The Ten Thousand Things

About The Play

Somewhere in the mountains of the American West a clock keeps time for ten thousand years.

Or, at least that’s the legend that drives a young woman to hunt down an old man in the wilderness; and keeps the consciousness of a savagely brilliant woman named Swastika locked in a fist-sized cube of gold; and compels an aging archivist cross a continent on foot to search for the fabled cube; and inspires an embittered playwright to start a play intended to change through the centuries like the clock in mountains, ticking one word at a time.

Inspired by the Long Now Foundation’s actual plans to build a decamillenial clock, THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS interweaves stories across deep time in an attempt to answer, or perhaps only ask, the questions of what it means to be a human being beyond a human lifespan.

Production History

2008

Seattle

Washington Ensemble Theatre

Production Media

Awards and Mentions

“… challenges notions of faith and humanity by asking if what we do matters beyond us. As the show comes to its remarkable end, the answer appears to be a resounding yes ”

--The Seattle Weekly

 

“Mullin's dialogue is sharp and clever, and his devices, such as the play's 10,000-word length and its proposal to "tick" each performance, are daring”:

--The Seattle Post-Intelligencer

 

The Seattle Times: “inventively and unpredictably reflects on time, space and existence, veering into heady intellectual territory few plays visit.”

--The Seattle Times

 

“Six actors portray characters that exist at different times through the millennia, from today to the last humans on Earth. Each group struggles with the implications of the clock, the weight of myth and the fragility of human knowledge.”

--The Seattle Post-Intelligencer

 

The Ten Thousand Things creates its own atmospheric weather patterns, dramatically speaking. You don't spend a lot of time thinking This is just like the play we saw at.... It isn't. Nor is it easy to sum up in a Title-Meets-Title format. We tried, we gave up. Not many people have sat down to dramatize deep time, or the conflict between the all-encompassing archive and the eternal now…. It sticks with you.”

--The Seattlest

 

“Paul highlights the faults and heroism of the people who drive major scientific developments like the lab accidents at Los Alamos, the human genome project and research for the future. Paul Mullin's latest play The 10,000 Things was inspired by a meeting with a famous futurist.”

--KUOW

 

“Mullin has built a self-destruct mechanism into the script: It is exactly ten thousand words long and the actors change one word per night: He has written a play designed to be mangled by time.”

--The Stranger