When you’re hot, you’re hot. Aside from Fayette County’s undefeated Lady Tiger basketball team, no one knows this better than Fayetteville resident Dan Guyton. His latest play, “The Mother of God Visits Hell,” is currently being produced out in Los Angeles and will also be staged by the Town and Gown Players in Athens this month.

The title of Guyton’s play comes from Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov.” In the novel, one of the characters reads a poem about the Virgin Mary visiting Hell, seeing all of the suffering that is taking place there, and asking God to forgive all of the souls there. Guyton started researching the idea, sure that someone had already written a play based on it, only to find that it was likely Dostoevsky made the poem up and that no one had capitalized on the idea yet.
Guyton immediately got to work and decided to write the play in iambic pentameter, which Guyton admits was a challenge.

“I had always wanted to do this and I wrote the first few lines and realized it sounded right, so I thought I would give it a try,” said Guyton. He has since had scholars look at the play and while they said it wasn’t as perfect as Shakespeare’s use of iambic pentameter, it was close to what his contemporaries would have done.
Iambic pentameter describes a particular rhythm that the words establish in each line. It is used in many of the major English poetic forms, including blank verse and the heroic couplet. The style, while difficult to write in, kept Guyton focused throughout the process of writing the play.
“It gave me a structure and, in a way, it made it easier to write,” said Guyton. “Each piece of dialogue had to fit with the rest of the work. It could really only go in one direction.”
That isn’t to say, “The Mother of God Visits Hell” is a straight-forward piece of drama. Guyton admits that the play features very heightened characters, such as God, Satan and the Virgin Mary, and that because the whole play rhymes, it isn’t very realistic either. What Guyton hopes does connect with the audience are the themes of forgiveness and love.

The play has already connected with the theater groups that have decided to produce the show. Guyton submitted the play to the Alive Theatre’s Cherry Poppin’ Play Festival where it faced off against 499 other plays. It was one of 12 selected for a staged reading and it was one of the six plays to earn a staged production on the Queen Mary. A little closer to home, the Town and Gown Playhouse in Athens, where Guyton earned a Masters in Dramatic Writing from the University of Georgia, decided to stage it as well. It just so happens that on one weekend this month, the show will be performed on both coasts at the same time. Guyton will not be able to go to Los Angeles to see their production, but he will be in Athens for the Town and Gown performance.

Guyton is no stranger to seeing his shows being performed, although he wasn’t able to see what was arguably his biggest success live. His play, “I’m Not Gay,” was performed at the Loftkastalinn Theatre in Iceland, where it achieved such popularity that it was featured on that nation’s music video channel and on the cover of an entertainment magazine over there.
“It got staged right after I was finished with grad school,” said Guyton. “I didn’t have the money to go over and see it performed.”
Other plays of Guyton’s have been performed in New York, British Columbia, Oregon, California and Georgia. His plays have won awards and been published, but Guyton is still hoping to break through to the next level. He hopes this play is the one to do it, but he is always writing and thinking of new projects. He is currently working on a Christmas themed play called “Death of a Snowman.”
Although “The Mother of God Visits Hell,” sounds like it is agit-prop theater, Guyton believes that it has wide appeal and could find its way to stages on high school and college campuses some day.

“There are countless ways to stage this show,” said Guyton. There is a bigger budget for this show, out in Los Angeles, so, according to Guyton, their ideas for scenery and costumes sound grand, while the show in Athens will have to be realized on a smaller scale. In either form, Guyton expects the audience to feel the impact of his words.

“The Mother of God Visits Hell” will be presented at the Royal Theatre aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, Calif., Feb. 20-Mar. 8. It will be staged in Athens at Town and Gown, Feb. 27-Mar. 1.

For more information on Daniel Guyton and his works, visit www.danguyton.com

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