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Recently, I saw a play titled 'Arabian Night', by Silver Blue productions at the Alliance Francaise. The play unravels itself through five monologues, acted out by five people, sequentially yet simultaneously.
Each monologue represents five threads in the story. They are all part of the same story, progressing in their own line of existence. So each actor makes the mind follow the thread he or she owns, till their quanta of time expires and the mind has to stack it and shift to the next thread as it starts up from where it left off.
The threads do intertwine and the characters do interact. The playwright has nicely used time slice allocation to each thread for conveying this. When there is no interaction, each thread gets a large time slice, and takes me forward a large step through its story. When they are close together and are facing each other, the time slices get smaller, and smaller. Though the characters do talk to each other at these close encounters, the threads never completely lose their story teller posture. And at these times the mind goes to overdrive shifting between the threads, stacking and retrieving contexts that differ only minutely at present.
And there were very few props. So the entire setting is left to your imagination, even the physical separation or closeness between the characters and dimensions of the world in which they exist. I liked to be reminded that I used to like books without pictures better, when I was a kid.
One no-relation phrase that improbability drive brought into my mind as a result of this whole episode was the title of the final year project one of my seniors did, "communicating sequential processes."
:-)
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