Midnight Plays
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Boson Books by Leon Katz Metamorphoses Midnight Plays
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MIDNIGHT PLAYS by Leon Katz ______________________________________
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Midnight Plays Published by Boson Books ISBN 1-886420-17-3 An imprint of C&M Online Media Inc. © Copyright 2000 Leon Katz All rights reserved For information contact C&M Online Media Inc. 3905 Meadow Field Lane Raleigh, NC 27606 Tel: (919) 233-8164 e-mail:
[email protected] URL: http://www.bosonbooks.com
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LEON KATZ Leon Katz is Emeritus Professor of Drama, Yale University and Visiting Professor of Drama at UCLA. He is the author of several dozen original plays and adaptations produced in the United States and abroad, among them, The Three Cuckolds, a commedia Dell’arte which has had over four hundred productions internationally and been translated into six languages, and The Making of Americans, an opera based on Gertrude Stein’s monumental novel with a score by Al Carmines. In a long teaching career, he has taught at Cornell, Stanford, Columbia, Vassar, Carnegie-Mellon, Manhattanville, Barnard, San Francisco State, the University of Giessen. He is currently preparing a biography of Gertrude Stein together with an edition of her Notebooks.
DONALD FREED Donald Freed’s plays and films include: Inquest (directed by Alan Schneider); Secret Honor (directed by Robert Altman); and Circe & Bravo (with Faye Dunaway, directed by Harold Pinter).
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CONTENTS Donald Freed Interview With Leon Katz
Justine
Swellfoot's Tears
Dracula/Sabbat
The Dybbuk
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DONALD FREED INTERVIEW WITH LEON KATZ
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Donald Freed Interview With Leon Katz Donald: These are four strange plays from four different worlds of storytelling: A Victorian tale of vampires, a story of Jewish mysticism, a scatological retelling of the Oedipus myth, and a sexually graphic saga taken from the Marquis de Sade. Would you say they have, in any sense, a common denominator? Leon: They have indeed. All of them have as their heroes cultural victims, and the focus in each play is on the theme of suffering and redemption. It emerges differently in each of the plays. In one, the victim achieves redemption, in the others not. But the theme in all of them is the victimization of cultural outcasts. D: Let's take this common denominator of the victim's suffering. Were you making deliberate connections between that and the history of the twentieth century, with its victimizations and tortures and suffering? Or, first of all, are these plays, given their Grand Guignol environment, nineteenth or twentieth century, or does that matter? L: They're twentieth century, all right, post-mass murder wars, postholocaust, post-hydrogen bomb. But the plays are not directly concerned with public policy, public acts, political acts, but with the victimization of those who live counter to the ideologies and politics of their time. All four protagonists are sort of holy fools who suffer and get mangled by institutional processes and ideologies. After all, in this century, whether it's Communism, Fascism, or Democracy, the crime is the same. In each of the plays, there's a system that's operating. The systems are various and have no relation to one another except that they're systems. In the Dybbuk, for example, the system is Jewish orthodoxy, which is very distinctly an ideology and governs almost every aspect of behavior, of life. In Justine, the orthodoxy is sadistic, not merely male chauvinist, but sadism as an ideological principle, a system totally pervasive and in control. In Swellfoot, the system is the most savage of all—a concentration camp in which everyone is under the control of one voice, the Director's. In Dracula, the operative system is Christianity in its most virulent Victorian form. Although the Dracula figure in the play is, in anyone's normal terms, evil, in fact the Devil, nevertheless he is the outcast being victimized by what in his terms is an even more pervasive and threatening evil, Victorian-Christian values. I've reversed the values in the novel, and the four representatives of Christianity become in effect the villains, and Dracula becomes, though I suppose it's hard to imagine, the Christ-figure. BOSON BOOKS
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D: When you wrote the plays, did you have in mind to structure the four of them so uniformly? L: Actually, no. You can call this a moment of discovery. It never crossed my mind before that they were so closely connected, but they are. D: Our editors are waiting in the closet. L: Each play started from a different base, and didn't begin thematically. There was always some practical reason. For example, a marvelous Israeli director, Rina Yerushalmi, wanted to do a new version of the Dybbuk. She wanted to get back to her 'roots.' I have trouble with that notion. Ansky, who wrote the original play, also wanted to get back to his roots. Well, despite the fact that the original is considered a classic, I really don't like it. It's nineteenthcentury melodrama pretending not to be, extremely sentimental and very selfserving. Ansky was a product of the Jewish Enlightenment, and was about as close to the life of the East European shtetl as a Protestant anthropologist studying the life of the natives in the New Hebrides. I wasn't interested in that back-to-the-roots perspective at all. What interested me was the mystical basis of the Dybbuk story, which involves two principal characters, Azrael, the rabidlyorthodox rabbi, and the young student Channan, who transgresses God's law to become a Dybbuk—for me, another devil-martyr. But in each play, as it turns out, there's a victim-hero with an absolute commitment, and each one lives up to it unrelentingly. Whether we think of it as good or evil, it has absolute purity of intent. D: Do you put a name on this commitment, or is it a sheer energy? L: Well, it varies from victim to victim. D: Is their substance relevant? L: Extremely relevant. In each of them, the commitment is the opposite of the pervasive ideology. Swellfoot, or Oedipus, is totally committed to his belief in the oracle of Apollo, the promise of a life of holy suffering which will end in glorious redemption. He is in the plague pit, a.k.a. concentration camp. The Director, who is in fact Oedipus now old, is commanding a performance showing the time long ago when he wallowed in his suffering. The plague-victim portraying the young Oedipus, having adopted his persona, holds to the ideal of Apollo's promise in the face of the Director, who in his loathing of his former delusions of salvation, and out of his embittered nihilism, has made torture and mindless inhumanity the formal rule of the camp. In each of the plays, absolute confronts its opposite. Swellfoot is the only one in his world of nihilism who retains faith; none of the others, neither plague-victims, Guards, nor Director, has any whatsoever. D: Is rebellion a function of these scapegoats? BOSON BOOKS
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L: It's automatic. Since they're totally victimized, and totally committed to the reason for their victimization, they're implicitly rebels, to my mind the most authentic kind. It's the only posture I can imagine that has any heroic dimension in the twentieth century, the only one. The scapegoat is in automatic rebellion, not with the intention of rebelling, but only with the intention of being uncompromisingly himself. D: Let's make a point here. The reason I ask whether it's relevant—are you saying evil and good are irrelevant in the moral sense, or only aesthetically? You could certainly argue over your characters whether their intention is moral, but is that relevant to what you're getting at? L: It's relevant to audiences, but I have to admit, not to me. They're of a moral kind people don't normally think of as victims, but as criminals or fools. Readers or viewers have reason to be outraged by these 'victims.' D: And since the plays are about these victims, they would have reason to be outraged or repelled by the plays. L: Yes, they're horrifying and sort of repellent. That's why they're midnight plays, after most good people are asleep. They function best after midnight. What I have in mind I guess has to do with the nature of the heroism of these victims. No matter what their intent, no matter how wrong they may be in a practical or moral or social sense, the force with which they commit themselves to their lifeideal is what redeems them as heroes. There's something absurd, ludicrous, about each one. That Justine, for example, does not have the sense to join the pack is ridiculous. In every instance, she's victimized because of the fact that she will not give up her belief in the absolute justice of God. She is in de Sade's world in which the commitment to God is a joke. For de Sade, Nature is the ruling principle, and that principle is utterly indifferent to the fate of each man, to morality, and it operates simply on the basis of its own willfulness, completely hedonistic, governed by nothing but gross satisfaction. If Justine were to join that willfulness, as she has the opportunity to do over and over again, she would do just fine. Her virtue outrages the men who victimize her, and eventually she is destroyed by Nature, which is enraged in principle at her devotion to Christian virtue. Even Justine knows after she is rescued from torment that rescue is not the end of her story, and rather than being in raptures over her escape, she falls into despair awaiting the inevitable. De Sade says at the end of the play to the Countess who is Justine's rescuer and the only woman de Sade himself ever respected for her virtue: Regard the monstrosity of Justine's virtue; understand well how monstrous such virtue is. It flies in the face of everything that is true of and operative in the world. He makes a joke of Justine's principles—and significantly, audiences join in the joke whenever the performance reaches the moment in which Justine determines, after many lessons which should have taught her more common sense, to rescue the tormentor who has sworn, if rescued by her, to torment her to her death. Audiences consistently laugh at the BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays impractical godliness of Justine, because fundamentally their convictions about the practical world are the same as de Sade's. D: They cannot follow her. L: Nor can they follow along the path of any of the others. Even within the plays themselves, the strongest supporters of the victim-heroes turn from them at the critical moment. Even Channan's rabbi-mentor, who has taught him the very strategy with which Channan is to embark on his sacrilegious journey, longs to abandon him. He is terrified at the thought that carrying through the cabalistic strategy Channan has in mind will destroy the entire universe. But Channan in effect says: And if it does? Swellfoot also holds to his belief unrelentingly, which is simply to stay alive, to pass through all this and stay alive, simply survive, holding out for the promised redemption. Swellfoot's Tears is the play closest to the twentieth century. D: Oedipus at Auschwitz. L: Oedipus at Auschwitz, precisely. D: This extremity of passion you're describing in these victims, does that make you suppose that Nietzsche's statement is merely ironic, that anything absolute tends toward the pathological? One always thought of that as cautionary but perhaps it shouldn't be thought of in that way. Or perhaps Nietzsche is not exempting anything, including his own passion. L: I would say the same thing, that anything absolute is pathological. And commendable. D: Then in your mind, doesn't it follow that the only alternative is banality, a life of following orders? L: No, one is good, the other is great. D: Adjustment, reason, the middle way is good, but still, so much for Aristotle. L: So much for him. The lunatics are the great ones, the moral lunatics. D: You used a phrase before: these characters are unarguably themselves. So was Charles Manson. How does it make you feel when you realize you can't follow in the footsteps of your own protagonists and that you're forced to join the rest of the banal who in revenge, in resentment, some I suppose in sadness, simply watch the protagonists disappear into the horizon? Many people feel bitter resentment and fury, don't they? and would like to kill those protagonists. What are the feelings that are the alternatives, do you think? When you watch a Swellfoot or a Justine or a Dracula go beyond the point where you can follow, do
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Midnight Plays you have to make a choice at that point whether to hate them or love them? What personal feelings do you have? L: I go with them all the way.. The very thing that I'm celebrating is that quality that is either awesome or reprehensible. D: Beyond good and evil, in effect. L: Beyond good and evil, yes. In Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, Timon is a character who goes right through. He reaches the point of utter hatred of mankind. He hates even his own humanity. I follow that with a tremendous sense of awe—not with moral admiration but with human admiration. That's the one play of Shakespeare's that people find it hardest to stomach. Timon has the same effect as Justine. He becomes ludicrous to viewers. How much simpler it would be for him to take the option of Alcibiades, joining up at the end of the play, satisfied, and satisfying all the senators of Athens. Timon holds out even against the cynic Apimantus who does a devastating critique on the origins of Timon’s nihilism. He points out that he who never really suffered in his life, at the first endurance of suffering takes on the posture, says Apimantus, the costume of the total cynic. I have earned it, you have not, he tells him. The critique makes no difference to Timon. Even so shrewd and accurate an analysis of Timon's slender claims to misanthropy doesn't pull him back from it. D: He pushes through. L: That's right. Though it's been pointed out to Timon that what he's doing is psychologically absurd, he feels no impulse to relent. He still goes all the way. D: You can learn the truth through suffering, or you can learn it in a lightning flash, I take it. L: Whether it's the truth they've learned is a question, and whether they've learned it in the long or the short run is their business, not mine. Either way, they're uncontradictable, absolute; they're lunatics and saints. That's the quality I want to define. I believe that it's the one possible way of portraying the heroic in the twentieth century, because I really believe that all the others are as false as they can possibly be. D: You mean that given the pervasive technocratic control of the state in the twentieth century, the only option open to— L: You see, in the past, in most cultures, heroes embodied the prime social, cultural and political values of their moment. Even the negative and positively morbid heroes of Jacobean tragedy had always to be called villains, and made to suffer providential punishment to signify that what they manifestly were intended to be all through the play was really only aberration. Even now scholars take satisfaction in demonstrating at those plays' ends that 'order is restored' and BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays we can all breathe a sigh of relief. What is true now is that anyone who embodies our predominant values is about as horrible a human being as you can possibly find. Underneath the commitments to loyalty, to patriotism, to honor, lies a deadly evil, and functions as that evil. We have a perfect example of the heroic figure who portrays every one of those values, mouths them, is them: Colonel North. Sitting underneath the icon of Colonel North is just about all the evil of our political times. Yet what is coming out of his mouth would make him a prime candidate for heroism in the French seventeenth century. Corneille would celebrate his boy-scout rhetoric. He spouts all the right values and does all the right things to exemplify them, and flying in the face of a couple of secondary values makes little difference because his ultimate objective is noble. It's that 'noble' that's so dangerous in our time. Its devotion is to abstractions—to the intangible, the imperceptible, the non-existent: Flag and Country, Democracy, Race, that sort of thing, and is reverenced largely for its distance from tangible earthly delights. Devotion to such abstractions is the highest of nobilities and the most insidious of evils. D: The Nazis claimed they were rebels and revolutionaries. L: And they had a very lofty ideal, and the rhetoric of that ideal, that ideology, was of exactly the same false kind as the rhetoric of Christianity, of Democracy, of Marxism, of Jewish orthodoxy, they're all the same in the twentieth century. The most evil thing that is happening in Judaism, for example, emanates from the man who is the most committed Zionist on earth, the Lubovitche Rabbi, and he trumpets every one of the prime values of orthodox Judaic tradition. D: Then everything absolutely owing to pathology is written in capital letters when we're talking about these enormous ideologies against which these individual commitments which we may call fanatic, ludicrous, mad, oppose themselves. Pathological commitments are reserved then, for individuals, is that it? L: Necessarily. Notice that if you universalize the values of Nietzsche's Superman, he becomes monstrous. Dracula writ large in the context of a whole culture is worse than the Marquis de Sade. But it's the individual who goes against the stream, not his ideology, that is heroic. D: If it succeeds, then the idea is doomed to be coopted. L: For which reason both Ibsen and Nietzsche said: Save me from my disciples. The moment any of these principles is generalized beyond the individual himself, you get the evils of a broad social/political ideology. D: But if the principle remains the same, why is it evil in the one and not in the other?
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Midnight Plays L: Because when it's generally subscribed to, the only function left to it is hunting out and killing its enemies, or inventing them. D: This common denominator—it seems to me you do have a leap here—if you go back to Lucifer's fall and as far back as we can go in story-telling, there seems to have been a general recognition that the possibility (in your case you make it the necessity) of antithesis, of negation, has always been there. L: Well, yes, always, the alpha creates the omega. When you reach a point of general social and cultural agreement, then automatically the opposite rears its head. One of the functions of drama, as a matter of fact, is, I think, to compensate for a culture's prime values by countering them. It does so almost automatically, since, to get very pretentious about it, drama has the capacity to reveal the truth. It poses alternate truths to the ostensible truth. When you add one to the other, you have the truth. D: Now, isn't it also true that the very nature of everyday life is adjustment, compromise, from the most practical to the ideological. All human beings short of being a Ghandi or a Martin Luther King, or a person in real life who behaves like your fictional characters — isn't it also true that your midnight plays are suggesting to them some increment of courage or energy to make a decision more consciously than they otherwise would have? It would approach a miracle, wouldn't it? if for a member of the audience there was opened up so much as a tiny window or a question mark about what otherwise would seem to be no choice at all. L: If the plays had such a consequence, I would deplore it. I'm not advising, I'm sneering. What I'm doing is telling audiences what they are not. They are not these protagonists. The only thing that one can do with figures like these is contemplate them. I'm not advising anyone to follow the path of scapegoats and become one. If anything, out of charity, I would urge them to resist the temptation. D: So there's an element of cruelty in even introducing these figures to the body politic. L: The cruelty, if there is any, is only to moral sensibility. As a matter of fact, when I was writing the plays, what I had in mind more than anything else was Artaud, and his notion of getting to the audience through the skin. To prove your case on those grounds is of course more difficult than by corroborating moral sensibility. But there's always a lie involved in that. I wanted to step away from that completely. For drama to float on top of that stream, saying the normal things that are normally said, and appealing to normal responses, means that we're not even touching on the reality. That's what I respect so much about Artaud. He was a lunatic himself, and we recognize in him that it's from the posture of lunacy that one can see the horror and the reality behind. I think one
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Midnight Plays way to get at that reality is to portray these absolute tensions between the lunatic saint on the one hand and controlling ideologies on the other. D: It appears to the viewer that for these lunatics, their portion of the violence, unequal as the struggle is, is a kind of suicide. About all they can do is throw themselves on the wheel. And so it's a sort of slow-motion suicide for them, which may be extremely poetic and evocative, but gets little accomplished. Now it's true that death or suicide is always a possibility for any act of rebellion, however modest, if it should lead to other small acts. But so extreme is the control of the state, so jealous of its power, that it doesn't take more than a few 'no's' till you reach confrontation. So that everyone knows instinctively that they don't have much margin. And that's why perhaps people are sensible. We complain that they won't even lift a finger, but they know that to lift a finger is the beginning of a critical gesture. L: If that impulse to lift a finger exists at all. You remember what Ibsen said about the compact majority: they've all joined. It's hardly just the state that is the enemy. The enemy is the mind-set of the whole culture. D: Then your scapegoat-heroes and the plays they're in invite pretty broad negative reaction. L: They invite and hope for censorship. Justine, in fact, was once banned in Pittsburgh. It was a modest ban, but a pleasure nonetheless. Finally, I thought, maybe somebody got it. D: Could you tell us a little bit about the atmospherics? Because in America, they're always funny instead of tragic. L: Yes, tragically, it was only funny. Theater Express, which produced the play, was touring it around Pittsburgh and environs for evening performances, and one of the venues was a high school. The principal got wind of the substance of the play, and he forbade it to be done in his school even though it was being done when no classes were in session. But of course the newspapers picked it up, and it did wonders for the box office. What he was worried about was the sexual explicitness of the performance. Since censorship in this country almost automatically means censorship of sexual explicitness, you can't possibly get people to run to a theater more quickly than when they expect to see censorable sexuality on stage. It's not as though you're being censored for the right reasons, though. You can't get yourself censored for the right reasons, it's very hard. It's very hard to get arrested, because everything floats on this foam rubber pad and it simply doesn't make noise. You're automatically coopted by the big silence. D: But the reason for that silence is finally political, because political realities are the final revetment to stop a challenging idea. So I'd like to bring you back to where we started. I suppose it's no accident that the organized violence of the twentieth century is in inverse ratio to the reduced power of the symbolic arts. BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays Never has the ratio been so unequal. As one of the people who give full weight to what you're up against, does this provoke a combination of depression and rebellion, or how does it fall out for you? L: When I'm writing plays like these, I allow myself the illusion of supposing that there can be no opposition to them. Everybody is and will be in perfect accord with what I'm doing and showing and saying, which makes it possible to— D: Overcome self-censorship in the first place. L: Exactly the point. That's where the silence is really operative. It's the selfcensorship that really subverts the writing. I think the only way to break through it is to pretend with perfect comfort and ease that nobody could possibly object to this kind of discourse. You pretend perfect freedom, and solidarity of opinion with all possible readers. D: What you're calling pretense is a sort of cunning. On the one hand, you're completely innocent and naive, and at absolute solidarity with what the world's opinions will be in the next five minutes. On the other hand, you do have a passport, and haven't actually sent your resignation to the institution where you might be teaching. It's a willed naivete, and possibly, just possibly, in good faith. The cunning stems from the knowledge of the fear. In overcoming your own you’ve made the assumption that you'll overcome all the others. But at the same time you know that the fear is so great and so diffused that the time lag could be enormous, and that while you've written it for everybody, the truth is that it's only an anybody who might see it. L: Yes, you play this game at considerable risk, because one thing is certain. These plays can never be popular. If they became so, I'd have to rewrite them or ban them. D: You've been occupied for a long time working on Gertrude Stein. Has there been any strength, any reinforcement gathered for your own writing from her? L: And how. In her own peculiar way, reactionary Republican though she was, she was doing in language what I would long to do in theater in dealing with moral and aesthetic questions. Imagine someone who breaks through the barrier of conventional communicative language and continues on that course despite the fact that she could not get published for years except for spasmodic and limited publication. Imagine a lifetime of that kind of pursuit before redemption came. What's interesting is that when she finally did become successful with the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, it caused her about five or six years of disorientation, because as she said, now that I'm a public rather than a private voice, and I hear that voice coming at me from outside, from that other Gertrude Stein persona, which one is writing? And then her work devolved on the question of identity. When she was in Hollywood, and one of the stars asked her how she became so famous a personality when so few people had ever read her BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays books, she said, the secret of that is not to become successful until very late in life. She had the courage of remaining herself—not just the general idea of 'being yourself,' but step by step opening doors that nobody had even supposed were there, step by step breaking through one barrier of language after another, until she was doing something in which she was absolutely alone. And that is the kind of lunacy and sanctity that I most respect. She was both, a lunatic and a saint— hardly personally, but aesthetically. It doesn't have to be directly on the social or moral or political issue. It has to do with fundamental courage and unremitting commitment. D: Then even the aesthetic becomes a moral question, and therefore a political— L: Agreed. We'll leave it at that.
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JUSTINE
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Justine is based on the novel by the Marquis de Sade. It was first performed by Theatre Express in Pittsburgh in 1977, directed by Jed Harris.
LIST OF CHARACTERS (To be played by a company of three women and four men) A Voice (Marquis de Sade) Madame Dubois 3 Bandits Justine Saint-Florent Le Compte de Bressac Valet Madame de Bressac Dom Severino Dom Clement Dom Antonin Dom Jerome Omphale Armande Two Men A Traveler Rolande Suzanne Judge Two Guards Madame Quesnet
PART ONE SCENE ONE: THE FOREST Madame Dubois and her three bandits, at rear, straining to hear something at a distance. Justine, her hands tied, off to one side, away from them. VOICE BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays Justine Made captive, Caught by thieves, A band of murderers, Cutthroats. (A distant sound) DUBOIS (Peremptory whisper to the others) Lie flat. (They drop flat on the ground) FIRST BANDIT (Whispering) He's coming? DUBOIS (Cautioning them with her hand) No sound. JUSTINE (Cries out) Not murder, no! DUBOIS Keep her still! BANDITS (Severally) I will! Mine! For me, Dubois! (They run-crawl toward Justine) JUSTINE No! COEUR-DE-FER (Reaching her first, preventing the others) I'll hold her. (The other two retreat) DUBOIS (To the two who return) Go closer. Crawl. BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays Then wait. (The two crawl off noiselessly toward the road. Dubois remains, watching. Coeur-de-fer is with Justine) JUSTINE Murder! For a purse! COEUR-DE-FER Even for one centime. We're hanged for robbery, We're hanged for murder. Why stop at robbery When murder hides it? You're marked as well. JUSTINE I? For murder? COEUR-DE-FER Murder too. Justine, Belong to me, To me alone. Serve Coeur-de-fer, Serve his pleasure, And you'll be spared. Even Dubois will not. . . DUBOIS No lies to her. Don't touch her. We want her innocent. We'll use her so. JUSTINE Use! How use? DUBOIS (Watching the road) Be still! (Cries from the road) BOSON BOOKS
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We have him! (As Saint-Florent is dragged in:) VOICE The traveler is brought, Dubois receives his purse, he begs his life. COEUR-DE-FER Friend, understand: We cannot let you live. JUSTINE I plead for him! Dubois, I beg, I beg you for his life. DUBOIS Silence her. JUSTINE (To Coeur-de-fer) Grant me this. Ask anything. Grant me his life. COEUR-DE-FER You know what I demand. JUSTINE I will serve you, Serve with devotion, If you grant me this. I will serve your pleasure. Spare him. COEUR-DE-FER If he lives, Then he must join us. He must be one of us. If he refuses. . .
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Midnight Plays SAINT-FLORENT I will not refuse. (Slow fade begins) VOICE Content, They drink, They sleep. Justine remains awake. (Justine touches the sleeping St. Florent) JUSTINE Monsieur! SAINT-FLORENT (Waking) Ah! JUSTINE Sh! You are. . .? SAINT-FLORENT A traveler. JUSTINE Poor traveler! Your name? SAINT-FLORENT St. Florent. And you. . . of these? JUSTINE Ah, no, monsieur, no, no! I am Justine, A captive like yourself, A votary of God, Virtue my sole devotion. I am Justine, monsieur, Defending, With no means, BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays No cunning, No protection, Against monstrosity, Barbarity, The world's corruption. I am Justine, I wander Long, Pray, Only for peace, Safe harbor, Blessed sanctuary. SAINT-FLORENT Your home? JUSTINE None. SAINT-FLORENT Your mother? Your father? JUSTINE They died ruined, monsieur. I have no one, Nothing. SAINT-FLORENT And live by virtue? JUSTINE It is my god. SAINT-FLORENT How does it serve? JUSTINE It serves the God We both adore. SAINT-FLORENT What use is it to men? BOSON BOOKS
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JUSTINE Use! SAINT-FLORENT What does it profit them? How does it flatter? How does it please? JUSTINE You too, monsieur! Wantonness from you! SAINT-FLORENT Learn wantonness. It serves. JUSTINE Odious man! How are you worthy? How do you merit God? SAINT-FLORENT How do you merit bread? JUSTINE (Turning from him) Justine, Let God alone have pity. Trust God alone To find you peace. SAINT-FLORENT Justine, Forgive me. I was unkind. Let us. . . JUSTINE Contrive escape? SAINT-FLORENT Contrive. BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays Steal back my purse, and. . . JUSTINE Steal! SAINT-FLORENT Recover, then. I will reward. . . JUSTINE Ah, no reward! Reward is. . . SAINT-FLORENT His above. I will then help you Through the woods To sanctuary. JUSTINE Sanctuary! God grant, God grant. . . SAINT-FLORENT Recover, then. Recover. (Justine steals toward the sleeping Coeur-de-fer, recovers the purse) SAINT-FLORENT Ah, good! Unbind. (They unbind, Justine aiding Saint-Florent) JUSTINE To sanctuary! (They go off)
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SCENE TWO: DARK WOODS Justine preceding, Saint-Florent following several paces behind. Justine muses as she threads her way through the difficult paths. Saint-Florent follows expressionless. JUSTINE (To herself) Heaven mends, restores. The mind is easy now, The heart is calm. SAINT-FLORENT Justine. JUSTINE My lord? SAINT-FLORENT (Indicating) The narrow path. JUSTINE This? SAINT-FLORENT So. (Justine tuns. The path is more difficult) JUSTINE (To herself) In gratitude I praise the Lord For my protector. Soon, soon I will know peace And sanctuary. SAINT-FLORENT Justine. JUSTINE BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays My lord? SAINT-FLORENT The darker path. JUSTINE I cannot see. SAINT-FLORENT It is the path. JUSTINE The way is closed. SAINT-FLORENT You must bend. Lower. JUSTINE I will creep. SAINT-FLORENT Do so. (Justine creeps. Saint-Florent follows) JUSTINE (With difficulty) Through these. . . dark. . .woods Will we reach. . . asylum? In this path. . . Have we lost. . . our way? Soon. . . soon. . . will we arrive? (Saint-Florent stands up and raises his cane over Justine) SAINT-FLORENT WHORE! (Justine turns, screams. He strikes her to the ground viciously with his cane. She lies unconscious) SAINT-FLORENT BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays We have arrived. (He bends to tear off her dress) Blackout
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INTERLUDE: THE PRECIOUS ROSE SAINT-FLORENT That phantom, That treasure of virginity, That precious rose. What difference can it make To nature or to man That such a rose remains intact Or tampered with for pleasure? That such a rose is closed, That such a rose is open, That such a rose is great or tiny Measured in diameter? I tore the rose by rape. Delight. Delight. The rose was torn for pleasure, The only law. The rose was torn for passion, The only right. What reason for this crime? What reason, Saint-Florent? None. None. Do not explain. Women will loathe, Men will not understand. But those who have seen, Those who know The darkest corners of the heart of man Will understand, Will dare to share This sweetest, deepest joy: Crime without point, Crime without reason, Crime for the joy of crime.
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SCENE THREE: THE WOOD, MORNING VOICE Naked, bleeding, Justine awakes, Screams bitterly at fate. JUSTINE Monstrous! Why? Tigers in jungles, Savage beasts Would be less cruel. VOICE Injured, torn, Lost to honor, Lost to hope. JUSTINE Infamy! This beast I saved, This man whose fortunes I restored, This savage Tears from me This precious rose. VOICE In tears, In terror, Eyes turn in, The heart leaps up, Eyes see. JUSTINE Majesty! The glittering vault, Still sky, The home of peace! Majesty! Take me to your bosom Far from evil And this place of agony. Majesty! BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays The world is stings and nettles. Take me to your bosom. Let me adore. VOICE Two draw near. Justine in fright Conceals herself, Sees new depravity. (The two men mime the ritual of their lust in the recesses of the mottled forest light. Justine, concealed, observes) One gives himself, Unclothes; The other masters. One turns, kneels, worships; The idol raised, He worships. He kneels, Excites, Seizes, Kisses, The idol plunges, He swallows ecstacy. Turns, Writhes, Struggles, Braves the shaft; Blows of iron, Greets, Repels, Falls, Sighs; They reach The vortex of delight. Leaving, They see. . . (The one who played the master sees Justine) VALET Monsieur le Comte, A girl.
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Midnight Plays COMTE DE BRESSAC Flush the bitch out. (The Valet pulls Justine to the Comte de Bressac's feet) Did you see what passed? JUSTINE Nothing, my lord. COMTE DE BRESSAC (To Valet) Our cravats. (They tear off their cravats. The Comte de Bressac holds them) A kerchief. (The Valet holds one) Braces. (The Valet pulls off his braces, holds them) The four trees. VALET (Laughing) Ah! (They lift Justine and tie her to the four trees standing in a rectangle. Justine screams her protestations. They 1augh as they spread-eagle her, face down, in midair) JUSTINE Pity! Messieurs, have pity! Misfortune dogs my life! Be kind! Show mercy! The furies hound, They hound My every step, My life! A-ah! Messieurs! My body tears! COMTE DE BRESSAC BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays The dove, The simple creature. Jasmín, restrain her cries. (The Valet silences Justine with a blow. The Compte de Bressac holds up Justine’s chin as he speaks to her. Her face is distorted with pain) Listen most carefully. The Comte de Bressac speaks. Your name? JUSTINE Justine. COMTE DE BRESSAC Justine, Behold these trees. Behold this plot of earth. This dreadful place Will be your sepulchre If you betray my trust, If you whisper to my aunt Our secret confidence. I will use you. I have need of you. You shall forward my designs. Submit, be loyal, And I will be kind. Answer. Do you understand? JUSTINE I understand. COMTE DE BRESSAC Will you submit? JUSTINE I will. (He motions to the Valet to release Justine. The Valet begins to untie her) COMTE DE BRESSAC Then you are ours. BOSON BOOKS
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Blackout
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INTERLUDE: THE JOYS OF CELADON VALET How sweet it is to imitate the sex! Delirium to be a slut! In one day be the mistress of A baron, porter, marquis, friar, Sometimes victorious over them, Sometimes a victim at their feet. Ardor, Drunkenness, The plunging shaft, Mouth glued to his, Embraced in lover's arms, Being into being, One with him. The Valet of Monsieur le Comte Would have him More robust than Hercules, Enlarge him, stab him, Shoot the blazing stream, All its heat and all its strength, To the depths, the depths of him. Not one of woman's pleasures Is unknown to him; Abhors the sex, Yet revels in its joys And in the separate pleasures of his own. Delicious combination, Delirium. The valet of Monsieur le Comte Will worship, to the grave itself, The double ecstacy of woman-man, The forward-backward pleasure which enthralls, The perfect moment of delirium.
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SCENE FOUR: MADAME DE BRESSAC'S ESTATE Madame de Bressac, ancient, bejewelled, painted, powdered, bewigged, holding a fan, rides with exquisite bearing about the stage, a footman before, one behind. She circles, borne about like an icon. Compte de Bressac on one side of the stage, Justine on the other. MADAME Blessings on him who brought you here! Nephew, my thanks. The child is pure, The child is innocence. Justine, my dear Justine! (Justine does not hear, regarding only the Comte de Bressac) Justine! JUSTINE Madame? MADAME Justine, take heart! Madame will guard and keep you. Nephew, your word! The child is good. Protect, Do not molest her. COMTE DE BRESSAC (Assenting) Madame. JUSTINE (To herself) What is the heart that loves its pain? Justine, destroy your passion. Recall his vice, Recall his hate of woman. Justine, Justine, Recall yourself. What is the mind that loves its death? Justine, you love, You love this man, You love abomination.
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Midnight Plays MADAME Old age dotes, Justine, On youth and innocence. It dotes And revels in its loveliness. Nephew, come here. Assure her. COMTE DE BRESSAC (Assenting) It dotes, Madame, it dotes. MADAME Hear me, Justine! Justine! JUSTINE Madame? MADAME Know peace with us for always. I give you peace and sanctuary. (Madame de Bressac and the Footman go out) COMTE DE BRESSAC (approaching) Justine. JUSTINE My lord? COMTE DE BRESSAC Did I mistake? JUSTINE In what? COMTE DE BRESSAC To trust in you. JUSTINE (to herself) Justine, recall yourself, Justine, recall your God. BOSON BOOKS
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COMTE DE BRESSAC Did I mistake? JUSTINE (surrendering) No. COMTE DE BRESSAC I have condemned my aunt to die. JUSTINE No! COMTE DE BRESSAC I will use your hand. (Justine raises her hands as though screaming in silent horror) Your answer? (Justine runs out. Le Compte de Bressac motions to the Valet) COMTE DE BRESSAC Follow! (The Valet follows, le Comte de Bressac leaves the other way. A cry is heard. Madame de Bressac rushes in, unattended, and circles about) MADAME No! No! He could not! Would not! Justine! What have you told me? No! Nephew, what is the truth? (Le Comte de Bressac and the Valet appear on either side of the stage, face Madame. She throws up her hands, gasps, waits, horrified. They move toward her. She screams. The scream continues into:
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Blackout and segues into the scream of Justine at the beginning of:)
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SCENE FIVE: THE WOOD Justine, screaming, is naked, face down on a block. She is being branded by the Valet. COMTE DE BRESSAC Brand! Sear her! Scum! Folly! JUSTINE Lord! Lord! COMTE DE BRESSAC Press! Brand! Press! Burn her crime into her flesh! JUSTINE I could not, Lord, I could not! COMTE DE BRESSAC Scum, did you suppose Betraying me would save her? To me, you owed your peace, To me, your happiness, To me! Your shield and guardian! JUSTINE Against her good, Against her life, Against the saving of my soul, This crime. . . COMTE DE BRESSAC Which crime, you scum, which crime? Betraying me, or murdering Madame? You fool, you chose the worse! BOSON BOOKS
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JUSTINE The worse! I could not murder her, I could not! (The branding over, the Valet kicks Justine away from the block) Ah, my lord! A-ah! (Le Comte de Bressac stoops over her) COMTE DE BRESSAC Now look at innocence, Justine. You risked your life, And did not save Madame. She died, her wealth is mine; She died, and by your hand. JUSTINE By mine! COMTE DE BRESSAC You fled, Were caught by me, Were branded murderess, I left you here to die. Which crime was less? You might have lived, And owed your wealth to me, To me, your shield and guardian. (To the Valet) Leave her, The branded murderess. (They leave. Justine remains on the ground) JUSTINE I will not relent, O God, My God, I do not relent. My torn body, My branded flesh BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays Will not relent. Accused, betrayed, outraged, My soul does not relent. I move toward you, my God, To live in you, in you.
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INTERLUDE: THE WORD IS MURDER DE BRESSAC Man is the fool who thinks The greatest gift in nature Is a man. Man is the fool who calls The greatest crime in nature The murder of a man. What is he to nature? Whole or mangled, well or ill, He's one to her. Living and breathing, still and dead, It’s one to her. A horse, a piece of earth, a fly, a man, All one to her. One into another one. She stirs the pot, Dismantles one, She stirs, And forms another one. De Bressac kills his aunt, Dismantles one, And nature shuffles, Makes another one. Friendly murder helps her stir, Helps her shuffle One for one and one and one and one. Infamy, you say! A crime! Of all men's lies, this is the worst. Man's pride, and nothing else, Calls murder crime.
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SCENE SIX: THE WOOD: THEN, THE MONASTERY Justine is asleep. VOICE Whose is my voice, Justine? JUSTINE My own. VOICE What do you see in sleep? JUSTINE Oak, sky, endless woods. VOICE Within the wood? JUSTINE Nothing. VOICE At its heart? JUSTINE Nothing. VOICE Then what is your hope? JUSTINE Asylum. Dearest solitude. VOICE No other? JUSTINE None. No other. BOSON BOOKS
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(Monastery bells sound) VOICE Listen. JUSTINE Ah, beloved sound. Beloved bells. VOICE Asylum. (Justine wakes up. The bells are louder. She stands, looks out) JUSTINE Tower. Cloister. Within these woods The house of God! (She kneels) God, let me win this gift Let me fly oh God to its door. My God, let me know at last Your house and gentle hands. Lord, let me be in your holy house! (Justine journeys to the cloister. A monk appears at its entrance, leads her to its interior as three other monks appear. The grotesque, debauched or obese features of the monks are not visible until Justine arrives at the last room) VOICE Going, hurrying, With bitter hope, Toward ruin, despair, abomination. Five leagues, Prayers, Bitter hopes, The door of the house. Gently received, Piously welcomed, BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays Led, Doors, paths, corridors, Last door of all, In God's own house, The worst betrayal. (Dom Severino hurls Justine through the door into the last room) DOM SEVERINO Whore! Pick up your feet! No cries, No pleas! Not here! It would be useless! JUSTINE God, God! Betrayed in your own house! DOM SEVERINO A vestal, Dom Clement! All candor, All religion, Almost a virgin! Verify. (Dom Clement seizes Justine, strips her of her clothing) DOM CLEMENT Verify! Ah! Fuck! What rosiness! What handsome mounds! JUSTINE Terror! My God! Death! His scythe Over my head! Justine!
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Midnight Plays DOM SEVERINO Dom Antonin, The flagellant Will know your pleasure! DOM ANTONIN Flagellant! Her back, Her precious mounds! Tear! Tear! (As Dom Antonin whips Justine:) DOM JEROME Severino, Hold the vestal To the temple Of my mouth! Raise her High! DOM SEVERINO Wait, Clement, Jerome, Dom Antonin! The formula of welcome For untried initiates. DOM ANTONIN The ceremony whole. DOM CLEMENT The other women, Bring them. (Dom Antonin goes for the other women, brings in two) DOM SEVERINO Nothing omitted, Nothing left to chance. DOM JEROME
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Midnight Plays The circle
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Midnight Plays VOICE The circle forms, Justine, its center. DOM CLEMENT Severino, Yours to rule. VOICE The ram, inflamed, Presents itself. Justine, crouched In terror, Nature revolts in her At Severino's quest. Justine repulses. DOM SEVERINO The slut will not submit! VOICE Dom Severino thrusts, In fury strikes, Lashes. Clement whips, Whips and gouges. Flesh yields, Justine submits, The ram bursts through. Screams, screams, Screams of agony. Each takes his separate pleasure, Clement with blows, Cuts and blows; Jerome with mouth, Mouth and tongue; Dom Antonin with several, With every sense, At last cries out, Floods with fire; Frees Justine, BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays Ends her immolation. The beasts retire. The women aid Justine. (The monks are gone; the women tend to Justine, then cradle her in their arms) OMPHALE We too wept, For days we wept. First blows are terrible, The rest is habit. Blows, pain, the acts themselves Are habit. JUSTINE Cry out! Justine, cry out! Cry: Torturers! Cry: Butchers! Cry: Torture! Execration! Execration! ARMANDE All cry out, For days cry out, Tear hair, Tear breasts, Invoke the butchers. Cry: Give us death, Bestow upon us, Blessed death! OMPHALE Take courage, Yield. Resist the butchers And you bring upon your head Misfortunes worse than death. Yield everything. Submit. JUSTINE
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Midnight Plays Escape, Is there escape? OMPHALE We stay till death. Blackout (The Voice and the carolling of the bells begins at once in the darkness)
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SCENE SEVEN: THE MONASTERY The scene, in four sequences, is a kaleidoscope of pictures and activities— some frozen, some in movement— of the round of days in the monastery. First Sequence: A carolling of bells. A spotlight on an otherwise dark stage, of the four monks in their robes, center stage, mounted on one another and resembling a multi-headed beast. It moves and sways slightly — back and forth — under the spot which is directly overhead. The girls, in shadow and silhouette, move toward them to be grasped or struck, and past them like automata, and around them. During this: VOICE (Speaking monotonously, over music) Failure to rise at prescribed hour Thirty strokes Disrespect shown to monks One hundred and eighty strokes Presentation of one part of the body instead of the desired part during the pleasurable act Fifty strokes Disobedience to the superintendents in The girls' chambers, or surliness to the Officer of the Day, One hundred strokes Hint of revulsion at the monks' proposals, of whatever nature they may be, Two hundred strokes Tears, remorse, sorrow, or the slightest hint or look of return to religious feelings or scruples Two hundred strokes Projected suicide, or refusal to eat prescribed food or proper quantity in order to accomplish death Three hundred strokes Attempted escape or instigation to revolt Nine days in the dungeon, entirely naked, and three hundred lashes a day. BOSON BOOKS
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Blackout Second Sequence: A double-monk figure (representing the Officer of the Day), a two-headed monster who prowls, then takes up his position for the morning ceremonies. VOICE Prescribed behavior at the morning rounds of the Officer of the Day: Each girl advances singly toward his chair with skirts raised upon the side he prefers, so that he may touch, kiss, examine, or use which part he pleases according to his pleasure This done, each girl waits submissively on the report of the Superintendent concerning the previous day's infractions, after which the Officer of the Day imposes suitable punishments While this is being done, girls awaiting their punishment gather round the Officer of the Day, and with entire submission to his desires, find roles in whatever scene of luxury the Officer of the Day invites This done, the Officer of the Day consults the cards bearing the names of the girls required by the reverend fathers, and he himself conducts the designated girls to the monks' beds, where they remain until dismissed Morning ceremonies concluded, the girls are permitted to breakfast. Blackout Third Sequence: Three insets with one monk in each, as each is visited by one or two girls.
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Midnight Plays VOICE Prescribed behavior for those recruits who are designated Girls of the Watch: She remains standing all night in her patron's bedroom, at any moment ready to offer herself to whatever passions may stir her master Under pain of savage reprisals, she provides her mouth or her breast for the relief of the one or the other of the master's needs, offering herself willingly as his vase or his receptacle She accompanies him everywhere, dresses him, undresses him, is ever at his elbow, allowing that she is always in the wrong, always at fault, and as a consequence submissive to beatings and other punishments She serves as the object of his every caprice; blows, slaps, beatings, whippings, hard language, all to be endured She stands behind the master's chair at supper, or, like a dog, at his feet under the table, or upon his knees, between his thighs, exciting him or serving according to his pleasure as his cushion, his seat or his torch Blackout Fourth Sequence: Repeat of the multi-headed beast center stage in brilliant downspot. VOICE All recruits remain in the shelter of the monastery, sealed forever, strangers to the world, until such time as they are retired from service, when they shall disappear from the sight of their consorts and masters without ceremony, so that none living shall ever know what becomes of them when they are freed from the days of servitude to which they, BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays for their lifetime, have been called. (The monks leap out of their four-figure grouping as Dom Severino cries out:)
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SCENE EIGHT: THE FESTIVAL OF THE VIRGIN DOM SEVERINO Justine! The newest! (Justine is brought forward toward the altar table) VOICE The newest girl is called, (Justine is wrapped in the brilliant robes of the Virgin Mary) Prepared, (She is placed on the altar) Raised, (Dom Severino and Dom Clement swing censers, circle the altar with smoke) DOM SEVERINO Homage, Antonin! (Dom Antonin and Dom Jerome lift candelabra, circle the altar) VOICE Paid homage. DOM SEVERINO Jerome! Dom Clement! Homage to the Virgin! VOICE Justine, With all adornments, Stunned, Silent, Mocks the Virgin.
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Midnight Plays (Procession of candles and incense continues around the altar) SEVERINO Ave, ave, Salve me! DOM CLEMENT Ave, Lady, ave! DOM SEVERINO Offerings! Clement, First offerings! (Dom Clement leaps onto the altar table, tears off Justine's robe and throws her face down on the table. As he whips her:) DOM CLEMENT Offerings! Clement offers! Offers! Offers! Severino, Yours to consummate! (Dom Severino leaps on the altar. The others at the foot of the altar, and Clement kneeling on it, fling Justine about. Her back is to Severino. Her face is visible. Her mouth is open, fixed in a silent scream) VOICE Last sacrilege endured, (The cross is raised from its resting place by Dom Jerome and Dom Antonin, and passed to Clement and Severino over Justine. They hold the cross over the invisible body of Justine, and force it down on her. Pause) Silently endured; The cross restored, (The cross is returned to its place. Justine, naked, immobile, lies face down on the altar) The outrage ends. (The three monks leave, but Dom Severino comes close to Justine, whispers:)
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Midnight Plays DOM SEVERINO Justine! The newest Celebrates the Virgin; Is honored; Is left to contemplate, To ask her Savior: When? (He leaves. Justine tries to raise her head) JUSTINE God, My God, Deign to answer. End of Part One
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PART TWO SCENE ONE: THE MONASTERY; THEN, THE JOURNEY; THEN, ST. FLORENT'S HOUSE Lights go up on the four-headed monster, moving and turning. The three girls move toward it, are seized, move away, around. In slow movement, the figures fall apart, couple, move off, during the speech of The Voice. Justine moves off from them toward the end, remains alone. VOICE Escape! From years of blows, The lash, Torn flesh, Thrusts of fire, Dulled horror, Years of horror. Escape, The prayer, the dream of years. Escape is planned for years. (As Justine begins her journey of escape, the scene and the other figures move off. Dim, empty stage, with sudden gashes of light appearing during the journey) Justine, in terror, Stumbles through rooms, Through halls, Through paths, Finds labyrinths. Succumbs, Revives, Finds, Below crypt, A charnel house. Stifles disgust, Goes through, Bodies heaped, Decay, Stench. A way is seen, BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays A wall, Another— There! A place! Tears with bloodied hands, Goes through! Sees, Once more, Field, Forest. Runs, weeps, runs. Escape from death, Escape! Wanders, Free! A town, A field, A city square. Wanders, Free! (She lies down) Sleeps. Sleeps. (Two dark figures come up behind her out of no where) Is held, Muffled, Bound, (As they raise her up to carry her off, the scene of St. Florent's House appears) Borne to splendid halls, Stands before one blessed With splendor, prowess, power. (Justine is standing before a table covered with a rich cloth behind which a resplendent Saint-Florent is seated) SAINT-FLORENT I, Saint-Florent, BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays Brought you here, Justine. JUSTINE You! SAINT-FLORENT Recognized you In the market-place, And brought you here. . . JUSTINE Brought! SAINT-FLORENT Had you conducted, then. You were conducted. I offer you. . . JUSTINE Recompense? Reward? For blackest treachery? I saved your life, I pleaded for your life And won your freedom From thieves and murders! And you destroyed me, Called me whore, Then took my innocence And left me so, a whore. You think to give me recompense? Now? Recompense? SAINT-FLORENT None. I owe you nothing. I sacrificed to my belief, No more. JUSTINE Belief? Crime! BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays Rape and robbery? What beast calls these belief? SAINT-FLORENT Leave off pretense, Justine. Confess you understand. Beneath your show of virtue, You have cunning and wit. JUSTINE Cunning! SAINT-FLORENT Low cunning, Quick, sharp wit. I saw it used for my sake In the forest. I offer you the chance To use it now. JUSTINE I, profit you? I, aid your crimes? SAINT-FLORENT Your virtue will be useful. It will serve me well. My passion is for children Stolen from the dungheap, Destroyed by misery, by want; A want so great, it eats away Their courage, pride, their decency. It rots their souls, and hardens them To undertake whatever is at hand To win them bread. Justine, you found your way through misery. Who else knows better all the ways That misery might be betrayed By virtue's face, And virtue's tongue? You have the face, the tongue, the wit To serve me well. JUSTINE BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays How do you live, Monsieur? How do you bear your guilt? How will you face the Providence That judges all? SAINT-FLORENT Replete with honors, pleasures, power, wealth. Justine, I wait your answer. Consider well your fortune. Don't let illusion spoil it. JUSTINE Illusion! SAINT-FLORENT Return tomorrow with your answer. For once, consider well your gain. (He leaves. Justine remains, looks about her at Saint-Florent's room) JUSTINE Your gain, Justine, your gain.
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SCENE TWO: A ROAD Justine alone. JUSTINE I ask forgiveness, Lord, My courage fails, I falter. Let me consider well, my Lord, Let me consider. I pray for guidance, Lord, My courage fails, I waiver. I have followed virtue's way, I have walked its blessed path To know your blessedness. I have walked, and run, and prayed, I have moved in virtue's light, I have moved and bathed in virtue's light. I ask my Lord's forgiveness. I ask, is this my way, My Lord, is this my way? I falter, Lord, I falter, I am blinded by despair. Is this the way to you, This path that leads me Only to monstrosity, To beasts and monsters, To abomination? At every turn I stretch my hand toward you And meet destruction, And beasts know pleasure, Recompense and honor. Is this your way, my Lord, Is this your way? (On the road, a man is seized, felled, trampled under foot. Justine, concealing herself, observes) VOICE
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Midnight Plays A victim, Mad with rage at villainy, Waylays his torturer, Racks him, Tramples him, Leaves him for dead. Justine observes, Is moved by victim's suffering, Conquers her despair, And prays for victim's rescue. (The trampled man, now alone, lies outstretched, motionless) Approaches, Weeps, Gives aid. JUSTINE You are. . .? ROLAND A traveler. JUSTINE Poor traveler. Your name? ROLAND Roland. VOICE The victim smiles, The villain speaks his gratitude, Makes promise of reward. Roland, the villain, rises, Leads Justine to promised peace And sanctuary. Justine, Once more betrayed, Is brought to virtue's cruelest test. (Justine and Roland go off together)
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SCENE THREE: THE DUNGEON IN ROLAND'S CASTLE Instruments of torture on the walls. Justine and Suzanne are sitting on stools; Roland is removing instruments from the wall. ROLAND You know this room, Justine? JUSTINE I know it well. ROLAND And you, Suzanne? SUZANNE Well. ROLAND It is long since you have been here. SUZANNE Yes, Monsieur. ROLAND Always together, yes? SUZANNE Always, Monsieur. ROLAND Arrived and left together. Is it so, Justine? JUSTINE It is. ROLAND One, today, will leave alone. Does that frighten you, Justine? (Justine does not answer) BOSON BOOKS
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ROLAND Suzanne, it does not frighten you? SUZANNE No. ROLAND You do not value life? SUZANNE For wretches such as us, It has no value. ROLAND That is well. You will not spoil my pleasure. JUSTINE How, spoil your pleasure? ROLAND Each will take her turn To fire this disabled thing. A devil keeps it limp. The one of you who first excites Will lose her life. JUSTINE Madness! She who first arouses you Should win your mercy! ROLAND Wretched you are, Justine, Not to understand my pleasure. The one who rouses most Is she whose death will give me greater joy. If I spare her, Both of you would work To plunge me into ecstasy Before the sacrifice, Before the death. BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays That must not happen. The sacrifice must come Before the ecstasy. JUSTINE But this is senseless! Murder for the sake of murder! If completion comes without the crime, What need have you of crime? ROLAND To make crime the completion. Lie so, Suzanne. (Suzanne does not move) LIE! (She lies down) ROLAND Observe, Justine. You have served me now for months, Is that not so? JUSTINE It is so, Monsieur. ROLAND Suzanne for years. You see her flesh? Whips fail to draw a drop of blood now From this flesh. You see? The child feels nothing, She cannot feel a thing. But her breasts, ah, yes, Her breasts remain still tender. (Suzanne screams) Yes, she feels, she feels now. See? Suzanne has feeling. The whore excites me cruelly.
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Midnight Plays Oh, lovely she was, Justine. Lovely Suzanne, Roland remembers With how much delight our first embrace. Never has woman been such joy, Never has Roland loved As once he loved Suzanne! Oh, let us embrace, sweet child! Let us embrace with love! For we part tonight, Suzanne, We part, and will not meet again. Here, see, Justine, The temple of my first delight. Delight so sweet was here When first I took this precious rose. To it I make my last farewell. (Roland plunges his hand into Suzanne. She screams.) For you have won, Suzanne, you've won. The sleeping ram is now awake. Yours is the victory! Come, Justine. The three of us Will share in sport. A game called Cut-the-cord. Mount the stool against the wall. (Justine does so) So. Release the cord. Above. (Justine releases it) Yes, so. JUSTINE A noose! ROLAND A noose, Justine. The game is played BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays With knife and noose. Bring the knife. It is there, Justine. Bring it with care It is sharp. (Justine goes for the knife. Roland takes up Suzanne in his arms) Come, Suzanne, Reward for victory! (He carries her to the rope. As he stands her on the stool:) Justine, You have the knife? JUSTINE Here, Monsieur. I hold it at your back! ROLAND (not rising from his stooping posture) And so? JUSTINE You are not afraid? ROLAND Of death? Of you? The noose goes round her neck. (Justine does not move) Her neck, Justine. (Justine adjusts the halter) The knife is for Suzanne. (Justine gives Suzanne the knife) Justine, The other cord. BOSON BOOKS
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(Justine takes up the other cord, tied to the stool's leg) To me. (She brings it to Roland, at the far side of the room) Observe, Justine. The child Suzanne Will have one moment After the stool is pulled Before she is despatched. One moment to cut the cord And live. The child was always quick. Alert, Suzanne, alert! Be ready! (Suzanne throws the knife down) SUZANNE I am ready! JUSTINE (screams) No! (Roland pulls the cord Suzanne is left hanging. Roland rushes to Suzanne, studies her closely) ROLAND Ah, Justine, look! Look! Not yet. . . Still alive. . . Endless, endless. . . So. Quick, Justine, the noose! (Justine rushes forward) JUSTINE Can she be saved? ROLAND
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Midnight Plays No, fool. She is dead! (Justine removes the noose, turns away. Roland holds Suzanne to him) Observe, Justine, observe. . . (Roland lays Suzanne on the ground) Observe the death. . . Observe. . . JUSTINE No! Terror! This will be my death! This! ROLAND Nothing to fear, Justine. It is I who take her place!
JUSTINE You! ROLAND I want to touch this death, To test its sweet delight. JUSTINE Delight! ROLAND Infinitely sweet, Not cruel. At that last moment, When halter chokes And breath is stopped, Lust rises, thrills, explodes, Pours out its final ecstasy. If this is so, Justine, The death is pleasure, game, the spear's delight, BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays And one can brave it with no fear. JUSTINE And I? I am to be the instrument Of such a monstrous death? ROLAND If you wish. JUSTINE How, if I wish? ROLAND You will hold the knife. After my pleasure flares, After ecstasy, I will be in the throes of death. Leave me so, and you are free. Nothing prevents your freedom. I will be dead, You will be free. JUSTINE Then I would be your murderer! ROLAND Or you will use the knife, And you will be my savior. JUSTINE And what. . .? ROLAND Ah, cunning child! What is your reward? Torment and death. JUSTINE For saving you? For owing me your life? ROLAND BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays You see these instruments On the cavern's walls? If virtue leads you to the folly Of saving your tormentor, He will reward you with their cruelest blows, Torments that cannot be survived, Then death. JUSTINE And if I choose to let you die? ROLAND I will not know! Be quick, Prepare the stool! (Justine sets the stool, Roland mounts, adjusts the noose) ROLAND Justine! (She does not move) ROLAND The stool! (She runs to it) JUSTINE May God have mercy… (She pulls it away. Roland writhes, his body in spasms) Lord God! Lord God! (She cuts the rope. Roland falls to the ground) Monsieur! Monsieur! (She bends over him to aid him) ROLAND
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Midnight Plays Justine, Prepare for torment. Blackout
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INTERLUDE: THE ONLY CRIME ROLAND Man the dog Man the coward Out of dread Out of terror Man the slave Out of fear Made God God is man's surrender His despair Man needs, Roland, he needs To still the heart The longing of the heart To calm the mind Agony of mind Mind seeks Heart yearns For absence For that phantom Vacuum Nothingness Called God Heart seeks for its surrender Mind sleeps in its despair Cry shame, Roland, cry shame Man Dog Slave Grovels He surrenders To the phantom To the nothingness Of God Whose is the crime, Roland Whose is the terrible crime His, man's his Out of dread Out of terror Out of nothing Out of absence Made he Him. BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays God is man's surrender His only crime
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SCENE FOUR: COURT OF JUSTICE The Judge behind his bench; Justine, bound, before him; guards. Very slow dim-up during: VOICE Justine, The prisoner of Roland, Endures her torment, Lives, In misery and terror. The courts of justice learn Of Roland's crimes. His castle is surprised. Roland escapes with wealth. Justine, his victim, left within, Is bound, is brought Before the bar of justice. Justine recites her tale Before the court and strangers. A citizen of means Comes before the court, Deposes. (Spotlight on St. Florent, at one side of court) SAINT-FLORENT That I, Saint-Florent, First saw her with a band of thieves. That she, Justine, Was first to steal my purse. That they, the band, Wishing to spare my life, Were urged by her, Murderess and whore, To slay me. VOICE The court takes note. The brand upon her back, Exposed, Declares her murderess. Justine is judged, Condemned to execution. BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays Justine, in prison, waits for death. (The Guards have taken Justine into a prison cell, defined by a spotlight on the Marquis de Sade at a desk. The light comes through prison bars, and falls on him, the desk and Justine. Spotlight comes up on Marie-Constance, upstage, who stands looking toward Justine and the Marquis de Sade. The Marquis de Sade and Marie-Constance are dressed in black, late 18th century fashion)
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SCENE FIVE: THE PRISON CELL OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE AND OF JUSTINE; THEN, THE HOUSE OF MARIE-CONSTANCE; THEN, OPEN FIELD The Voice of the Marquis de Sade is recognizably the Voice heard narrating throughout the play. MARQUIS DE SADE Madame Quesnet, My dear Marie-Constance, I, Alphonse-Francois, Marquis de Sade, Confide this tale to you, To you, the paragon and honor of your sex. I have shown you Virtue exposed to barbarous caprice, To calumny, injustice, malice, greed. My object was but one— To make these words escape your lips: Ah, how these renderings of crime Make me proud of Virtue's blessedness! How then shall I glorify for you, My dear Constance, its greatest glory? Shall Justice triumph over vice? Shall I reward the good? And punish wickedness? No, let us suppose instead, my friend, The monstrous life of virtue meets Its providential end, That providence reserves For virtue such as this An unexampled fate. (Marie-Constance moves toward Justine in prison, takes her out of it, goes with her to another part of the stage from the Marquis, gives her comfort, during:) Let us suppose a virtue such as yours, My dear Constance, Moved by her tale of innocence betrayed, Storms heaven and earth, Obtains, with power and wealth, Justine's release from death. Removed from prison by your blessed hand BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays And raised at last to fortune's blessedness, To peace and blessed sanctuary, The sweetest tears flow from her grateful heart. Justine rejoices on her savior's breast. (Justine leaves Marie-Constance, is alone. Lightning and music build to crescendo during:) But let us suppose, my dear and honest friend, That this is not her end. Justine, not born for such felicity, Foresees a final blow, Turns somber, weeps at nothing, waits the day When Nature, blind with rage, sends fire and storm; (Crescendo is reached:) Wind blows, lightning comes, the fires of heaven seethe, And Justine, captive of the storm, is struck! A blazing thunderbolt sears her breast, Destroys her heart, consumes her flesh, Brings Justine's virtue to its monstrous end. (Silence. One spotlight on the Marquis de Sade, one on the consumed Justine. The Marquis de Sade speaks the last couplet in a cold, even tone:) Discern the virtue of her monstrous end. Discern it well, my true and honest friend. The End
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SWELLFOOT'S TEARS
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for Larry Kornfeld
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The Oedipus legend in Swellfoot's Tears is derived from Euripides' The Phoenician Women, and from variants of the Laius and Tiresias legends. Swellfoot's Tears was first performed at the Lab Theatre in Pittsburgh in 1980, directed by David Marchick. LIST OF CHARACTERS Director Guards Victims (who play, in order): Swellfoot Little Fart Interviewer Ghulam Jocasta Two Women Attendants Woman Plague Victim Tiresias Laius Chrysippus Eteocles The Jerkoff Antigone
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ACT I SCENE 1 THE SETTING: A round, once-white, now almost colorless and filthy wall, covered with graffiti no longer legible. Within it, the compound. DIRECTOR: The ones who make a big thing of dying are a fucking bore. (He is sitting between stage and audience, facing stage. Portable light board in front of him. Percussion instruments, a siren near him. He wears a neck mike, through which he is heard. Tape machine within reach. He talks only to the actors on stage, never to the audience) (Bringing up lights) Get it over with. (Dim light. Actors lying face down, face up, sitting, leaning. Looking dead or asleep) Wakeup time. (He sets the tape machine: tolling plague bell. Slight movement among the actors. But they do not get up) WAKEUP TIME. (The actors get up, in torpor. Three or four remain prone) It's your compound. Clean the fucker. (The three or four dead are tossed onto a cart, wheeled to the pit, dumped. While the bodies are being collected, one actor in loin-cloth and smeared with filth goes behind the "Oedipus-mound.” It is a seven-foot-tall papier-maché figure resembling a man crudely sculptured out of a huge pile of shit. The mouth is cavernous and distorted, as though in pain, and the sockets of the eyes dribble blood endlessly) Runnyeyes. Now. SWELLFOOT: (His voice amplified through the funnel-mouth of the Oedipus figure) Old Thebes. Gone to nothing. Ruin of time. DIRECTOR: Different. BOSON BOOKS
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SWELLFOOT: I am Swellfoot. Blight of Thebes. I remember. First in pain, then in wonder. Bloody tears. My city. My city. DIRECTOR: The other. SWELLFOOT: (Suddenly screams) I CLAIM MY SIN. IT IS MY SIN. DIRECTOR: Shut. SWELLFOOT: MY SIN. I CLAIM MY SIN. I. I. DIRECTOR: Shut it. Shut. (He slams the lever down on the light board and the Oedipus-mound is dark and silent) Pull the prick out. (Two or three actors grab Swellfoot from behind the mound and toss him violently into the midst of the compound. Swellfoot is grinning idiotically) Fix him. (The actors wait, resisting) IN THE ASS. (Vicious kick in the ass. Swellfoot screams, sprawls) Remember. (Finished with the burials, the actors have moved back to their original positions: lying, sitting, leaning, as though asleep or dead. Lights out) SCENE 2 DIRECTOR: Waiting time. (Lights up. Slight movement among the actors. But they do not get up) Fill it.
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Midnight Plays (The actors shuffle, but to no effect) The STUFF. (The actors drag out things and busy themselves: fixing matted and filthy wigs; laying out makeup — black, white and red, no other colors, putting paint on plastic face masks — same colors and no other; filing metal barbs on whips. Two more live victims are dropped into the compound from the top of the wall. When they have all settled to their work, the Director calls to one of the actors) Little fart over there. (The Little Fart drops his work and comes forward) Say the first. (The actor resists in silence) SAY. ACTOR: Round wall, no cover on the compound, when it rains. . . DIRECTOR: About the HILL. ACTOR: Mount. A little ways outside the city. Without the wall you could see the city. Fuckall to see now. Most of us here waiting the last convulsion. To save the others. Which is horseshit anyhow. Some don’t even make it to here before… DIRECTOR: Just the hill. ACTOR: Cithaeron, above the city, where he was exposed way back, and now locked with us behind bolts, son of a bitch, with us he robbed of out lives, even his sons, his own sons, scored the son of a bitch, shut him here, to be forgotten, here, where all his time is howling about his sin. DIRECTOR: Shut. (The actor goes back to work) That one.
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Midnight Plays (Another actor comes forward) About Camus. Say. ACTOR: He says at first the rats come slowly, then one of them is seen having a fit, then a couple more have convulsions in the street and die, some spinning like little tops and then flopping over with a little plop. But. . .(he hesitates) DIRECTOR: The prick is dead. Say. ACTOR: But that's horseshit, the one here came all at once, on one particular day, and the rats didn't pop out of nowhere, they came from a ship, and then by caravan overland. We had regulations like any other place about inspecting caravans for poisonous plants and foodstuffs, and especially for rats dropping blood out of their mouths and then having convulsions. But Asshole was having a state celebration, so when the caravan came to the gates, he said, open, let them pass, give free entry to the merchants, they bring our revelry. We’ve been reveling ever since. (Swellfoot rushes behind the Oedipus-mound and screams:) SWELLFOOT: My sin! My sin! Mother of harvest, Demeter, return, I give my blood to sow our grain again, to heal my land. . . DIRECTOR: Shut him. Gag. Gag. (Some actors get the gag—a big, filthy rag wrapped around heavy stick— and rush to the Oedipus-mound) SWELLFOOT: Daughter Proserpine, adjure the dark ones, give us. . . (They shove the gag into the figure's mouth. Swellfoot is silent) DIRECTOR: Grab him. (Swellfoot is pulled from behind the mound) In the groin. (Vicious kick. Swellfoot screams, lies flat, cluthches groin) Turd. (Lights out) SCENE 3 BOSON BOOKS
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DIRECTOR: Eating time. (Lights up. Guards, on rim of wall, throw down food. The victims lunge for it, but silently. Jab each other, throw one another out of the way. No retaliation, all concentrating on getting a chunk of food. Before they have settled to their meal:) Him. Guard jabs one of the actors with a polehook. The actor stops eating, comes forward) Facts from the people. (Actor takes up mike, goes to victim sitting to one side of the pit. Begins interview, each speaking in turn through the mike held by the interviewer) FIRST ACTOR: Hello. SECOND ACTOR: Ghulam. Came here a week ago. FIRST ACTOR: Always sit here? SECOND ACTOR: All I do. Four children, two wives, dead in my house three days, cows died too, pain of their teats terrible, nobody milking them, afraid to go out, get killed, buried alive if anybody else knew, I thought, jerked off all over the women three whole days, wasn't anything to do, creamed them but wouldn't touch them, the carts came, saw the dead cows, screamed at them nobody dead here, when they broke in ran to the woods, fucking hunters wouldn't feed me, came here by myself, sat over the pit, jerked off over the bodies for a week and that's all, swelling's started, not too bad yet. FIRST ACTOR: Get any here? SECOND ACTOR: Pussy all over. Come up to you, shove it in your face, black buboes all over it, green something sticking in the hairs, smells like piss, but isn't. FIRST ACTOR: Can't take it? SECOND ACTOR: Don't want none. FIRST ACTOR: Wooden dildo?
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Midnight Plays SECOND ACTOR: (Nods) Do that. FIRST ACTOR: Finger fuck? SECOND ACTOR: Do that too. FIRST ACTOR: On guys or girls? SECOND ACTOR: On myself, wouldn't work no bung on them here. FIRST ACTOR: Not even fingers? SECOND ACTOR: No. FIRST ACTOR: Fist fuck? SECOND ACTOR: Four fingers is all, so far. FIRST ACTOR: Practice? SECOND ACTOR: Nights. FIRST ACTOR: Go down? SECOND ACTOR: On them? FIRST ACTOR: On yourself SECOND ACTOR: Used to. Cock is black now, and swollen. Looks. . . FIRST ACTOR: How long you think you have? SECOND ACTOR: Maybe tomorrow. (First actor leaves the other to go back to his meal. Swellfoot, on fours, scurries to him) SWELLFOOT: Me! Me! Swellfoot. Blackened my city, murdered my people. . . FIRST ACTOR: Screw. (First actor joins the others. Swellfoot remains in center of stage, weeping, alone) SWELLFOOT: I am Swellfoot, mound of merde, sinned. . .
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Midnight Plays (The actors clatter their empty wooden bowls on the ground to shut him up. Lights out) SCENE 4 DIRECTOR: Sleeping time. (Lights up. Actors lying face down, face up, sitting, leaning. Looking dead or asleep) Runnyeyes. (Swellfoot, half asleep, crawls forward) (Quietly, intimately, moumfully) The whole thing. The whole fucking pain. The clutch of it. The dog in the belly. The whole fucking god damn bite in the keester. The tearing gash of it. The screaming whole screaming pinch in the groin. The whole ache. The whole misery. All the time. The filth of it. The shit in the mouth. The whole life. All the time. The screaming agony. The wear of it. The wear of it. (Swellfoot, aroused by the Director's instructions, squirms, on all fours, trembles in anticipation of saying it all. When Director is finished, Swellfoot rushes, on all fours, behind the Oedipus-mound, ready to begin) Where they can see. (Swellfoot steps away from mound, bewildered) Out here. (Swellfoot, in full view, raises his hands, opens his mouth) Say. (Swellfoot tries. No words come) All of it. (Swellfoot tries again) Vomit on them. (Swellfoot tries again, his face working) BOSON BOOKS
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Now. (Swellfoot clutches the air, trying) Now. (Swellfoot gasps, stutters wordlessly) NOW. (Swellfoot screams maniacally, but soundlessly) NOW! (Desperate rattle in Swellfoot's throat, face working. Director blows whistle; guards show on rim of wall) Nail him. (Guards pin him with polehooks. Swellfoot screams with pain, collapses) Shithead. (Lights out) SCENE 5 DIRECTOR: Wakeup time. (The actors get up, in torpor. Some remain prone) Get rid of them. (Torches are lit. The dead are dumped into the cart; procession to the pit. One near the pit, sleeping, is dragged by a foot toward the pit. He wakes, shudders, in terror motions no, he is not dead. He is dragged and dumped anyhow) Kill the smell, assholes. (Two of the torches are thrown into the pit. Blaze of red light fiom the pit [subsides before end of scene].
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Midnight Plays While the actors are returning from the pit and assuming their original positions (lying, sitting, leaning, as though asleep or dead), the Director calls to one of the actors:) The cunt. The big one. (The Big Cunt comes forward, having grabbed up a white garment) Two more. (Two more women come forward) Like visitors. (The three women begin a walk close to the wall, as though entering the compound) The white! The white! (They break their procession, throw white garments over themselves [diaphanous fabric, graceful, clean and lovely, lawn or organdy]. A white umbrella is opened and carried by one of the women over the Big Cunt, who leads. They walk slowly) Get there. (They protest by not hurrying. They arrive at the Oedipus- mound and sit, Kabuki fashion, to one side of it. Swellfoot is lying against the mound, inspecting his wounds and sores. He pays no attention to the women) Talk, twat. (The Big Cunt clenches her mouth in protest, but begins) JOCASTA: Take your wet eyes out of here. Die. Die. For me. (No response from Swellfoot) When? (She motions to her women) Women! Vinegar. (They pour vinegar on a patch of clean white lawn.. Jocasta holds it over her nose for a moment. She uses the vinagered handkerchief now and then throughout the scene) BOSON BOOKS
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The stench of him, the vile son, the filthy husband, the blood-reeking eyes, the curse of him. On us, the living. DIRECTOR: The other way. JOCASTA: (Clenches her mouth, tries again) The hate, the hate. Followd his father to the same place. Plowed the same rut. Poured his slime into the same vessel. The wrong to me. Women! The watchers in heaven will witness. Forever they’ll witness. DIRECTOR: Not that. The other way. JOCASTA: (Paying no attention to the Director, mourning in the same vein) The shame and the wrong! DIRECTOR: ABOUT THE BED. JUST THE BED, CUNT. JOCASTA: (Tries again, biting back her protest) Crawled in every night beside me. Then the hours, the hours before he mounted. Plowed a little way, widdled around, nothing. What was the hand motion? Round and around. Making circles around one breast, then the other, a hundred times. What was that? And with the hair. Biting hair down there. Disgusting. Leave it alone, I used to pray, that's all I wanted. Leave it alone. Instead of lick lick, widdle widdle. DIRECTOR: That's the way. Hot mouth, cold twat. JOCASTA: The big two sons. Yours. YOURS not mine. Wears his cullions, the bigger one, like a money pouch, swinging them and clanging them like sword against shield. Everybody's supposed to slobber. He comes in and everybody's supposed to slobber. Clang clang, and they slobber, the stupid cunts. Hate. Hate. Drank in what I poured out. Ate my own turd. They'll witness. Forever they'll witness. DIRECTOR: More of the other. Laius down on the little boys. Dirtymouth. Dirtymouth. JOCASTA: TALK, you stuttering shit. Laius, your faggot father, lapping the diddle out of Chrysippus, you ask him why? Why? Same as you. Fuckall to get anything out of. Did you suck the widdle too? You sucked at me, lapper, chewing the folds. Little tongue, nothing. Disgusting. It gave me the pimples, oh god, the gooseflesh, crawling inside I was, not to laugh, with you slurping your way toward the brown, I wanted to pee in your face. Not shoot, PEE. Never shoot. Oh the misery, the squirming misery, the never coming off with widdle widdle not knowing how to use it, not knowing what I was, not knowing what it took to bring me to the place. The clammy misery, locked in the marriage-bed with dumb shit, no style, no rod, zero. BOSON BOOKS
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DIRECTOR: When the cunt was hot. Tell him. JOCASTA: Not like him. Not like your father, faggot he was, but oh hot, at the seeding of you, I shit, so hot was it, explosion every way, old faggot drunk, thinking he rammed the ass of little pisser Chrysippus, moaning buns, buns, I'm banging those beautiful buns, and me not giving a shit, let him call me anything, crammed to the throat I was with cock shooting off like cannon, and me shitting and shooting all at once. Smelling like a cowfield, me, a lady, getting out of bed to wash the shit off and you out, but you stuck, you fucker, you held, and grew round, and lived to diddle us all. (Swellfoot runs behind the Oedipus-mound) SWELLFOOT: (Screams) MY SIN! (He emerges again, sits as before) JOCASTA: Women! His breath stinks. Lozenge! (Women pass her a lozenge. Jocasta lays it on her tongue) The twins, the two of them. Turdy sons of bitches, with swords hacking at one another, ready to kill, to kill, that's all they want, first themselves, then the whole bleeding world, and me screaming from the roof of the palace, Cocksuckers, may your swords rust, may your flesh wither, may the black boils cover your rotten bodies, may the green slime swim in your eyes, may you wither, may the seed die, may it die, with him, your father, let the muck, watchers in heaven, let the muck of Laius, children and children's children, drain out of the world. And wash me, god, wash me clean of the stench of his sin, the fucker, his spawn, the sin of the world, the stench, the stench, and leave me, hugging my misery, alone, god help me, in quiet. How long will you be? Where are the signs? When? When will you blacken? Tell me. My women and I will come, Jocasta, queen, smiling, grateful, loving the sight, the cart, the heap in the pit, the rumble of fire, the stink for the last time. Miserable Swellfoot. When will the joy of it be? (Lights out) SCENE 6 DIRECTOR: Waiting time. (Lights up.
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Midnight Plays Actors lying about, some investigating their swellings, sores and black blotches, some painting on new ones, some doing nothing. Swellfoot, in front of the Oedipus-mound, leans against it, staring at nothing) Her. (An actress comes forward) Facts. ACTRESS: Brought him here to put on the fire, the baby, held his hand, thing rotting and stinking but wouldn't let go, did finally, dropped him into the fire, when the carts left, stayed, lay down here at the pit, started screwing and laughing, fucked everybody who came here with their dead, was still clean why not, no marks, crazy out of my mind smelling so many bodies dead and burning, till the vomit came, and the buboes on me, and the swellings like walnuts all over, and the blood coming out of the groin. They left me, wouldn't touch me, wouldn't throw me in till I was dead, looking crazy, screaming fuck me fuck me crazy with pain, then just screaming. All right now that it's stopped. Later, maybe today, worse. Then, after that, it's over. DIRECTOR: Lesson. The different ways. (The actress sits cross-legged, center stage, waits for instructions) How the burning starts. (She demonstrates, silently, how the guts begin to burn) How the sack swells. (She demonstrates the pain in the groin when it swells up) The crazed eyes, the screams. (She demonstrates, silently, the insane screaming that comes with the unbearable pain) The dry heaving. (She demonstration, silently, the racking pulsations of dry vomiting) How they won't die. (She demonstrates, silently, how a victim screams:"Never!" when she's in the last throes of dying.
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Midnight Plays To the others:) Finish her. (The actors lift her up and carry her to the pit. She screams: "NO!" Continues until they throw her in. Indicating Swellfoot:) Him. (Swellfoot scrambles on all fours to hide behind the Oedipus-mound, but they grab him) Play the scare. SWELLFOOT: (Screams) NO! (The actors lift him with one rolled towel or sheet under the neck, one under the feet, and toss him. The first actor [who ran the interviews] speaks the text) ACTOR: No patches showing, all of us waiting, asking when, how long till the dry mouth, the swollen tongue, the groin pissing black, the burning. . . SWELLFOOT: (Screams) Never! DIRECTOR: Bring the fucker to it. (They carry Swellfoot to the pit, toss him up and down over the hole) SWELLFOOT: (Screaming) No! The pain and suffering! Long pain and suffering! Apollo! The promise! DIRECTOR: Let him. (The actors drop Swellfoot to the ground. He scrambles on all fours, in terror, to the Oedipus-mound, hides behind it) Leave the pisser. Clean the fucking hole. (The actors gather up the dead, start loading them on the cart. Lights out) SCENE 7
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Midnight Plays DIRECTOR: Eating time. (Lights up. Guards, on rim of wall, throw down food. The victims lunge for it, silently. Several remain motionless. The victims, after they have caught their food, settle to eating, avoid the motionless bodies) (To guards) Swivel ass. (Fat Queen, ass like Jello, appears on the wall, arms raised, beaming, like stripper moving into purple light. He has the blotches and swellings. He is blind) Throw him in. (The guards heave him into compound) TIRESIAS: (Recovering, righting himself, leering, to guards) Bold. DIRECTOR: (To guards) Fix him. (Two guards raise polehooks to plunge into Tiresias. He scrambles on all fours, in deathly fright, toward the Oedipus-mound. Out of reach of hooks, he sits on ground, rocking back and forth, panting, almost weeping. Swellfoot, at the raising of the poles, runs terrified behind the Oedipus-mound) Say the comfort. (Tiresias, with great effort, controls himself, painfully crawls to Oedipus-mound, says to it in small voice, on all fours:) TIRESIAS: Magic-time, zeendeleh. All good things, goodies, nothing but goodies, doll. Balm for the chafed groin, lotions for the nasty cracks, oil for the armpits, essence for the toidy smells. Loveliness, all loveliness. Peek out of the turd-thing, angel. See? Just old Auntie making nice, that's all. Blind, old, god-forsaken, wise in the head Auntie-poo. That's all. Where's the beamish boy? Come, goodness. Nice. All nice. See? (Swellfoot backs out of the mound, on the far side of it from Tiresias) There's the sweetheart. Come, listen to Auntie. Here. On the bosom, doll. Good. Rest. Far-gone old Auntie knows everything, how to soothe, how to quiet. Magic loveliness, see?
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Midnight Plays (Swellfoot has come close to Tiresias, who is sitting on a low heap of something, legs and arms spread wide) Come. (Taking Swellfoot in his arms, laying him in his lap:) Yes. Close the eyes. Tight, tight eyes. Dark is nice. Auntie will show in the dark how the thing happened, how once upon a time ballsy me became a flaming creature. Fun? Wept for years, lover, for years, until the news was cold, and who?—not even me, gave a fuck. DIRECTOR: (To guards) Pin the fucker. TIRESIAS: (Screams) No! (Swellfoot, startled, almost leaps out of his arms, but Tiresias holds him tight, in terror. Trembling, almost fainting, he rocks Swellfoot, mumbles:) Nothing, doll. Sh-h, the. . . the. . . DIRECTOR: The fucking snakes, twat. Say. TIRESIAS: (Rocking Swellfoot to calm him, tumbling out his story, still trembling) The fucking snakes. Twice, seven years apart, saw them, same place, two screwing the skin off each other, watchers, first time, sacred snakes, they said, anybody sees them fucking turns, so I turned, and the big breasts, milk, everything, hole where the thing was, and then, before the fuckers came, brand-new Tiresias, bellowing leather dyke, seven years stuffing his cunt with dildoes, ramming cock, slamming the shit out of puffy-assed janes, them squealing, me bellowing, balling jocks strapped to the bed, fun? Sure. Cunt-thing, Me, I marveled all the time, Me, the watchers have reasons, deep inside me, the growing hope, the learning, the learning, the coming wisdom, and then, same woods, seven years later, the fucking two, again, and the old dong back in place hanging between the legs, the tits vanishing like that, the hair here again, and there, Tiresias as was. But new eyes, you say, doll, new eyes. No, doll, none. Left the woods a blind man. Fuckall for what I was and saw. Cock, cunt, either way, same nothing, doll. Same itch in the groin, same dog in the belly. All that wisdom, I yelled, watchers, shoved up your ass, there's still loads of room, I said with the finger, for a total fuck. Blind, they said. Blind I am, doll. But to what? DIRECTOR: BALLOONS. And shut your hole, Virginia.
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Midnight Plays TIRESIAS: (Hurrying what he has to say, clutched and nervous; to Swellfoot) Balloons coming, sweet one, tight shut eyes now, tight, and look. Study the sins, back to the beginning, oh how sweet they were in the rosy time. Think Daddy, and he’ll come, old, big, the way he wasn’t, smelling of his sin, sweating sin from all the pores, you’ll love it, pure one, wailing to the watchers: Call off the dogs, it was him, not me. Enjoy, baby, enjoy. But don’t be too mean, good one, blaming Laius for now. Daddy in the old time, before you were, was wishing you well. Every joy. DIRECTOR: BALLOONS. (Tiresias hurriedly lowers Swellfoot, whose eyes are still shut, to the ground, and goes quickly toward the other actors) TIRESIAS: Zeeser kinder! Loveliness, wonderful ones! Magic-time, are you ready? Beautiful, kids, swell the balloon. (to Swellfoot) Eyes shut, goodness, do you see it? Growing, growing. (to the actors) Over the turd-thing, angels, first let me squeeze it to make sure. (The actors, with the balloon swelled to the full with an air hose, have it behind the Oedipus-mound, towering over it. The balloon is shaped like a mournful, sorrowing Laius. One of the actors grabs Tiresias by the arm and gets him unceremoniously to the balloon, which he squeezes for test) Oh hilarity, dears, the thing works, no holes, no pustules, like the golden time. I stand there, so goodness-angel can see. (Tiresias is led to the place where he wants to stand, while he slows journey to say last explanations to Swellfoot) Watch, angel. Tiresias, priest, and his exorcism thing. Ready? DIRECTOR: NOW! (Terrified, he rushes to the spot and, gasping, begins. A young actor, his body covered with black sores and filth, stands in for Chrysippus during the exorcism. He performs diffidently but fairly accurately, Tiresias' narrative-instructions. The balloon, used with dignity, moves little, faces this way and that, but slowly and somberly) TIRESIAS: Laius, guest in the house of Pelops, laid slobbery eyes on Pelops' son, Chrysippus. Came, almost, every time, at the sight of him, who, proud little prick, smelling the rut, made Daddy's life hell on earth, waving his fanny, bending over to scratch his toe, who, I ask you, could bear it? Little bastard, empty eyes, pure face, led old dong to the woods; old dong in the bushes, hiding, watching.
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Midnight Plays (The actors, now in silhouette [lights now only on Swellfoot, balloon, Chrysippus and Tiresias], form a pattern of woods, and the balloon is carried slowly behind the line of actors and lowered, with head and shoulders still visible. Chrysippus, on the floor, front of stage area, wiggles the motions described by Tiresias) Naked wiggling body in the stream. Old yellow eyes drooling, body on fire. Little bastard on his back in the water, thing dancing on his belly, eyes closed, making believe no watchers. Old fucker, stripped to the buff, lumbers toward, haunches down at the edge of the stream, watches, dreams. DIRECTOR: Balloon to tell. TIRESIAS: (To balloon) Tell. (The actor manipulating the balloon speaks for Laius) LAIUS: White dolphin. Belly alive, carved back. The buns on him. White eggs. Tongue the crack, I said to myself. Lick the marble. My hand, hairy, running over the rounds and valleys cupping the sack, the pink moons, the blue veins, the ivory length. And oh, the down, the down. Swallow the smooth thing, I said to myself. Kiss, lick, slurp, drink, anoint. Cover the pink thing, with cheek, and lips, and mouth, and teeth, and tongue. Make it grow its little length. The little shudder, the little moan. Ah. DIRECTOR: Piss on that. Old shit. TIRESIAS: (To Laius) Old shit. LAIUS: Old shit, he said. Old shit. Old cock with dribblejism. Old hands won't touch my body. Let me be. And I wept. Son of Pelops, glistening boy, old heart yearns, I said. He laughed but I held, held the body, reached the thing, shudder of soul through and through me, until he listened, face grave, mouth still, shrewd eyes born in that moment, and I whispered (curse of Pelops thundering toward), but I whispered (clouds gathering black with Pelops' cry), but I whispered (crack of thunderbolts hurling his curse), but I whispered: Go with me. And Pelops thundered: Your son to come, may he kill you as you kill me, and close with his mother as you close with my son. And what, said Chrysippus, will you pay me, if I let you brown me once? We closed, he laughed, I held him days, days passed, yawning he went, and I, weeping exile, wandered, won back my city, here, knew Jocasta, longed, bitterly, for Pelops' son. Pelops, forgive. . . SWELLFOOT: (Suddenly screams) My sin! My sin! Apollo, seer, my sin seeded in the arms of Chrysippus, thunder and lightning at the birth of my sin!
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Midnight Plays (The actors hurry away the Laius figure, Tiresias tosses away his flash-powder gun [used when Laius first appeared in his story to start the formal exorcism], lights come up) DIRECTOR: (In disgust) The gag! SWELLFOOT: (Uncontrollable) Path to myself, backward, Apollo, show me again. Out of your love. My sin, before I was. . . DIRECTOR: Shove it in, shove! (The actors, having found the gag, shove it viciously into Swellfoot's mouth. Swellfoot, beyond reason now, tears it out again and tosses it away. He goes on screaming) SWELLFOOT: Vision! Swellfoot hunched in the buns of Chrysippus, waiting. Apollo, giver of blessings, molding Swellfoot before the seeding of him. The holy sin. Let me suffer, let me be. . . DIRECTOR: FIX HIM. (The actors, this time, shove the gag in deeply. Swellfoot chokes, but his hands are held behind him. He falls limp. The actors toss him on the ground, leave him. Tiresias comes forward, tentatively approaching Swellfoot. He stops, waits) Go ahead, what the fuck. (Tiresias darts to the ground, feels around for Swellfoot, finds him, pulls him onto his lap. Pieta. He whispers) TIRESIAS: Angel, pure one, wasn’t it lovely? Marvelous pictures, no? The wiggling thing, the rolling over, the live belly. (His hand on Swellfoot’s belly, roaming) Auntie has scrapbooks full. Lover, heart, did it make you ready? A little help? Hm? (Feels lower, touches Swellfoot’s cock gingerly.) Need more pictures? No. (He grabs Swellfoot’s cock.) Growing, nice. You won’t push me off when it’s almost there? You won’t start the not-now thing? You won’t be mean to old Auntie, will you? Promise? (He adjusts his position so that he can lower his head to Swellfoot’s crotch.) Hold still, doll. DIRECTOR: (Sh-sh-sh-ing laugh. Lights out)
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SCENE 8 DIRECTOR: Sleeping time. (Lights up. Actors lying face down, face up, sitting, leaning. Looking dead or asleep. Tiresias is still lying on Swellfoot, his head on Swellfoot's groin) Cocksman. (The guards prod the Cocksman with polehooks. He screams, is awake, comes forward, still not focused) Say. ETEOCLES: Eteocles, son of Swellfoot, defending Thebes against the son of a bitch my twin, fucker tearing at the gates, to rob us of. . . DIRECTOR: Not that. Just the balls. ETEOCLES: (Waits, in protest. Then, speaking more clearly, now more wide-awake) W. m. stud, super hung, twenty-two, horny, anything. Like-minded swinging chicks. No queers. (Director's sh-sh-sh-ing laugh) DIRECTOR: That. Visitor. (Eteocles goes toward Swellfoot, is stopped by the Director's voice) AT THE WALL. (He goes to the wall, waits) Question. ETEOCLES: (Pointing to Swellfoot) Is the fucker dead? (No answer) Did he die? (No answer.
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Midnight Plays Tiresias changes position of his head, lays it back on Swellfoot) Me! Talking! (No response) DIRECTOR: Pull pigface out of the crotch. (Eteocles goes up to Swellfoot and Tiresias, drags Tiresias off) Asshole. Throw him. (Eteocles hesitates, then lifts Tiresias and drops him a short distance from Swellfoot) THROW HIM! (Eteocles waits, in protest, then grabs Tiresias) TIRESIAS: (Screams) NO! (Eteocles throws him viciously to far side of stage) DIRECTOR: And him, behind bloodyeyes. (Swellfoot, in fright, flies behind the Oedipus-mound before Eteocles can manage to grab him. Director's sh-sh-sh-ing laugh. Eteocles waits, doing nothing, in protest) Say. To father. ETEOCLES: Rotting in the stinkhole. Almost dead, but still here. Small price, you fucker, for the filth you made of us. When you're gone, I swear to them, they witness, the clean thing will come again, flesh that's healed, that can be touched, the city with life, the living with clean bodies, the blackness gone, young ones closing with blessing, joy in the closing, not this, the slime, the sores you gave us. Where are the marks on you? Wasted body still whole, dead eyes still running, almost dead, but fucker still clawing. Give me the answer, the secret, the word. Then it can finish. It can come soon, if you say. The best for you is the dying, fucker, the easy thing at the end. The promise, mine, the watchers heard, to fix it, with sword or fire or hands or any good way, and finish the fucking life in you. If you're kind. If you give the gift. The answer, the word for me, in my ear, for me alone. Pay me that, fucker, and the wait is over, before the sweat, before the flesh crawls, before the marks on the face, in the groin, on the prick
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Midnight Plays that spent us, before the slime, fucker, runs out of me, and you're eased.
the hole. The word for
DIRECTOR: The other way, ballocks, the other way. Not suckoff. ETEOCLES: (Clenches mouth, tries again) Say the words once, SAY them, then fuck, drop into the pit, who gives a shit? TALK. The words. Savior of your city, the watchers say, will be named by you, the win coming from your mouth. Give it to me. To me, not the other one. Blessing on my battle, on me fighting the siege. So I will live, not him. (Silence. In rage, Eteocles grabs Swellfoot from behind the mound and drags him out, holding him by the neck) Last time I come to this shithole, crawling to you, begging you, LAST TIME. No way out. If it's forever, you cunning shit, if you blacken there, if you rot, no move. (He slams Swellfoot down on the ground) Stay till the word is said. To me. One of us wins it, son of a bitch twin tearing down the gates, or me. Which is it? Who knows? Anyone? Her, screaming cunt on the roof of the palace, she doesn't know, pisses fire on both of us, neither, she says, will live. Bitch's hate talking, that's all, she doesn't know. Does he have it? Fucker smashing the gates of the city, did you give it to him? It's mine. Defending. Defending you, you cunning prick, saving your city, your home, your people. Pay me. With my life. (He has grabbed up Swellfoot again, by the shoulders, shakes him viciously, knocks him down, kicks him, slaps him, brutalizes him during his interrogation throughout scene) TIRESIAS: (On the ground, far corner of stage from Eteocles and Swellfoot, screams at Eteocles) Big strong fucking tool-box, SHIT on you! Take your fat meat back to the gates, hack the twin, chop each other to death. Leave him alone! ETEOCLES: (Ignoring Tiresias) Did you give it to him, to the twin? How? When? Did he come at night, slip through the gates, climb the mount, scale the walls, crawl, slobber, swear, swear anything, till you, simple shit, believed him? Did you say? To him? Why him? Why his life? Fucker, miserable prick, he hates you. Hates her, even her, the screaming bitch. And the city. Tearing at the gates of the city to kill me, kill you, shit on us all, finish us. TIRESIAS: Bull's pistle, strong, brave, not scared of anything, not even bleeding doll coughing blood on the ground. Out of here, take your goddamn dummy out of here and bang that, hack at that, you. . .
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Midnight Plays (Eteocles lunges at Tiresias who scrambles, fast, behind the corpses, grabs up one of them, shielding himself with it and holding it, ready to throw at Eteocles) Not me, you murdering prick. Touch me, and pus-bag here splats all over your murdering face. (Eteocles relents and goes back to Swellfoot. Tiresias lets the corpse drop to the ground, but stays close to the dead) Cocksucker here, fucked-up nelly, you sent him. Was that how it was? Him, bringing the word down to the gates, calling for son of bitch to come, signs to him: Come close, this to be whispered, the word from weteyes, the good word, the blessing, the win is yours, the battle is over today, tomorrow, whenever you say, whenever you please, lost shit is in your hands. Is that how it was? Is it sure? Give me that. If not the blessing, just the word: It's over for you. (Swellfoot is face down on the ground, choking on the blood coming out of his mouth) You can talk. One word. Nothing from you. Nothing. Ever. Nothing, but the shame you left us, the blood-running eyes, the vomit-thing with her, the stinking shudder out of you that made us. All your gifts. To us. The sons. For days, at the gates, hacking at each other, waiting, each one, to know: which one is it? which one did he save, which one did the cunning prick doom? Give us that. Either way. For both of us. One word. (He waits) Have I won? (He waits) Has he? (He waits) Nothing from you. Cunning shit. (Lights out) SCENE 9 DIRECTOR: Wakeup time. (Lights up.
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Midnight Plays Actors lying face down, face up, sitting, leaning, looking dead or asleep. Swellfoot, leaning against the Oedipus-mound, his chin and front caked with dried, dribbled blood) (To one of the actors) Jerkoff. Here. (Jerkoff gets to his feet, comes forward. The Director throws a large plastic sack at him, filled with balloons) Balloons. (The actor doesn't pick up the sack, in protest) For them! (He picks up the sack, brings it to the other actors, overturns it and dumps the contents all over them. They push the balloons away from him, in protest) NOW! (The actors start blowing up the balloons. They are weirdly-shaped, fragmentary plastic forms, colored white, black and red. The Director, watching them for a while blowing up the balloons, laughs his sh-sh-sh-ing laugh) Runnyeyes. (Director puts on tape-machine: strange, elongated breathing sounds, not intelligible. Swellfoot starts, listens, frightened. Tape finished) The rosy time. When she screamed. (Swellfoot's head signs no, in protest and fright. Director starts tape-machine again: same sound) Bitch-face howling the question. (Swellfoot listens, terrified, crawls away from mound, trying to escape the sound. Director's sh-sh-sh-ing laugh. Tape again, now a little louder: voice, in lengthy, elongated scream, almost clear enough for us to hear: "W-h-a-t-i-s-t-h-e-a-n-s-w-e-r ?”) How you saved the city. Back then. SWELLFOOT: (screams) No! BOSON BOOKS
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(He crawls, at a run, behind the mound, and hides. The tape, looping, with slight increase in volume, more intelligible) DIRECTOR: The rosy time. SWELLFOOT: (Screaming, through funnel-mouth of Oedipus-mound) Hera, forgive! She flung herself from the rock, fell into Dirce's scream, vulture and serpent, flapping her wings. . . DIRECTOR: Shut him. Pull him out. SWELLFOOT: (Continues) I! I! sinned, spoke the answer, my tongue loosed by her terror, only the terror. . . DIRECTOR: Fucking creeps, GRAB HIM! (The actors, long since aroused, not wanting to respond, ignore Swellfoot and go on blowing up the balloons. But two of the actors, furious, run to the mound and rip Swellfoot out from behind it, while he continues:) SWELLFOOT: . . .forgive my sin, she fell, I won, and tore my city, tore my people! Remember my sin forever, remember as they'll remember, beyond my time. . . DIRECTOR: GAG! Plunge it! JAM! SWELLFOOT: (Continues) . . .forever! I spoke! I spoke! I answered. My sin remembered forev— (The actors have jammed the gag into Swellfoot's mouth. They hold him, restrain him, until he is immobile. Silence) DIRECTOR: (To an actor) Jerkoff. (Actor steps forward) The rosy time. When he won. (Actor waits, in protest) SAY. How he answered. ACTOR: Back then. Sphinx, on the rock, fire and. . . DIRECTOR: Shut. Three, four slobs under balloons. (Three or four slobs grab the strings under the balloons, bunch them, and manipulate them for the rest of the scene. When the balloons are bunched, BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays they form into image of Sphinx— a repulsive nightmarish, huge monster of a thing, with a woman's face; great bloody jaws and red phosphorescent eyes; lion's head; eagle's wings; great red-nippled breasts; goat's body; vulture's claws; snake's tail with snake's head at the end of it. The Director brings up light on the Sphinx, which is hovering on the rim of the back wall. Firelight. He sets the smoke, he sets the tape-machine: "What is the answer?" louder now) Fast. How little prick killed the bitch thing. (During actor's recitation, at a fast clip, the actors holding down Swellfoot maneuver him, and the three or four slobs maneuver the balloon, showing the story. Elongation of Sphinx's "What is the answer?" is in perpetual counterpoint to speed and motion of the rest of the scene. Volume of Sphinx's question crescendoes to end, like the scene) ACTOR: Sphinx, high on the rock, howling the question, son of a bitch, him, coming this way, from the forked road to Dirce's stream, murder on his hands, wet from the killing at the forked road, Laius dead, bringing us that too, bitchface lashing her tail, yelling, clamped on the rock. . . (Swellfoot, each time he is brought close to the Sphinx balloon [which is moved about the stage, sometimes directly over, or against him] screams with fright. If possible, almost nothing should be visible on stage during this charade but Swellfoot and the Sphinx) . . .jaws chomping more and more of us, grinding the best of us, spitting heads bodies bones, claws tearing the rock, screaming for more, more, and him, prick, knowing more than the best of us, more than himself then, saved us, finished us, spitting back, the fuck, at the bitch-thing, the answer that bled us, blessed us and shat on us. . . (They raise Swellfoot high in the air, carry him about, toss him, he screaming, the Sphinx menacing, during:) . . .and we, assholes, tossing him high, through the gates, patting his ass, clapping his back, yelling he saved us, saved us, from that, the thing, when he, fucker, under the eagle's wings, opened his mouth, almost too late. . . (The Sphinx's reiterated line on the tape-machine has changed to: THE QUESTION IS: WHAT IS THE ANSWER? THE QUESTION IS: WHAT IS THE ANSWER? the last "What is the answer" coming here in the text, not only loud but in multiple-track with several different voice qualities audible simultaneously)
. . .torn by the vulture claws, burned by the lion eyes, hacked by the serpent tail, answered the bitch-snake's dog-howl, bullfart, whistle, roar, voice like the voice of the watchers, screaming: BOSON BOOKS
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(Swellfoot now entangled in the parts and members of the Sphinx-balloon, Sphinx seeming to throttle, smother and claw him, Swellfoot in last desperate struggle with the thing, as voice of Sphinx, on the tape-machine, comes through, for last time, with four- or five-track recording sounding like mixture of doghowl, bullfart, whistle, roar, god's voice, all screaming, climactically: WHAT IS THE ANSWER?) SWELLFOOT: (Agonizing cry) NEVER TO BE BORN. (Freeze. Silence. Plug pulled on Sphinx-balloon: it fizzles to nothing. Everyone still waits) DIRECTOR: (Furious about the long wait, screams) SAY! ACTOR: And saved us. (They throw Swellfoot onto the ground, start back to their places. Lights out) SCENE 10 DIRECTOR: Waiting time. (Lights up. The actors left are, a few of them, moving about, without direction, the others sit, idly, some asleep. Jocasta, her face covered with black sores, sits on ground near Swellfoot, a basin of water beside her, getting clean rag ready to wash Swellfoot's blood and grime. She wears same white garment, now dirty, stained) JOCASTA: (Speaks quietly, works busily) Fuckall left of it. Both of them gone. Beautiful, tall. Both. The slaughter. To die on each other. Finished, no help. No, hold up your face, the chin first. Don't pull back, the black won't touch you. None on my hands, just my face. And down there, all over. Didn't touch you till now, won't touch you now, you'll last. One of us at least. To remember, what they were. Laugh, I know. The hate. Talk, that's all. The hate runs off, it was nothing. Screamed at them till the last, stood there on the roof of the palace screaming at them, all the hate, all the hate, and then the blood, on one of them, then both, falling on top of each other, my god, dying. Sons. Beautiful, straight bodies. When I'm dead. Will you remember? Will you cry for them? Will you? Fuckall left of that. What were they for you? A little wet dropped in the womb. Nothing torn out of you. What they did to you, all they ever were. For you. Finish of that. BOSON BOOKS
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One thing, no pain at the end of it for me. Happened, over now, now better than later. The screaming, the black dripping out, the things smelling, fucking misery, no. Now, better than later, for me. Don't freeze, not groping at you. Washing down there, that's all. Filth gone, the blood on you, clean. Wonderful. Here in this, and clean, no patches anywhere. Live. Have it all, the way you want. The pain, all of it. Never enough for you, wonderful. Everything out there, talking to you, promising. You think. Live. Have it. Not me. The oil they're hiding, steal some more. Want it covering thick, so I go fast. No time to feel anything. Go on. (He crawls over to the group of actors, filches a flagon of oil. Jocasta has been rubbing oil on her arms after washing Swellfoot) Then the quiet. (She waits. He steals back with the oil) The warm, the quiet. Or nothing. Maybe nothing is best. Yes. The hope for nothing. On the back, and the shoulders. Don’t have to touch, just pour. Does it cover? Then stop. Hold something, to help me up. (He holds his staff erect, steadying it against the ground. She grasps it and gets to her feet. Stands over him. They look at each other. Mute farewell) It wasn't hate. Fuckall, what was it? I don't know. (She goes to the pit, sits at the edge of it. Light of the banked fire glowing out of it. Jocasta waits) Help me. (Swellfoot starts toward her) No, not you. Let him do it, old faggot. The one who knew me. (She drops into the pit. Lights out) SCENE 11 DIRECTOR: Eating time. (Lights up.
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Number of victims dwindling; only a few living, a few dead. The guards throw down food, the victims scramble for it, but not vigorously. Few compete) Those. Fucking bruisers. (A couple of guards jump off the wall into the compound, and come forward) Follow. As I remember. (One of them moves toward the victims, as though to begin) JUST FOLLOW. (He comes back, waits) Take him up. Runnyeyes. (Two lift Swellfoot, who is slouched against the Oedipus-mound. They stand him up, stay behind him. They manipulate him, puppet-like. Swellfoot is too terrified to resist them) His cry. (Swellfoot, stuttering, can't get the words out) From the shudder. SWELLFOOT: (Screams) I SINNED! DIRECTOR: When he told you. The news given. SWELLFOOT: (Screams) I. I SINNED! DIRECTOR: The first moment. SWELLFOOT: (Screams) MY SIN! DIRECTOR: The CRY! JUST THE CRY! (Swellfoot screams endlessly, wordlessly, like an animal in torment. Silence) How it was. Then. SWELLFOOT: Stench! Earth, open! Stone! My people, brands for my body! Burn!
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Midnight Plays DIRECTOR: Fucker. How it WAS! HOW IT WAS! SWELLFOOT: (Long pause, in protest. Then, stuttering) Still. DIRECTOR: The soft place. SWELLFOOT: Gentle. DIRECTOR: In the place. SWELLFOOT: Still. DIRECTOR: How it blurred. SWELLFOOT: The blur. My hands, before me, no, on the ground, spread. No, part of. . . DIRECTOR: Looking up. SWELLFOOT: At palace, against, sky. No, against nothing. Stones, in the wall, like clouds, faces. Dogs, then mice. I, close to them. Looked, through their eyes. Miserable Swellfoot, still screaming. DIRECTOR: Shapes. All shapes. SWELLFOOT: Entered, I, Swellfoot, entered them. Knew them, spoke. They spoke. Tore my heart. DIRECTOR: The sun. SWELLFOOT: Screaming. Acid thing. Called, screamed. I, Swellfoot, shared its suffering. DIRECTOR: Embrace. SWELLFOOT: Wind embraced me. Carried me to palace, along wall, hurled me, then, commanded them, the watchers, come, Swellfoot at the point, and they, silent, eyes wide, smiling, their gentle way when, and lifted Swellfoot, high, there, at the bed, sin reeking, high, high, hands spread, screaming, Dog, Dog, filth among men, the sin, here, at the point, body hurled, head thrown, held, in the place, here, screaming here, grasped, flung, again, at the place, Kill, kill, kill, Swellfoot screaming, Kill, watching, they silent, he still weeping blood, praying, god Apollo, speak now, brought to this place, let me embrace you, let me ask you, why do I suffer long life, why? Watchers gone, Swellfoot, kneeling on stone, calling to them, still.
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Midnight Plays Gentle Apollo, ran to the palace to find darkness. Good. Listen now, always the same, hear nothing. Good. Touch things, at one with things, share their suffering. And know mine. My blessing. Good. DIRECTOR: THE PLACE WHERE! SWELLFOOT: No! DIRECTOR: Shithead! Do it. SWELLFOOT: No! (Swellfoot, terrified, runs from the guards, tries to escape) DIRECTOR: Grab the fucker. Hold him. (The guards retrieve Swellfoot, again hold him from behind, ready to manipulate him, puppet-like) SWELLFOOT: NO!!! DIRECTOR: Held over the bed, flung to the floor. Back there. (Swellfoot,shivering with fright, can't speak) BACK THERE! (Swellfoot screams soundlessly, insane terror in face. Guards following Director's instructions, Swellfoot desperately trying to prevent) They, fucking bastards, threw back his head, he praying— horseshit, slobbering— turd eyes jumping, terror on him, hands reaching for there. Wants to. To change the stench. And stupid shit locks nails in eyes. LOCKS. Tears them. Digs. (To guards) SHOW. SHOW. (Furious that they can't manage sooner) PULLS THEM! (Swellfoot's scream, while guards forcing his eyes out with his own fingers. Finished. Silence) For the hate. Just the hate. (The guards drop Swellfoot in front of mound. Both are now weeping blood; same face)
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Midnight Plays How it was. (Lights out) SCENE 12 DIRECTOR: Sleeping time. (Lights up. Swellfoot is at the foot of the mound, almost dead, his eyes pouring blood, resembling those of the mound itself. Two dead bodies are lying in grotesque postures; a young girl, with sores and swellings, sits alone, away from them.. No other victims are left) Come. (The girl comes forward) Get the white. (She gets a white garment — still immaculate — and puts it over her) Say the last. (The girl hesitates, in protest) To father. The comfort. ANTIGONE: Visitor. (She approaches Swellfoot) Daughter, to say it's over, the city restored. (No response from Swellfoot) Believe me. Believe me. DIRECTOR: Shut. Dotty. Doesn't hear. ANTIGONE: (Goes closer, almost shouting into Swellfoot's ear) Antigone, spared. The city healed, happy. Asks only to be shut of you. Nod if you can hear. (He nods once) We'll go where we want to go. Gates are open, wall is down, no one to stop us. The city free of the filth, clean again. . . (A new body is thrown into the compound)
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Midnight Plays . . .pit covered, stench gone, fire out. Do you hear? (He nods) Shouting, from the city, hear? (He listens, tries to hear. Antigone suddenly drops to her knees, weeping) NONE. DIRECTOR: SAY! ANTIGONE: (Delays, in protest, then continues) My father. Let me touch you, don't shiver, I'll warm you. (She holds him.) Sit. Not crouching. Tall. The day, on the roof of the palace, when I hid, not breathing, to watch you, long robed, shining, bidding welcome, offering feast, giving thanks for long peace. King. As tall as Ganymede. Day of joy. Now the joy again. We'll go, I'll lead you, freed of this, down the hill, outside the wall, through the city, beyond the gates. Journey. To find blessing, learn strength, say no always, suffer long life. Bitter, but the joy of it. For us. The joy touching us always. Sunlight, shouting sea, bright shores, fields, their gifts, the earth under us, the kind earth, its blessings. And they, they will see you, watch you, honor you. Silent, no sign, the way they do, but blessing the wanderer, knowing his love. Do you hear me? (He nods) Until the time of rest. Long days, endless nights, bearing trials, until the time. They'll call, out of the dark, open the unlit door, the thunder, the flash of lightning, the welcome, the embrace, end of suffering, weeping, bitter life, wanderer, victim, king, long rest. Stay. (She leans him against the mound. She stands, puts out her hand, says gently) ANTIGONE: Give me your hand. My father. SWELLFOOT: (After long pause) Give me my staff. (She holds his staff for him, as he had held it for Jocasta, and he rises. Unable to walk, he stands leaning against the mound. She puts his hand on her shoulder, and begins to lead him. After two or three steps, they stop. Wait) DIRECTOR: Walk him around the compound.
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Midnight Plays (Antigone hesitates, in protest) WALK! (She walks him around the compound) (While they walk the circle) Old Thebes. Gone to nothing. Ruin of time. My city, oh my people. I, Swellfoot, mound of merde, remember.
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DRACULA/SABBAT
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Dracula/Sabbat is based on Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula, and on Timothy Leary's westernization of The Tibetan Book of the Dead in The Psychedelic Experience. It was first performed at the Loeb Playhouse, Purdue University, in 1970, directed by Word Baker. LIST OF CHARACTERS Speaker A Coven of twelve or more, who play: Coachman Renfield Dracula Lucy Mina Seward Van Helsing Arthur Holmswood Townspeople, Vampires, Wolves, Guards, Gypsies
ACT I PREPARATION Blank stage. A circle of white light on stage floor. After a long time, a VOICE is heard through speakers situated under the theatre seats. The VOICE is quiet, neutral, as though whispering into each spectator's ear. SPEAKER Listen carefully. It is as though you are dead. This will be the hour of your death and rebirth. Not the death of the body, but of the self. Take advantage of this temporary death to seek illumination. (A long silence) BOSON BOOKS
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You are face to face with the clear light. All things are void. Remain in this state. Do not fear it. Hold on to this moment Of void, Of non-self. (A long silence) If you are slipping back, If you are again falling into contact with the self, You will begin to see figures. Do not be frightened. These visions are your own thoughts. They exist only within you. During this journey through your visions, Relax. Merge with them. Be neither attracted by them nor repulsed. Enter into the world of your hallucinations with good grace. Remain calm. Remember the teachings. (THREE or FOUR FIGURES appear. THEY drape an altar, and put a crucifix, bowl and chalice on it. ONE of them sits center stage. HE pulls a mask over his head: a huge GOAT-HEAD. HE lights a candle between his horns. All other lights go out, The lighted GOAT-HEAD alone is visible, Otherwise, darkness and silence) INTROIT Extremely slow. Low, almost inaudible hissing. The COVEN (a minimum of TWELVE who, with the SATAN PRIEST make up the celebrants of the Witches' Sabbat) assembles from all parts of the theatre. THEY carry lighted incense tapers. THEY move toward the GOAT-HEAD at the altar. As THEY approach in very slow procession: SPEAKER Answer us BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays Old Horned One Provender And power Are yours Come to us God of Blessings Come Among us Bring us death Greatest Father Let us know The one Clear Light (The COVEN is seated in a perfect circle around the GOAT-HEAD. A harsh down-spot on the GOAT. HE smashes the crucifix. Spot off. The COVEN stomps the crucifix, rends it, scatters the pieces. THEY are in motion, soundless ecstasy. THEY cluster around the now-invisible form of the GOAT. THEY have covered themselves with lengths of black cloth. THEY are one. THEY lurch away from the center [now in blue light] and reveal. A black object [made of SOME of the COVEN's bodies] which passes for a coach. Seated in front of it is a black-cloaked FIGURE, face invisible. Standing in front of it is RENFIELD, a solicitor, holding a Portmanteau and wearing an overcoat. [This revelation of the first scene should appear to materialize out of the massed body of the COVEN]) THE CASTLE ROAD THE COACHMEN The Englishman? RENFIELD Yes. Renfield. BOSON BOOKS
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THE COACHMAN You are expected. (The COVEN is now a GROUP OF TOWNSPEOPLE moving anxiously about the perimeter of the scene. Muffled whispers during the rest of this scene, in which only these words audible:) TOWNSPEOPLE Ordog — pokol — stregoica — vrolok — vlkoslak— (A WOMAN approaches RENFIELD) WOMAN Do you know what day it is? RENFIELD Yes. The fourth of May. WOMAN But do you know what day it is? A MAN The Eve of St. George's Day. WOMAN Do you know where you are going? RENFIELD To the castle of Count Dracula. ANOTHER WOMAN (Runs up to him and kneels) Do not go. At least, wait a day or two before starting. RENFIELD (Raising her up) It is imperative. I must go. (The WOMAN gives him a crucifix) WOMAN Wear this. (SHE makes the sign of the cross, The TOWNSPEOPLE point two fingers at him, making the sign of the cross. RENFIELD mounts. The COACHMAN cracks a fantastically long whip. The COVEN falls flat on the floor. The coach is in motion, though remaining in place. The journey of the coach is done with light and sound and the motions of the COVEN. The coach passes WOLVES [the COVEN, hunched on floor, covered with their black cloths, holding lighted tapers to the sides of their heads, like eyes]. Blue flames flicker —when they are behind the COACHMAN, HE is revealed to be transparent [black cheesecloth form with no one inside it. Note: the ACTOR has slipped behind the "coach” proper. At the end of the scene, HE will be back in place, behind the cheesecloth form]. BOSON BOOKS
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During the journey, the SPEAKER recites from the Tibetan Book of the Dead:) SPEAKER Strange sounds, weird sights, disturbed visions may occur. Do not impose your will on them. Do not fear them. They are old friends. Blood-drinking demons, machines, monsters, devils, Exist nowhere but in your own skull. The motto is peace, acceptance. The key is inaction, merging. (The WOLVES begin to howl. The HORSES rear. The COACHMAN reins in the HORSES, dismounts, goes out of sight. RENFIELD is ringed by WOLVES, Their howling terrifies him) RENFIELD (Calling) Coachman. They're upon us. They're here. (HE feels strangled by the encroaching CIRCLE. The COACHMAN returns, With a gesture, as though brushing them aside, HE causes the WOLVES to fall back. THEY flatten on the stage floor, extinguish their tapers [their eyes]. Absolute silence) COACHMAN We have arrived. Come in. (RENFIELD takes his portmanteau from the coach, and goes in. The COACHMAN turns, and walks to stage center. HE is wearing the GOAT'S HEAD) THE LIGHTING OF TORCHES From behind him, the GOAT's torch is lighted, as the coach FIGURES separate. The COVEN collects six torches and pans [of water].
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Midnight Plays THEY light their torches from the GOAT's Candle, and stand them upright in the pans, which are arranged like footlights. The coffin boxes are shifted about for the next scene. Under this torch-preparation: SPEAKER You are in the magic theatre of heroes and demons. Devils, sorcerers, infernal spirits. The werewolf, the vampire, the witch. The whole divine theatre of figures are aspects of yourself. The whole fantastic comedy takes place within you. Do not become attached to the figures, Do not be afraid of them. Recognize them. (SIX of the COVEN lie prone in front of the torches, feet toward audience, heads upstage. The ACTOR wearing the GOAT-HEAD removes it: HE is DRACULA. RENFIELD enters without coat or portmanteau. A down-light at center is put on. The scene begins) THE CASTLE DRACULA I am Count Dracula. I bid you welcome to my house. Come in. The night air is chill, and you must need eat and rest. (RENFIELD comes toward him) I pray you, be seated, and sup how you please. You will, I trust, excuse me that I do not join you. (HE uncovers the dish for RENFIELD, who sits, HE pours for RENFIELD. The goblet and dish are the altar's chalice and bowl) My coachman has told me of your experiences on the road. I must remind you that we are in Transylvania, and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways. You know something of what strange things there may be already. Tomorrow you must tell me of London, and of the house you have procured for me. I am glad that it is old and big, and that it has a chapel of old times. We Transylvanian nobles love not to think that our bones may lie among the common dead. You have brought the deed? (RENFIELD takes it from his breast pocket and gives it to him.
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Midnight Plays DRACULA regards the papers) For some years past, I have longed to go to your great England. I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is. I trust you will forgive me, but I have much work to do in private this evening. You will, I hope, find all things as you wish. This will be your room. Retire when you please. (HE leaves. RENFIELD sits motionless, then rises and goes to his bed. HE removes his coat. The SIX FIGURES lying prone rise slightly and hunch forward. RENFIELD stops) RENFIELD Who is there? Who is there? (The SIX plunge the torch-flames into the pans of water. Black light throughout theatre. In niches against the walls of the theatre, SIX VAMPIRE WOMEN appear, luminous in black light. THEY and RENFIELD's shirt are prominent. THEY advance toward RENFIELD, who freezes in [formal] posture of fear) VAMPIRE I Go on. VAMPIRE II You are the first, and we shall follow. Yours is the right to begin. VAMPIRE III He is young and strong. VAMPIRE II There are kisses for us all. VAMPIRE III How dare you cast your eyes on him. Back, I tell you. (Light above. DRACULA appears aloft in a long black cloak, reaching to floor of stage. HE as an immensely long apparition) DRACULA (To VAMPIRE III) Love him. VAMPIRE III Yes, I can love. You know it from the past. Is it not so?
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Midnight Plays (SHE is standing over RENFIELD, who is now reclining) VAMPIRE II Are we to have nothing tonight? VAMPIRE III Back to your own place. Your time has not yet come. DRACULA (To the OTHER VAMPIRES) Wait. Have patience. On the voyage, he will be yours. (To VAMPIRE III) Embrace him. (VAMPIRE III lies on RENFIELD's body and fastens her teeth in his neck [This is performed as a gentle, loving gesture.] RENFIELD exhales deeply. The green and purplish light seeps back, replacing the black light) THE BANQUET Solemn, but matter of fact. DRACULA moves to stage level and puts on the GOAT'S HEAD. Meanwhile, without disturbing their positions [prone, SHE on him], RENFIELD and the VAMPIRE are borne to center stage and laid on the altar. The VAMPIRE rises and rejoins the COVEN. DRACULA brings to the altar a sack with a form inside it. HE removes a dead baby from the sack. The ritual preparation of the baby is done over RENFIELD's body. As the blood drips on his face, HE grunts with pleasure, drinking drops of blood, writhing. Blood from the baby is put into the chalice. Urine and dung are squeezed out of the baby's body and put into the chalice. The segmented body is distributed to the COVEN. THEY eat the flesh and drink the brew from the chalice. A rhythmic tremor begins to run through the COVEN.
As THEY respond to it more and more, THEY rise, and gradually fall into the pattern of:
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Midnight Plays THE WITCHES’ ROUND The Round is danced by the whole COVEN, alternately facing in and out from a circle, hands clasped and heads turned so that THEY might see each other. The pattern of the dance can be either a circle or a more complicated form, swastika or other. Staggered gait, jerky movements, which induce a shift of consciousness so that psychic contact can be made with inner life. The dance produces "magical" reactive effects on the DANCERS. When the DANCERS are possessed by the spirit, THEY are capable of acrobatic and muscular feats absolutely impossible in their normal state. Frenzy. THE VOYAGE Lentissimo, lentissimo, lentissimo. Overhead, on levels that exploit the full height of the playing area [or on an arrangement of planks connecting ladders of different heights], the SIX MEN of the COVEN represent SAILORS—in the lookout, at the wheel, on the mast, on the deck —ALL facing in one direction, into the wind. On the stage floor —below-decks—boxes. RENFIELD is still lying on the altar-coffin. Pans of hot ice near the boxes cover the floor of the stage with mist [if possible, much of the stage is enveloped in mist]. Rhythm of the scene is established by the creaking of the ship [excruciatingly slow, audible on speakers] and synchronized motion of the CREW. The TILLER at the wheel, the MATE beside him, and the OTHER SAILORS hang limp in their positions —dead. THEY flop gently with the roll of the ship. As the SPEAKER drones on very softly, hypnotically, reading instructions from the Book of the Dead, One by one, the coffins — their glass-paneled sides now facing the spectators — are slowly, slowly illuminated, revealing the sleeping DRACULA and VAMPIRES, And severally, at random, THEY rise from their coffins and move somnambulistically about the mistcovered stage floor. The scene is devoted — literally — to putting the spectators to sleep. It is a calculated exercise in hypnosis. SPEAKER (Throughout scene) You imagine a voyage of the dead. The figures before you are lifeless. You have slipped back into self-isolation. The people around you are robots. The world is a facade, a stage set. You are a helpless marionette, BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays A plastic doll in a plastic world. Cold, Feelingless, Wooden, Waxen. You are unable to feel. You say: I am dead. I will never live and feel again. Do not force feeling by action, by shouting, Do not be attracted to your old self. Merge with the feeling of one-ness of all life and all matter. (DRACULA climbs to the upper levels on which the SAILORS are hanging limply, and beckons them down from their perches. THEY join the drifting movement of the VAMPIRES below. DRACULA, with a gesture, instructs them to drag ashore the boxes. THEY go off with the boxes [and the pans of ice], DRACULA and the VAMPIRES drift off too. RENFIELD, alone, rises. HE is bewildered, then terrified. HE cries out:) RENFIELD Master. (HE jumps off the altar, and screams in desperation:) Don't leave me. (HE falls to the ground. An endlessly prolonged scream from RENFIELD) THE CHURCHYARD LUCY and MINA are sitting on the altar box. White lawn dresses. Sunset, then night. Lovely English churchyard, out of Trollope [suggest in lights]. LUCY His eyes were beautiful. When I first saw them, they were red and terrible, but when I looked closely, they were beautiful. I suppose I walked here to the churchyard. I didn't quite dream. It all seemed to be real. I only wanted to be in this spot — I don't know why, but I was afraid of something — I don't know what. I suppose I was asleep, but I remember passing through the street and over the bridge. And I heard dogs howling as I went up the steps. Then there is a memory of something long and dark with red eyes, just as I see his, and something very sweet and very bitter all around me at once. And then I sank into deep green water, and everything seemed to pass away from me. BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays My soul seemed to go out from my body, and float about in the air. Then there was an agonizing feeling, as if I were in an earthquake, and I came back and found you shaking my body. I saw you crying, "Lucy." I saw you before I heard you or felt you. MINA It will be dark soon. LUCY No, let me stay. I want to be here alone, and go back alone. (MINA leaves. LUCY lies down on the altar-box. SHE remains there throughout the next episode) THE MADMAN First part of scene, realistic. After DRACULA's entrance, same presentational style as in earlier scenes. RENFIELD in a cage, the size of a room. With him, DR. SEWARD and TWO GUARDS. RENFIELD screams — continuation of scream at end of his last scene. Lights up. SEWARD Overpower him. RENFIELD I beg you, don't put me into a jacket. I won't harm you. I have no hatred for you. You don't understand. (SEWARD nevertheless signals to the GUARDS) No! Don't tie me! I'm abandoned, I'm suffering. I won't make you suffer with me. (THEY tie him into a straitjacket. RENFIELD is quiet. HE speaks) The blood is the life. I must do for myself now. He's gone from me. He won't help me. (HE weeps quietly) SEWARD Who won't help you? Who is He? RENFIELD I must have life. I must do for myself now. Will you give me sugar? SEWARD For what? BOSON BOOKS
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RENFIELD For crumbs. SEWARD What will you do with them? RENFIELD Feed them to flies. SEWARD And the flies? RENFIELD To spiders. GUARD We give him no more sugar. SEWARD What harm is there in it? GUARD He feeds the spiders to sparrows, then eats the sparrows himself. OTHER GUARD He eats them alive. He vomits up the feathers. RENFIELD (Laughs) Bother all that. I'm sick of all that rubbish. SEWARD You want no more sugar? RENFIELD Give me a cat. Let me have a cat. . . A kitten? SEWARD You're laughing at us. RENFIELD (Suddenly) SH! SEWARD What is it? RENFIELD AH. . . (Silence, A long sliver of DRACULA's face — as though seen through a door crack — is projected, the full height of the stage, behind RENFIELD's cage. In frenzy) He has come! SEWARD (To GUARDS) Control him. RENFIELD No, I will be still! SEWARD You said you were like Enoch. Why? RENFIELD Because he walked with God.
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Midnight Plays SEWARD Have you a soul? RENFIELD I don't want to talk to you. You don't count now. My Master is at hand! SEWARD You don't care about spiders any more either? RENFIELD (Screaming) Don't torment me! Go! SEWARD (To GUARDS) Stay close to him. (Faint suggestions of bat wings above, which RENFIELD follows with his eyes. Then the projection of DRACULA's face dies, and DRACULA himself is visible above the cage, his cloak falling to the floor in Beardsley folds. Specks of light swirling amid blue-toned stage light. They dart about. Flitting shadows of small bat-forms) RENFIELD I am here to do your bidding, Master. I am your slave, and you will reward me, for I shall be faithful. Do not pass me by, Let me join you now. DRACULA Soon. RENFIELD I shall be patient. I can wait. DRACULA You shall have gifts. RENFIELD They are life to me. DRACULA You shall be of my household. RENFIELD (In paroxysm, screaming) I want to be with you! I'll frustrate them. They shan't murder me by inches. I'll be with my Lord and Master. (HE beats his head against the bars of his cage. The GUARDS rush in, then SEWARD) SEWARD Stop him. GUARD (To the OTHER) The chains. (THEY chain him to either side of the cage so that HE is in center of cell, preventing him from getting close to the bars. RENFIELD is on his knees, head bowed, immobilized, weeping quietly.
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Midnight Plays SEWARD regards him, then motions to the GUARDS to leave. The THREE exit) RENFIELD (Weeping. Talking quietly. In misery) I shall be faithful. Now that you are near, I shall be patient. I will pray to you, and for the life to come. Will you embrace me? (DRACULA raises his arms — hugely extended, like wings. His cloak enfolds the entire cage)
THE RITE Swirling specks of light continue. DR VAN HELSING, DR SEWARD, ARTHUR HOLMSWOOD and MINA. MINA's white dress, SEWARD's and VAN HELSINGs white coats; ARTHUR's white suit. Acting style is patently 19th century, but not to be done as parody. For the most part, THEY speak in anxious whispers. All through the scene with the FOUR VISITORS and LUCY on her bed (the altar), the COVEN, flat on their stomachs, completely covered by their black cloths, crawl onto the stage[so that the floor of the stage looks alive with dark living things]. The FOUR IN WHITE take no notice of them. More huge projections of DRACULA appear one after the other on different parts of the stage. In all of them, his eyes are fixed on the FOUR gathered about LUCY. VAN HELSING goes to LUCY. SEWARD follows him. VAN HELSING (Heavy Dutch accent) It is not too late. Her heart beats, though but feebly. (HE goes to ARTHUR) She is very, very bad. (ARTHUR sits, almost fainting) Nay, my child, Do not go on like that. You are to help her, you can do more for her than any that live and your courage is your best help. ARTHUR What can I do? VAN HELSING Come, you are a man, and it is a man we want. She wants blood, and blood she must have or die.
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Midnight Plays ARTHUR If you only knew how gladly I would die for her, you would understand— VAN HELSING Good boy. In the not so far off, you will be happy you have done all for her you love. Come now and be silent. You shall kiss her once whiles I bring over the table. Friend John, help to me. (BOTH look away while ARTHUR bends over LUCY and kisses her. Aside to SEWARD) He is young and strong and of blood so pure that we need not defibrilate it. (The transfusion is performed. Silence during the passage of the blood from ONE to the OTHER, except for breathing, audible on speakers [continues to end of scene]. To SEWARD) It is enough. You attend to him, I will look to her. (SEWARD dresses ARTHUR's wound) The brave lover, I think, deserve another kiss, which he will have presently. (To ARTHUR) You have saved her life, and you can rest easy in mind that all that can be is. She shall love you none the less for what you have done. (To ALL of them) Now we may begin. (HE takes a great bundle of white garlic flowers from his case. To MINA) These are for you, Miss Mina. MINA Oh, dear Dr. Van Helsing. VAN HELSING Yes, my dear, but not to play with. These are medicines. You will put them about Miss Lucy's room. You will make pretty wreath and hang him around her neck so that she sleep well. Oh, yes. They are like the lotus flower, make her trouble forgotten. It smell so like the waters of Lethe.
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Midnight Plays MINA Oh, Professor, I believe you are only putting up a joke on us. Why, these flowers are only common garlic. VAN HELSING (Sternly) No trifling with me! There is grim purpose in all I do. And I warn you that you do not thwart me. Take care, for the sake of the others, if not for your own. (While MINA puts the wreaths about, VAN HELSING takes a crucifix from his case) And this most of all, to protect her from any. (HE places the crucifix upright at LUCY's head, on the altar. THEY ALL kneel) God. God. God. What have we done, what has this poor thing done that we are so sore beset? Is there fate among us still, sent down from the pagan world of old, that such things must be, and in such a way? How are all the powers of the devil against us? We must see and act. Devils or no devils, or all the devils at once, it matters not. We fight him all the same. In your name, in your father's, in your holy ghost's. (THEY rise) Come. (To MINA) You will watch outside the door, and see to Miss Lucy during the night. May all be prevented. (THEY leave.) Muttered words, unintelligible sounds, are heard simultaneously with the sounds of breathing emanating from the speakers. The stage lighting [the green and purplish tints] again embraces the whole theatre. It is supplanted gradually by black light. The VAMPIRES, in their niches around the walls, alternately appear and fade out of sight. [This continues until the Rite begins.] A projection of DRACULA appears behind the altar, towering over the figure of LUCY) DRACULA'S VOICE (To LUCY) Nosferatu. (SHE rises. BOSON BOOKS
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Sounds of WOLVES howling. The swirling points of light, the flitting shadows of bat-forms. LUCY rids the room of all the protective talismen. While SHE is engaged in this, the SPEAKER recites:) SPEAKER You are now preparing visions of sexual acts. Desire and anticipation seize you. You wonder what sexual performance is expected of you. Withhold yourself from action or attachment. If you try to join the orgy you are hallucinating, You will experience possessive desire and jealousy. You will suffer stupidity and misery. Be neither attracted nor repulsed by your sexual hallucinations. (The Rite begins. LUCY stands on the altar facing the crucifix and disrobes) LUCY Enter in, to this altar, my Master, my Lord. Protect me, in your embrace, from the violent, the treacherous, the hypocrites, the liars. (The MEN of the COVEN, who are still prone on the floor, still completely covered by their black cloths, rise, and sit in a wide ring facing the altar. LUCY lifts the crucifix from its place and lays it flat on the altar. SHE rises with the GOAT-MASK in her hands, its torch alight. The back of the GOAT-MASK faces us. As the COVEN lights its torches from the GOAT's, THEY chant in response to LUCY:) LUCY Come, my Lord who has suffered wrong COVEN My Lord who has suffered wrong LUCY The Proscribed God of ancient days COVEN Proscribed of ancient days LUCY Unjustly driven out of heaven
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Midnight Plays COVEN Driven out of heaven LUCY The implanter of seed in the earth COVEN Seed of the earth LUCY God of my body and my blood COVEN Body and blood (The torches are again ringing the altar, The COVEN sits outside the ring, their backs to the altar. DRACULA, cloaked, has appeared upstage of the altar, and facing upstage. [The projection of him dims before his appearance on stage.] The COVEN begins the singing of the Gloria. The text is sung backwards. LUCY places the Goat-mask on DRACULA. SHE unfastens his cloak, which drops to the floor. HE is still facing upstage. HE is naked, covered with glistening black hair, like an animal. His torso is human, his legs and feet those of a goat. LUCY, with ceremonious gravity, kisses his backside. HE turns, and faces forward. TWO MEN of the COVEN fasten an enormous dildo on him. LUCY is elevated by the TWO MEN for her ritual impregnation [this is ceremonial; there is no sexuality in the action]. SHE is then placed on her back on the altar, and lies on the crucifix. Two black candlesticks are put at the head of the altar, which SHE grasps. SHE is outspread. The Mass is then performed on her body. The Credo is chanted backwards by the GOAT-PRIEST. HE deposits the Host — a black compost — on her loins. HE sets it aflame; it bakes on her loins. LUCY moans in ecstatic pain. Bats, toads and insects are deposited on her body [they are attached to long fishing-poles held by the COVEN].
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Midnight Plays Prayers are said over these offerings by the GOAT-PRIEST. At the conclusion of the prayers, the offerings are “flown”from LUCY's body. The sacrament is distributed to the COVEN while the Agnus Dei is sung backwards. At the conclusion of the sacrament, LUCY raises the crucifix from the altar and holding it aloft, cries out:) LUCY I defy you, Jesus, I, the priestess of this rite, whose body is now both altar and offering, to strike me with lightning and turn my flesh to dust this moment, before the eyes of my faithful coven, if your power is greater than my Lord's and Master's. (As part of the ritual, ALL look up expectantly and wait. After a long pause, THEY scream their pleasure at Jesus’ defeat. LUCY smashes the crucifix to bits) My Lord Satan is redeemed. I give myself to my Lord. My Lord and Master, your bride is hungry for your embrace. (The torches are again doused suddenly. The lighting is again green and purplish, and fills the theatre. The same atmosphere which preceded the rite [the flitting batforms, etc.] is recovered. The VAMPIRES move again through the audience toward the stage, gasping, making whispering and sucking noises. LUCY is lifted and put on her back on the altar. The GOAT-PRIEST moves to the foot of the altar and stands before LUCY, his back to us, a huge, naked, animal figure. When the VAMPIRES have reached the stage, and the whole COVEN is moving again as in the Voyage scene [narcotic movement], the GOAT-PRIEST removes his mask. His hovering presence excites LUCY. HE touches her. LUCY's sounds blend with the low breathing and sucking sounds of the COVEN. DRACULA mounts her and buries his face in her neck. LUCY cries out, a triumphant, impassioned cry. MINA bursts into the room holding a lamp.
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Midnight Plays The COVEN falls flat on the floor and remains motionless. LUCY turns to MINA with a wild, mocking look and laughs outrageously. MINA screams, drops the lantern with a crash and runs out LUCY lies back, and, rubbing her body, her breasts, her loins, with sheer pleasure of longing, urges:) My lover, My lover. Embrace me. Again. (DRACULA's body covers hers. HE buries his teeth in her neck. SHE is in bliss) End of Act I
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ACT II THE DEATH OF LUCY The COVEN sits in a semi-circle, facing upstage, dressed in long black robes and holding tapers. ONE of the COVEN, standing center, puts a mask of LUCY on a cross-braced pole. The mask has the face of a vampire. The flowing garments of the vampire are hung from the cross- bracing. In the dim light, the effigy of LUCY is borne about the stage. It moves faster and faster, until it appears to take on motion of its own. A nightingale singing outside; the face of DRACULA, dimly perceived, is projected on the back wall. The projection covers the wall. The effigy of LUCY, now floating, now flying, is borne to the altar where it is lain, as though sleeping. The FOUR WHITE ONES — MINA, ARTHUR, DR. VAN HELSING and DR. SEWARD— group for a formal death-bed scene. Again the actors perform formally in Victorian idiom, but not parodistically. VAN HELSING She is dying. (MINA, weeping, goes to SEWARD, who supports her) Wake that poor boy, and let him come and see the last. (SEWARD seats MINA, and raises ARTHUR) SEWARD (To ARTHUR) Come, my dear fellow, summon all your fortitude. (ARTHUR approaches LUCY's bed. LUCY's heavy breathing is heard on the speaker) LUCY (Her voice emanates from inside the altar-coffin, from below the effigy) Arthur! My love. I want you with me. Kiss me. (As ARTHUR bends over her, VAN HELSING swoops upon him, grabs him by the neck, and hurls him across the room) VAN HELSING Not for your life! Not for your living soul, and hers! (LUCY's breathing [over the speaker] becomes a spasm of rage, SHE moans, but almost inaudibly. LUCY extends her hands toward VAN HELSING. [NOTE: the hands are extended from below the effigy])
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Midnight Plays LUCY (To VAN HELSING) Thank you, my true friend. My true friend and his. Oh, guard him from me, guard him and give him peace. (VAN HELSING kneels beside her) VAN HELSING I swear it. (To ARTHUR) Come, my child, take her hand in yours and kiss her on the forehead but once. (ARTHUR kisses her forehead) LUCY (Suddenly, in the voice of the priestess of the Rite:) Embrace me. Love me. Love me. Kiss my mouth. Take my body. Kiss me. (VAN HELSING tears ARTHUR out of her embrace) LUCY (A great cry) Give me my lover. ARTHUR Let me go to her! VAN HELSING Courage! (A long sigh is heard on the loudspeaker. Then LUCY's breathing stops) ARTHUR (La Boheme) LUCY! (HE falls across her body. VAN HELSING goes to the bed, and bends over LUCY) VAN HELSING It is over. She is dead. (VAN HELSING leads ARTHUR to a seat, where HE sobs, beyond comfort) MINA (Approaches LUCY) We thought her dying whilst she slept, and sleeping when she died. She is restored in death. Her end is peace. VAN HELSING It is only the beginning. Friend John, bring me postmortem knives. We must cut off her head, and take out her heart. (Sensation among the OTHER THREE) It is I that shall operate, and you must only help. When she is entombed, we shall uncover her, and do what we must.
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Midnight Plays SEWARD But why? VAN HELSING I have good reason for all. ARTHUR In God's name, what does it mean? Are we mad? Or what sort of horrible danger is there? VAN HELSING It is for your dear girl's sake. Come, now we must pray for her soul. (The FOUR leave) THE SORCERESS' SACRILEGE The COVEN, robed in black and holding their lighted tapers, make up a PROCESSION. THEY take up the coffin on which LUCY is lying, and proceed, while chanting the Burial Service, to the back of the stage, where the coffin is raised high and lowered three times, then placed on a platform. As the PROCESSION is about to lift the coffin, the effigy of LUCY lying on it is raised high so that SHE appears to swoop into the air. The effigy is moved about as though it is enraged. LUCY, in the voice of the High Priestess of the Rite, cries out [above the chant of the Burial Service, and accompanying the PROCESSION] a curse against the FOUR IN WHITE: LUCY I call on the lightning to strike their bodies and wither their flesh. Let my Master empty their veins of blood and leave them without desire, dead to every desire. Let their veins shrivel and their bodies lie in agony, in eternal drought. Let them scream with the pain of hunger and thirst forever, and never know, never, that hunger and thirst are their pain. I call on my master to bring me toads, to bring me crawling things to eat, to bite, to crush, to bleed, to drink, and may he let them, those whom I hate—see me and loathe me and vomit at the sight of me, and be damned forever not to know that the blood is the life, that the kiss of blood is joy, that the joy of life is my Master's. (Very slowly, during the procession and the curse, the projection of DRACULA's face at the rear of the stage dissolves into a matching projection of the Goat-head, so that the features of the ONE are individually and precisely replaced by the features of the OTHER. At the end of the procession and the curse, the COVEN flings off its black robes, and claps on demon-masks. Their bodies are naked, but painted with viscera, organs, veins and arteries, glistening with slime and blood. The masks are of Tibetan demons, the wrists and ankles of the COVEN MEMBERS have bracelets and anklets attached so that each body's silhouette reflects that of an Oriental demon's.
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Midnight Plays SOME of the COVEN drag on a sack and throw it onto LUCY’s coffin. OTHERS set up an uneven line of torches across the stage. In place of her effigy [which disappeared behind the coffin] LUCY rises from the coffin — vampire entiere. SHE dumps the contents of the sack onto coffin and floor: a mass of toads swollen with blood. The COVEN freezes, facing her. SHE lifts several toads and bites into them. The blood spurts; the COVEN goes wild. SHE throws a handful into the midst of the COVEN, which THEY grab and eat. The COVEN leaps and tumbles over the torches, screaming. The COVEN grows wanton. It reaches delirium. It passes beyond its delirium to the rite's climactic image of ecstatic unification. When it reaches this final state, which is blissful, throbbing:) SPEAKER The motor of the heart merges with the pulsing of all life. The heart breaks, And red fire bleeds into all living beings. All living beings are throbbing together. You are at last divested of robot clothes and limbs. Every cell in your body is singing its song of freedom. The entire universe is in harmony, Freed from your censorship, Freed from your control. You are a joyful part of all life, Ecstatic, orgiastic, blissful unity. (A long pause. The unified pulsation of the COVEN is suddenly broken) You are afraid. The self, an island in this throbbing life, Screams, STOP. THE MURDER BOSON BOOKS
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VAN HELSING’s voice is heard [from loudspeaker on stage]: VAN HELSING Unlock the tomb! (The torches are doused and the COVEN falls flat. The brilliant red of the previous scene changes to cold blue— a dank, dark stage. Silence. VAN HELSING leads in the FOUR, EACH carrying a lantern. HE carries a crucifix before him. SEWARD carries a bag. The COVEN crawls out of sight; hissing sounds are heard on the speaker. The FOUR stand looking about, silent. Suddenly the effigy of LUCY swoops up from behind her coffin, brushes them, and disappears. MINA screams) Have no fear from Miss Lucy, or for her. She is young as Undead, and she will need. (LUCY laughs uproariously [over stage speaker]. VAN HELSING gives the crucifix to SEWARD) Seal up the door of the tomb with this crucifix. So, she will stay. (Suddenly, a down-spot illuminates the vampire LUCY, standing quietly, far upstage, in the shadows. VAN HELSING gasps, and points to her. The OTHER THREE fall back in astonishment, and SEWARD holds the crucifix over them) LUCY (With voluptuous grace) Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my lover, come. (As SHE and ARTHUR begin to move toward one another, VAN HELSING grabs the crucifix and springs between them) VAN HELSING Stay. (LUCY, with a cry of rage, leaps behind her coffin. To ARTHUR) BOSON BOOKS
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Answer me, Am I to proceed? Or do you falter? ARTHUR (Falling to the ground) Do as you will, there can be no horror like this ever, any more. VAN HELSING (Still holding the crucifix toward the coffin, to keep the invisible LUCY at bay) Light the candles. (SEWARD takes two candles from the bag, lights them and places them on two coffins. To MINA) Hold our cross. (SHE takes it, and VAN HELSING takes from the bag a wooden stake about three feet long and gives it to SEWARD. HE keeps for himself a heavy hammer. ARTHUR is given an axe, MINA a wreath of garlic. While distributing these things:) A moment's courage, and it is done. (To SEWARD) Take this stake in your hand, ready to place the point over the heart. (To ARTHUR) When the moment is here, strike in God's name, that the Undead may pass away. Yours is the blessed hand that shall strike the blow to set her free. (LUCY, with a yell of rage, tries to leap over the coffin to escape. VAN HELSING prevents her, catches her by the hair, and flings her full-length on the coffin) Arthur. Now! (LUCY screams, tosses her head, trying to get out of VAN HELSING's grip. VAN HELSING, still holding her hair, pulls her head up high, and cries out to ARTHUR over LUCY’s screams:) NOW! For our God!
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Midnight Plays (In an instant, ARTHUR, already beside VAN HELSING, swings the axe and slices off LUCY's head. The force of the blow tips the coffin over, and LUCY's body falls onto the stage floor. ARTHUR takes LUCY's head from VAN HELSING, and MINA rushes to it with the wreath of garlic) Hold firm! (As SEWARD grabs the rolling body and rights it, and presses the stake directly to the heart, VAN HELSING drives the stake in with repeated blows of his hammer. Blood is spurting from LUCY's severed head, her neck, her heart. While ARTHUR holds the severed head, MINA stuffs LUCY's mouth with garlic. When the FOUR have finished, THEY come forward, join hands, and speak to the audience ONE after the OTHER [Don Giovanni epilogue]:) The ordeal was fearful, but none of us did falter. ARTHUR Mine was the hand that sent her to the stars. The hand of him that loved her best. MINA Now our Lucy takes her place among the other angels. SEWARD Her captive soul is free. (The FOUR then walk in procession. During their processional:) SPEAKER You were terrified by the radiant red light. With a terrible ripping of fibres and veins, You tore your roots out of the body of life. The throbbing stopped. The ecstacy ceases. Your plastic doll body hardened and stiffened into its angular form. Now you walk Outside the stream, Isolated, Impotent, Miserable. BOSON BOOKS
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THE BETRAYAL In the dark, RENFIELD's scream. Lights up. HE is in his cell. From far side of stage, the FOUR are walking toward his cell. As THEY approach it, and climb to its stage level, RENFIELD is in breathless prayer, choking back tears. RENFIELD Why do you leave me here to suffer this death? Why do you leave me with these demons of righteousness? I am not of their world. Believe me, believe I am not as they are, I am not of them. I am of your body and your blood. I am at one with you, I have no substance but your substance, I have no will but yours. I believe in your body and your spirit. I believe in your blood. I hunger and thirst for you. I hunger and thirst. Cast me aside, tread on me, I will do what you will, and shout your praise. My master, I am your tears, I weep your blood, I am a lake of tears. (HE hears the approach of the VISITORS behind him) Save me, my Master! The righteous are here. (The FOUR enter) SEWARD Visitors. (RENFIELD looks up, but does not respond to SEWARD. For a long time, HE stares at MINA) RENFIELD (To MINA) Why are you here? VAN HELSING Only to talk with you. RENFIELD No need. (Again, to MINA) Why are you here? I don't care for pale people. I like them with lots of blood in them. Yours seems to have run out. You have bad dreams. You dreamed you coupled with my Master, and that He clapped your face to His body, and made you drink from the gash in His side. You dreamed this many times. (To SEWARD) You made light of Him. But I warned you. SEWARD Of what? RENFIELD Of what is in her face. Touch a cross to it. (VAN HELSING takes a crucifix from his pocket. HE touches it to MINA's forehead. SHE screams with pain) She is one of us. Like the other, whom you destroyed. BOSON BOOKS
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MINA (Falling to her knees) Unclean! Unclean! RENFIELD She belongs to you. She should not be one of us. But He has taken her too. VAN HELSING Who is He? RENFIELD My Master. VAN HELSING Who is your Master? RENFIELD S-sh-h-h-h. He will hear you. VAN HELSING And if he does? RENFIELD It is not just that He should pass me by, and choose her. (HE screams) It is not just! (HE is calm) She will follow Him. MINA My God, protect me! VAN HELSING When he comes, we will be waiting. RENFIELD He will not come again. VAN HELSING Where is he? MINA (With closed eyes) In his grave. He is asleep in his own earth. Cold. Dark. He is on a road. I am inside his body. RENFIELD (Screams) Master, don't abandon me! MINA I am inside his body. I am being carried in darkness. There is silence. No, there are shuffling steps. Darkness, but there are points of light. Lanterns. My way is being lighted. RENFIELD The gypsies carry Him. They are not afraid of Him. They are taking Him away. VAN HELSING Away? RENFIELD From me. VAN HELSING Where are they taking him. RENFIELD (Screams) Away! (Calm) To His own land. He is going home.
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Midnight Plays MINA (Screams) I will not go! VAN HELSING What road is he on? RENFIELD I won't tell you. He is my Master. VAN HELSING What road? RENFIELD Back to the sea. VAN HELSING The port? RENFIELD (Waits, then HE nods) To the port. Five miles from. Five miles from. (HE is trembling) At Whitby. VAN HELSING (To the OTHER VISITORS) Come. (THEY leave quickly. RENFIELD, alone, shouts after them:) RENFIELD You cannot catch Him. He is greater than all of you.
THE MAGIC CIRCLE The FIGURES on stage are in silhouette. SOME of the COVEN are in the shape of a grotesque HORSE, on which MINA rides. VAN HELSING leads the HORSE, ARTHUR and SEWARD follow. The FOUR wear long white travelling cloaks. The PROCESSION moves on stage in a wide circle. The REST of the COVEN are formless forms [covered in their black cloths] on the periphery of the circle. THEY move restlessly, like great sleeping beasts. Their sounds are whispers, hisses. The stage floor begins to fill with mist [continues to the end]. The lighting of the scene [after the silhouetted journey on the HORSE] comes in, gradually, filling the stage with indefinable anxieties. SPEAKER (During the silent procession) In confusion and bewilderment You look at your fellow voyagers and friends And sense that they cannot understand you. You think: "I am dead! What shall I do?" And in misery wonder if you will ever return. You feel oppressed, squeezed, Held within a cage or prison, BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays Trapped within a magic circle. These are signs that you are struggling to return. Do not struggle. Your re-entry will happen by itself. Only recognize where you are. Recognition will lead to your liberation. (VAN HELSING brings the TRAVELLERS to a halt) VAN HELSING Is this the road? MINA (Whose eyes remain shut throughout the episode) Not yet. (THEY continue in silence. THEY stop) VAN HELSING Have we found the road? MINA Not yet. (THEY continue in silence. THEY stop) VAN HELSING Is it here? MINA Not yet. (THEY continue in silence) Stop. He will pass here. (The HORSE is led to one side. MINA is taken off) VAN HELSING Build the fire. (A fire is set at the rear of stage center. MINA is seated center stage, on a box) Draw the circle. (ARTHUR and SEWARD, with their feet, describe a wide circle on the ground, with MINA at its center. During the drawing of the circle, the COVEN, on the periphery, begin to emerge, bit by bit, from their coverings. THEY are wearing the Oriental demon masks. THEY are dimly visible, but the eyes of all of them are
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Midnight Plays phosphorescent. ONE by ONE, the WOMEN VAMPIRES become discernible among the DEMON FIGURES, but faintly) Take the Host. (HE holds up the bowl. The MEN EACH take Wafers. THEY cross themselves, then crumble the Wafers around the edge of the circle. Standing at the fire in the rear of the stage, to MINA) Will you not come over to the fire? (MINA starts to go, but stops before reaching the edge of the circle) Why not go on? MINA I cannot. ARTHUR (At a different point outside the circle, to MINA) Will you come to this side? (SHE starts again, but stops) Go on. MINA I cannot. SEWARD (At a different point outside the circle, to MINA) Will you come here? (SHE tries again, but stops) Come. MINA I cannot. VAN HELSING She is safe. If she cannot leave the circle, none whom we dread may enter. (VAN HELSING gives ARTHUR and SEWARD crosses) Make your ambush. (ARTHUR and SEWARD go off together. VAN HELSING joins MINA in the center of the circle.
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Midnight Plays The COVEN outside the circle become somewhat more agitated; THEY cluster around the HORSE momentarily, then leave him again. The HORSE rears and moans) VAMPIRES Come, sister. Come to us. Come, Come. VAN HELSING What is around us? MINA (Eyes still closed) Wolves. Snakes. Great dogs. Some. Flying things. VAN HELSING And spirits such as Lucy's? MINA (Doesn't answer for a moment) Yes. VAMPIRES Come, sister. Come. (THEY laugh) VAN HELSING They cannot touch you. (HE starts for the fire) MINA Take care. Don't go there. Here you are safe. I have the cross. VAN HELSING It is for you that I fear. MINA There is none safer in all the world from them than I am. VAMPIRES You are one of us. Come to us. Come, sister. Come to us. (The COVEN cluster again around the HORSE. Sharp, hissing sounds. THEY swirl around the HORSE. HE bridles, trembles, moans. HE begins to fall) VAN HELSING (Inside the circle) What is happening? MINA They have fastened on the horse. (VAN HELSING moves toward the HORSE) It is too late. His life is almost gone. (The HORSE sinks to the ground and lies still) VAN HELSING Did they drain his blood? BOSON BOOKS
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MINA No, He died of terror. (THEY are silent) VAN HELSING Are they coming? MINA They are almost here. VAN HELSING (Rises) Make ready. (HE brings two lighted torches from the fire to MINA. SHE stands in the center of the circle, holding the torches. VAN HELSING goes out) THE SACRIFICE Slow and deliberate. The episode is performed as a grave, utterly unimpassioned ritual. SPEAKER The gypsies came up the road bearing the coffin of the Master. (The LINE OF GYPSIES, carrying lanterns, precedes the coffin, which is mounted on wheels. THEY pull it with ropes) There was a struggle. The protectors of the coffin abandoned Him. (VAN HELSING, SEWARD and ARTHUR come out of ambush, and attack the cart and the GYPSIES. The GYPSIES slash at them with knives; the THREE MEN protect themselves with their implements: the hammer, the stake, the axe. ARTHUR mounts the cart and rips open the lid of the coffin. The GYPSIES run away. The COVEN disperses gradually. The rest of the ritual is done almost in silence, the indistinct and inarticulate sounds of the COVEN and of the speaker fading out) The body was disinterred. (DRACULA is lifted from the coffin and placed on the ground before the fire) The heart was impaled. BOSON BOOKS
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(The stake is hammered, soundlessly and deliberately, through DRACULA's heart) The head was severed. (The axe is brought down on DRACULA's neck slowly, and passes through the neck effortlessly) The Master revealed Himself. (The severed head and body are lifted and impaled on a post center stage, directly behind the fire. But in transit from ground to post, the head becomes the GOAT'S HEAD, and the body, an empty goat-skin) He was burned, so that He might not return. (MINA puts the torches to the goatskin. The effigy is aflame. While it burns, the ENTIRE COVEN emerges quietly, dressed in black, as at the beginning of the play. THEY form a broken pattern of FIGURES all over the stage. THEY observe the burning. The FOUR ACTORS remove their travelling cloaks. THEY are dressed like the REST of the COVEN. The WHOLE COVEN, without changing positions, clasps hands) He is remembered. (The ENTIRE COVEN, very slowly, forms a circle, clasping one another closely. During this movement, the final instruction is read over the speaker to the audience:) It is almost time to return. Choose your future self with care. A vision of your new self is forming. Recognize it. When you return to game-existence Try to follow the pleasant delightful visions. If you return in panic, a fearful state will follow. If you return in radiance, a happy state will follow. Whatever you choose, Choose impartially, Without attraction or repulsion. Go back to game-existence with good grace. Voluntarily and freely. Remain calm. BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays Remember the teachings. (The COVEN extends its hands to the spectators, and takes one or two steps toward them) The End
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THE DYBBUK
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The Dybbuk is based on S. Ansky's play of the same name. It was first performed at La Mama E. T. C. in New York in 1971, directed by Rina Yerushalmi. LIST OF CHARACTERS Dumbshow: Petlura the Cossak Bride Groom Speaking Roles: Commere Compere Presenter Channan Leah Nissin ben Henie Sender Rabbi Azrael Elchannan Frade, the Nurse Congregation, Young Disciples, Demons, Dead Souls
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ACT I SCENE 1 COSSAK, on papier maché carnival horse, in dim light amid shadows. COMPERE Petlura Kuzak PRESENTER Petlura the Cossak COMMERE Oisvohrf, chilugahn PRESENTER Devil, gangster COMPERE Bleibt, wie a shtein PRESENTER Waits. Stone (Slow dimup on BRIDE and BRIDEGROOM under canopy, during:) COMMERE An eppele, a kahla PRESENTER Bride, little apple COMPERE Shein vie die veldt PRESENTER Like the world, lovely COMMERE Chussen, a beimel PRESENTER Bridegroom, sapling COMPERE Chuchim, rein PRESENTER Wise, pure COMMERE Lachendick, veinendick PRESENTER Hearts laughing, crying COMPERE Tritten untern chippa PRESENTER Under the canopy (PETLURA moves toward them, cuts off their heads and limbs, during:) BOSON BOOKS
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COMMERE In mitzkaderinnen PRESENTER Why? For no reason COMPERE Riert sach der chazer PRESENTER The pig moves in COMMERE Heibt sach die linke PRESENTER Raises his left hand COMPERE Hackt durch der beiner PRESENTER Axe through the bones (TWO MEN and a WOMAN emerge, reassemble the bodies, shroud and mask them as dead, seat them on chairs in hole in stage floor, during:) COMMERE Nemmt mir der ehlim PRESENTER Then take the people COMPERE Fleish, blit und beiner PRESENTER Flesh, blood and bones and COMMERE Gantz macht die kinder PRESENTER Make whole the children COMPERE Du macht zeir grub PRESENTER Here make their grave COMPERE Leite, leite, gedennk sach, gedennk PRESENTER Remember, people, remember COMMERE Neshuhmes vuss lieben, neshuhmes in glick PRESENTER Souls who knew love, fortunate souls COMPERE Fin der veldt opgehacht in sehr glichlichsten zeit PRESENTER Cut from the world in their happiest time BOSON BOOKS
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COMMERE Gehen nicht veit fin sehr libinken ort PRESENTER Do not abandon the place where they lived COMPERE Zey shtehen, und shtehen, mit ins PRESENTER They stay, they stay, among us (Lights remain on COMMERE and COMPERE. THEY converse intimately) COMPERE Zey shtehen du? PRESENTER They're staying here? COMMERE Bis die bascherte zeit. PRESENTER For their destined time. COMPERE Vehr darf zey? PRESENTER Who needs them? COMMERE Azeine vie zey, kennen zey zinn, kennen reden, teilen zich mit die gedanken. PRESENTER Those like themselves, will see them, speak with them, share the same thoughts. COMPERE Mit die teute? PRESENTER With the dead? COMMERE Mhm. PRESENTER Mhm. COMPERE Vuss zugt der ehlim? PRESENTER What say the people? COMMERE Der ehlim.macht in die heizen. PRESENTER The people shit in their pants.
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Midnight Plays SCENE 2 CHANNAN sits at the grave of the BRIDE and BRIDE-GROOM. LEAH and her father, SENDER, are in a pool of light at a distance from him. The young scholar and the young girl sit on their knees, hands in lap, Kabuki fashion. THEY remain rigid throughout the scene. The dead NISSIN, Channan's father, is circled by a pool of sickly light far upstage. He is in a filthy, shredded shroud, with the mask of a dead man far more desiccated than those of the dead BRIDE and BRIDEGROOM. SENDER stares at NISSIN in horror. NISSIN Sender, rich man, I come from my grave with hatred. I speak with hatred and without forgiveness. Sender, breaker of vows, in the years of our youth, bound soul to soul in friendship, swore in the house of the holy rabbi Yehudah Hayyim that if the wife of the one should bear a son, and the other a daughter, then son and daughter, at the appointed time, should be man and wife. Sender, rich man, I hate you and loathe you for this: that when my son Channan, wandering, poor, came at last to your house and sat at your table, and his soul bound itself to the soul of your daughter, you turned your back on him and sought for your daughter a bridegroom of great possessions, and made my son a wanderer once more, setting his path toward the dark powers who tear him from the world before his time. Sender, rich man, may my son confound you. May he break the shells that bind him, may he find his way from the blackness of his prison, and destroy your hopes, and claim his bride. SENDER Out of my thoughts, Nissen ben Henie. Go away from my house and back to your grave. I hold in my bosom hope for my daughter's joy. NISSIN I hold in my bosom the torment of my son. (NISSIN disappears. Brilliant light comes up on one stage area where the CONGREGATION with its READER perform the seven Hakkafoth [processions with the Torah] in celebration of Simhath Torah. The triple scene represents the gravesite, Synagogue, and the house of SENDER, who walks back and forth, praying, observing his daughter) CONGREGATION (Singing in Hebrew, triumphantly) Sisu vesimchu vesimchas tora, Vesenu kabir latora. Bi tov sachra michal sechora Mipatz umipninim yekara BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays Nanil venasis betzos hatora Bi hi lanu itz ve-ora. (The CONGREGATION continue their song sotto voce during:) COMMERE Se gevinn a muhl a bucher PRESENTER Once there was a young man COMPERE Channan, chuchim, uhrim PRESENTER Channan, wise, poor COMMERE Hut gevoint in shtieb fin Sender dem rachen PRESENTER Who lived in the house of Sender the rich man COMPERE Und sein tochter Leah PRESENTER And his daughter Leah COMPERE A tayerss PRESENTER Dear COMPERE Die yinge brennen PRESENTER The young ones burn with love CONGREGATION Ana adonai, hoshia na; ana adonai, hatzlicha na; ana adonai aneinu veyom kareinu. LEAH You whom my soul loves, I wait for you in my bed at night; I wait for you but I do not find you. CONGREGATION (The second procession, sung in Hebrew:) Dover tsdakot, hoshia na; hadur bilvusho, hatzlicha na; vatik vechasid, aneinu veyom kareinu. PRESENTER They are surrounded by the joy of Simhath Torah. They are surrounded by the holiness of prayer. They are watched by Sender the father. CHANNAN You have raped my heart, my sister, my bride; you have raped my heart with one glance of your eyes. CONGREGATION (The third procession, sung in Hebrew:) Zach veyashar, hoshiya na; chomeil dalim, hatzlicha na; tov umetiv, aneinu veyorn kareinu.
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Midnight Plays PRESENTER Each calls inwardly to the other. The dead speak through them. They speak through the dead. None are comforted. LEAH Northwind, southwind! Blow upon the garden of my body, that its perfume may waft to him. Let my lover come into my garden and eat its precious fruits. CHANNAN Open your body to me, my sister, my love; my head is heavy with dew, my locks are drenched with the drops of the night. CONGREGATION (The fourth procession, sung in Hebrew:) Yodeya machashavos, hoshiya na; kabir vena-ohd, hatzlicha na; lovesh tzedakos, aneinu veyom kareinu. LEAH Place me like a seal upon your heart, like a seal upon your arm. Oh that your left hand were under my head, and your right hand were embracing me! CONGREGATION (The fifth procession, sung in Hebrew:) Melech olalim, hoshiya na; na-or ve-adir, hatzlichana; somech noflim, aneinu veyom kareinu. LEAH The kiss of your lips. The stroke of your hand on the length of my body. CHANNAN The smell of your body; your body is all perfume. CONGREGATION (The sixth procession, sung in Hebrew:) Ozer dalim hoshia na; podeh umatzil hatzlicha na; tzur olamim aneinu veyom kareinu. CHANNAN Come away with me, my bride; go with me from the dens of these lions, from these mountains of leopards. CONGREGATION (The seventh procession, sung in Hebrew:) Kalosh venora, hoshia na; rachom vechanuch, hatzlicha na; shomer habrit, aneinu veyom kareinu. (As the scrolls are being returned to the Ark:) CHANNAN Floods cannot quench it, rivers cannot drown it. Love is like death itself, strong; like the deep grave, hard; like fire, flashing; like the flame of God. CONGREGATION (Crescendo:) Bekal leib araneitz zidkosecha Va-asafra tehilasecha Be-odi agid niflosecha Al chasrichen ve-al amisecha Nagil venasis betzos hatora Bi hi lenu itz ve-orad.
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SCENE 3 RABBI AZRAEL, in brilliant down-spot, stands in the position of a warrior in Kabuki theatre: knees spread, hands on hips, whip trailing. PRESENTER Azrael (AZRAEL cracks his whip) Rebbe (HE cracks it again) Serene of mind (Again) Pious (Again) Zealous (Again) Wise (Again) Compassionate (Again, louder. In another area, CHANNAN, alone, is illuminated under a brilliant down-spot. HE is bent over, weeping, wearing a hair-shirt, holding a whip) PRESENTER Channan (CHANNAN cracks the whip across his own body and cries out) Chassid (HE cracks the whip again) Tormented of mind
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Midnight Plays (Again) Pious (Again) Zealous (Again) Wise (Again) One who bears shame (Again, and falls. PRESENTER joining AZRAEL) A rich man came to the house of the Rebbe. "I am rich!" he said. "I am powerful!" he said. "I am a friend of the Czar himself!" he said. "How have you settled my dispute?" AZRAEL What was your dispute, friend of the Czar? PRESENTER "My dispute was with Baer the Shoemaker about the land on which a corner of my house rests." Rabbi Azrael went deep into himself, and lifted the curtain from his inward eye, and traced the corridors and byways of his illuminated mind, and reached the end of the passage of his memory, and there, raising the ultimate veil and throwing a piercing light on the last recesses of the dark and empty store-bins of his discarded yesterdays, there, as if by a miracle, found a small, blind, unfed, shivering, whimpering recollection of that day of the judgment between the friend of the Czar and Baer the Shoemaker, still alive. AZRAEL It was last Tuesday. This was my decision! (HE cracks his whip, CHANNAN cries out as though struck, and falls. AZRAEL and the PRESENTER freeze) CHANNAN In the heart of God is Satan, wrapped in the inmost self of the most pure. As in Him, so in the heart of man there is also Satan, entwined in his inmost being. And for his presence, I bear shame. Shame and derision must be my life. Let me be shamed. (HE cracks his whip across his body) BOSON BOOKS
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AZRAEL My decision was for Baer the Shoemaker, who has the use of the land, and his children, and his children's children, even to the seventh generation. PRESENTER (Enraged) Cocker! Paskutzvener baheima! Vantz! (Translating, still enraged) Shit-face! Disgusting ass! Cockroach! (Returning to AZRAEL) Where is your head? What should I do with the corner of my house? Cut it off? AZRAEL (Towering fury, cracks his whip) Schweig! PRESENTER (Translating) Be still! (CHANNAN cries out. THEY freeze) CHANNAN A child is born. His guardian angel strikes him across the nose, and the new-born child forgets the infinite knowledge he stored in his celestial cheder. It is right that he should forget. Because if he did not, the course of this world would drive him to madness, if he thought about it in the light of what he knew. My God, I am a rope whose two ends are stretched between You and Satan. Pull me, even to the tearing of my limbs. It is right that you should prove the stronger. (HE cracks his whip across his body) AZRAEL Do you, shtinker, flout my rabbinical authority? PRESENTER I fart on your rabbinical authority, I fart on you, Ruv Rebbe Azrael, who is known for hundreds of miles as a seer and holy man, but who as a lawyer, on the subject of property ownership, is an asshole. AZRAEL Beware, rich man! You shall do as I say. When a Rabbi commands, his commands are obeyed. PRESENTER You can take your commands and push them up your scrofulous arm, Rebbe Azrael, may you live forever. Today, either Baer the Shoemaker will stop his dog from digging his hole under the corner of my house, or erev Shabbath or no erev Shabbath, I will shoot the dog and bury him in the hole. AZRAEL Go from here instantly and abide by my decision, or I shall resort to my whip. (HE cracks the whip. CHANNAN cries out)
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Midnight Plays CHANNAN I love her beyond measure, beyond sense. That I love her more than myself is no great matter. I love her more than my father and my mother and the friends of my youth. It is only God that I cannot help loving more. Let me feel the sting and bite and knife-wound of this love. For Your sake, let me be killed all day long. Let my body be red with sores, and my face pale with shame, so that they will be radiant hereafter. (HE cracks his whip across his body) PRESENTER Rabbi Azrael, a numinous spirit of vengeance having descended on him and wrapped him in its black, invisible and weightless robe, turned his back to the impious rich man, bent down to the second drawer of the chest which held the sum of his most sacred possessions, rummaged in the tangle of yamalkim, tallisim, parchments written in letters of gold, phials and philters of base metals, secret scissors, old letters wrapped in faded pink and yellow ribbon, a shrivelled stocking, two white buttons and a yard of thread, until his blind fingers inched and stumbled to the end of a length of whip, not leather, marked with the sacred, tattered seal of Aaron entwined together with but also effacing and in a dark way mocking at the once equally prominent seal of the Pharaoh, and clutching its tail, drew its enormous length from the webbed and shrouded interior of the tiny drawer, and as the cracked and stiffened length of whip caught the light of Rabbi Azrael's mournful study, lo, the Original Serpent hissed and uncoiled itself from itself and guided by the zealous arm of the just and severely merciful Seer, found the neck and shoulders and back and waist of the mortified rich man, who when he found himself staring into the face of the dread Serpent of Serpents, uttered a shriek that was remembered in Rabbi Azrael's pale for two generations. (The PRESENTER shrieks. CHANNAN cries out) CHANNAN Let me bear this pain with small outcry. Let me mortify this flesh in penance for the exile of Zion from Ain Soph, from the shell of the center of your being. Let me hasten the time of our redemption by my shame, by my hunger, by my torment, by my unendurable pain. Let me travel, in this way, to my God. (HE cracks his whip across his body) PRESENTER (In violent contortions) Rabbi! Rabbi! Forgive me! I'll do whatever you command. Only call off your serpent! (The whip, still held by AZRAEL, drops from the body of the PRESENTER) AZRAEL Go home and tell yourself three times a day, and tell your children and your children's children; Obey the Rabbi, and fear his whip.
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Midnight Plays (As the PRESENTER runs off, AZRAEL cracks his whip with a resounding thwack, and CHANNAN screams and falls face down, motionless, on the ground) SCENE 4 AZRAEL is with his disciples, in a session of chassidic rabbinical teaching. Separated from the DISCIPLES, CHANNAN sits alone, listening, but taking no part in the lesson. AZRAEL's head and upper body is visible through a hole in the center of a large cloth which has holes around its perimeter, through which the heads of AZRAEL's DISCIPLES are seen. At the beginning of the scene, THEY are all seated in a ring around the TEACHER. When the DISCIPLES move in rhythmic or random response to AZRAEL's teaching, THEY look like dangling ornaments on the hem of AZRAEL's turning skirt. The DISCIPLES punctuate their ecstatic responses to AZRAEL'S wise teachings with a chorus of sneezes, nose-blowings, extended burps and farts of every length and force.The farts, burps, sneezes and nose-blowings, are the musical accompaniment to the scene. AZRAEL Meiner kinder, sweethearts, what is the alphabet? Can you say it? DISCIPLE I Aleph, Beth, Gimmel, Dal. . . AZRAEL Stop! You have said. DISCIPLE I Only the first four letters, holy seer. AZRAEL No. All. What is aleph? DISCIPLE II The first of the letters. AZRAEL Darling stupid, no. DISCIPLE III It is not the first of the letters? AZRAEL It is all of them. From aleph, poured out all the rest. DISCIPLE II From where? AZRAEL (Yelling at him — the dope:) From inside! (The patient teacher again) From aleph, came all the twenty-two holy letters, including itself. Aleph is the first big breath of God. When God first looked at aleph, and in a voice of perfumed thunder said it aloud, the world, even though nobody saw it yet, was already created. (The DISCIPLES clap their hands in delight) BOSON BOOKS
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Do not potch the hennter, my loving stupids, the lesson is not yet finished. (TWO of the DISCIPLES slap their NEIGHBORS’ hands for being so stupid) Now tell me, zeeser, how was aleph made? DISCIPLE IV From air. AZRAEL What air? Where was air? DISCIPLE II From stone. AZRAEL Who had stones? DISCIPLE I From the mist of the breath of God. CHANNAN (Cries out:) No! From nothing. (AZRAEL stares at him, then ignores him) AZRAEL Dumbbells. From God himself. (The DISCIPLES are thrilled by the news) Out of himself he drew aleph, and out of aleph all the letters and the numbers from one to ten, out of which he got all the other numbers, He hacked them out, and then he weighed them, and then he mixed them up together, and then he put one in place of the other, and numbers in the place of letters, and letters in the place of numbers, until everything that could ever be, was said or about to be said, was shown or about to be shown, and the letters and the numbers were alive, and they jumped from God like flashes of lightning, and they went from him everywhere in the universe and came back to him, and when they got to his throne, they fell down around him like the hem of a long nightgown. Because, what are they? DISCIPLE III They are letters and numbers. AZRAEL Dummy, they are the clothing of God. And he throws them around everything there is, like an overcoat. And what was out there to be covered by God's overcoat. DISCIPLE IV Things without names. DISCIPLE II Space. DISCIPLE IV Air. BOSON BOOKS
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AZRAEL Babies. Nothing was out there, the overcoat flew out into nothing, and made the things. Because, what is the world? (THEY open their mouths to answer) Don't answer, emptyheads, you don't know. The world is God's overcoat, the world is God's clothing, clothing is his name. The world is nothing but the name of God. (The DISCIPLES are awed, sit in silence for a moment) So say a letter. Pick any letter. Menachem, you. DISCIPLE I Yod. AZRAEL Chayim, you. DISCIPLE II Hey. AZRAEL Haynoch, you. DISCIPLE III Vov. AZRAEL Zev, you. DISCIPLE IV Hey. AZRAEL Tayerss, go close to the letter. Go into its fire. Go, go! Every letter is a flame. Inside each one is the meaning of the whole world. (During the course of AZRAEL's speech, the DISCIPLES get to their feet one by one, and begin to move rhythmically, not in unison. AZRAEL rises too) Shout, tayerss. Sing. Go into the holy letter, all the way in. Let it become you, and you become it. Jump into the holy letters. You'll touch God, and you'll touch each other, and you'll touch the whole world. (Shouting, singing, leaping, and dancing, the DISCIPLES, with AZRAEL in the center, become a grotesque centipede-like thing in aberrant motion. One by one, THEY stop, sway and fall, facing toward AZRAEL, who remains standing. The prostrate FIGURES are like the hem of his nightgown) Now you're exhausted, tayerss. Good. Be exhausted always when you wrap around yourself the great name of God. Never find the strength to play with BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays this terrible name. Never look into the pockets of God's overcoat for what should stay there in the dark. You want to know when you will see the heavenly majesty. You want to know when will be the final time of redemption. You want to know how you can see what no eye has ever seen. Pitziloch, take your hands out of the overcoat pockets, and don't try to know. Because if you play with the name of God, you know what could happen? The whole coat could unravel, thread by thread. You want that? (The DISCIPLES’ foreheads are touching the ground, their behinds are in the air, and THEY are trembling) Shame on you, zeeser, shame on you. (The crack of AZRAEL's whip is heard, but it is not seen. The lights dim on EVERYONE except CHANNAN, who remains in place for:)
SCENE 5 CHANNAN I am the sun and she is the moon. (HE cries out:) Adonai! Why is she in exile from me, why is she in utter darkness? We are, from the beginning and without end, one! (HE speaks quietly:) Adonai, my bride is in darkness. Among the dead. Now sun too must go into darkness. It must leap into the depths of exile. It must fall into filth and impurity. It must wallow in the abyss of the other side. There in the darkness it will find the hidden sparks of light. They will fly toward the sun. I will take my bride. I will restore her to heaven. The light of the sun and the light of the moon. When they are equal, there will be redemption. (CHANNAN walks from area to area of the bare stage, crossing and criss-crossing in the pattern of a journey. COMMERE and COMPERE observe him, and discuss his actions in anxious whispers. The PRESENTER, impatient with COMMERE's and COMPERE's paucity of information, allows his translations considerable license) COMMERE Vie geht ehr? PRESENTER Where is he going? COMPERE Ehr geht. PRESENTER No where. COMMERE Vuss tiet ehr?
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Midnight Plays PRESENTER What is he doing? COMPERE Ehr tiet. PRESENTER Nothing. COMMERE Me leift. Me leift. Kinder. PRESENTER Children are always running. COMMERE Pass oiss! Ehr fallt. PRESENTER Be careful! COMPERE Ehr fallt nicht. PRESENTER He's all right. COMMERE Vuss i'? PRESENTER What's the matter with him? COMPERE Ehr hingert. Ehr fasst. PRESENTER He's fasting. COMMERE Ehr redt zu zech allein. PRESENTER He is deep in prayer. CHANNAN Blessed are the minds of men, that can conceive the vilest thoughts, and enlarge by them the glory of God. Blessed are the tongues of men, that can speak infernal words, and praise by them the glory of God. COMPERE Ehr tzittert. PRESENTER His soul is shivering. COMMERE Nasser hemmd. PRESENTER He is in a mist. COMPERE Ehr siht goornicht. PRESENTER He sees nothing around him. He sees only a vision of good and evil.
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Midnight Plays CELANNAN Blessed is Satan and all his evil, that can be washed clean by the purity of man's mind, so that only holiness remains. COMMERE Vie lang geht ehr yetzt? PRESENTER How long has he been journeying? COMPERE Halb a yoor. PRESENTER Five days. COMMERE Ehr's daar vie a shtecken. PRESENTER He has transcended the body. COMPERE Ehr lacht, ehr veint. PRESENTER He is in ecstacy and torment. COMMERE Ehr's farblunzhet. PRESENTER He is finding his way. COMPERE Ehr's fin der gedanken. PRESENTER He is possessed by the spirit of paradox. CHANNAN I am the lover of God. I taste, I see, I touch, I eat and drink my God. If I lust for my God in his guise as a man—He, Him—then I, in my love, am his woman. If I as a man kiss and fondle and play with Him, then He, in His love. is my woman. Either way, one of us is shameful. COMMERE Vie lang geht ehr yetzt? PRESENTER How long has he been journeying? COMPERE A yoor und a mitvoch. PRESENTER Twenty-two days. COMMERE Ehr hahlt zach bei'm moog'n. PRESENTER He is grasping for the spiritual meaning of sexual desire. COMPERE Ehr nasst in der haizen. PRESENTER His thoughts are flowing toward the lowest regions. BOSON BOOKS
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CHANNAN Blessed are the acts of adultery, of sodomy, of pederasty, of group-grope, that bring light and beauty and joy into the heart of the world. COMMERE Ehr zugt vie ehr geht? PRESENTER Has he revealed where he is going? COMPERE Sein Rebbe. Elchannan. PRESENTER To his mentor, Rabbi Elchannan. His name means the God of Channan. And he is versed in the forbidden rites of the Sefer Raziel and of the secret Book of Solomon. COMMERE Ehr zugt vie duss is? PRESENTER Has he revealed in what place he will find him? COMPERE A toisend und zvuntzig verst fim inser shtetl. PRESENTER In the village of Krasny, in Polesia. COMMERE Ehr zugt far vuss ehr geht? PRESENTER Has he revealed the secret of his mission? COMPERE Ehr zugt nicht. PRESENTER From Rabbi Elchannan, he will learn the secret of winning the rich man's daughter to his newly-conceived desires. COMMERE Oi, ehr toppt zach. PRESENTER Good Heavens, he's touching himself. COMPERE Keek nicht. PRESENTER Don't look. COMMERE Ehr shpielt mit zein eigenem. . . PRESENTER He's playing with his own. . . COMPERE Shweig. PRESENTER Sh.
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Midnight Plays COMMERE Shmuck. (PRESENTER refuses to translate. A pause) Nuch a muhl, ehr tzittert. PRESENTER He's shivering again. (A pause) COMPERE Oisgemuttert. PRESENTER Exhausted. CHANNAN Blessed is cunnilingus, mare's hump, sixty-nine, auto-fellatio, that give us the ultimate of joy at no charge. COMPERE Ehr's dort. PRESENTER He has arrived. (CHANNAN has arrived at the house of ELCHANNAN, at the far end of the stage, ELCHANNAN stands before a collection of heads mounted on poles— at various heights— representing an assortment of hellish creatures. Thin drapery suspends to the floor from the necks of the creatures. ELCHANNAN, when the lights come up on him, has his arms raised. CHANNAN is on the floor before him, sitting back on his heels)
SCENE 6 ELCHANNAN I disown you, you're a pig. What kind of a pig are you? CHANNAN Sinful. ELCHANNAN Why did you do such a disgusting thing? On my doorstep? Clean it up. CHANNAN There is no filth on your doorstep. My seed did not spill onto the ground. ELCHANNAN Then where is it? In the air?
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Midnight Plays CHANNAN Female demons, succubi, took me into themselves during my act, and conceived from my pollution. They have given birth to bodies from my lost seed. ELCHANNAN Who taught you these things? CHANNAN There is a passage in Zohar, II, 231b, and also in the Midrash Tanhuma, that speaks darkly of demons who are called nig'e bne Adam, spirits of harm that come from man. I was told I would not stumble on this passage until my way was clear to me. Then I would find it, and understand it, and also recognize the sign by which you marked it for me. ELCHANNAN What was the sign? CHANNAN Your own seed, dried and mixed with blood, smeared over the letters of the word, Adam. ELCHANNAN Do you see what is behind me? CHANNAN Demons. ELCHANNAN Do you recognize them? CHANNAN Children born out of my recent act with Mahlath and Lillith. They are waiting to prod and pinch and mutilate me, and call me father, and if they can, to claim my soul. ELCHANNAN Will you let them? CHANNAN Yes. ELCHANNAN Are you crazy? Why? CHANNAN I know who I am. I conceive my mission. I have come here to begin my reign. ELCHANNAN Reign? What reign? No, don't tell me. I don't want to hear it. CHANNAN I am ready to speak of it. I have fasted, I have spent whole days in penitential prayer, I have confessed all my sins, I have engaged for three years in acts of flagellation. I know the secret of Messiah. ELCHANNAN Go away. CHANNAN You will help me. ELCHANNAN Why should you bother me now? Couldn't you be ready later?
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CHANNAN I am ready now. Now is the right time. ELCHANNAN Now is the wrong time. Tomorrow is the right time. CHANNAN Begin. (ELCHANNAN kneels beside CHANNAN and cradles him in his arms. His manner changes completely) ELCHANNAN Channan, I give you warning. CHANNAN I know all the warnings, ELCHANNAN This one is terrible. When you say the words, when you have wrapped yourself in the secret name and have leaped into the abyss, when you have fallen among the kelippoth on the other side, you may not be able to raise them up, or even to save your own soul, which will remain there forever. And you will wander among the dead without rest. The dead will not abide you. The living will cry anathema. CHANNAN When I pronounce the secret name, I will pronounce it perfectly. ELCHANNAN The whole universe will shudder. CHANNAN I will say it three times. ELCHANNAN You will release demons into the world. They will gather about graves, and wait for the dying, and torment them when they come. CHANNAN But my soul will be imperfect. I will have filth on my soul. ELCHANNAN Then you will be destroyed. You will be turned into ice. You will be eaten by flames. You will be torn apart by whirlwinds. You will be kneaded into earth. (HE rocks CHANNAN like a child) Channan, Channan, you are more to me than son. I taught you. CHANNAN You taught me everything. ELCHANNAN We are one being. CHANNAN Then we have one wish. Begin. (ELCHANNAN rises, weeping, and begins reluctantly. HE pours water over his hands and CHANNAN's, as BOTH speak in unison the Hebrew blessing for washing hands:) ELCHANNAN AND CHANNAN Baruch ata adonai, Melech ha-olam, asher tsivanu genetilat yadaim. Amen. BOSON BOOKS
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(ELCHANNAN uncovers a table prepared with the instruments of conjuration. CHANNAN remains sitting on the floor, in kneeling position) ELCHANNAN I implore you, great and powerful Adonai, I beseech you, Elohim, be favorable to the prayers of this innocent. I surrender to you my soul, my heart, my inward parts, my hands, my feet, my desires, my entire being. I am, cleaned and purified for this undertaking. CHANNAN I surrender to you my soul, my heart, my inward parts, my hands, my feet, my desires, my entire being. I am befouled and unclean for this undertaking. (ELCHANNAN trembles, does not speak) Go on. ELCHANNAN Channan. . . CHANNAN (Rises) Asacro, Asac, Bedrimulael, Tilath, Arabonas, Elamos, Izachel, I conjure you, by the great and living God, to appear in your own forms, without noise and without terror, to bear witness to my undertaking, and to take possession of my soul when it befouls the secret name, and when the great God of all living beings has utterly cast me from him. ELCHANNAN In the name of the Lord, Amen. You shall behold in this mirror all things that you may desire. CHANNAN In the name of the Lord who is blessed, in the name of the Lord, Amen. (ELCHANNAN has taken up a white pigeon, and pierced its breast. With the blood from the pigeon's breast, HE inscribes four letters on the corners of the mirror: the initial letters of the names HE speaks) ELCHANNAN J ehova, Elohim, Metatron, Adonai. (HE sets the mirror vertically on the table, and covers it with a white cloth. The mirror faces CHANNAN) God ineffable, look at me, Elchannan, your most unworthy servant, and at this, my intention. Send me your servant Enoch, even on this mirror, so that in your name he will judge this innocent and act justly.
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Midnight Plays CHANNAN Send me your servant Enoch, even on this mirror, that in your name he will instruct me in all things I require of him. ELCHANNAN (Casting perfume on burning coals) In this, by this, and with this, which I pour out before your face, O God, my God, who will judge the world by fire, hear me! CHANNAN In this, by this, and with this, which I pour out before your face, O God, my God, who will judge the world by fire, hear me! ELCHANNAN Come, Enoch, come, in the name of the terrible Jehovah. CHANNAN Come, Enoch, come, in the name of the immortal Elohim. Come to me and make manifest before my eyes the things which are hidden from me. Pause on this mirror, and show me what I most desire to see. (CHANNAN removes the cloth from the mirror) ELCHANNAN Do not look! CHANNAN (To the mirror) Enoch, chief servant of God, show me the name of names, the letters unveiled, the double name of the Invisible, the Nothing. (CHANNAN takes up the mirror and holds it high over his head. Whispering, thrilled) Ah! (HE mouths silently what HE is reading in the mirror) Ah! (The mirror shatters in his hands. At the same instant, the demons lunge forward, away from the wall, in a single motion, and freeze) Soul at the point. (After each phrase HE speaks, CHANNAN, in jerky, abrupt motion, shifts position and freezes. All his positions together describe a stop-motion fall of a man in incredible pain and ecstasy succumbing to death. In unison with his movements, the demons, with each of CHANNAN's shifts of position, lunge toward the far end of the stage, until, at his death, THEY dot the entire stage area) Turn, Two one. (In bliss) Ah! God.
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Midnight Plays It is wrapped tight. Leap. Holy torment. Sparks of holiness. O God, let me fall, let us rise. (HE dies.) ELCHANNAN (Falling to the ground, reaching toward CHANNAN) Channan. Pull me toward you. I can't live now.
SCENE 7 FRADE, LEAH's nurse, is cradling LEAH in her arms. All the stage areas are infiltrated by the DEMONIC FIGURES.While FRADE hums to her charge, wordlessly, CHANNAN is lifted by the DEMONS near him and cradled by them, so that there is a unison of rhythm and movement for him and LEAH. During her wordless song, FRADE puts the BRIDE'S veil on her head, then her crown, then her long face-veil; and the DEMONS put on CHANNAN first his shroud, then "gloves" with desiccated fingers and scaly flesh, then a mask of death (like that of the dead BRIDE and BRIDEGROOM), and partly one like their own, signifying "evil spirit." At the end of the scene, when CHANNAN and LEAH are both dressed, THEY stand at a great distance from ONE ANOTHER, facing in opposite directions. The dead BRIDE and BRIDEGROOM are visible in their grave throughout the scene. COMMERE Veist vehr s'it tanzen auf der tayeress chasseneh? PRESENTER You know who will dance at the dear one's wedding? COMPERE Me macht chasseneh? PRESENTER She's being married? COMMERE Voo' den? PRESENTER Naturally. COMPERE Sie vill es? BOSON BOOKS
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PRESENTER Does she want to? COMMERE Sie vill nicht. PRESENTER Oh no. (A long pause, during which the humming and dressing go on in silence) COMPERE Vehr will? PRESENTER Who wants it? COMMERE Vehr noch? Sender der Tateh. PRESENTER Who else? Sender. Papa. COMPERE Mit vehr? PRESENTER To whom? COMMERE Menashe Nachmon's. COMPERE Der schlemiel? (COMPERE nods, shrugs. A long pause. The humming and dressing go on in silence) Zey uhben? PRESENTER Menashe's family is rich? COMMERE Ungeshtuppt. PRESENTER Stuffed. COMPERE Voo' den. PRESENTER Of course. (Long pause. The humming and dressing go on) COMPERE Und vehr tantzd, sugst de? PRESENTER And who will be dancing at the wedding? COMMERE Bettlerkes.
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PRESENTER Beggar women. COMPERE Auf parnusseh. PRESENTER That brings good luck. COMMERE Veist vehr noch? PRESENTER You know who else? COMPERE Zug shen. PRESENTER Who? COMMERE Chussenkahleh in draird. PRESENTER The bride and groom in the grave. COMPERE Ah nechteger tug. PRESENTER O dear. (COMMERE and COMPERE look at the PRESENTER with contempt. A long pause. The humming and dressing go on) COMMERE Veist vehr noch? PRESENTER You know who else? COMPERE Shen genug. PRESENTER It's enough. COMMERE Ehr. PRESENTER Him. COMPERE Vehr? COMMERE Ehr. COMPERE Der meshugener? COMMERE Der teuter meshugener. PRESENTER The dead lunatic. BOSON BOOKS
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COMPERE Luz mihr shen gehen. PRESENTER Let's go. COMMERE Vihlst mehr nicht zihn? PRESENTER Don't you want to see any more? COMPERE Wehn die teute tantzen, bin ich shen zufrieden. PRESENTER When the dead start dancing, I've had enough. (Lights out on EVERYONE but LEAH and CHANNAN, and the dead BRIDE and BRIDEGROOM. A weird quadrille is danced, sometimes standing uptight, sometimes intertwining on the ground At the end of it, when the dead BRIDE and BRIDEGROOM are back in their grave, CHANNAN and LEAH, lying on the ground embracing, begin to breathe, in great gulps, in unison. THEY stand, HE behind her; HE lifts her so that her arms and legs are behind her, wrapped around him. Her dress reaches to the ground, and hides CHANNAN from the front. Her veil covers CHANNAN from behind. SHE mouths his groans: three groans that could signify sexual climax. Lights up on the rest of the stage. LEAH, now a strangely elongated figure [being borne by the invisible CHANNAN, who is concealed by her clothing] is in the center of the beggar's dance at her wedding. AZRAEL, SENDER, the BRIDEGROOM [the schlemiel, who is under a wedding canopy] and the other WEDDING GUESTS enter processionally and severally during the beggar's dance. THEY behave like supernumeraries in a nineteenth-century ballet, miming their pleasure in the occasion. Suddenly, the dance is stopped by a scream: LEAH mouths the scream, but the sound is a sustained, high, flute-like note done by a musical instrument. The GUESTS freeze in horror) On a Wednesday, the least holy day of the week, remote from the Sabbath that had reigned and the Sabbath whose reign had not yet come, at sundown, at the moment prepared for the holy ceremony of marriage of Leah Sender's the dear one and Menashe Nachmon's the schlemiel, the sacred event was postponed by a cry from the mouth of Leah that shattered the joy of the guests and crushed the hopes of the parents of bride and groom. The tormented spirit of the dead Channan had entered into the body of Leah, and spoke in a voice of thunder.
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Midnight Plays CHANNAN'S VOICE (His speech mouthed by LEAH:) Abrachay, Araton, Samatov, Adonai! PRESENTER The spirit of Channan spoke in the sacred tongue. (CHANNAN speaks in Hebrew, for which the PRESENTER does simultaneous translation to the end of the scene) CHANNAN Ani kore elecha mimaamakei tehomot. Nafshi nosheket lenishmata shel ahuvati asher bagalut. Nishmati zoeket mitoch gerona shel hashechina, asher hi kalati.
PRESENTER (Translating) I cry to you, he raged, out of the depths of the great abyss. My soul is at one, he said, with the soul of the exiled bride. My soul cries aloud, he wept, through the mouth of Shekinah the Bride.
(CHANNAN pauses; the GUESTS respond, terrified, and freeze once more when HE begins to speak again:) Avarti et shivat medorei h ag eh e nom ve sh ka t i amok mikol shedei shacht ve-et chayai otef ata hachoshech. Choshech mitsraim, ma-afelya ed leyesurei hashechina kalati. Nishmati meleah beashpatot cheto shel ha-adam harishon.
I have broken through all the hells in one act, and am sunk lower than the lowest demons, and live now in perfect dark-ness. I am in Egypt, in the pit of darkness, and witness t h e suffering of Shekinah the Bride. I am filled with the stench and filth of the perpetual moment o f Adam’s sin.
(CHANNAN pauses; again the GUESTS respond, and then freeze) Adonai elohim, BeBOSON BOOKS
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Prison gates, I weep for the exile of my bride.
Adonai elohim, Mimaamakim kraticha ya lu tehi lesivlotai teshua.
Adonai! In the depths of the great abyss, we suf- fer to be redeemed.
(CHANNAN stops speaking. In her own voice, LEAH screams; SHE falls to the ground. Sensation. Tableau) End of Act I
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ACT II SCENE 1 LEAH is lying on the ground center stage, in her bridal gown and veils. AZRAEL and his DISCIPLES are to one side, cloaked in white. THEY sit gravely, watching LEAH, making no response to LEAH-CHANNAN's outcries. PRESENTER From sundown to sundown, the obscene Adam raged in the body of the pure one. CHANNAN'S VOICE (LEAH mouthing his words:) I am the holy serpent who has conquered the serpents of the abyss. PRESENTER She suffered the passage of his words through her body. CHANNAN'S VOICE I have slithered into the body of the Bride Shekhina and am hissing the holy words of my love through her lovely mouth. PRESENTER She suffered his words to scald her tongue and rush through her mouth. CHANNAN'S VOICE I am Shaddai, and she is the garment of Shaddai. I am joy, and she is the vessel of my pleasure. I am strong, and she is the strength of the world. PRESENTER The river of her body bore the filth of his words. CHANNAN'S VOICE The body of Shekhinah is large. It swells to the outermost limits of myself. Her body is like chrysolite, her light breaks tremendously from the dark-ness, through the clouds and fog that surround her. The measure of the crown of her head is ten million parasangs. PRESENTER She suffered her breath to be fouled by the stench of his words. CHANNAN'S VOICE Yod is in Yod, Yesod in Yesod, Zion and Israel are one! PRESENTER At sundown, on the following day, the voice of Channan, with its burden of filth from the prison of the dark abyss, was still. (Silence. A pause. Then AZRAEL raises his hand. The crack of his whip is heard) AZRAEL Pitziloch, kinder, are you frightened? BOSON BOOKS
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DISCIPLE I Very frightened, holy one. AZRAEL You will be more frightened. DISCIPLE II Your will is our law, majesty. AZRAEL Prepare. DISCIPLE III We have prepared, great one. DISCIPLE IV We have fasted. DISCIPLE V We have prayed all day and all night. DISCIPLE I We have confessed all our sins. DISCIPLE II We have jumped into the mikvah, and bathed naked with our eyes closed. AZRAEL You are getting very smart, zeeser. Now raise your hands. (THEY do so) Clap them together twice. (THEY do so) Sing to me, speak to me, when I go on my journey. (THEY begin to hum) DISCIPLE III (Over the humming) Will you leave us, perfect one? AZRAEL I will leave you, and I will be here. DISCIPLE IV Will you go far? AZRAEL To the seven palaces, and sit before the chariot-throne. DISCIPLE V Will you bring back a holy medicine for the pure one? AZRAEL I will make her well. DISCIPLE I Don't leave us in the dark when you go down. DISCIPLE II Up. BOSON BOOKS
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AZRAEL Down and up. I will talk with you. DISCIPLE III Will your words reach us when you have gone so far away? AZRAEL My words will reach you. (HE raises his hands, and instructs them:) Begin. (THEY clap their hands once, and AZRAEL immediately throws his body forward so that his head rests on his knees. In a deep, sonorous voice, HE begins the prayer, in Hebrew, for the beginning of a journey. The DISCIPLES chant the same prayer responsively) AZRAEL AND DISCIPLES (Responsively, in Hebrew:) Yehi ratzon milefanecha adonai eloheinu ve-elohei avoteinu shetolicheinu leshalom vetatzideinu leshalom, vetagienu el mehoz cheftzeinu lehaim ulesimha uleshalom. Vetatzileinu mikaf kol oyev ve-orev ve-ason baderech, vetitneinu lechen ulehesed ulerahamim be-einecha ube-einei kol roeinu. Vetishma kol tahanuneinu ki el somea tefila vetahanun ata. Baruch ata adonai shomeia tefila. (AZRAEL raises his head, while the DISCIPLES continue the chant. His face is profoundly transformed. HE stares before him, seeing nothing. HE is no longer singing. The DISCIPLES, caught up in the rhythm of the chant have already begun to move, while seated, as though dancing. AZRAEL begins a slow, grave dance step almost in place; the DISCIPLES, during the rest of the chant, rise and join him. THEY continue to chant, AZRAEL does not) Veyaakov halach ledarko, vayifgev bo malachai elohim. Vayomer yaakov ka-asher ra-am, machanei elohim tze; vayikra sheim hamakom hahu machanaim. (The DANCERS begin to move more agilely) Hinei anochi sholeach malach lefanecha, lishmarcha badarech, velahaviyacha el hamakom asher hachinoti. Yevorechecha adonai veyishmerecha. Ya-er adonai panayiv eilecha vichunecha. Yesa adonai panayiv eilecha veyasem lecha shalom. (AZRAEL cries out, and stops in the midst of all the whirling. The DISCIPLES take sitting positions at a distance from AZRAEL, more or less
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Midnight Plays surrounding him, and prepare to watch the miracle-worker accomplish his whole journey. Gradually, AZRAEL's dance gets wilder; his eyes bulge, sweat pours, his groans and moans and cries become fearful. Very dimly, and very gradually, ONE or TWO DEMON FIGURES are illuminated at the far end of the stage from AZRAEL. HE is suddenly very still. The DISCIPLES begin a new rhythmic chant [Psalm 91, Birnbaum, p. 731]. THEY sing very quietly, clap hands (or use other percussive effect] very softly. Their rhythm is steady and unwavering. AZRAEL, eyes closed, drops to the ground. HE is sitting erect; the voluminous draping of the cloth describes an even circle around him. [The trance-state is beginning in earnest.] Sitting rigidly, a tremor begins to seize him. It stops; HE opens his eyes. HE is in trance. HE tries to form words) AZRAEL Ahr-r o-r-r-eh Ahr-r o-r-r-eh PRESENTER (Very quietly) He calls on the Prince, Sar Torah. AZRAEL Ahr-r or-r-r-eh PRESENTER He adjures the Prince, Sar Torah. AZRAEL E-e. E-e o ay. PRESENTER Sar Torah, reveal the secret of the way. AZRAEL (Babbling, utterly unintelligible, his tongue uncontrolled, attempts:) Mystery and wisdom Splendor and wonder (The DISCIPLES' chant becomes slightly faster and louder. HE suddenly falls face down, and slaps his hands hard against the ground, in a single gesture. HE is seized by convulsions. HE vomits dryly.
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Midnight Plays Gasping, needs water. Makes sounds. The PRESENTER sets a basin several feet from him. AZRAEL stares at the basin of water. ONE or TWO more of the DEMON FIGURES are revealed in very low illumination. When AZRAEL finally immerses his face in the water, ONE of the DEMONS lunges forward, circles him, stops at the far side of the basin from AZRAEL. When HE lifts his face from the water, HE sees the DEMON, who begins to play dog. AZRAEL invites the dog to drink. THEY drink together. While the DOG is still drinking, AZRAEL moves away from the basin. HE becomes filled with the sensation of being aglow, on fire. The liquid fire goes through his body, to each pore. It projects out of his body like fibers of silk HE becomes intensely happy, as HE and the DOG begin to move in relation to EACH OTHER.. HE is thrilled that HE and the DOG are alike. HE plays with the DOG, madly, and chases him about. HE becomes a dog, barking. THEY begin to understand EACH OTHER's wishes. THEY manipulate EACH OTHER, like puppets, by using signals. The DOG by waggling his head makes AZRAEL scratch his head with his foot. AZRAEL makes the DOG move his legs by twisting his own toes. HE finds this act unbearably funny, and laughs, in pure euphoria, until HE cannot breathe. HE rolls over on his back, paws in the air. Suddenly, HE is seized by intense convulsions. HE seeks a place to hide from his pain, and crawls, as though into a low, narrow tunnel. The tunnel compresses and suffocates him. HE crawls to the far end of the tunnel, where HE falls flat, exhausted BOSON BOOKS
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HE rolls back and forth trying to find a position in which to rest. HE succumbs, lies rigid, as though dead. The DISCIPLES surround him, raise him up and carry him to the rear of the stage, where THEY place him, face up, with his feet and head resting on blocks, with nothing supporting him in between. HE lies on the blocks in deep trance, rigid [when the disciples surround Azrael, he slips into one of the holes in the stage floor, and is replaced by a substitute figure, who lies on the blocks]. Then, with a white carnival-horse strapped onto his body, HE rises from behind his own FIGURE lying on the blocks— in effect, the spirit of AZRAEL rising from his own body. Then his journey proper begins) PRESENTER He is traveling, soul out of body, on the road to the seven palaces. (The PRESENTER, in white robes, precedes AZRAEL. The DEMONS softly and silently move toward the TRAVELER. The PRESENTER, holding a flask containing nuts, rattles the flask against the onset of the DEMONS) Shabriri, Briri, Riri, Iri, Ri. I am thirsty in a white cup. Shabriri, Briri, Riri, Iri, Ri. I am thirsty in a white cup. (At each repetition of this formula, the DEMONS retire. When it is over, THEY return) DISCIPLE I (Anxiously) Holy One, whom do you see? AZRAEL Demons. DISCIPLE II Holy One, have you glimpsed the faces of angels? AZRAEL They show themselves only as demons. DISCIPLE III Holy One, how shall we pray to help you? AZRAEL In purity, examining the letters of the name of God, Yod Hey Vov Hey. In purity. DISCIPLE IV Holy One, we will. BOSON BOOKS
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(As the PRESENTER continues to lead AZRAEL, quietly, through the threatening HOST of DEMONS, the DISCIPLES intone:) DISCIPLES He Be Hod Yah Yeho Eheye Hachai Yo'e Hine Ha Veh Hoveh Vehoo Ha Hih Hoo Ha Yehih Hih Hih Yihiyeh Yehovah This is my name forever This is my remembrance from generation to generation. Hehoh Hehayoo Hayah Hai Yah Yah Hohih Hayah V'yihiyoo Yehoo Hochai V'yahoh Yehih Hih Hehayoo Hayih Hoh Yehovah This is my name forever This is my remembrance from generation to generation (DISCIPLES repeat this formula ad lib, as necessary, during AZRAEL's journey. Over the DISCIPLES' low, rhythmic chant, the PRESENTER recites a descriptive chant of AZRAEL's journey, which HE accompanies with rhythmic steps. As HE chants his description, the PRESENTER gradually separates himself from AZRAEL, and takes up a position near the rigid body of AZRAEL reclining on the two blocks) PRESENTER Down, up, he is traveling to the throne in the hall of the seventh palace. He is traveling to the sphere of the seven palaces to reach the seventh in which stands the throne of divine glory. He is traveling, soul out of body, on the road to the seven palaces to enter the seventh to stand before the chariot-throne of glory. Soul out of body, he stands before the gate at the entrance to the heavenly halls. Soul out of body, he stands before the angels and archons who are keepers of the gates. (All movement and sound stops. AZRAEL is standing before TWO very threatening DEMONS) The keepers stand to the right and the left of the gates. (The KEEPERS make a shivering movement, and AZRAEL backs away from them, then returns) BOSON BOOKS
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They greet the holy man with loathing. (Again the DEMONS make their shivering movement, and, never touching AZRAEL, THEY appear to fling him a great distance from the gates. HE returns) They drive him away. (Again THEY appear to fling him away from the gates. This time, AZRAEL comes back with great effort, as though fainting, and calls out:) AZRAEL Sar Metatron, in the name of Israel, in the name of the seven palaces, in the name or the legions above who praise your name and the legions below who tremble at the signs of your terrible strength, I, dust and ashes, I, the worm below the foot, I, the prayer flung at the foot of your throne of splendor, lift me to the place before your glorious throne, where I may win the strength to heal the fallen bride. Lift me to the place before your throne, where I may win the wisdom to redeem the suffering bride. PRESENTER For answer, the keepers of the gate torment him with fire. (Sudden, loud, startling sounds. The TWO DEMONS fix on AZRAEL lumps of adhesive with short red and orange streamers fastened to them. They are on his horse, on his arms, on his garment. AZRAEL screams, as though burning, and whirls in agony trying to cool the raging fires. The DISCIPLES anxiously resume their chant in the name of God) Horse and rider are parted. Horse is consumed. (MORE DEMONS appear, who rip the horse from AZRAEL's body) Flesh is transformed into fiery torch. (AZRAEL gradually sinks to the ground, pulls in his arms) Arms and legs crumble to ashes. Stump of body remains. (AZRAEL, as though without hands and feet, remains erect, trembling with pain. HE is still, and the ribbons of fire on his garment are motionless. As a stump, AZRAEL moves forward, waddling slowly, in great pain, chanting over the chanting of his DISCIPLES:) AZRAEL BOSON BOOKS
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Bar Papa Rakish Bar Papa Daru Bar Papa Chamuh Bar Papa Marih Bar Papa Rapu Bar Papa Raprass
Bar Papa Achi
(HE stops at the gates. A white curtain with letters of gold is beyond them) Baruch atah adonai (The DEMONS, during AZRAEL's progress forward, have disappeared. HE is in radiant down-light, which grows in intensity. HE continues forward toward an increasingly brilliant pool of light before the white curtain. AZRAEL, on his stumps, goes majestically toward the white curtain. A crescendo of prayer from the DISCIPLES, and a crescendo of musical sound, come at the end of AZRAEL's descriptive incantation:) Many are gathered about the Throne. The angels of the seventh heaven are gathered about the Throne. From below the heavens, From the heavenly choir encircling the Throne, From the Throne of Glory, From the mouth of the angel Israel, From the mouth of the archon Shemuiel, The song of praise to the King, to the Holy Being, to the supreme master of the arts of numbers and measure and the fixing of names, The holy cry of Kedushah rises, The holy ecstasy of Kedushah rises, The ocean of voices crying the holy Kedushah rises, And breaks against the shell of Nothing, crying: HOLY HOLY HOLY IS THE LORD OF HOSTS GOD IS KING, GOD WAS KING, GOD WILL EVER BE KING, HOLY HOLY HOLY IS THE LORD OF HOSTS HOLY HOLY HOLY IS THE LORD OF HOSTS. (AZRAEL is now before the curtain. HE cries in ecstasy:) Metatron Adonai Elohim Jehovah YAHWEH, make me wise. (HE goes through the curtain. The DISCIPLES bend forward, foreheads touching the ground, and cover their heads with the hems of their white robes. A rumble of top-speed
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Midnight Plays praying in Hebrew [again: The Prayer For a Journey] issues from them, their bodies moving under their robes in pious, rapturous devotion. A great sound is heard. The DISCIPLES sit up, stare straight forward, not at the curtain. A light shines behind the curtain. AZRAEL is visible behind it. HE is a head— the head of AZRAEL is the size of his former body. Silence) PRESENTER He is wise. (AZRAEL steps through the curtain. HE moves forward, smoothly, gliding on his still visible feet, which are just below his neck. HE runs about, in smooth glides, with abandon. HE stops) He revels in his God-given wisdom. (AZRAEL raises one foot a little, then the other, then inclines his head-body this way and that) He grows accustomed to the greatness of his wisdom. (AZRAEL jumps, like a child playing hop-scotch, in great loping bounds) He gallops through the seven spheres of heaven, jumping quickly, quickly, from Shabbtai, to Ztzedek, to Ma'adim, to Chamah, to Nogah, to Kochav, to Levanah, to the dear earth, eager, eager, to be once again in his beloved shtetl. (AZRAEL trots in a wide circle, then in straight lines, as though running through streets) He hurries briskly to the graveyard of his beloved shtetl and stands over the grave of Nissin ben Rifke, the father of the chassid Channan. (AZRAEL has stopped before a hole in the stage floor) He is itching to exercise his new-found wisdom for the redemption of the bride. (AZRAEL stamps his foot seven times. The sound is thunderous) AZRAEL (In a terrible voice:) Nissin ben Rifke.
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Midnight Plays (Silence) Answer. (Silence) I command you, father of the dead Channan, by the name of Schema Amathia, by the four beasts before the throne, to show yourself to me before the radiant circle of my wisdom, and to speak with clear and perfect voice, and to my new understanding. (NISSIN appears out of the grave in a shroud and dead man's mask. The head-body of RABBI AZRAEL, again visible, moves in a half-circle around the figure of NISSIN BEN RIFKE) PRESENTER Can the Holy One, who has passed through rings of fire and has stood before the chariot-throne, enlist the aid of Nissin ben Rifke in exorcising the dybbuk Channan from the tormented body of the pure one? No. (RABBI AZRAEL again makes the same movement) Can the Holy One who has rent the curtain and stared into the nothingness command Nissin ben Rifke to return with him to the living to give comfort to his son while he suffers the pain of being cast out from the body of the pure one? Yes. (NISSIN slowly climbs out of his grave) Leaving his grave, and enfolded in the mind of Rabbi Azrael the all-wise, Nissin ben Rifke chains his sorrow and stills his voice, and hurries with the Seer to the aid of his son, who is lying in darkness at the furthest remove from man and God, preparing to do battle with the great master Ruv Rebbe Azrael for his place among the souls of men and for the redemption of his bride. (NISSIN clasps the head-body of AZRAEL, and BOTH tilt forward as though setting out on a journey)
SCENE 2
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Midnight Plays AZRAEL and NISSIN are in the same position as THEY were at the end of the previous scene. Numbers of DEAD, lying on the stage floor, rise up and join AZRAEL and NISSIN in their slow-motion journey back to the living. THEY ALL make up, not a procession, but a slow convergence on the center stage area. There, AZRAEL is still lying outstretched between the two blocks, rigid, LEAH is on the floor, disheveled. The DISCIPLES watch her, horrified. COMPERE Ba'nacht Fin heilige erd PRESENTER Night Graves COMMERE Fin offene griber Teute neshumes Shpatziern PRESENTER Out of their graves Dead March COMPERE Greissen geschrei Machen die teute Dov'nen und veinen PRESENTER Terrible cries The dead Pray weep COMMERE Zum heiligen Gott Bitten die teute Rachmunness auf alle Farblunzhet neshumes PRESENTER Mercy O God On dead souls Lost and abandoned By You
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Midnight Plays COMPERE Heilige draird Luzzen zay uber Shpatzieren in shtetl Tzum Rebbe's schuhl PRESENTER Dead souls Walk the streets To Azrael's schuhl COMMERE Mentchen in haiser Tzittern und zorgen Gehen nicht arois In nachtige luft PRESENTER Men in their houses Shiver and wonder Hide From the night LEAH (In torment, on the ground. In her own voice) Machlat, he grows in my womb. He is locked in my belly forever. Do not tear him from me! DISCIPLE I (Galvanized:) Bring the black candles! DISCIPLE II Candles! DISCIPLE I Glowing coals! DISCIPLE III Heynoch, coals! LEAH Channan, be at peace. Machlat torments me. She bites my breasts with her broken teeth. She strangles me with my own hair, When I open my mouth to cry out, she pisses in my throat. She straddles my mouth and pisses. DISCIPLE I Chayyim, the Shofar! DISCIPLE IV I have it! DISCIPLE V He's waking! DISCIPLE VI The Holy One is waking! DISCIPLE I Soon, Majesty! BOSON BOOKS
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LEAH Assacro is pulling worms and newts from the flesh of my thigh. Lizards are crawling into the nipples of my breasts. Give me a stone, a stone to beat the lizards from my breasts. Assacro, Machlat, come out of my breasts. I will not give up Channan. A stone! (SHE beats her breasts and body as though with a stone. AZRAEL wakes) DISCIPLE I Master, Holy One, she is mad. DISCIPLE VI Possessed. AZRAEL Incense. Onycha. DISCIPLE II We're frightened, Holy One. AZRAEL Wax. Has he spoken? DISCIPLE I Only she. LEAH (While the DISCIPLES are lighting the coals) Channan! Samael is parting my legs, like a woman's in labor and heating the place with red fire. He is opening the, place with hot coals. I will not let you go, Channan, be at peace, you are with me. A-ah! Lilith is coming to tear my tongue. A-ah! (SHE speaks gibberish, trying to say: "Channan, I hold my hands over the entrance to my womb. Samael will not reach you." During her unintelligible cries, AZRAEL and the DISCIPLES hurriedly prepare the censer with incense and the other spices, bring the board of purification. NISSIN, during this, prays:) NISSIN Have mercy, God On the lost soul of my son. He is cast from the garden of Adam. He is a beggar in the universe. On your living Tree He is withered fruit. Quicken his torments. God, double his pain. Hurry the time of his suffering. Bring him to light. BOSON BOOKS
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AZRAEL (To a DISCIPLE) Take the Shofar. (To the OTHERS) Open the doors of the Holy Ark. Scatter the smoke of the spice in the censer. The smell of incense will shatter kelipoth. CHANNAN'S VOICE (As though coming through the mouth of LEAH: HE screams) No nearer! Don't torment me with the smell of spice. AZRAEL Take up her body, and place her on the blocks. CHANNAN'S VOICE Her body must not be close to Torah. No! Rabbi Azrael, be accursed. Be damned to suffer our suffering in your soul's journey. Be damned to suffer our pain. (While LEAH's body, resisting violently, is being borne by the DISCIPLES to the blocks, AZRAEL cries out his ceremonial bragging in preparation for the exorcism:) AZRAEL Lul, Shaphan, Avigron, Avirdaphon, I walked among the stars, I sat among seraphim, chashmalim, chayot. I passed through the eighteen thousand worlds, through rivers of fire, walls of water and fire, mountains of terrible storms. I returned with the root which is secret to Solomon, the root held under the powerful seal, the root which destroys demons. Dybbuk, beware! I am armed with the root of Solomon, I am armed with the zeal of God, with the zeal of my fathers, righteous and holy men of God. Dybbuk, beware! Upon the head of a lion and upon the nose of a lioness, I found the demon Bar Shiriba Panda. In the valley where the leeks grow, I beat him. With an ass's jawbone, I struck him. Dybbuk, beware! (LEAH's body has been placed on the blocks. AZRAEL holds the seal to her nose) I hold the seal to her nostrils. Under the seal is placed Solomon's root. Under her nostrils, I place the seal. Through her nostrils, dybbuk, touch the seal. Smell seal and root, dybbuk, BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays Smell seal and powerful root. Through her nostrils, dybbuk, I draw your soul. Through the nostrils of the pure one, breathing the odor of the root, I draw your soul. Through her nostrils, dybbuk, fly out of the belly of the possessed. CHANNAN'S VOICE (HE laughs wildly) I am in dung. Slime and shit fills the place of my being. Slime and shit cover my self. In the dark slime and blood of her belly, I will keep my watch till my appointed time. My nostrils are filled with the stink of dung. Fuck seal, Fuck root. There is no power over me in root and seal. AZRAEL Dybbuk, beware! You left our world, and are forbidden to return until the blast of the great trumpet. Dead souls may not stay in the realm of the living. CHANNAN'S VOICE I am not dead. AZRAEL Why did you enter the pure one? CRANNAN'S VOICE I am her bridegroom. AZRAEL Through what opening did you force your way? CHANNAN'S VOICE Adam's way. Through cunt, through passage, to womb. AZRAEL Your abominations will be cast out of the pure one. (Holding censer closer to LEAH.:) Dybbuk, be split, be accursed, broken and banned, son of clay, son of vileness, son of filth, in the name of Morigo, Moriphath and the secret seal. CHANNAN'S VOICE I will not be torn out of the womb that gives me peace and nourishment, and keeps me from the torments of the demons on the other side. You, Azrael, are in league with demons. You torment the body of my suffering bride as they do. In heaven and earth, every road is barred against me, every gate is locked. On every side, the things of darkness lie in wait to seize me. My soul has found refuge from their terrors, and you want to drive me away. You have the mercy of demons! You have the pity of Ashmedai! AZRAEL For the last time, I adjure you. Leave the body of the maiden. If you do not, I shall utter anathema against you, and deliver you to the fiends of destruction. BOSON BOOKS
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CHANNANIS VOICE In the name of Adonai, I am bound to my bride and will remain with her until the appointed time. Be accursed! AZRAEL Nissin ben Rifke, you have heard my judgment on your son. Will you persuade him to depart? NISSIN No! AZRAEL Do you accept my judgment? NISSIN I cry curses on you, Ruv Rebbe Azrael, who has won power in Heaven, but not the wisdom to see. You have brought living and dead together to blast my son's soul, but not to save him. You have no pity on him, and work to destroy him. He is of the seed of Israel. He holds in his suffering the light of our redemption. Hurry his torments! You are blind to his light. The blessing of God is on my son's way and my son's suffering, and the curse of God is on you! AZRAEL (Angrily) Dead souls, depart from here and go back to that place where no man dwells and where no cattle of the field set foot. It is not fitting that you should remain longer among the living. (As the DEAD and NISSIN are retreating:) NISSIN Who are you and what merit is in the house of your fathers that you think you can contend with the turning wheel of God? Do you think you are master of his secrets and wise in the secret books? No, you are blind and in darkness, and know only words, and not the purity of His light. (NISSIN and the OTHER DEAD are gone) AZRAEL (To his DISCIPLES) Light the black candles. (THEY do so) Hang a black curtain over the altar. (THEY do so) Blow Tekiah! (The Shofar is blown. AZRAEL spreads his arms, and pronounces the excommunication:)
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Midnight Plays Rise up, O Lord, and let your enemies be driven before you. As smoke is scattered, so let them be scattered. Sinful and obstinate soul, with the power of Almighty God and with the sanction of the holy scriptures, I, Azrael, do with these words rend asunder every cord that binds you to the world of living creatures and to the body and soul of the maiden Leah, daughter of Channah. CHANNAN'S VOICE (Screaming) God! You are merciful! AZRAEL I pronounce these words of excommunication: May every curse and every ban in the Chapter of Curses fall on your head. From this moment, you are outcast from all Israel and all the righteous of God. Blow Teruah! (The Shofar is blown. LEAH, in her own voice, screams, and hurls herself off the blocks and onto the stage floor. SHE appears to be leaping through the air. CHANNAN's head emerges from under the blocks. At the same instant, the lights go down on EVERYONE except LEAH and CHANNAN) PRESENTER The moment of the coming of light. Great and bitter cry from the soul. (As CHANNAN speaks, half his naked body, covered with slime and blood, gradually emerges:) CHANNAN Turn. One two. (In bliss) Ah! God. It is light. Leap. PRESENTER BOSON BOOKS
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The pure one leaps up and rolls on the ground, and vomit dribbles from her mouth. Final servitude of soul to evil: She flings her garments from her, and uncovers her body. She spreads her legs to show her nakedness, and laughs at our thoughts of transgression. She pisses, and befouls the holy place with shit. She twists her legs around her body. She vomits blood and slime; it drips from nostrils and eyes. A stink issues from the belly. CHANNAN (Crawling out, away from LEAH, on far side of stage:) Kicking drum of belly. Cock slithering out of belly. Spent fuck streaming out of drum. Taste of the shit. Red hole of cunt. The turn. The life. Part, to join. (CHANNAN turns toward LEAH) PRESENTER Shekhinah the Bride descends on the Sabbath, and is greeted by the bridegroom, the world. The bridegroom's hymn welcomes her in marriage. (CHANNAN, while slowly crawling along the ground toward LEAH, chants in a whisper:) CHANNAN Now we will greet the bride We will welcome the Sabbath-bride In one word, God said "Observe" and "Remember" Now we will praise his word Now we will praise his name Shekhinah the bride is our blessing Last to be made of God First to be thought in his heart Now we greet her, the bride BOSON BOOKS
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Midnight Plays We welcome the Sabbath-bride Vessel of God, arise Holy City, arise Come out of the broken ruins Come out of the place of tears Touch the mercy of God We come to greet the bride We welcome Shekhinah the bride Leap, dance in the light Wake, rise, sing The bride shines in his light The glory of God is alight We hurry to greet the bride We run to the Sabbath-bride (LEAH, sitting naked on the stage floor, stretches her arms up and out, her fingers spread. CHANNAN, directly behind her now, stretches his arms and places his hands over hers. Clasping her hands, HE enfolds her) Crown of joy, be among us Joy of our joy, bring peace Welcome, Bride of the Sabbath Welcome, Shekhinah our Bride. (The PRESENTER speaks the text of the Hebrew wedding service in English:) PRESENTER Blest are you, Lord, King of the Universe, who created bride and groom, joy and happiness, delight and cheer, love and harmony, peace and companionship. Lord our God, may there soon be heard in the cities of Judah, in the streets of Jerusalem, the sound of joy and happiness, the sound of joyful marriage, the sound of young people feasting and singing. Blest are you, Lord, who created the joyful world as groom and bride.
The End
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