Yeah, I'll have it on your desk by five 'oclock EST.
Anyway, basically, the concept of the show is that everything everyone has ever believed about the Afterlife is true, but it's all true at the same time. In the stage directions I describe the Afterall as:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Afterall Act I Scene I
...a hodgepodge of statues, Greek and Egyptian stonework, books, paintings, rusted gears, car parts and tattered flags. It looks like some inter-dimensional mish-mash halfway between the world’s greatest antique fair and a universal garbage dump.
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So the world is kind of an amalgamation of multiple beliefs and time-periods.
Basically this scene introduces Redmond as the primary protagonist of the story, and
sorta introduces two of the main secondary characters. The play follows him as he journeys through the nine kingdoms of the dead in an attempt to reach the gates of judgment. The whole time he's followed by a character called "The Stranger" who never speaks and only sings, and it's implied that he's somehow in control of what's going on (or at least manipulating things behind the scenes), as he's introduced seated and masked upon a throne, and keeps showing up disguised as different people (there's a motif all throughout the first act of things and people being unmasked). The story kinda loosely follows
Dante's Inferno and makes reference to
Wizard of Oz,
Peter Pan, and
Alice in Wonderland multiple times. Ethan and Sam show up again as Redmond's companions, except they kinda
aren't they just look like Sam and Ethan and share some of their personality traits. Sam is a famous historical crusader from the fourteenth century named Roland and Ethan turns out to be the Norse god Odin. Redmond also runs into characters from Greek and Egyptian mythology (Prominently Cassandra from the Illiad and Anubis the Egyptian god of the dead). The act one ends with a pretty big reveal, and act two is more of how Redmond deals with the fallout from that.
Right now I think the themes of the story seem to revolve around belief, the nature of reality, how I feel people should live their lives, and what I think the purpose of stories is etc. but as I've only just now finished the first draft, I think I need some time to let the themes congeal in my head before I can really speak definitively on that.
Mainly this whole thing was just an excuse to have a scene where a giant flying mechanical titan fights an army of demons lead by an archangel.