The World of the Play

The World of the Play

Abduction's fictional world of Pluto, Pennsylvania pulls inspiration from the real-life Mars, Pennsylvania. In keeping with the space travel and extraterrestrial theme that Abduction brings us, production dramaturg Frederick Miller encouraged the cast and crew to envision the fictional town of Pluto as a real place that must be traveled to in order to understand it!

A useful tool in navigating the realm of script analysis is theatre scholar Elinor Fuchs' foundational essay, EF's Visit to a Small Planet. In the early 1990s, Fuchs developed her process in her classroom at the Yale School of Drama. Since then, Visit to a Small Planet has become a foundational dramaturgical text for theatre artists to analyze the "world of the play" - or in Abduction's case - Pluto! In her essay, Fuchs asks us to consider each play (or musical text) as a fictional planet that we must "visit." Each planet has its own physical and social "world", with its own set of patterns, rules, and functions.

Utilize the subpages to your left to learn more about the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania before diving into the rich history of Western PA, Butler County, and our final destination - Mars, PA!