Scotto Moore

[Cain]

Found this interesting news article about Moore here:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/theater/373004_fanfare01.html


Somehow, on its low-ceilinged loft stage on Capitol Hill, the Annex Theatre will squeeze an infinitely tall high-rise.

While its topmost floors are occupied by a corporate management of interdimensional archangels, a divine superhero sits in the lobby suffering a crisis of faith. Here, an amnesiac named Andrea Change seeks her true identity, a quest that will threaten to unravel the fabric of creation.

Is this Dante's Purgatory, perhaps? No, it's a science-fiction mystery from the fevered mind of Seattle writer Scotto Moore, whose punctuation-defying "interlace [falling star]" has its world premiere this weekend.

"I definitely have an absurdist streak in me," Moore admits, in a typically soft-spoken understatement. After all, this is the guy whose last staged work was an adaptation of the faux religious tract "Principia Discordia," in which Malaclypse the Younger reveals the ways of Eris, Goddess of Chaos and Confusion.

He's the scribe behind the popular Internet video series "Cherub, the Vampire with Bunny Slippers," a parody of the cult television show "Angel." He's also working on a set of stories about the floating head of Timothy Leary.

Despite Moore's delight in the outlandish, his current play, much like most of his other work, really comes out of some serious spiritual thinking about the nature and existence of God.

Growing up in Iowa, Moore was raised in the Lutheran Missouri Synod, a moderately conservative and scripture-focused Christian denomination. Attending a Lutheran school, he spent the first hour of every day studying the Bible, a religious devotion he maintained through his teenage years.

But he also was reading the science fiction of writers like Philip K. Dick, whose dark and dystopian stories often blended religious tropes into his visions of the future. He also counts authors Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge and William Gibson as influences.

Later, stumbling away from the faith of his youth, Moore discovered the writings of the Gnostics, an early array of Christian sects later deemed heretical. The mystical ideas of these forgotten gospels echoed the science fiction he had come to adore, with its conception of mysterious gods, a divine spark waiting to be free and demiurges that police the outer realm of the heavens.

Moore explained that "interlace," for all of its oddity, is really a riff on the Gnostic idea of an unknown God that looks at the material plane and finds it lacking.

At the heart of the play is Moore's own wrestling with issues of faith, ones spurred by "minor tragedies that cause you to question things." When his mother married a Catholic man, for example, he couldn't reconcile which half of the family was going to heaven.

In adulthood, Moore still looks for his niche. "Interlace" was originally a novel, reworked for the small stage. He also sings with the Elegant Catastrophe Singers, an alternative music a cappella group he has performed with for the past 10 years.

Now an agnostic, Moore admits to some nostalgia for the comfort of certainty in belief he knew in his youth. Which is why, in large measure, his play is a thinly veiled search for the divine, and expresses the discomfort of finding it so close.

[scotto2317]

hey yeah, come see my play!

details:  http://www.annextheatre.org/shows/interlace/

"interlace [falling star]" delivers "a cheerful blend of horror and humor, fueled by a heady mixture of future shock and super-heroics. Gotta say this about Annex: For a company that just reached the advanced age of 21, it's still unafraid to tackle weird material and provocative ideas."
– John Longenbaugh, Seattle Weekly

"This trippy, smart, new sci-fi fantasy...uses futuristic techno-speak cleverly, and often keeps you guessing."
– Seattle Times

In this "bent science-fiction vision of the godly plane", the "characters joust with jaded irreverence and are skeptical of their own tropes." The show is "zany fun...as if Joseph Campbell wrote an episode of Red Dwarf."
– Seattle Post-Intelligencer

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

How is it that you have only posted twice in FOUR YEARS? <Mind boggles>

[LMNO]

Still, it only goes to show... They always come back.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

What I wanna know is his total time logged in.

OH SHIT I found it... 7 minutes! 7 minutes and 2 posts in 4 YEARS! I am oddly impressed by this.