On Stage: Performing Arts at our Oneonta Campuses by Rachel Frick Cardelle

Democracy, Mars and Line Dancing Come Together in ‘The Alleged Children of Darkness’

If you were to imagine a world 30 years in the future, what would this country look like? Playwright Dan O’Neil did just that in his play, “The Alleged Children of Darkness,” premiering at the SUNY Oneonta theatre February 28 through March 5 and directed by Andrew Kahl. Do you care about democracy? Do you think about issues of “self” versus “other,” and where community comes into that relationship? Do you love line dancing to Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song”? If so, you should make it a point to see the first live production of “The Alleged Children of Darkness.”

Part of the excitement around this show lies in the fact that it has never been seen performed before. The director, writer, actors and crew are workshopping the play as they rehearse, figuring out what works and tweaking (and in some cases rewriting) what needs to be changed. After watching a rehearsal where Dan, Drew, and the actors and crew workshopped the end of the play, I spent an hour interviewing Dan, endeavoring to understand the show from the playwright’s perspective.

After reading the play, I had been struck by some of the parallels between what the play predicts will happen in the future to community and American democracy—and conversations I have heard in our own community—and what has been happening in the federal government over the past month. I began by asking Dan how he would describe the play.

“I would describe [the play] as an attempt at a big blockbuster, dystopian world-building story… it’s always been a popular genre, the dystopian future thing, and I’ve always been drawn to it. It’s pretty hard to do on stage effectively… I started [writing] it in 2018 and I was just like, ‘Let’s see if I can do it.’ … I just started building this 30-years-in-the-future world. I created the astronaut—the Mars man—who could come back and encounter a new world 30 years later. And I also set the conditions for myself, what if it doesn’t get better? I think we make an assumption sometimes that the future will be better. What if the future is legitimately worse? How can we play out the fractures in our institutions, push them 30 years further?”