J.T. by A Demon Sheen
"Jeremiah's Tuesday" is a monodrama written and directed by Stefan Mrowinski and performed by Steven Kennedy, with sound and atmospheres created by myself.
First drafted in Polish in 1990, Jeremiah's Tueday was translated to English in 1997 by Robert Reisner and published in "The World of Monodrama - Stefan Mrowinski" in 2007. Early in 2011, Mrowinski cast Steven Kennedy (after the two had worked together on Leonard Radic's "The Revengers Comedy"), and in 2012 the two redrafted the work, updating the monodrama for a post-9/11 post-globalisation Australian audience. I was brought in to create soundscapes for the piece, after having worked on the atmospheres and music for "Tinkertown", a play Kennedy had starred in previously.
As pretty much all of the focus was going to be on the lone man ranting onstage, my soundscapes were almost entirely emotive, with deep resonances, subtle dissonances, and environmental cues - rain, waves, dripping, breath, blood, etc - to balance the onslaught of words. The lone character, Jeremiah, sees himself as a prophet and savior - a Caligula, a Nero, a Stalin, a Hitler - but everything the character tells us may actually be the product of his diseased imagination. Suitably, the soundscape is almost claustrophobic: heavy, subconcious, subtle, almost internal. It was designed not to be heard, as such, but just to underpin the intensity of the monodrama, highlight the surreality of the performance, and to unsettle the audience, almost invisibly.
Out of the assorted pieces I created for the play, three main pieces were used: one piece to be used before the show began, to prepare the audience for discomfort and surreality (breath, odd tones, cut up sounds, dissonance); one piece to accompany Kennedy onstage (mainly low tones, the sound of rain, and waves, but other small sounds as well); and one final climax (attacking dogs, rising into distortion). For this release, I have bled all three pieces together as one long piece. This is music that was never meant to be "heard", so please, just absorb it instead, in all its minimalistic glory.
