Inside the musical, the roles of Martin Henry Dawson’s penicillin-for-all co-workers, his family and his patients and families are played by his real life opponents, now all dead and returned to Earth annually to atone for their penicillin sins by MCing, acting and singing in an annual telethon for the stone-hearted.
Stone-hearted is both a metaphor for people like themselves and for all the SBEs, whose heart valves got calcified as the result of their affliction.
The ‘actors’ arrive in the darkening theatre as before, from the rear where the audience enters, in all white clothes and shoes and in obvious whiteface, to the a blast of sound and light with a faint wiff of brimstone.
I should make it clear that all these ‘actors’ are white middle aged middle class men, but often playing the real life parts of people who were often poor, immigrant, young , of color etc.
The ‘actors’ play more than one role - in each scene they might be the voice-over MC stting the scene, actors miming activities in the scene, or actors talk-singing the principal roles.
As before, the ‘actors’ indicate their roles in each new scene by putting on one of four different colored jackets for patient, family, hospital front line worker or hospital administrator.
Now the real actors playing the roles of these pretend white middle aged middle class male ‘actors’ can be of color, young, old, women, men —- it entirely doesn’t matter.
Like all telethons, their is a big result/progress board in the back undating totals of results along with images appropriate to the current scene below - even including facial close-ups from that scene.
The totals aren’t about money - its about hearts softened and minds opened up : think of it as a sort of Faith Telethon.
The actors also work the phones sotto voce, to right, as scene is played out at left.
About three dozen scenes cum songs —— 3.5 to 4.5 minutes per scene : covering the 55 months between mid-October 1940 and mid-April 1945.
Each text of the fictional scene setting, musical score, lyrics, dialogue is followed by a lengthy non-fictional note that details the real actual scene and its intellectual, cultural, emotional background.
A 1500 word fictional scene might have a 25,000 word note : its rather like GBS plays, on steriods !
