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Ghost in the Machine

Ghost in the Machine
Your Price: $18.95 CDN
Last Copy!
Author: David Gilman
Publisher: Applause Books
Format: Softcover
# of Pages: 78
Pub. Date: 1996
ISBN-10: 1557832285
ISBN-13: 9781557832283
Cast Size: 2 female, 4 male

About the Play:

Ghost in the Machine is a full-length drama by David Gilman. The six-character play is a contemporary brain twister about American academics that begins with a common situation – that of a missing fifty dollar bill – and spins it into intriguing questions of probability, chance and the complexities of musical composition: illusion and reality.

Ghost in the Machine begins with one of those petty occurrences that can turn a rational person into a fixated nut case: the loss of a $50 bill. Matt is a musicologist who has been studying the work of a young multicultural composer of electronic music, Minh Schumann. With the help of his game theorist girlfriend Kim, Matt has discovered a randomly generated sequence in a Schumann composition that corresponds note for note to the melody of the 15th century chorale A Mighty Fortress. Matt and Kim are at Harvard to deliver a paper on this discovery and are staying as houseguests with Matt's old friend Nancy and her professor husband, Wes. When Wes discovers $50 is missing from his wallet, he decides that Kim has stolen it and responds in a way that begins a series of moves and responses that resemble a chess-like zero-sum game. The response to Matt's Harvard presentation similarly takes the form of a hostile confrontation: the chorale melody could only appear in a random sequence through fraud, the establishment decides. The question is, is it Schumann, Matt or Kim who is to be held responsible and punished?

Ghost in the Machine was first performed in 1993 at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, received its New York premiere in 1994 at The Perry Street Theater in Greenwich Village, and its West Coast premiere in 1995 at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California. Since then the play has been successfully staged at several professional theatres.

Cast: 2 female, 4 male

What people say:

"A devilishly clever puzzler of a comedy... it traps us in a web of uncertainty till we begin to second guess with the characters." — New York Newsday

"...a vastly entertaining whodunit, a chess game with human pieces, that does not limit itself... Gilman teases us with philosophical questions on the nature of reality." — Los Angeles Times

"A tight theatrical puzzle, the play echoes both the menacing personal relationships at the center of Harold Pinter's work and complex mathematical equations that animate Tom Stoppard... but it is also very much of its own thing." — The Chicago Sun-Times

About the Playwright:

David Gilman is an English novelist and award-winning screenwriter, who has written for successful long-running series like A Touch of Frost and Dalziel and Pascoe. He has lived and travelled the world performing an impressive variety of jobs – from firefighter to professional photographer, from soldier in the Parachute Regiment's Reconnaissance Platoon to a Marketing Manager for an international publisher. He lives in Devon, England.