Introduction

Most writers compose stories with microscopes. I wrote these plays with a telescope. It's impossible for me to think of theatre without a moral center. This work is an effort to expose the worst in us all, to cause us to face up to the enormities of our potential for perfidy, disgrace, and criminal behavior. And these stories portray a human sensibility, idealism, innocence, and the impulse that we do terrible things in the name of what we see as good and right.

The Big Malibu: Why Does The Devil Have All The Good Music? is my Hell. It’s a dead, blood-soaked hotel in the desert of eastern New Mexico, where nothing is silent no matter how quiet it gets. Demons and fiends come from the floor, injuring the audience, critics, and the actors. Yet hope runs like a little girl’s racehorse. What is Hell without hope?

The Big Malibu: Intermezzo is Heaven. A white wasteland where ukuleles hang from the sky and a gonzo journalist can find peace at the bottom of cocktails. Where all are safe, but discontent is only a heartbeat away.

The Big Malibu: Beyond The Sea is earth. It is violent and chaotic. Angels and devils are known by name only, and reality slams like a drum beat in a Roy Orbinson song. Where the most difficult things are honesty and truth.

In these three plays everything is dangerous, everything is tentative, nothing is certain. They can be done separately, but I like them together. Take these plays and read them, produce them, perform them, sit on them, burn them, chew them, or show them to your neighbors and ask them what to do. These plays aren’t heavy on plot, but they are huge on structure and designed to be messed with, investigated and interrupted. With these plays, there is no ontological security. Twist them and snap them. You won’t break the rules. At The Big Malibu, there aren’t any.

Timothy Braun