Notes for / After / on a Tech Week /
in which a play is broken apart

^CHARACTER

^{I        Female / 25 years-old / working in a job        [Characteristics go here, can be anything: emotional, prone to rage or calm or lover of the finer things in life or no-nonsense type—terms that gives the audience (and the director) a basic idea of the character.]}

^SETTING 

^{SEAT F17 of an undisclosed theatre / 
name withheld for privacy concerns}

^TIME 

<sup>Tech rehearsals for a play, when thoughts
aren’t so coherent.

All STORYTELLERS are people who’ve fled. Not necessarily refugees. Certainly those exiled from a place or belief or feeling. Who, after time spent running, turn around to look back and realise, they may be blind to what’s ahead. But behind them there’s a road to carve with their voice, across all the stops between flight and now. A storyteller is living as a record of the albums they wish they could throw away. They’ve memorised all of them, there’s no possibility of forgetting. They share tracks they’ve made in the dirt along the way with us, choruses and melodies, a solo or two, a bridge—in order to lighten the weight of their tunes.

cc: the author</sup>

^{SCENE I}

<sup>¶ A monster is around me, thrashing in pain. Its voice is silent.

The prologue is an essence, distilled. Snapshots of the cracks we’ll enter later and their chunks, appear connected when later they’ll be revealed as not. The following acts trace disparate feelings with an equivalent melody. Three sections, one a colour, another an action, the final its residue into a shadow.

A villain wants. A hero cries. I don’t pay attention to what’s going on. Then a ghost ends it. A chorus chooses a side.

Every day I watch a stage for a different story. A different ending. But I leave before it finds itself, because it never does.

George Eliot
novelistic, more traditional; horny and petty and ravaging

Niccolò Machiavelli  
the middle an interlude takes up space ( ) vengeful

Gretel
a blending of space outside of space, an anti-space; 
a cross-section of journals addressed to dissatisfied names 
unprepared for the imminent cataclysm

The middle is too long. The beginning too uncertain of itself. The end, as mentioned, is missing. Everyone is in the wrong place and they’re slacking. I’m watching, from F17, some mimics trying their hand at impersonating confidence. Try me, they beg of the air. I’ll wrestle you, win. Try me.

Edit the cast list

I          Female / 25 years-old / working as an assistant / a job        [Characteristics go here, can be anything: ‘emotional, prone to rage’ or ‘calm’ or ‘lover of the finer things in life’ or ‘no-nonsense type’—terms that gives the audience (and the director) a basic idea of the character.]

Add an epigraph

The supreme task of an epic production is to give expression
to the relationship between the action being staged and everything
that is involved in the act of staging per se.

—Walter Benjamin</sup>

^{SCENE II}

¶ G
her shirt off
pens loose on the floor
desk illuminated with a lamp
lamp coddled by a monkey
hair curler guillotined
pink painted over

¶ N
he’s upstaging himself
pants loose around his ankles
counts in willows
1 2 3 3 4 5 6 8 9 10 11 12 13 13 13
ink always missing 
wants to wear pink 

¶ G
armour’s unstitched                                                          
chainmail threadbare 
crows circle 
empire of runways 
so is the United States 

they giggle simultaneously

 

^{SCENE III}

<sup>¶ It’s somewhere in a locker. Then it moved to the other side of the building. Then the apron of the stage. Flying underneath the makeshift map made by the lights of the city, seen from an aeroplane mid-flight twists fluttering, below until the crash—MOVE. Over and over and over again I shudder at the entrance of a theatrical event. The pause before it when I’m furthest away from its centre.

Niccolò’s been cutting my vocal chords by battering through them with a screw, slowly. Ripping carefully, enough for me to register every count a cry I let out by the order of it losing me to 4, 5, 33, 80, 7,902. Farther and farther away from accessing the centre of sound I’m at a farther point than it, moments ago. George laterally walks. Back and forth, perpendicular to me. In parallel of the minute before. Gretel snips the proscenium with a wire cutter.

The brutality of repetition is tasteless.

Next week is the premiere. I’m being better paid, slightly in comparison on an individual level.

Gretel quoted Peter Brook yesterday.
To paraphrase she mentioned he once said:
‘hold tightly when you do, but let go lightly.’
 
I want to.

I feel much better now.

            I’m about to leave the theatre.

I’m allergic to artifice.
I’m artifice as allergy.

I imagine I’m thirsty but I’m cutting a table, open sharply with a knife. Slicing in uneven lines as my throat dissolves into a burn. Saliva’s missing.

I look up at a stage and see fog, green.

What have I been denied?

I’m an infidel to integrity and obligatory about fidelity. No, I feel a fidelity to obligation. A strange pull that’s so familiar, more than myself. I’ve barely talked with anyone recently.

What’s the alternative to being an expert?

I don’t travel in a pack.

A young wolf enters from downstage left,
padding across in zigzags,
eating every metal shard it finds.

Words are material. Choice is too loose. To have no idea what to want and how. To realise there are some I can’t see. To place yearning inside of a box I identify with a ballpoint pen I call LIKE ME. No that, is the subtext. I write, SAVE THIS FOR LATER. I think, I’M BETTER OFF ANYWHERE ELSE, I dream, JUST FORGET THIS. I name this box I WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND WHY I accept nothing.

I’ve lost the key to this box I’ve just found. I want to decide on the right label. I’m scrolling through emails I forgot to respond to as George fondles the edge of the apron.

What’s the alternative to being an amateur?

I’d love a sense of its scale.            
            it’s indefinite.           
            it’s constraint.           
            it’s fiasco.           
            it’s control.           
            it’s the taste of noticing.             

It’s nice to feel good at something.
Especially if people around you tell you to pursue it.

PERSON YOU LIKE—Put on this uniform!
YOU—I’m not so sure about that….
PERSON YOU LIKE—I’m telling you, it’ll make you feel good.
YOU—But you’re not wearing it.
PERSON YOU LIKE—I don’t need it anymore.
YOU—How did that happen?
PERSON YOU LIKE—I forgot.
                                                                                               bullshit.

If people tell you to pursue something, reject it.
It means they think they know you. They don’t.

YOU—I think I’m going to listen to baroque music.
THEY—But I don’t like that.
YOU—I think I’m going to learn bolero.            
THEY—But I don’t know that.
YOU—I think I’m going to learn to make shoes.
THEY—But I pay a cobbler already.

People will want to befriend you in order
for you to help them get future work. 
Knowledge is useful.

Enter Gretel who starts rolling 
on the stage as a log 
George jumps over 
Niccolò snorts

Ambition is useful. Distracting, too. It can be an excuse to leave a city. Skip a day of eating. Sweat through a holiday. Crawl across a terrain whose ecosystem you destroy singularily. It can always replace other things and make them seem less important. Make the things that exist in the realm of the unspeakable seem foreign, silly, a waste of space, less worthy of care. Ignore this belittling. Ambition, this villainous kind, is a reach up and pressure down. A belief erasing the now. A forcefield that shields anything foreign to its continuity from penetrating it, except when it smells hot chocolate. Then, you sneak in the ideas it’ll never recognise. Sneak in stealth. It’ll find its way to the right locker.

One day I woke up and I realised I didn’t have to let myself be tightened by it all the time.

I let the lock go.

It spun loose.

I went too far one way
and I’m tracing back an inhale, 
its exhale.</sup>

^{SCENE IV}

¶ I’m watching reverberations as a spectator.

Back to F17.

Not even a full cup of coffee in me and barely a slip of water before already on it, the train. A cold rushed back in, one I left on the seat on the train ride home yesterday. I miss wolves. Their shadow and the mew they release when they’re happy.

Rushing in sick during tech doesn’t make you popular. People in the same pants they’ve worn all week occasionally turn back to glare at you, the moment after you sneeze into the elbow of your jumper. The lightboard operator shouts directions to the pants addict, every message louder. Every moment after a sneeze, louder. I’m sucking on a lozenge and dozing on the shoulder of Gretel as the person pretending to be me today crosses the stage. Their silhouette flickers once they stop to freeze. The actors are above, gossiping and drinking coffee while below, a girl plays each and every one of them silently, filling time for a rest unrequired. The edge of my nose burns, I look up and shiver. ‘What is it?’ Gretel asks, her eyelids flickering. She keeps them closed, but rolls her shoulder. A howl and the shadow of the girl five rows ahead of me rises, on a height she’ll only ever reach by colluding breaths to stretch across the width of an extended plank, making up the deck of this space into something almost real, a wolf sashaying in with its teeth extending, mouth opening, saliva slicking, to a—SNAP. It closes its mouth.

(Blackout)

Vampires drunk on a Sunday—I’d see that play
Yes is a word I’m washing out of my mouth 
I’m a home for dead people on a weekend already
On a train ride after Jerusalem

All STORYTELLERS are people who’ve fled. Not necessarily refugees. Certainly those exiled from a place or belief or feeling. Who, after time spent running, turn around to look back and realise, they may be blind to what’s ahead. But behind them there’s a road to carve with their voice, across all the stops between flight and now. A storyteller is living as a record of the albums they wish they could throw away. They’ve memorised all of them, there’s no possibility of forgetting. They share tracks they’ve made in the dirt along the way with us, choruses and melodies, a solo or two, a bridge—in order to lighten the weight of their fumes.

In the Torah there are stories about a god. A lonely one, a vengeful one. Niccolò told me this god built a fort. Once complete, he was given a chaise lounge and a piña colada. His fate was to look down at what he built across the ages, with no power to in terfere in how it ran itself. No ability to interfere with how its players took it apart.

How he must ache.

It’s a haunting. For me to linger on, for longer than the time between now and the next thought that appears.

I’ve left epics for anything in the distance I saw.

I’m a record keeper of all the leaving.

I’m a testament to all the volving.

Re-volve me.

^{SCENE V}

<sup>¶ a small fire downstage burns

Notes

dim lamps cover castor oil 
continuing to be confused about pant selection 
is this naturalism or realism? 
theatre is a prison for pretend 
for no conceivable reason
a grape’s supposed to help her
a grape’s never helped me
I’ve never needed any             
                309
vocal chords throb from for glue
but only an empty echo            
                0000004
fell asleep five minutes ago 
hypocrisy isn’t always visible 
a guitar solo just described as the fuck you
one sound cues are underneath dialogue 
action happens by person the sound language is 
What?      backdrops continuously chase feelings of scenes

with a pen sharper than a knife
with a pen sharper than a knife
with a pen sharper than a knife

Actors

everyone keeps yelling as an acting choice
N is unshowered
G snagged a prop grape and ate it
all wear mics
N took his shirt off
G pretends to masturbate
123    
                 8 9 33345                        
                                907283                                    
                                            903

Gretel, what about you?                        
                                44792
Gretel, sorry for disturbing you                
                  4000000
Both G’s keep pacing
N licks the floor
1
2
3
4
Gretel throws her sweater to the floor
Niccolò cuts scrim curtains the furniture
George summons a thunderstorm

How am I supposed to follow the tone?
Woven together in hopes the audience
feels its fragmentation.
Can anything, really ever feel whole?

words             connect                 different                      
                         tracks                     trace                 details
on the page         all at once, with eventually each            
in         a          different           idea enters      
a sentence     layering            overlapping       cacophony                            
                         into moments of suspension
some    god      only knows       what     I’d        be                                
                          without

bye</sup>

^{SCENE VI}

^{¶ I’m not           
                    I’m not sure how… I swerve… words arrange themselves by it I don’t know, of someone flickering I might wish to be… it watches me… exactly who I’d be if my brain were the same, in a ragged body in an immedical time… someone please rain, over this feeling.}

^{an ambush, possibly}

<sup>Everything wilts as if breath auctions itself off before any of us raise our hands for a bid. Clouds cross the sky, swerving into loops as if only they know how, how to exhale. Desks and backdrops and lamps and monkeys and people with glue in their hair squeal in disbelief after tripping on something thick enough to rip through dead skin.

The pause before when I’m furthest away from its centre. It’s trapped in light. Over and over and over again I shudder in the middle of a theatrical event. Sparked there into it I fly, underneath the makeshift map made by the lights of the city, seen from an aeroplane mid-flight twisting in flutters, below until a soar—MOVE. An apron’s on a stage. So, is a stage inside of its own building. It moved. Somewhere different. Outside of a locker. 

I don’t know if calm is a symbol or an instrument or a material or an interlude or some vehicle and I’ve never learned how to ride it but I also, know that if it’s an ending then reaching for it’s never worth it and so I’m leaving, I’m deciding to push against the stagedoor and I’m nudging, but nothing and shoving and nothing, still empty handed but for cuts of blood and I’m banging, my hands thrashing onto wood without rigging and more, and more, I pound and ravage, bleeding and scavenge and trying, open my mouth floats and my voice is back I’m screaming—every body turns, any around but there’s no one.

Only a wolf puppy, at centre stage
with its wide paws spread, licking</sup>

^{unstray from the action}