A sensuous undertaking
by temi (brodkey) rose
CAST
Women:
Hope (40+) Tidy in everything she does, she is disciplined and passionate.
Gina (40+) Oddly amazing with philosophical tendencies, the live-in maid.
Connie (19+) Hope’s well-educated daughter, takes herself seriously.
Julie (40+) Hope’s best friend since high school. (also plays She, a playwright)
Brenda (60+) Bruce’s wife is a social worker and a big reader. (also plays Vaudeville Woman)
Men:
Arthur (30+) Since he is dead, he can appear any age directorially appealing.
Michael (19-25) and Stephen (24-29) Hope and Arthur’s sons. Michael is artistic. Stephen is in the military. They are close.
Frankie (20+) Julie’s son, friends with Michael and Stephen. (also plays He, a corporateman)
Bruce (60+) Hope’s older brother is a storefront lawyer. (also plays Vaudeville Man)
Raj (30-60) An elegant, masculine, majestic man. A close friend of Hope and Arthur.
PlaCEs/TIMeS
Act 1: In the theatre. Now and then.
Act 2: In the kitchen. Morning cont’d. Afternoon. Dinner.
Act 3: In the kitchen. Evening. Midnight. Wee Hours, Just Before Dawn.
Act 4: In the hall. Tragedy. Comedy. Gray Area. The night before. Morning.
Ballets
Ballet #1 : Act 2 Scene 1 : Siblings : Connie, Michael, Stephen
Ballet #2 : Act 2 Scene 6 : Clean the Kitchen part one : All but Arthur
Ballet #3 : Act 3 Scene 7 : Clean the Kitchen part two : All but Arthur
Ballet #4 : Act 4 Scene 1 : Shock : Hope
Ballet #5 : Act 4 Scene 1 : Rage and Grief : Hope
Ballet #6 : Act 4 Scene 4 : Row : Hope and Arthur
Ballet #7 : Act 4 Scene 5 : Morning : Hope and Connie
Act One takes place mostly in the theatre during a production of Brecht’s Mother Courage. Part of the audience is seated onstage facing the rest of the audience sitting where audience normally sits. The actor/esses mingled with the audience in the regular audience area (none of the actor/esses are seated onstage). Act one begins with Arthur alone in some area in between the two audiences, speaking to both.
Scene One: Memo
For the most part, Arthur is in good humor even when discussing difficult subjects. Nevertheless, he is not by any stretch of the imagination a peaple-pleaser.
Arthur: We live in a state of constant warfare. That’s our dirty little secret. So much (a majority?) of our culture exists to support our war efforts and our war efforts exist to support the limited interests of a few merciless organizations addicted to force.
I am convinced that if these people knew, for a certainty, that their greed would result in the annihilation of our planet, it would not make a difference in their actions. The only thing that matters to a psychopathic competitor is winning. There is no cost too high.
So we take anti-depressants and forget our duty to forge a durable, livable society. We live down to Oscar Wilde’s edict that life imitates art to the point that life currently imitates advertising. What if we posit that society is emblematic of the way we are and as long as we are personally (searches for the right word) repellent, we will project on and be repelled by our society.
Culture is society in embryo and it does make a difference whether the embryo was generated in a test tube or inside a sex act.
I consider it more wholesome for a human being to be generated by a sex act. It even makes a difference to me what kind of sex act: a whimsical exchange of love, a dance of passion, a violent forcing of capitulation, a disgrace or a rapture. What kind of people are made by these different originating processes? Surely we are affected by how we are made.
Reverence and rage.
We tell ourselves stories. Inside these stories are versions of how we wish to be or not to be. This web of meaning creates our world and catches us, even while we are making, and remaking, every second, the web, the story.
How is it that aggrandizement is the purpose of every corporate strategy? How is it that we can’t recognize this as the same strategy cancer uses to kill us?
In our culture, identity is spoken of as an object. People are conceptualized as objects. Counted. Disposed of. But we know that everything is both process and object. Science is convinced that objects and processes cannot be perceived simultaneously. In our present range of imaginative and scientific skill, we, you, I can either look at the qualities of a person as an object or view the qualities of the person as a process. We can’t do both simultaneously, yet.
Women primp and prepare themselves to be perceived as objects. They compete to establish who will be perceived as the most valuable object. Wouldn’t you rather be perceived as a process? People who like to be perceived as objects generally don’t want anyone to notice their process. No one is supposed to notice when manipulations buttress pretentions or when you justify your hypocrisy by blaming your insecurity.
Certainly women have as much right as men do to be free. But we keep ignoring the fact that freedom requires, demands, responsibility. You have to be strong to be free. The meek, the humble, might indeed inherit the earth but even the meek will have to be strong if they’re intending to carry out their responsibilities lovingly and well.
If you allow women to be slaves, it’s not long before men will once again be slaves and not long after that, children will be slaves serving elites who have never perceived process so the rot of their perspectives, their cannibalistic self-expressions are invisible to them. Can they possibly know how foul they are? When they look in the mirror, what do they see? That’s not a rhetorical question: I have no idea and you probably don’t either. I don’t think people like that go to plays like this. People like that try to get plays like this banned.
People who keep slaves are always also themselves enslaved to something or other. Achieving power over oneself is a creative process available to any individual no matter how immersed in materiality. Incredible beauty on the other side of despair like a spring forest after a rain sun shower tremendous rhapsody an avalanche of emotions faire love demands, we genuflect.
Who do you work for? Why do you try? When you wake up in the morning, what is your relationship to the day facing you? How do you move in time? How do you move through time? Who experiences you? Where do memories reside? Why are there only data retrieval problems in the brain? Why isn’t there a data storage problem?
Confounded.
Peculiar light dashes pieces on the shore roar and roar frantically distinctly aware.
Inconceivable only until someone conceives it. Isn’t that a Beatles song? Incomparable until someone compares it.
My love challenged my expressions of love.
Grandiose philosophical dicta command us to render the extinction of desire. Desire will not perish. Desire is life. Desire can be educated, miseducated, manipulated by propaganda, ideology, advertising. People can be brutalized, isolated or numbed to the point that they can’t locate a genuine desire. Roses without smell, that’s definitely a loss for the world but so are roses with smell when people can’t remember how to use their noses.
I get tired of the rules but I don’t want new rules, that’s just a whole lot more to remember.
Experiencing living in the moment has been the most challenging of all my enterprises. The pinnacle of my endeavors. Life is the purpose of life.
My father told me it didn’t matter what I thought, the world was the way it was, force trumps idealism, fight means right and if you decide to put your faith in art or academics, you will find that it is exactly as cutthroat as any other group. I had no intention of being an artist. I came from a family of artists, I was the first to join an armed service in our family for generations. My father said, he thought the daily petty aggressions and battles for dominance that one encountered in every profession were somewhat dampened by the extreme organization of military society. You know where you stand, who has power and who doesn’t in any given exchange. Whereas in non-military life you never know, relationships are continuously in turmoil because of ceaseless power struggles. This is the central magnetism of military dictatorships: when we are constantly at war, when our stance to the world is war, when we war against the world we are more able to masquerade as peaceful. Genuinely peaceful people are always walking tightropes, instability a constant threat and yet, and yet – alive. War has a narcotic effect. It’s an addiction.
There are not different types of torture. There are different ways to do it but there’s always someone hurt for the purposes of an other someone, someone willing to use force. Intentional cruelty, causing pain on purpose is that what war is? Is war organized torture or is it more like a violent ball game or neither? Maybe war is an exercise of violence in service to greed? Warmongers make money on conflict. Generals, kings, democratic leaders, fascists, dictators, all make fortunes. Foot soldiers not so much. But they used to get paid by looting, pillaging, raping and this is still how soldiers are paid in some societies. In our repressed white dominated insanely warlike society we pay soldiers skimpily out of the common purse and pretend that honor will be enough recompense for them to risk their lives so the rest of us can live.
This is nonsense. I speak nonsense. There is still vast rape in our civilized, present-day army, the difference is we do it to ourselves.
Current critical analogies notwithstanding, I disapprove of everything I just said.
Competence runs circles around arrogance.
Distinguish me.
Previously, prior to the earlier once upon a time. Renditions reverently filled the air with the fondness of love lost in forests streams rush by me pour their beauty on me I rise with your fall, embrace, rest in your restlessness proceed onward towards destinies previously dreamed.
I assumed that men were good. Was I wrong? Most of the books I read were by men and I read a lot of books, the men who wrote these theories, philosophies, scientific theorems surely these men who created skyscrapers, elevators, running water, operas, cell phones, surely, they had some good in them. Or not?
A peaceable kingdom? Oxymoron? Impossibility? Or simple irony. Nothing simple about irony.
The shattered remains of bodies and lives litter the landscape of my life and the war digs deeper and deeper into the pattern of our lives. We are drowning in our abundance. We’re rarely aware of one another. Cruelty shelters people from their own vulnerability. Somehow, a pose of strength ameliorates the persistent denigrations of individual identity and enterprise.
I know how the earth feels exhausted yet motivated to keep producing, to continue spinning, to dance around and have every piece of her reach toward the sun.
I feel I failed in my loving. I feel that somehow my love could have transcended my personality. I know that’s impossible, we can’t be anything but who we are, but for those of us who grew up during the cold war, we were not raised in love. We rebelled against our parents, ran away from home, had serial sexual relationships, destroyed IBM’s monopoly, showed Vietnam to be a war for economic supremacy, invented free love to try and heal ourselves from the lack of love we experienced as children.
But we didn’t realize the foundational nature of early habits. So, when faced with inter-personal scenarios that brought up our upbringing, our family of origin scripts, a royal battle between projected habitual formulaic inauthentic selves ensued, pursued, and deluded us. So often. We did this a lot … until it killed us or we gave up and hunkered down to create new habits.
It’s like coming from a country where no one’s ever been and no one knows your language. So you’re constantly translating and simultaneously aware that your translation sucks. As each word comes out of my mouth, I feel the betrayal of the other, truer language that doesn’t even meet the criteria of a language since it doesn’t get shared so what is that world of meaning? Is it unique to each of us or is it a common conceptual perception? Like the parallel realities that we speak of so often, the elemental physical, spiritual duality dichotomy. Those parallel realities, do they both have a language, a dialogic space?
So much needs expression: no one language could possibly capture the glory, the beauty, the terror, the majesty of life.
Have you ever seen a happy, lively, interested aware elephant? In my dreams, that’s how they are. Am I dreaming of a past or of a future?
Scene Two: “Where’s my morning fuck?”
He and She enter the middle ground between audiences. They are always somehow physically opposite. One is higher or lower; one is stage right, the other stage left; any opposite is acceptable as they move around their scenes.
She: He said, “Where’s my breakfast; and where’s my morning fuck?”
He: What are you doing?
She: I’m writing a new play.
Long pause, achingly long.
She: Aren’t you proud of me? (pause) Do you want to read it? It’s pretty good.
He: No.
He’s getting ready for work.
She: I’ve been getting up early before the baby wakes up and I’m making progress. I can’t do anything during the day because --
He: No I’m not excited. Where’s my breakfast and where’s my morning fuck?
Arthur: She didn’t know then that people speak that way. I suppose that’s an advantage of reality tv. We’re used to gutter discourse, becoming immune to the sounds of brutality. But there are other sounds that people can make that don’t tear our souls apart. There are sounds everywhere around us that make us want to live that bring sparkles to the eyes.
Arthur exits.
In some cases, the acoustics will be such that actor/esses in the audience will need mics. In small theatres, it’s better not to amplify the voices. In either case, the actor/esses are not to yell. They can go from whispering to a regular speaking voice but no louder as they are, in theory, part of the audience at a performance of Brecht’s Mother Courage and what is spoken is occurring in their minds. The lines from Mother Courage are spoken by characters in the audience as indicated.
Recruiter (all males=m): I’ve been thinking about suicide, Sargeant.
Gina: Did I turn off the lights?
Bruce: God, I forget how uncomfortable this shirt is.
Recruiter (m): This place has shattered my confidence in the human race, Sargeant.
Michael: I ate too much.
Raj: I love him.
Hope: I feel sick.
Sargeant (m): Where’s their sense of morality to come from?
Raj: He could love me.
Sargeant (m): Peace. That’s just a mess, takes war to make order.
Stephen: Aw shit, I forgot to go to the bathroom. Damn it.
She: She is wordless, not conceptless. She feels what she thinks because her thinking includes her feelings. But the complexity of her emotional life is not articulateable using her current vocabulary. So she feels diminished. She sees the story happening in front her, feels it, she knows that her words could have power but she has no words, not some words NO words, none, just the vividness, the clarity of feelings when they merge with thoughts and the flow is there and the truth is there and love is there but somehow not knowledge, not history, not even her story, no marking that she was here in this moment, alive.
He: I hit her once. But it was enough to shut her up. She left me then. She seemed so big, like a huge Macy’s balloon, mushrooming in front of me, and I couldn’t see our baby in her arms, I just had to break that balloon.
She: He hit me in the back of my head, from a low angle to catch the curve of my head on his hand and launch me and our daughter into the air. (pause) Thank god I was writing that play, we were in a five story walk up and I hadn't done the laundry in a long time, what with having to take the baby and the laundry down and up those stairs by myself. He was above doing laundry or changing diapers, watering the plants. My baby daughter and I landed miraculously in a big soft pile of dirty laundry. A miracle. I thought: You don’t get a lot of those and I began to plot my escape from Alcatraz.
Courage (all females=f): Morning.
Bruce: Duck.
Sargeant (m): Morning.
Bruce: I love duck.
Sargeant (m): Halt.
Bruce: Isn’t there a duck in this?
Courage (f): Courage is the name they gave me because I was scared of going broke.
Bruce: Or is it a chicken?
Hope: I hope I don’t pass out.
Courage (f): Stay with your mother.
Hope: I’m so tired.
Raj: That meeting was terrible.
Courage (f): Laugh.
Brenda: But everybody doesn’t love the same way.
Courage (f): Coin’s good.
Raj: Forgive me my trespasses.
General (m): Soldiers, men of courage.
Connie: In between.
Courage (f): Bone stupid.
Michael: I hope I can get out of town this weekend.
Courage (f): Light.
Gina: I turned off all the lights.
Courage (f): Flight.
Hope: I think I turned off all the lights.
Courage (f): Right.
He: I didn’t mean to hurt her. Not really. Just STOP her. Silence her. There’s a tone that women get when they -- she always makes me hate myself.
Sargeant (m): You want the war to nourish you? You have to feed it something too.
Bruce: It’s a chicken.
Courage (f): Miserable bird.
She: I left him.
General (m): Soldiers.
She: A friend of mine asked me if I wanted him killed.
General (m): Men of courage.
She: Or beat up.
Courage (f): Suppose some general or king is bone stupid.
She: I was still in love with him so I didn’t hesitate (she makes fun of herself) “No, oh no, I don’t want to hurt him.” Now, I think that I was more spiritually advanced than I thought I was at the time. At the time I was terrified, I had stepped off the map of the known world and was now a single mother with no family, no plan, no money, no job, and a baby. Can you be proud in retrospect?
Courage (f): Not dashing like your brother.
He: I got rich.
Courage (f): Lutherans!
He: I use pharmaceutical aids to sleep --
Armourer (m): Catholics!
He: To aid my heart, to aid my anxieties, to lower my cholesterol.
She: The tendency that gets me into trouble, that I can be overly swayed by my appreciations of an “other,” the largeness of the “other” is beautiful to me, in lovers, friends, children. I can’t put myself inside him; inside of someone who, when he feels something beautiful, rare, huge, feels he wants to make it smaller, vanquish, hit it, bring it to its knees. (pause) I wonder if it’s a subconscious rage against parents who, when they were large and loved, were cruel and denying. I think, if he had let me, I could have loved him.
He: I don’t know how to be happy.
Courage (f): You shameless creature.
He: Don’t get me wrong. (chuckles) I’ve had good times.
Courage (f): No soldiers for you.
He: I’m lonely.
She: I do have trust issues. I can’t blame that on him. My parents were cruel and denying while dementedly pursuing fame and fortune. They left me to fend for myself.
Courage (f): You’re not to start exhibiting yourself until it’s peacetime.
Brenda: They seemed like nice people.
Swiss Cheese (m): Kattrin says she can’t sleep.
Stephen: If I call her after midnight, will she pick up?
Swiss Cheese (m): Best if I got rid of that box.
She: I found a man who would rather sail the sea of fame and fortune, than swim in the oceans of love. I left him to fend for myself.
Swiss Cheese (m): I think I found a good place to hide it.
Hope: I can’t eat wheat.
She: The first step is not far from the tree.
Courage (f): We are law abiding.
Raj: That’s how I knew he might be a hero: he didn’t believe in heroism.
She: I never wish I never met you. Isn't that odd? After all the damage. I remain glad of you.
Courage (f): With two thieves, they nailed him on the cross.
Hope: I swell up when I eat wheat.
He: What you’re interested in is silly and not worth thinking about.
Yvette (f): I’ll think it over.
Michael: Is it more courageous to obey the law or to defy it? Or to sneak around it? Or just ignore it? Pretend it doesn’t exist?
Colonel (m): He’s no good. He’s only making use of you.
She: No man will ever love you. My father told me that. I’m still not sure what he meant or what I should understand about that statement. I’m pretty sure it’s false. I think I’ve been loved a few times by men. But what did he mean? He was a closeted gay married man. Was he projecting? Did he feel that he would never be able to be loved openly in a relationship with a man? Men loved us. Both of us. Gay marriage is legal now in a lot of places. Love and marriage. Sometimes I’m ridiculously proud of the social revolutions that have occurred in my lifetime. Proud in retrospect again.
Chaplain (m): Far be it from me to interfere, but what are we going to live on?
He: I loved you. I did it all wrong. But what I thought I meant was love. What I thought I was meaning was love and I am sorry for my part of the sorrow. That sadness was so heavy; it broke me. I remain blind.
Hope: Food made from wheat is almost inescapable.
Members of the onstage audience (volunteers from the “real” audience, preferably a mix of genders, races and ages) were given slips of paper with one statement each and are now given their cues to read in the following order.
She: There are nights so beautiful, you can hardly bear the joy of existing – inside these bones, inside this world, inside this heart, inside this mind. I am never not terrified.
Scene Three: Exquisite
The lights become deeply colorful and haunting. The actor/esses who’ve been sitting in the audience, get up and move around the theatre. Every one moves completely differently, as a person might in a park, or in a living room or bar. Each one in a different environment. He and She are not part of this, they remain in between.
Brenda: Who do you think you are?
Raj: Why?
Michael: Where have you been?
Arthur: How long is this going to take?
Gina: If it really doesn’t matter, then why don’t you try it?
Stephen: When will this happen?
Connie: Where?
Bruce: How did this happen?
Hope: Can you tell me anything at all?
Michael: Who is he?
Raj: How are you?
Connie: How big is that?
Gina: How long will you be gone?
Arthur: How tall are you?
Stephen: Can you lift this?
Raj: Will you call me?
Hope: Since when is that ok?
Bruce: Who told you that?
Michael: Why can’t I cry?
Brenda: Will you please pick that up for me?
Gina: Do you think I need to try harder?
Connie: Why don’t you call me?
Michael: Why do I always have to call you?
Brenda: Where did I put that?
Stephen: Isn’t that the point?
Bruce: What kind of place is this?
Arthur: What kind of person are you?
Raj: It’s too much. Don’t you think it’s too much?
Connie: If you don’t stop saying that, I’ll scream.
Hope: What are we going to do?
Brenda: Why are you always rushing me?
Stephen: Do you know what you think?
Michael: Do you ever not know what you think?
Raj: When can I see you?
Scene Four: The Play’s the Thing
All the actor/esses are once again seated in the regular audience area, but each in a different seat than previously.
She: I wish because it feels beautiful to wish. Because I feel beautiful when I wish. I feel beautiful when I have hope. Hope is my beauty secret.
He: Too many confirming imbecilities.
She: Particle or wave.
Yvette (f): It’s up to you.
She: If there ever was a disaster, you’re it. An accident looking to happen. A burp. A loud burp during the quietest part of the symphony.
He: I just don’t care.
Chaplain (m): Freedom.
She: To be in awe of a universe that can grant a wish.
Chaplain (m): Slaves.
She: So enormous and magical that making a wish makes sense.
Chaplain (m): Liberate them.
She: A universe so miraculous that wishes come true. And that is the end of a proper fairy tale.
All: Lutherans!
Gina: He fucked the maid.
All: Catholics!
She: I was always scared. I was scared all the time. Every day. All day long. I never slept through a night. I couldn’t shit or breathe properly. I was scared all the time but I didn’t know why and I didn’t know how to make it stop.
Swiss Cheese (m): No appetite.
Raj: I like sex.
She: Your mistake is thinking that my naiveté is a weakness.
Courage (f): Yvette’s red high heeled boots.
She: My ticket of admission to a larger worldview. One that is not cynical and exploitive.
Swiss Cheese (m): She said she can’t sleep.
She: You are too frightened to take an existential leap – to experiment with your life to test the hypothesis that generosity and gratitude can create plenitude.
Courage (f): I got a complaint.
Bruce: Tuesday. Always Tuesdays. Mondays don’t bother me, everybody else is so angry on Mondays. I’m ok on Mondays but Tuesdays I feel hopeless I have no reason on Tuesdays nothing to look forward to for hours and days and I question my life the purpose of my existence. I hate Tuesdays.
Courage (f): Sit down.
Gina: I sat in a living room as a teenager next to 2 adults discussing the riots. This was the late 60’s. One was cute, in his early 30’s maybe. He worked for a bank. They’d had a meeting that afternoon. He said the solution was in play (that’s how he talked) The ghettos were going to be bought. Money would flow, scholarships and jobs would be offered and the ghettos would quiet down. Peace on earth and a shower of greenbacks. It worked for awhile. Then poetry replaced riots and (happily) all hell broke loose.
Courage (f): I changed my mind. I’m not complaining.
He: Her intelligence informs her sexuality… I mean, doesn’t it? I can appreciate her intelligence while I’m fucking her, right?
Chaplain (m): Why should it ever stop?
She: You live in a parallel universe where everything is upside down, Alice’s wonderland, Plato’s cave, Dante’s inferno. You think force is strong and patience is weak. And you have no idea how wrong you are.
Courage (f): Poor people have to have courage, simply getting up in the morning.
She: This is the ticking time bomb you are so afraid of --
Courage (f): The fact they bring kids into the world shows they have courage. Because there’s no hope for them.
She: The central theme of so much of your literature, the lie inside your truth.
Courage (f): Worn out.
She: Upside down and inside out.
Courage (f): Be sensible.
She: Nussbaum says that the gods have no courage -- because they don’t need it.
Brenda: Frenetically solving absolutely nothing. Working for nothing but ends no thought to the means, meanness is in every moment. Lies, evasions, poses, manipulations. All the time rushing to line up the next sucker for her sales pitch. Sometimes I wonder if she’s capable of articulating any unique vision or experience of life. All her statements are clichés. I haven’t heard one original statement, one original sentence in ten years.
Connie: There’s always something dirty about me. Something I can’t escape. A hemorrhoid, a psoriasis patch, a finger fungus, a broken toe, something that keeps me from being perfect.
Courage (f): She was assaulted.
Brenda: But she’s my sister.
Connie: And if nothing’s wrong, I’ll keep searching, delving deeper until I find a crooked finger, a lump of cellulite, a bad attitude, a greed for life. But I don’t know why I’m ashamed of my greed for life. Shouldn’t that be a good thing?
Brenda: And I love her.
Courage (f): War be damned.
Hope stands up abruptly and calls out.
Hope: The abstract doesn’t exist, it’s the opposite of real. Only things that exist exist.
Blackout.
End Act One
act one ~ In the Theatre pdf / html act two ~ In the Kitchen pdf / html act three ~ In the Kitchen cont'd pdf / html act four ~ In the Hall pdf / html 3/1/13 |
john leo, temi rose (elena sapora hidden), sophie nimmannit