A Note From Writer Mac Rogers

I can’t remember now where I read it, but some years ago my eye was caught by a reference somewhere to the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca – the god of night winds, discord, and obsidian – who entrapped a great crocodile called Cipacti and distorted her body to make the land he walked on. I was not only taken by the phrase “the god of obsidian,” but also by the resonance of the image. There are always people who are ready and willing to build their lives upon the energy and captivity of others. 

God Of Obsidian is a three-part podcast drama based on a play I wrote that my theater company produced in 2017. The entire creative team from that play – director Jordana Williams, producer Sean Williams, my co-performer Rebecca Comtois – have returned alongside our sound designer Bart Fasbender and co-producer Nat Cassidy to bring the story from stage to podcast.

It was the first script I wrote after the 2016 election (Steal The Stars was the second), my first fully thought-out reaction to that calamity. I spent a lot of those months grappling the idea that a person with little or no conscience can lie over and over until the sheer force of repetition and confidence give the lie an ugly facsimile of reality in the minds of the people who hear it. I wanted to write about it, but I needed to smart small, at a level I could wrap my mind around. I needed to start with just two people. 

What happened next was interesting: while God Of Obsidian started off as a political allegory, by a short ways into the writing process I had largely put that out of my mind. The more I wrote Alice and Nathan, the less I wanted them to function as symbols, and the more I wanted their relationship to feel real in its emotional dynamics, even as it was surrounded by a background feeling of sinister magic. 

In reading real life personal accounts of many people who had escaped emotionally manipulative relationships, I noticed one common element that many of the escapees emphasized: You will never get restitution or catharsis, you will never your gaslighting partner to admit they did wrong.  All you can do is leave.  I chose to wrap this character drama in a fairy tale because the extraordinary force of gaslighting often reminds me of a kind of enchantment – an enchantment one can never defeat, only escape.

It doesn’t feel at all strange to bring this 2017 play into audio in the year 2020. The helpless fury that originally sparked it never fully abated, and has, for obvious reasons, recently blazed back into full conflagration. It’s the angriest I’ve ever been writing a script, but I hope there’s some compassion and hope in there as well. I hope it’s also a story about how you can always hold onto a part of yourself, how even all alone and buckling under lies, you can still make fire.