This interview with Mac Rogers, playwright of The Honeycomb Trilogy, was conducted by Elizabeth Keel, Dramaturg.

1. What first inspired you to write The Honeycomb Trilogy? Was it always envisioned in three pieces?

At first it was conceived as a single play. I had an image in my head of a suburban American family attempting to keep up an appearance of normality in their home as the audience gradually becomes aware that the world outside has been completely conquered by extraterrestrials. The problem was: that was just a concept, just a hook, it didn't go anywhere.

So then I started thinking: what if the various family members had different views on the conquering aliens? What if some of them actually supported the conquest and the new way of life they'd brought with them, while others opposed it? I was particularly interested in the collaborators. Since I couldn't put actual giant insect aliens on stage in a play, the collaborator characters were my best way into dramatizing the aliens' perspective. Which naturally led me to the next thought: what if some of the members of this family helped bring the aliens to Earth in the first place? What if this was actually a Greek-scale tragedy of the sins of the elders being visited (and to some degree recreated) by the next generation?

At that point it was clear that I wasn't talking about one play anymore, but rather a cycle of plays. Which was crazy! Who would produce that? I mentioned it to my colleagues in my own theater company, Gideon Productions, fully expecting them to chuckle and move on. Instead they were riveted, and kept needling me until I actually wrote the damn thing.

2. One of my and director Andrew Roblyer's favorite aspects of the trilogy is the wonderfully diverse cast, populated by so many ages, races, and types of people. Which character did you most enjoy writing, and why?

That's a tough one! Over the course of the whole trilogy, that turned out to be Ronnie, which was a big surprise to me. Abbie's the character who's closer to me, who I informed with many of my own insecurities and private anger. But something about Ronnie's seething anger at her father, her lifelong mission to correct what she sees as his betrayal, and the dark places that mission takes her powerfully compelled me. While Abbie's scenes were often painful to write, Ronnie's were darkly invigorating in some way.

That said, I'm gonna offer an alternative answer to this question: for whatever reason, every scene involving Jimmy in Blast Radius just poured out of me. I have no idea why, but those scenes were some of the easiest writing I've ever done in my life - and when we produced those scenes in NYC, they killed. A big part of it was the actor (Joe Mathers) and the director (Jordana Williams), but sometimes as a writer you just tap into something and a character kind of leaps out of you whole cloth. To me Jimmy represents an unlikely form of the resilience of the human spirit. Even after a climate-altering alien conquest, there'll still be some folks who figure out how to get high and get laid. No tyranny can fully crush the desire to kick back and have a good time.

3. What gives you hope for humanity in the event of an alien invasion?

What I would hope at least some humans would recognize is the ways in which the alien conquest resembled the ways they themselves were already behaving before the aliens showed up. Depending on casting, which obviously varies from production to production, there's a certain degree to which The Honeycomb Trilogy depicts western white Americans getting a taste of how lots of other people in other parts of the world are already being treated without an army of alien insects making it happen. Part of the tragedy of the trilogy is that there's so little sense of history from before the invasion. Abbie in Sovereign offers a brief reminder of the injustices that were already rampant on Earth before the Honeycomb arrived. I would hope that any successful human rebellion against extraterrestrial conquerors would emerge on the other side perhaps a little humbled and wiser, with the desire not to rebuild the world before the conquest (like Ronnie wants), but a better one.

4. What excites you about science fiction theatre?

I love taking this storytelling form that we so innately associate with fiction (all that room for worldbuilding) and film/TV (all those special effects0 and adapting them to the unique strengths of the stage. With Honeycomb I was on a mission to prove that science fiction was a natural fit for some of the most tried-and-true stage formats: Advance Man would be a classic American living room drama; Blast Radius a Shakespearean comedy with nobles (the aliens), commoners (the rebel humans), and an ending featuring several marriages; and Sovereign would be a real-time Greek tragedy about the past haunting the present. To me the fact that the resulting plays connected as strongly as they did shows there's a lot of room for this sub-genre of theater to grow, and I'm psyched to watch other playwrights take it much further than I did.

5. For folks who emerge from the production craving more science fiction - in any format - any reading/viewing/listening recommendations? (Beyond your many sensational podcasts, which will be listed elsewhere in the playbill!)

I came up with a thriving science fiction scene in NYC indie theater in the 2010s, fantastic pulpy-yet-thoughtful stuff like Qui Nguyen's Vampire Cowboys plays, Corinna Schulenberg's "Deinde," and The Mad Ones "Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History Of The Robot War." If you can track down a copy, check out the anthology "Geek Theatre," edited by Jen Gunnels and Erin Underwood. I have a play in there, but so do a lot of other superb genre playwrights like Adam Szymcowicz and Crystal Skillman.

About Mac Rogers:

MAC ROGERS is an award-winning playwright based in New York City. His plays include SOVEREIGN (New York Times and Backstage Critic’s Pick), BLAST RADIUS (New York Times Critic’s Pick), ADVANCE MAN (Backstage Critic’s Pick and winner of the New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Premiere Production), FRANKENSTEIN UPSTAIRS (featured in the New York Magazine Approval Matrix and nominated for the NYIT Award for Best Premier Production), LIGATURE MARKS (CityBeat Critic’s Pick), ASYMMETRIC (produced by Philadelphia’s acclaimed New City Stage Company), VIRAL (winner of Outstanding Play at FringeNYC 2009 and Best Off-Off Broadway Play from the New York Independent Theater Bloggers), UNIVERSAL ROBOTS (nominated for four New York Innovative Theatre awards and winner of Best Off-Off Broadway Play from the New York Independent Theater Bloggers), HAIL SATAN (Outstanding Playwriting Winner at FringeNYC 2007), and FLEET WEEK: THE MUSICAL (co-written with Sean and Jordana Williams; winner of Outstanding Musical at FringeNYC 2005).

Mac’s plays have earned acclaim from The New York Times, Backstage, The Wall Street Journal, Time Out New York, New York Post, Flavorpill, io9.com (Gawker Media’s science fiction site), Tor.com, Show Business Weekly, New York Press, BroadwayWorld.com, nytheatre.com, ShowShowdown, and many others. Of SOVEREIGN, the concluding installment of Mac’s ambitious HONEYCOMB TRILOGY, Flavorpill writes, “Mac Rogers’ Sovereign is a gripping and satisfying ending to his epic alien invasion tale, The Honeycomb Trilogy, proving that the work as a whole is one of the most intelligent and complex theatrical events of the year.”

As a professional writer, Mac has contributed columns to Slate.com and New York Magazine’s Vulture site. His science fiction short story “Miss Emily’s Voyage” appears on At Length. Mac currently writes online content for a number of global brands in his role as a Copywriter/Producer with the Brooklyn-based community-building and management firm StellarEngine.