DRAMA, FANTASTIC/ The main theme of this drama is the very personality of JOHN SULLIVAN, a writer who is held in the corridor of death in a penitentiary in Virginia.
SYNOPSIS/
Having been convicted of murder and given the death penalty, he is awaiting his execution on the electric chair.
However, in the corridor of death, a strange character occupies the cell next to him: aggressive and nasty, it appears to be HIS BAD CONSCIENCE. This is when a second character of bizarre appearance will in turn occupy the other cell next to him: it turns out to be HIS GOOD CONSCIENCE.
These strange individuals will impose themselves to the end.
It is one of these “ personified consciences” that will suggest to our intellectually and failed writer to take up his pen again. It will prompt him to begin a diary in which he will record all his felling of terror and anguish in the face of his programmed death.
The story, entitled “ John Sullivan’s Diary” and published shortly before his execution, will, paradoxally, become a best-seller in the USA and will rehabilitate the writer in the eyes of the literary critics.
Interspersed sequences show parts of the diary being read at a literary gathering at the home of the Washington senator, passages of America’s book of the moment. Consequently, it will be dicussed in the drawing rooms of leading citizens and traditional thinkers whenever the polemic of capital punishment in the USA arises. These scenes will bring to the fore during these social gatherings, the fellings of both the abolitionists and staunch supporters of the death penalty.
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Notes
The idea of death will thus subject these two outer “consciences” to a double, perhaps triple, confrontation with the condemned man’s own conscience. The first, that will make our wretched doomed man identical to all other individuals.
The second that will reflect himself, that is to say his own conscience that will distinguish between the real and the unreal. And the one that will withdraw like a kind of split personality. They will become reunited just before his execution, becoming a single person in the face of death.
We shall thus witness the detachment that will exalt the relationship between reality,the man prey to his obsessions, his terror, his suffering, his nightmares and the” conciences” characters that are the total opposite in the face of death, being calm and serene.
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The play will draw freely on passages from Victor Hugo’s “ Le dernier jour d’un condamné”
The play could be situated in our times as the electric chair is still used in the state of Virginia.
- (US Copyright and WGA Registration)