Get Used To Death: The Lost Book of Enoch is an expressionistic dream play which explores the painful collisions between fundamentalist faith and queer identity.
The play’s friendly narrator and commentator, James, relays his experience of finding ancient scroll fragments in a coastal cave and trying to decipher them. What unfolds is an increasingly disjointed and surreal account of a man from another time, named Enoch. Allegedly, the same Enoch of the Bible and the Apocrypha, who is famously believed to have walked closely with God, only to be taken away by Him prematurely.
As the audience interacts with the play’s characters and performers, witnessing their increasingly unsettling enactments, we realise this is far from a traditional religious story. The audience finds itself instead in a twisted dream world where biblical figures, supernatural creatures and modern humans coexist. In an unpredictable transmutation of queer fantasy, nightmarish psychodrama and dark comedy, confessions of grief, fear and shame are released. Through ritual, song and fragmented dramatisation, we bear witness to a desperate and profane cry for benediction and acceptance.
Drawing on heavy stylistic influence from August Strindberg’s A Dream Play, the playwright explores the journey of self acceptance and recovery for queer people of faith, by couching real life experience in a wildly fantastic dramaturgy that honours subjective truth. The writer grafts references from the bible and a range of religious and cultural sources, in an attempt to construct a queer spiritual catharsis that provides space for both mourning and celebration.
