NO SECOND ACTS Interview: Jeff Lewonczyk (“Shit the Future Says,” Bill A)

My one-act play provides a definitive American experience by demonstrating yet again that the past of the future is the present. We’re too busy with the what’s-happening-now to remember the what-happened-then or predict the what-happens-next, and so we tend to be wrong about all three. America! (Or, to be fair, “Humanity!” though when you’re a blinkered American like me, the two are pretty much synonymous.)

I am proud to be an American because I’m fabulously wealthy in comparison to the majority of the earth’s citizens, yet I haven’t used that power to create a vast underground lair and hire thousands of minions to carry out my plan to enslave all of humankind and rebuild the world as a shrine to my own power... yet.

For me the defining moment in American history is the part where they signed the piece of paper.

True or False: Theater will save America. True. First of all, my play, which takes place in the future, involves America being saved, and, since the play exists in the medium of theater, America would never have been saved if the play had never been written. So, one point for theater. Secondly, when we finally have that horrible global thing when there’s no more electricity left and we go back to being barbaric savages, theater will be the only art form we have left, since all it requires is someone to be somewhere doing something so someone else can watch, and there will still be a fair amount of that going around, even if there are only a few hundred people left. And the shared discourse such a medium provides will rebuild society from scratch. As a person who writes about the future, I can certify that this is one hundred percent factual. So that’s Theater: Two, Everything Else: Nothing. Theater wins!