WHAT

THE PLAY

Escaping The Burning Sun: In a World Where Everyone Lives Forever, Why Are People Dying?

Escaping The Burning Sun is an original play by Jaziel Siegertsz. It is a one hour long, one act play, written specifically with the Fringe in mind. The play is a dystopian drama that dissects what it means to live and die, and takes a critical look at our world via the lens of this fictional one. It touches on power imbalances that are growing through wealth hoarding, the ethics of regulating life and death, and the pain that tyrannical governments have on its peoples.

The play follows eight main characters, five of whom the audience don’t meet until halfway through. They live in a world where people undergo a natural biological process called mithalosis. Mithalosis is the process where an individual ceases ageing between the ages of twenty to thirty, and it isn’t unheard of for people to stop ageing early or late. An example of this would be our protagonist, Sagan, who stops ageing at only fifteen. In this world, as one can imagine, overpopulation is a big issue. And it is dealt with by what is supposed to be a random selection. Whoever qualifies in said selection each night is sent up into space on a pod to be incinerated by the sun. To make things fair of course, only those who have stopped ageing are in the running. Fairness, however, is brought into question when fifteen-year-old Sagan is randomly selected to die as she has recently stopped ageing. When Sagan is sent to the pod, she encounters other people who are to meet their end. And through talking to them, not only is the fairness of the selection questioned, but so is the legitimacy of the randomness and the ethics of it all as well as the very foundations their world is built upon. Sagan and her new acquaintances decide that enough is enough and they try their best to escape their fate - to escape the burning sun approaching them.

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