Archive for the ‘My Plays’ Category
Entry 1571 — A Scene from Werebird
Monday, September 15th, 2014
My plan to post a copy of Werebird is indefinitely on hold. For one thing, I found two versions of it that seem equal to me. Both seem flawed, as well. For another, my OCR stinks. If I re-typed the thing, I’d have a decent copy of it faster than I can get one now, using my OCR software. I think it’d take a full day, at least, and I’m not up to that much work right now. Perhaps I would be if I had a version I liked. I have to read both versions and come up with something significantly less over-plotted.
What follows (in blank verse) is the first scene of my 1996 version, as close to looking the way I’d like it to as I could get it.
Act 1, scene i: The stage is dim. On it three witches, barely perceptible, speak in low voices.
WITCH #1: Three times the brinded cat has yowled.
WITCH #2: Four times the earth itself has growled.
WITCH #3: The dank ferns chime, “‘Tis time, ’tis time.” (At this point HORACE appears approaching from the auidence. His speech over-laps, and drowns out most of what the witches are saying.)
HORACE: If only there were something I could do.
If only there were something I could do.
But neither reason nor the wham of the
most costly underarm deodorant
available can work me into his
sweet place in her esteem. Nor have my deep-
wailed applications to the heavens won
me even half-a-wingbeat’s-worth of help.
Woe, woe, oh, woe. I flicker sadly through
her blank unconsciousness of me, my doomed
soul dimmed to something only owls could see,
my heart a crypt about to close on it ..
And th’ scald of my–
WITCH #1: Round about the cauldron go;
in the poisoned entrails throw.
Toad that under coldest stones
thirty days has frozen its bones–
add its urine to the pot
to inspire the brew to clot.
ALL WITCHES: Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
WITCH #2: Fillet of a fenny snake,
in the cauldron boil and bake;
eye of cow and mousie’s tail,
virgins’ spit and wool of whale,
For a charm most wondrous subtle,
Like a mad-mind boil and bubble.
ALL WITCHES: Double, double toil and, trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
WITCH #3: Scale of dragon– (At this point HORACE has mounted the stage.)
WITCH #1: Peace! He’s here!
HORACE: Ye gods,
from what far planet have you sprung? Or do
you come from Jersey? You appear to know
what I am saying from the way you each
at once your choppy finger lays upon
your skinny lips. You should be women, yet
your beards forbid me to interpret you
as such. Speak.if you can: say what you are.
WITCH #2: Owls. Owls are we, with art to see.
WITCH #1: Who who. Who who.
WITCH #3: For three long threes of centuries
we’ve waited in time’s darkest bin
for something new–
WITCH #2: –to winsomely do–
WITCH #1: –to counteract the world’s drear lack–
WITCH #3 –of narrative illustrative–
WITCH #2: –of how much men can win to when
they commit their souls to myth-large goals.
WITCH #3: And so this night we’ve come to light
a new pulse to your time of rue.
WITCH #1, holding up a flask: A sip of this and every kiss
its sipper gets he will regret.
ALL WITCHES: For every night the moon’s alight,
his brain, will thicken, and he turn chicken!
WITCH #1, handing the flask to Horace: In short, take this to win the bliss
for which you’ve yearned,
WITCH #2: . . . and will have earned …
WITCH #1: . . . if you know who to give it to!
(The WITCHES all laugh. HORACE accepts the flask blankly. Pause.)
WITCHES #2 & #3: Who who, who who.
HORACE: Ah, yes, I’ve got it! Yes! (The WITCHES disappear, but HORACE is too excited to notice.) Yes! Now at last
you’re finished, Larry! My long days and nights
of praying into every crevice that
a god or spirit could inhabit has
at last paid off! Dear Ursula will soon
be mine! Oh, yippee! Yippee and yahoo!
MARGARET, offstage: Yahoo? And yippee? Jesus, Horace, what
in Hell’s the matter with you? (As she speaks, the bursts out of the room she was in. She is partway into a bathrobe that she finishes putting on.)
HORACE: Mother? How
can you– (The lights go up to reveal HORACE and MARGARET’S apartment.) My gosh, I’m home.
MARGARET: The day has shrunk
to 4 A.M. You ought to be in bed,
not cannonading idiotic cheers
against the ramparts of my hard-won sleep!
HORACE: But I still have the potion. It could not
have been all dream! Oh, yippee! Yippee and
yahoo!
MARGARET: Goddamit, Horace, what is wrong
with you!?
HORACE: Oh, Mother, Mother! Life is not
as viciously unfair as I once thought.
My cruel long absence from the arms and heart
of my beloved is about to end! (He holds up the flask.)
As soon as I’ve delivered this, she’s mine!
Oh, yippeee! Yippee and yahoo! (He exits.)
MARGARET: Good god. (The scene ends.)
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Entry 1570 — Not William the Conquerer
Sunday, September 14th, 2014
In an article for the the latest issue of The New Criterion, Gary Saul Morson quotes this from a dialogue by Alexander Herzen, the Russian provocateur of letters: “An end that is infinitely remote is not an end, but, if you like, a trap; an end must be nearer–it ought to be, at the very least, the laborer’s wage, or pleasure in the work done.”
I prefer Emerson’s idea of hitching one’s wagon to a star but agree with the above, I suppose, if you know the end you are aiming for is infinitely remote. Otherwise, I fear I have Nietzschean elitist contempt for anyone without some goal vastly superior to the laborer’s wage (although only a little bit superior to pleasure in the work done.
One reason I bring this up, aside from my inner-directed near-obsession with attaining some grand goal or other is my impression that just about no one else I know seems to have any particular goal in life, other than having nice things, financial security and friends. They would agree with what Morson goes on to say after quoting Herzen: “Each present moment, and each human life, is precious in itself, not just as a means to some exalted goal. This is a lesson revolutionaries never seem to learn.”
Actually, the majority of present moments are at best innocuous. As for the preciousness of each human life, that our species seems to have made that its Primary Moral Truth is the reason I feel myself to be some kind of aberration–or would if it weren’t that there are people who think there are some things more valuable than human life. Morson would probably agree that liberty is, since liberty is what would be lost if reason controlled lives (from what he otherwise says in his article, which includes the Tolstoy quotation that I re-quoted yesterday). Yes, liberty is more valuable than life–but only if you use it for more than getting your kids through college. Unless you mistakenly believe that doing that is an important step toward getting them, or someone else, to another galaxy.
Sure, the latter is no doubt meaningless, but I hold that there are degrees of meaninglessness, and a final understanding of existence, which exploration of space may be a sine qua non for the achievement of, is substantially less meaningless than whatever it is that most people seem to be living for.
I do believe that all we have are moments, but that it’s foolish to be content with each of them equally. One should be aware that no moment is of any value unless it contains a lot more than the present. I would As I’ve said quite a few times, just about the only times I’ve experienced such moments have been when I’ve taken some work of art or verosophy into what seems to me of Final Positive Value to Mankind(!) and makes me remember other moments when I’ve felt the same way about something I’ve been working on, and makes me remember in reverse later such moments I’m sure I will have. Urp.
I have very few such moments now. (Yes, boo hoo.) Certainly not right now, although I have a hydrocodone in me. It occurred to me a moment after writing that the the best moments also contain some hint of an applauding audience, and now I really feel sad, as opposed to self-disgusted, because I would have wanted my parents in that audience, and too many others now dead. I think now of my poor alcoholic father whom I always looked down upon for not seeming to have any real goal, realizing (as I sort of have many times before) that he did have a superior goal: it was that his children have superior goals and reach them. He was proud of my achievements, however minor they were, once introducing me to someone as a playwright the day after a play of mine became a finalist in some play competition I lost.
That reminds me that I was going to post a copy of that play on the Internet yesterday, but found I had no computer file of it. Today I hope to scan it. It may take a while to correct the conversion to readable text, but I vow to do it and post the damned thing. I’m megalomaniacally thinking of then posting an extreme revision to update it to the present. I wrote the first draft of it more than forty years ago. Werebird is the name of it. A young man’s dream of marrying a certain young girl is threatened by his sudden propensity for becoming a chicken when the moon is full. The Marx brothers and Macbeth and his wife are in it, albeit with different names. I saying so much about it to psych myself up–and I want as many people to know of my vow to make sure fear of Horrid Embarrassment will force me to live up to it. (Although I have probably horrideously forsaken at least a thousand previous such vows. But I’ve begun scanning. Pray to Apollo for me–and Dionysius. You don’t have to pray to Athena–I know she’s on my side; how could it be otherwise considering the wonderful poem I made in homage to her?) No “urp” this time but an “Excelsior and Gahzoo the the power of 97!”
With this word, I brought this entry up to a total of 900 words. As an extreme example of Riesman’s inner-directed man and thus neurotically obsessed with goals even tinier than this one, I must now write another hundred or more. They will probably be filler butread them anyway: who knows what I may say. And, gosh, the way I’m going now, I may keep going until I hit two thousand! My scan, by the way, is up to page 7. 52 pages to go after that.
I glanced at the first page, by the way, and really liked the first stack of lines (in blank verse–the scenes my Macbeth and Lady Macbeth characters are in are in blank verse). The process is going much faster than I thought it would, but I have no idea how good the result will be. As always when doing anything concerned with pages, I curse the dryness of my aged fingers. I suppose I should use hand lotion much more than I do. With that, I pronounce this entry done, with a word count of 1066. Phooey, my counter just changed that to 1074. It didn’t want me to brag I was William the Conquerer, I guess. But it got me to go past a count of 1100.
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Entry 1525 — Beginning of a Revision
Friday, August 1st, 2014
My attempt to fix my play (main revisions in red) didn’t get too far:
INTRUSION
Act 1, scene i: RACHEL, 15, and HENRY, 17, are in the living room of RACHEL’S one-story suburban house in Darien, Connecticut. They are rehearsing an experimental play. A tape-recorder (TAPE, for short) is also “participating” in the play.
TAPE, in a female monotone: Over come over come over come . . . (TAPE continues to repeat the preceding until otherwise indicated.)
HENRY: Babbo, the foaming cleanser.
RACHEL: Babble, the phoning censor.
HENRY: Baffle the stoning centaur. (Pause.) Rachel. That’s when you’re supposed to do the somersault.
RACHEL: I know.
HENRY: Well, do it, then.
RACHEL: Henry, let’s just do lines now, okay? I don’t have the energy for gymnastics.
HENRY: Come on, Rachel. We can’t get the timing down if you just do lines.
RACHEL: So what? Nobody will notice.
HENRY: Miss Zachery will. (He resets the tape-recorder.) Please do it right this time.
RACHEL: Henry, we’ve been going over this scene for ages! I’m really getting tired.
HENRY: Good grief, Rachel, we’ve barely gotten to the second scene and we should have the whole first act learned by now! (Pause.) Rachel, please. We have to get through this scene at least. (Pause.) All right. I’ll just tell Miss Zachery we need someone else for Plinx.
RACHEL: Oh, will you? And lose your only chance to spend any time with me at all? You can’t do that: I’m too important in your nerdy little life–even though I can’t stand you.
HENRY: You are important in my nerdy little life, Rachel–even though you can’t stand me; but Miss Zachery’s play is more important!
RACHEL: You can’t be serious.
HENRY: Rachel, I’m turning the tape-recorder back on. Either you do what you’re supposed to, or I’ll get you canned.
RACHEL, after a Pause: You rat. (HENRY turns the tape-recorder back on. Pause.)
TAPE: Over come over come over come over . . .
HENRY: Babbo, the foaming cleanser.
RACHEL: Babble, the phoning senator.
HENRY: Baffle the stoning senator. (RACHEL turns a somersault, sullenly.)
RACHEL: Raffle Trigger, the wonder horse.
HENRY, acting enraged: Old MacDonald had a farm! (RACHEL runs into the audience.)
RACHEL: Eeee eye. (She does a jumping jack.) Oh. (She pulls a spectator out of his seat and stands in it.) Oh oh oh.
HENRY, with extreme pathos, as RACHEL returns to the stage: Old MacDonald . . . had . . . a farm.
TAPE, in a male monotone: Yes yes yes yes yes . . . (And so on until otherwise indicated.)
RACHEL: Eeee eye.
HENRY, striking a weird, contorted pose: Come over mah house, Checker-Goat Freddy, and Zinc-Man will cobble your gaiters.
TAPE: Wail, winds, wail. (Pause.)
HENRY: The. Sky. Is.
RACHEL: Blue. (Pause.) The sky is the. (Long Pause.) HENRY, running to RACHEL: Plinx, you are as beautiful as a cement-mixer in July, or a newly-painted butterknife, or a farmer, nude among his cows. (He begins stiffly to play Pattycakes with her. At this point SUSAN, 19, and GEORGE, 20, enter the Gliss living room.)
RACHEL: Oh, nuts, Susan’s back–with that crumb George.
TAPE: Not bananas. (RACHEL turns the tape-recorder off.)
GEORGE: Rachel–and Henry! Hi! What are you two up to?
RACHEL: We’re rehearsing a play.
GEORGE: Wow, I didn’t know you were a thespian! What play is it?
RACHEL: Aah, it’s some stupid thing Miss Zachery wrote.
HENRY: It’s called The Other Dwarf’s Iron Petunia. It’s very good, actually, but it’s experimental, and you have to have a brain if you want to get anything out of it, so Rachel, of course, doesn’t like it.
RACHEL: Yeah, yeah. I’m really dumb.
GEORGE: Well, if you’re not genuinely in sympathy with the play, you probably shouldn’t be in it.
RACHEL: Aah, if I don’t stay in it, I’ll flunk Drama. Then Mom and Dad would cut off my allowance.
SUSAN: I just love your positive outlook, Rachel.
GEORGE: Maybe once you’ve familiarized yourself with the play, you’ll come to appreciate it after all.
RACHEL: I wouldn’t bet on it: it’s pure gibberish.
HENRY: Actually it’s not gibberish at all. It’s an assault upon dead modes of thought. It’s a trapdoor into buried subconscious truths! It’s an exit from the falsity of our capitalistic society!
RACHEL, cutting him off: So Miss Zachery is always lecturing us. But nobody but Henry believes her.
PLINX, suddenly appearing in a puff of smoke, center stage: Don’t move—anybody! (He has a gun.)
RACHEL: What the. . . !
PLINX: Shut up! (Pause.) My name, in case you don’t recognize me, is Plinx.
RACHEL & HENRY, simultaneously: Plinx?!!
PLINX: Ah, you are surprised. (He laughs.) That’s to be expected, I guess. We literary characters have been quite good at keeping our powers concealed.
GEORGE: Literary character?
HENRY: There’s someone in our play by that name but–
PLINX: Yes, indeed—there is a man in your play by that name whom you play as a freaking woman! (The stage goes dark except for a spotlight stage front that PLINX steps into.) Alas, my Mississippi upbringing cursed me with a preference for being a male that I can’t easily overcome sufficiently to recognize what an honor it is to be depicted as a member of the sex all rational human beings now recognize as the sole redeeming members of the white race . . . except for queerboys. (Pause.) Oh, Great God in Heaven, forgive me yet again, but my Mississippi upbringing prevented even my time as a student and then professor at Harvard from coming to terms with my incorrigible homophobia however much I’ve tried to overcome it, even sharing cupcakes with homosexuals at cooking classes. (The lighting returns to normal.)
GEORGE: You absolute jerk! Don’t think I, for one, don’t recognize your sarcasm!
PLINX, shooting him in the head: You demean my struggle, you swine! (GEORGE just stares back at him, apparently unharmed by the shot.) Damn, I forgot we can’t affect the stinking real world. Idiot! (He throws his gun angrily off the stage. Then he turns to GEORGE.) I really have struggled. You really think anyone in his right mind would be homophobic in my world (or yours) if not for his upbringing! Or, even worse, be upset to be depicted as a woman in a play?!
RACHEL: If it’s any solace to you, I was only playing you in the play because Miss Zachery could only get one boy screwed-up enough to act in it, and half the parts are male.
GEORGE: You really are a redneck by upbringing—in Mississippi?
PLINX: Alas, yes. They call me “Plinxy-Bob” back home.
GEORGE: We have to forgive him. Now that the UN has certified Islamic suicide bombers as a Victim Group, it can’t be too long before even rednecks are.
SUSAN: Even this one?! My God, have you not been watching him?! Look how he drools when looking at my comely breasts, fully-clothed although they are.
PLINX: Yes, yes, it’s true, horribly true! Your knockers turn me on! Oh, Lord, how I wish I’d been born in Connecticut or San Francisco! (He drops heavily down into an easy chair.)
RACHEL: So, how’d you suddenly appear, and why are you here?
GEORGE: Good questions. You can’t be a literary character, but real people don’t suddenly appear out of nowhere.
PLINX: Oh, please. This whole universe came out of nowhere. Why shouldn’t a simple literary character be able to do the same thing?
GEORGE: There have been a lot of books about literary characters doing just that. But only in novels.
HENRY: He’s wrong about the universe, too: the latest issue of Scientific American has an article about the big bang that is clearly accurate: a four-dimensional black hole in a universe this one is now in, exploded, and its three-dimensional interface blew off it to form our universe.
RACHEL: I remember that article. It didn’t make any sense to me.
HENRY & SUSAN, simultaneously: You!? You read something in Scientific American!?
PLINX: Ha, see! Even you dwellers of the noble liberal state of Connecticut are sexist!
HENRY: Never!
SUSAN: Me, a woman majoring in interstellar hydraulic engineering, intimating that any female would not have the brains to appreciate a magazine like Scientific American!? You’re out of your mind.
GEORGE: You are making a mistake I fear too many liberals make: the mistake that only a sexist could contend that any woman might be unequipped to handle something scientific. Surely some women, just as some men, are. In this case, Henry was no doubt surprised by Rachel’s claim because she is only 15, and has never, so far as we are aware, shown any interest in science. I’m sure Henry would agree with me that if she had any interest in science, she would be capable not only of reading that magazine, but of writing for it. Although, I don’t understand why she thought the article in question, which I also have read, made no sense. Two of its three authors had Ph.D.’s in physics and the third, a woman, was working on a doctorate in that subject.
PLINX: Okay, okay: you got me. But it’s not my fault that my author gave me a rather unsophisticated sociopolitical attitude.
RACHEL: I read it at my dentist’s. There wasn’t anything else there to read.
HENRY: I’m curious about what didn’t make sense to you.
GEORGE: Right. As I said, its authors certainly had the right credentials. And two of them were professors, as I recall.
RACHEL: Okay, for one thing, I don’t see why inventing another universe for ours to come from is any help since that just means we have to explain where that universe came from. (Pause.) Something that seems even more daffy to me is the idea that the interfaces of black whole in our universe are two dimensional. I don’t see how anything in our universe can be two-dimensional.
PLINX: You never saw a piece of paper?
RACHEL: Not one with no thickness.
HENRY: Actually, that’s something that’s bothered me, too. I’ve been meaning to ask Mr. Shoffle, my physics teacher about it. Something two-dimensional would have length and width but zero thickness, and w times l times zero is zero.
GEORGE: Interesting observation. I’m not a science major, but I’m sure scientists can explain it.
RACHEL: As far as I’m concerned, scientists are nuts. They think anything that exists in mathematics can exist in the real world. But the real world has three spatial dimensions, no more and no less, and that’s that. The interface of a black hole is merely the surface of whatever three-dimensional matter happens to be there. The entirely three-dimensional black hole’s interface, like any face of anything material, is simply the last of its sub-atomic particles–which are pressed against the three-dimensional face of whatever is next to it. In the case of the black hole, that’s space. Which is some kind of material that can be curved but is otherwise beyond me.
PLINX: But as far as I can see, I am in this world immaterial. Am I therefore non-existent?red
RACHEL: Oh, you just did some kind of trivial magic trick.
GEORGE: But why?
SUSAN: Somebody’s practical joke is my guess. (She looks at RACHEL pointedly.)
PLINX: I assure you, I am no one’s practical joke.
RACHEL: Well, if you’re what you say you are, you aren’t a very bright literary character. We’re just actors following a script—a pretty ridiculous one to live in, I would say. We weren’t responsible for demeaning you, the author of the stupid play we were acting in was.
PLINX: Wait a minute. Just where in hell am I?! Something’s very wrong here.
SUSAN: You’re in the home of the Gliss family in Darien, Connecticut, as I rather suspect you are aware.
PLINX: A home? But it looks like some kind of auditorium to me.
HENRY: Well, Rachel and I were trying to rehearse a play, but here, not in an auditorium.
PLINX, gesturing toward the audience: Then what are those people doing here?
GEORGE, laughing: He seems to think he’s double-fictional!
SUSAN: Just what are you trying to pull? I don’t see any people; I just see our kitchen.
PLINX, laughing idiotically: Right! The people out there are real, but you’re fictional! It makes perfect sense!
GEORGE: I think I see your problem. If we’re fictional and don’t know it, we must be in some kind of fiction that includes the audience!
AUDIENCE MEMBER 1, standing up: Ridiculous. The explanation is obvious: all four of you are actors in a play that’s getting more and more stupid!
HENRY: All five of us.
AUDMEM1: Right, all five of you.
GEORGE: I must admit that I’m getting confused. How did this fellow suddenly get into the kitchen? Is he in the play you’ve come from, uh . . . (He is looking a PLINX.)
PLINX: Plinx, the name in Plinx, simply Plinx. And, no, he is certainly not from my world!
I stopped here because I have too much other much more important stuff to work on than this dumb play. (But if ten or more of you guys visiting it beg me to continue my revision, I will.)
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