Triton
Triton, mythological god, and messenger of sea, and son and herald to Poseidon, aided by a powerful conch shell to raise the sea or calm it, sometimes depending on the bidding or whim of his father, often carrying a trident like his father, carrying on the patriarchal tradition. He is often represented like a merman and sometimes represented as a legion of multiple Tritones. He acted as a foster parent to Athena who bonded with his real daughter Pallas. Both of them were prone to violent play, and Pallas was accidentally and tragically killed in a battle of sport with the goddess Athena, who was protected by Zeus at the worst possible moment for Pallas. Though Athena felt extreme guilt for the loss, and erected a wooden statue in her honor and took her name as part of her own becoming Pallas Athena, some speculate that this grief kept Triton out of the spotlight of many mythological adventures. Though Triton mostly seems to be under the direction of Poseidon’s will, he is not completely innocent of petty vengeance, drowning the trumpeter Misenus for challenging the gods to a musical contest in The Aeneid. In what seems like a final sense of restoration for Triton is his hand in saving Jason of Argo on his journey to find the Golden Fleece, in which he helped guide their stranded ship back to safe passage after visiting them in an alternate form with a clod of earth.
Of his play, Thinning Blood, John Lennon Harrison writes, “I wish to explore the view of Triton as a foddering Sea Captain who has lost his way and maybe his mind, sometimes driven by his capricious xenophobic father (the Dick Cheney of the sea), or the grief of his daughter’s death, especially in light of feeling his position of authority in the sea is a slighted one, and the death of his daughter is maligned by Athena’s attempts to pay tribute, resulting inadvertently in negating the very existence of Pallas. Drowning in the shadow of a multitude of issues, sailing in his tinny sub with his crew of Tritones, he seeks to both please his father, Admiral Poseidon’s need to root out every stranger in the sea as evil, playing war games in an upscale game of battleship, but he is the only one playing., while at the same time trying to use the erratic state of the sea controlled by his conch shells to destroy and shift power from here to there. Haunted by Admiral Poseidon’s unclear missives on his objectives in the sea, he has allowed his brain to unfetter. He starts off rationally delivering messages back and forth to headquarters with Admiral Poseidon, but the more he delivers the more he sees, hears, and interprets which lead him to engaging in a way that has an impact as opposed to being a passive witness. Bits and pieces of what seems like enemy’s hands in the murder of daughter, he grows complicit with Poseidon’s desires and since Poseidon has placed him in charge of the troops, he is going full MacArthur on the seas, and blow ships out of the water because he feels they might be a threat to the world and is being preemptive., tilting on the deaths of anyone deemed Odyssean in Poseidon’s view. He is heading full a full and total meltdown until he meets Jason on the seas. Jason, not a victim of his exploits but trapped in the type of difficulty he might have created, with ideals about the world, and goals that seem to have purpose, rather than being simply reactionary, or at least to him sheds his desire to keep twisting the seas, at least for the moment and guides Jason to safe passage. Ultimately, he has to decide to make a final call to signal an all out assault, and switch his pitch and bring peace to the sea, or bring the waves crashing on his own head with one last conch blast.”
TRITON or THINNING BLOOD by John Lennon Harrison
Directed by Cecelia Harrison
Staged Reading on November 4, 2015
Originally from Texas, John Lennon Harrison is a SAG/AFTRA actor with a BA in Creative Writing/English Literature Theater Minor where his plays The Most Depraved Tragedy of the Second Romeo, and Still Photography were both performed under the New Works program, and a partial screenplay treatment of The Burden was produced by 15k Productions in Austin. He holds an MFA in Acting from Northern Illinois University, where staged performances of his play Bash as a BFA production and the short prequel to Hamlet, Alas, Poor Yorick under the BA directing program were both performed. Currently John is teaching English Language Arts to impressionable youth in Hayward, and rotating through the commercial, industrial, and film industry looking for venues such as this to plant himself more as a writer in the Bay Area, and enjoying his 4th year with the SF Olympians, having acted in previous years.