John Sullivan

When Story Stops, the Leak Begins John Sullivan

When Story Stops, the Leak Begins is the story of accidental pilgrims on a journey through eerie, uncharted territory, having only each other as foils and resources, while they search for the key to their ultimate destination. Along the way, they meet a grifter, an archetypal character and a spooky digital presence, who might possibly be an ally. In Hollywood parlance, this tale could be described as a spiritual adventure story in which Six Characters in Search of an Author jump headlong with no net into a Canterbury Tales style quest across a dreamscape merging scenography from Waiting for Godot with digital shards of Bladerunner in a rowdy and irreverent Voyage to Arcturus.



The key to meaning, style and emotional resonances in When Story Stops, the Leak Begins, is the poem-script, a hybrid form that combines poetic dialogue, a performance script format and a narrator - imbedded in what would normally be called stage directions - who speculates, comments and reports on feelings and thought processes in each character's head. This storytelling format grew from the author's experiences making non-traditional theatre where speech conveys its usual content but also works as a form of gestural action. A series of routines weave through the poems-scripts and serve as armatures for developing character relationships. These routines also animate the pulse and cadences of the text. The dialogue derives from skaz, a Russian literary technique using singular dialect and speech rhythms to reveal motivations, intentions, even reliability as a narrator.