Pork Dream in the American House of Image

1994
Carl Hancock Rux with original music by Bill Toles
The story in this play is written as a libretto. Enveloping new wave music, post-ante-bellum rhythms, blues, gospel, show tunes, and pan-African percussions, Pork Dream is a postmodern musical fantasia about an eternally young boy, "Pork," who was born and raised in a movie house at the beginning of the twentieth century. His family are the characters he has come to love, hate, and imitate, in Westerns, post-war detective flicks, turn-of-the-century race films, musicals, and Home Boy Hood Independents. As he enters the twenty-first century, Pork finds himself bored and all too familiar with the images he has lived with for a hundred years. So he decides to give up his eternal role as a film voyeur and become a filmmaker, facing his own creativity for the first time. But filmmakers seem to come and go—only the images and the audience live forever... Commissioned by New American Radio. 1994-1995.