way that simple theater couldn’t. For me the core of the script is about our interaction on slippery moral slopes; how we all jostle and push each other up and down moral slopes.

To read more about All Good Men, click here.  To see another excerpt, click here.