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The problem of staging science Action, according to Ralph Willingham's Science Fiction and the Theatre (1994), is two-fold. First, the special effects necessary for the majority of sf narratives cannot be achieved on the stage as they might be on film or television (although, in light of technological advances since Willingham's work, this particular critique might be revisited). Second, Willingham hypothesizes that theatre artists share a popular misconception of sf as only escapist entertainment: 'gadget- and adventure-oriented fluff' (Willingham 1994: 3-4). Perhaps Willingham is right, and theatre artists as a whole dismiss sf as a genre for its technological preoccupations, leading to the dearth of sf plays, and sf dramatic criticism. Willingham's work remains the only monograph specifically dedicated to sf plays.
Playwright Jordan Harrison, in the postscript to his 2015 play Marjorie Prime, echoes some of Willingham's sentiments. The play, which premiered in Los Angeles's Mark Taper Forum in 2014 and received its New York premiere at Playwrights Horizons in late 2015, follows a family conflict in an unspecified near-future. Married couple Tess and Jon struggle to care for Tess's 85-yearold mother Marjorie, who is slowly losing her memory to a form of dementia, with the help of a new technological innovation: Primes. Despite its critical and audience reception as a work of sf, Harrison himself does not consider his play to be science fiction: 'While the play rests on a technology more advanced than what we're accustomed to, I don't think of it as science fiction. The less the audience is put in mind of how the technology works, the better' (Harrison 2016). Harrison's attitude toward sf demonstrates a misunderstanding of the critical possibilities of sf on the part of theatre artists, particularly how they can be explored and performed onstage. Through particular sf techniques, namely cognitive estrangement, Harrison's play exemplifies the possibilities of sf plays: how they can help us understand what it means to be human in the present and how that meaning could change in the future. For Willingham, the defining factor of an sf play is its 'novum', a concept he draws from Darko Suvin. The novum, an innovation or novelty, must be integral to the narrative of the plot in order to be considered sf (Willingham 1994: 11)....