Executive

Abstract

Executive is a play, first and foremost, that I wrote to grapple with moral issues both eternal and contemporary. What is the nature of right action? Do ends justify means? Is killing ever permissible? These questions, and more, are the ones I attempt to examine in this thesis project you have before you. The play is about many things. It’s about, as I mentioned moral issues, but it’s also about political and emotional ones. The main character, Geoffrey, is an autobiographical vessel; many of the elements of this work form a pastiche of my life. Like Geoffrey, I too struggle with fears about our contemporary political situation—with its absurdity, its hatred, and its uncertainty—as well as fears over the quotidian; I fear being dead, I fear being forgotten, and I fear being, ultimately, unimportant. As I struggle with these fears, so too do I make Geoffrey struggle. There is, of course, one important difference between him and me; Geoffrey—in a Twilight Zone-esque twist—is granted the ability to kill the bigoted politicians that plague his well-being and his TV screen with his mind. How these powers are granted are never explained because I did not really care to explain them. What interested me more was what a person—a person very much like myself—would do if given these powers and what would happen as a result of his actions. If that sounds intriguing to you then, hopefully, the play proper will make for a good read. I will offer up no spoilers in this abstract, so you will just have to read the work itself if you would like to know how the play ends. Is our hero victorious? What would victory even mean here? Who knows? All I can say is this; right or wrong, writing the death of a Donald Trump analogue was a fairly cathartic experience.