K.S. HADDOCK
Thanatics, A Rock Opera
Based on my second novel (unpublished), this near-future story follows a group of aging San Francisco artists who accidentally start an international Suicide Art movement. Satire ensues. It was my first foray into serious songwriting, and it won a Best of San Francisco Fringe Festival Award in 2006.
Story
In the near-future, the SoMa 7, a group of seemingly washed-up artists, become interested in a new political group called the Depopulation Party. The Depop are environmental fascists, claiming that depopulation is the only way to save the planet. The leader of the SoMa 7 sends a video endorsing Depop, killing himself on screen. SoMa 7's performance artist has himself publicly drawn-and-quartered. Soon artists all over the world are joining the suicide art movement in the name of Depopulation. Angry and confused, the remaining SoMa 7 conspire to take down the Depopulation Party, revealing that they are not environmentalists at all, just more feckless politicians.
Thanatics =
Thanatos (Freudian death instinct) + fanatics
Development
The San Francisco Bay Area is a bastion of liberalism. I should know: San Francisco is my dear home. But jumping on a bandwagon is human nature, whether you're liberal or conservative. Groupthink is real. And the media, even in the 1990s, exploded small radical ideas into fervent movements. So, I wrote Thanatics (the novel), satirizing how even left-leaning idealists can get caught up in the bullshit. No one touched the novel.
Flash-forward to the 2000s, and I had an itch for a musical project and I took on writing a rock opera of original music based around Thanatics. I workshopped it in an early production, then brought it to the vaunted San Francisco Fringe Festival, where we put on sold out performances of our rock opera and won a Best of Fringe.
