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Stranger Things Have Happened Here focuses on a group of people who don't strictly abide to a moral code: they're not bad people, they just don't always make the right decisions. This did present to us a conundrum: if everyone in this play is flawed, this means that everyone is to some degree unlikeable. There was originally the idea of having one person of this motley crew be the moral compass to the rest of them, but we found that it defeated a lot of what we were striving for. There never really is someone who dispenses good advice like candy; when we point others towards a right direction, what we really are doing is pointing them towards what we think is the right direction. Having a group of people struggle towards incongruent aims seemed a better alternative than having them be led by their nose to an eventual epoch by a moral figure we had ordained. In the end, we thought it best to let these characters be people. -- We have tried to take the real problems people face and exaggerate them to a degree which is slightly comical, partly because we didn't want to depress the audience and partly because we didn't want to depress ourselves. The possibilities that lie just beyond the yardstick of graduation already scare us, and imbuing the script with too much realism would have been just a little too bleak for us all. By magnifying the hardships on a comically-heightened pedestal, we hope to shed some light on the folly without presenting an image which is too stark or horrifying, the way life sometimes is. The issues we look at vary - we try to look at discontented marriages as well as the brittleness of friendship, and we try to comprehend the tumultuous path of adulthood taken by those who aren't necessarily ready for what they have been thrust into - but we don't purport to offer a tidy solution. We don't think the perfect conclusion exists in the yarn of life: to try to locate one would necessarily involve unravelling it; and as good as we are, we can't perform the impossible. |
