Norton Street Was Already Written
One of the interesting things about working with Norton Street right now is that I’m not actually writing it right now. The play was written more than fifty years ago.
The characters already exist. The scenes already exist. The dialogue already exists. What I’m doing now with the play is something quite different. It’s become a musical comedy.
Over the years, professional actors and actresses and directors and producers have come through the community, but none of them took the Norton Street Challenge, so now with the new technology, I’m making it happen on my own.
I have no theater, no director, no actors, no musicians, no stage hands, no script doctor. It’s just me, rearranging my script so it’s recognized by Suno and my intentions are there.
I’m lifting scenes from the script and running them through a variety of AI music, along with definite side commands, scripted actions and other alterations, and after a while, it became a staged musical with so far two scenes completed.
I started with Act One scene 2 rather than scene 1, saving the first scene for a time when I’ve done a few of these and understand more about how it works. Then I do scene 1, with the most possible effect.
In a sense, this isn’t a writing project at all. It’s an exploration. The script itself is fixed. The experiment lies in discovering how many different forms the same material can take.
So tonight, I took one of the scenes and prepared it for Suno. This particular scene features just two characters: Bornless and Mike.
Bornless is having what can only be described as a cosmic emergency. Reality is falling apart. Time is collapsing. Everything is expanding and contracting simultaneously. Creation itself appears to be restarting.
Mike, meanwhile, remains completely calm.
No matter what Bornless says, Mike simply accepts it.
“The universe is alive. Everything is everything else.”
“Yes. You noticed.”
“Everything is crumbling.”
“Yes.”
“I’m dying again.”
“Yes.”
The more agitated Bornless becomes, the calmer Mike appears.
It’s a wonderful dramatic structure because it works on several levels at once. It’s funny. It’s unsettling. It’s philosophical. Sometimes it’s all three at the same time.
What fascinates me is seeing how different musical and theatrical styles interpret the same scene. A psychedelic version feels one way. A Broadway version feels another.
A spoken-word version becomes something else entirely. A radio-drama treatment reveals aspects that might otherwise remain hidden. The text itself doesn’t change. The interpretation changes.
This is actually very similar to traditional theater. Give the same script to ten directors and you’ll likely get ten different productions. Give it to ten different casts and you’ll get ten more.
What artificial intelligence allows us to do is conduct those experiments rapidly. Instead of mounting ten productions over ten years, we can hear dozens of interpretations in a single evening.
The script becomes a kind of laboratory specimen. Every style reveals something. Some reveal the comedy. Some reveal the terror. Some reveal the absurdity. Some reveal the humanity hidden underneath.
What I’ve discovered is that Norton Street may be particularly suited to this process because it wasn’t written as song lyrics. It was written as a play.
The characters have continuity. They know who they are. Their conversations build upon one another. Their concerns persist from scene to scene.
In other words, the foundation is already there. The hard work was completed long ago.
Now the question becomes: What happens when the same scene is performed as a jazz piece? What happens when it’s treated as a radio broadcast? What happens when it’s filtered through psychedelic rock, ambient theater, Broadway show tunes, or some style that nobody would have expected?
The answers can be surprising. Sometimes the style that seems completely wrong turns out to be exactly right. What I’ve learned from these experiments is that I’m not creating the play. I’m rediscovering it.
Every new rendition shines a different light on material that has been sitting quietly on the page for years. The play already exists. The exploration is just beginning.
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Here’s the Bardo bus! Hop on quick or lose it!
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See You At The Top!!!
gorby