PROLOGUE
As the curtain opens, CHORUS enters and assumes position center stage. The stage lights are low, and a spot follows CHORUS. He pauses, looking off into the wings expectantly, then turns to the AUDIENCE.
CHORUS: Strangled by the definitive, in its last great hope, the word begins its slow descent. Alone, its sentence yet to be served in some once upon a future time, it crawls on scabbed and bloody knees to make its mark, to pass itself off as a living being.
As CHORUS is speaking, SELF enters from stage left and begins to circle curiously around him. When CHORUS is finished speaking, SELF begins, turned half to CHORUS and half to the AUDIENCE, within the circle of the spot on CHORUS.
SELF: You don’t begin to think about a noun until it verbs. Until and unless you see, notice, or run into a tree, does the tree have meaning or even existence? Likewise, unless you give yourself attention, do you exist or even matter? The hypocrisy of Hamlet’s church…
MAN (enters and walks across stage): "…its canon raised ‘gainst self-slaughter…"
CHORUS: A ha!
SELF: …lies in the fact that the church/state wants no one to take its birthright from it – its claim to ownership of self. Yet, once the individual begins to come into their own, to recognize that it has no debt to be repaid, no original sin, that is has worth in and of its self, separate and equal to its worth to the state, then the self’s usefulness to the Heavenly Host is no more. In fact, the self-martyred soul is a reproach. The church has failed, the walls of its Jericho crumbling onto its crimson-stained feet…feet marked with the stigmata from the shattered stained glass field where angels fear to tread. Indeed, as may be surmised, Judas was the only disciple strong enough to serve the Messiah as was required.
MAN: Let ye be judged in the last days by your works!
SELF: By your verbs, in other words – by the motion in your sentence.
CHORUS: Only the verb "to be" has not definable action. If I am "being" a tree, what action is taken? What visible, outward action, that is?
During SELF’s last monologue, the stage lights have come up slowly. MEMORY enters, slowly, twirling around and self-absorbed. She bumps into CHORUS, who has not seen her approach. They both jump, startled.
MEMORY: Am I a tree?
CHORUS: Don’t you remember?
MEMORY: I am not what is, you know, only what has been.
SELF: The ticking clock slows with being, its senses dulled into ecstasy. Ecstasy! That mud-brown nightingale song that completes itself in the ending of the sermon, while Father Status Quo (and the Buddha) languish speechlessly in the corner, cracked lips foaming with a murmur.
MAN: Love me, tinder box; strike your match against my heart, and level this body-house of nothingness and false promise to ashes!
CHILD comes skipping across the stage, singing. His song begins before he is seen on-stage and ends after he has left it.
CHILD (singing and skipping): Sixpence, sixpence, a pocket full of rye / Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie / When the pie was opened the birds began to sing / Wasn’t that a lovely dish to set before the King?
CHORUS turns to look wistfully at the child, now off-stage, then looks off into the distance beyond the AUDIENCE.
CHORUS: Oh, you of four-and-twenty, youthful and exuberant, sing from beyond your graves! You blackbirds and ravens, crows with harsh croaking laughter, feed upon the corpse of your grandfather’s memory, taunting the kings of this world to turn you into pastry filling or cannon fodder, and thereby preserve your immortality through their churning bellies. The goldfish and the rabbit will devour their young to prevent them from experiencing their own fear and sin. Like the jackrabbit confronted with the unknown, we absorb the unborn into our own flesh before they are free from the womb. Indigestion is the prize of parenthood, its glory. What mother doesn’t yearn to wake the sleepless night with her cry!
WOMAN (from the side of the stage): My children, now departed, how you cause your source to suffer! How you feed my disappointment with your merciless beaks and ungrateful claws!
CHORUS: While her haggard, tear-stained cheeks are illuminated by the light of a candle forged from the tallow of the tender babe’s flesh! Rise, oh mothers, and drink your purgative forgetfulness! Remember not the cries of youth that broke the morning still of your husband’s table when first you thrust in the knife! The first wound: Responsibility. The second: Conformity. The third: Obedience. The fourth, and most hurtful: Respectability.
MEMORY slips quietly beside CHORUS and begins to speak softly and firmly.
MEMORY: The dream of history is a wellspring of amnesia. Drink deep, then, oh mothers, from the fountain of continual youth – let the waters from this well smooth the worry-lines from your ancient eyes and gift you the illusion of endless childhood. For if you yourselves are newborns, there is no need for history, its hard lessons and the hateful memory of your own evils. Age without sign, and reap your just desserts, content and smug in Housman’s temple…
WOMAN (quietly, reverently): "..Alone and afraid…in a world we haven’t made…"
CHORUS: Feeble senility in your conquering smile.
WOMAN begins to weep; she moans, grieving.
WOMAN: I was right all along! After all I’ve done for them, they leave me alone to die. I am vindicated in my sorrow – there is no justice in this world! Woe is me!
CHORUS (to AUDIENCE): Justice? Oh, mother, let your moral view of justice perish and return to the dust made mud from your children’s tears! Let it end with you, return it to the bosom of your martyred prophets, where it may seep and burrow into the rotting flesh of your Heaven like maggots into an unwashed bowl of half-eaten soup. It is not the times, perhaps Godless and slipping headlong into change though they may be, dear Matriarch, nor the decay of civilization, unless you consider the time from birth part of the cycle of decay. It is civilization itself, now sprawling beyond its cradle-cage, gangly-limbed and clumsy, the globe that once hung peacefully spinning above its infant head crushed in between two sets of curious and grubby fingers. It is your own child that grips your heart with fear, mortifying you as it grasps your wrinkling hand with its miniature clamp, greedy and unable to voice its true needs with its untrained voice. Through the centuries you have watched it grow, first to cut its teeth upon your suckling breast, then to throw its gruel upon the walls and murmur satisfied to itself, as the thin paste you mixed together to hold its sides in stretched floorward to the threshold where conception was begun. ‘Tis a shame you never coaxed it to speak except in cooing, slobbering nonsense intended to quiet its inquisitive mind. Now you marvel, aghast, as its tongue begins to work against temporary teeth and from the words it learned from the milk and its maker…
INFANT: No! Want that! Me, me, me!
CHORUS: And more, the reproachful, sly drool of…
INFANT (slowly, sweetly): Ma ma.
CHILD enters quietly from offstage and stands looking at WOMAN.
CHILD: Each child knows well the face hidden behind the mask of its executioner. At four-and-twenty, the young rebel whispers…
MAN (in a hoarse whisper): Mother!
CHORUS: As the rope stretches his neck and the hangman’s daughter lets him through her trapbox into the pleasures of her timeless womb.
WOMAN (weeping, yet smiling triumphantly): He was a good boy – always thinking of his mother.
CHILD: Yes, mother, with every waking breath…
MEMORY: …and every inhaled dream…
SELF: …and every exhaled ejaculation!
CHORUS: So we confront the mother with her sin at the breakfast table, in the presence of her husband. For the king, the father, the government, is constantly in need of the service of his wife, the Mother Church. When the king becomes apostate and turns to the charms and beckoning void of the harlot Godlessness (or Freedom), when he realizes that the ring holding his hand, the band that chafes at his sex when he takes matters into his own hand for a brief moment of peace, is held in place by the cement that once was gruel sticking to his ribs, then he becomes desolate and angry. With this anger and the seed of his life, he takes his wife, Religion, and breeds sleep’s tiny monsters. For if the mother’s crime is amnesia, the father’s is a lack of wakefulness. Where the mother forgets, the father sleeps.
FATHER and CHILD: The king is in his counting house / Counting out his money …
MOTHER and CHILD: The queen is in the parlor / Eating bread and honey.
CHORUS: But the father does not know where the money comes from, and in fact has no idea where it goes. He rises each morning, sleepwalking through meals and traffic and endless transactions, paying little regard to the consequences and even less to the promises he made his wife.
MEMORY: Promises she only pretends to have forgotten.
CHORUS: She is married to a ghost, and only allows their union to produce children, since she knows he will not recognize them as his own. She knows the children belong to her, a hateful legacy that will provide her with little but an excuse to be forgotten.
SELF: Heaven on earth is the last thing a parent wants. To perpetuate the myth is the sole desire; and yet, the truth will out, as evidenced in our prayer…
MOTHER, FATHER, CHILD and INFANT: Our Father, who Art in Heaven.
CHORUS: In the Heaven of dreams that is sleep, the King can remember the knife of his own mother, and slip beyond the chains of respectability to which she has him consigned. The King, his pocket full of rye, sleeps on. How else could the stepmother of his children, the harlot Religion and her ill-favored breed of Churches, torture his true children and fear no reprisals from the court of his Reason?
All exeunt quickly except CHORUS, who lingers for a moment after the others have left, then spins on his heel and slowly exits stage right as the stage lights fade to black.
