The theme is “Living among Strangers: The Lost Meaning of Home.”  My mission, because I have to accept it, is to come up with a premise based on this concept.  My first thought?  A character I developed for a playwriting class last semester.  His name is Granth MkDoil, and he’s an alien trapped in a human body.

Aliens and Northern Ireland together onstage?  Yeah, that’ll work.

But it works so well with the concept.  Granth, an alien traveler, has an accident with a brain swapper and suddenly winds up as a twenty-odd-year-old man with a family and a job just like so many others.  From the outside, it may seem as if he fits in, but he is living among strangers in every sense of the word.  He has no understanding of even the simplest Earth customs; human behavior doesn’t come naturally to him; he couldn’t be more different from the people who think they know him.  And when it comes to home, he couldn’t be farther away, physically speaking.

But what if he’s not as far from home as he thinks?  I imagined Granth’s home world, Zyrk, as a violent place, with family members struggling against each other just to survive.  To a Zyrkonian, sarcasm is a love language, and your best friend is the person you can trust not to bite your head off . . . literally.  Obviously, it’s not a perfect metaphor for Northern Ireland, but the country has had its share of violence and distrust.  The two worlds may not be as different as I first thought.

And what if I have him go to the local pub and reveal his extraterrestrial origin to some of the patrons?  What if one of the people he meets is a woman who used to be a waitress in Canada (a character based on a conversation I overheard recently)?  Her idea of home would surely be confused.  What if the bartender has a wealth of knowledge about history and folklore?  What if he and Granth start comparing their worlds and their mythology?  What if . . .

And then I remember this play can’t be any longer than ten minutes.

Drat.