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Ghost in the Machine
Ghost in the Machine
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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
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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.
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