Preface To Meet The Fractals by Derek Strahan

This Preface is 50 pages long. Why a Preface? Too long? There is precedent for writing a long preface to a theater play. G. B. Shaw’s Prefaces were written to engage his readers’ interest in the play’s central topic and in the dialectic that was at the basis of the drama. Invariably the themes Shaw chose were of social interest, and the prefaces were polemic in nature. This sobriety of purpose never deterred Shaw from imbuing his plays with humor, whimsy and lively dramatic conflict. He incurred the wrath of his Fabian associates who disapproved of what they took to be levity. What they failed to appreciate was that you can’t use drama for preaching. If you have a cause to promote, an option to explore, a paradox to unravel, you must give equal representation to opposing viewpoints otherwise there is no drama! I openly acknowledge my admiration for Shaw, and my desire to emulate his model. I always found Shaw’s Prefaces to be thoroughly engaging, but it was not until I embarked on writing “Meet The Fractals” that I found writing a Preface to be an absolute necessity. It was through writing the Preface that I found the arguments, the plot and the characters. As the Preface discloses, this is the story of a group of people who, each for different reasons, have decided that monogamy is an outmoded custom because it is more honoured in the breach than in the observance. As statics reveal, fifty per cent of all marriages fail! The union lasts only “until divorce do us part”. In “Meet The Fractals” you will meet ten people, five of each gender, who decide to apply the theories of quantum physics to living. They commit to a group marriage: an extreme form of polyamory. They accept that human sexuality is in essence, chaotic, and this chaos is better managed by accepting it than resisting it. The play covers only the first 48 hours of their meeting and their deliberations, during which time they have to ward off attacks by an ambitious politician and an angry puritan