NOTE FROM RICHARD FOREMAN
When I began rehearsing, I thought "The Gods Are Pounding My Head" would be totally metaphysical in its orientation. But as rehearsals continued, I found echoes of the real world of 2004 creeping into many of my directorial choices. So be it.
Nevertheless, this very - to my mind - elegiac play does deliniate my own philosophical dilemma. I come from a tradition of Western culture in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and "cathedral-like" structure of the highly educated and articulate personality - a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.
And such multi-faceted evolved personalities did not hesitate - especially during the final period of "Romanticism-Modernism" - to cut down, like lumberjacks, large forests of previous achievement in order to heroically stake new claim to the ancient inherited land - this was the ploy of the avant-garde.
But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self - evolving under the pressure of imformation overload and the technology of the "instantly available." A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance - as wee all become "pancake" people" - spread wise and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.
Will this produce a new kind of enlightnement of "super-consciousness"? Sometimes I am seduced by those proclaiming so - and sometimes I shirk back in horror at a world that seems to have lost the thick and multi-textured density of deeply evolved personality.
This play speaks to that anguish. The lumberjacks suffer, in secret, from a broken heart - which may indeed be the heart of the world. But, at the end, hope still springs eternal...
