Two things just within the first ten pages of the book are relevant to The Honest-to-God True Story of the Atheist
First: Medicine Shows. Medicine Shows were a precursor to vaudeville in which companies would travel around doing sketch comedy and songs to help hawk alcohol based remedies and... um... morphine. ... Atheist is a medicine show on two fronts, selling both black-market viagra and the very concept of "belief" as cures to what ails ya. (If you're interested, here be some amazing pictures of medicine show performers including-- consider yourself warned if such things offend you-- a blackface artist)
Second: The idea of variety . Vaudeville shows were first and foremost variety shows. Or, as Trav puts it:
Over the course of a couple of hours the vaudeville audience might encounter singers, comedians, musicians, dancers, trained animals, female-impersonators, acrobats, magicians, hypnotists, jugglers, contortionists, mind readers, and a wide variety of strange, uncategorizable performers usually lumped into the category of "nuts".
In ...Atheist the audience witnesses a variety show except the variety is all kept within the confines of the play itself. The variety is in the genres and rules that the play constantly adjusts (one moment it's a goofy musical, the next it's a serious act of story telling, there's a magic trick that goes awry etc.)
One of my main jobs as director on this thing to help give the play enough concreteness that it's not bewildering to the performers and audience, and maybe this idea of a succession of variety acts (that's still always the same performers telling the same story! yikes!!) is a helpful way of doing that.
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