9:39 pm

I don’t get this play.

I’ve been staring at it for an hour and all I’ve gotten out of it is this raging fucking headache. There’s a reason why I specialise in revivals of plays (which was apparently pointedly ignored today); I’ve never been fond of this avant-garde, contemporary bullshit, the kind that has its actors twist into Kafkaesque contortions or crawl on their knees under hellish strobing lights or scream their dialogue over a shitty jukebox underscore. I want them straight and to the point. I want to read the dialogue and know what the hell is going on.

I glance through the script, already disgruntled at its lack of title page. No playwright, no name of the play itself, not even a working title or a hint at what it’s about. The first page is entirely in italics, paragraphs upon paragraphs of exposition. Not a capitalised character name in sight. Fine, this playwright is pedantic about the worldbuilding of their play, whatever.

I turn the page—more slabs of indented text barely distinguishable from the first. The vaguest character name ever finally appears, capitalised but thrown in at the end of the sentence like an afterthought. THE MAN, and nothing more to him.

You’d think by page three maybe we’d get a little taste of, I don’t know, spoken words, but there isn’t any dialogue. I flick through the rest of the script and… nothing.

What kind of play has so many words without saying a thing?

~~~

10:06 pm

Pen in hand. Dissecting the opening. Again.

It’s warm under the black moonlight.

[Subverting our expectations much?]

The air buzzes, not with nightlife, but an eerie absence of it. Completely quiet, save for the hum of a record emanating from somewhere down the street.

[Okay, so, NOT completely quiet… not quiet at all!!!!]

It’s crackly, skipping every now and then. The song is a piano piece, early 1800s Germany, perhaps. Suffocating the nondescript weatherboard houses with anachronistic, dissonant harmony.

I keep coming back to that first line, even after my eyes have long since drifted past. How am I meant to show black moonlight on stage? Kind of defeats the purpose of lights if I make them all black, doesn’t it? And I’m really not enjoying the uncertainty and contradictions peppered throughout. If you have something to say, then say it and mean it for God’s sake!

You’d think this was an opening to a subdued Streetcar whose name was more of a Feigned Neutrality than Desire, but it goes on:

The flickering gas lamplight is out of place in the deserted street, like THE MAN. He saunters in, his quiet but confident air practically begging to be snuffed out. His shoes click as heel meets pavement. It looks like he’s suspended on air, he carries himself so lightly. His two-piece suit inexplicably sits wrong on him—

And suddenly, if you flip to the end:

The thunder grows louder as he falls prostrate into the soil. He cries out—whether at the rushing headlights of cars hurtling towards him or at the judgement of the stage lights broadcasting his breakdown to the audience, no one knows.

A complete shift in character, the decimation of the authority he initially held. An awesome progression in every sense of the word—if only I could just figure out how the hell to get the guy there. Well, it isn’t clicking in my mind just sitting at my desk, so you know what? Screw it. I’ll be the guy for now. I’ll put on some stupid fucking lyric-less 19th-century German piano music. I’ll act it through and see where the wordless script takes me.

And how it takes THE MAN.

~~~

12:25 am

THE MAN, in all his glory, paces in the middle of a bare room, breaking his mind so the resounding silence can glue it together again. He’s now reduced to the whims of a BFA dropout, blasting anachronistic Mendelssohn from his record player and holding his second refill of bourbon in his wretched little hand.

I’ve had the same piece loop for two hours now. I’ve turned on my bad heater and turned off the lights. And, as I get into THE MAN’s head, I tune out every voice in my own saying this is a stupid, stupid, stupid idea.

THE MAN buries his head in his hands.

I bury my head in my hands.

With his two-piece suit engulfing his body completely like that, you cannot tell where the dirt floor begins and he ends.

I pull my jumper over my head and the scratchy wool makes my neck prickle and leaves my lower back cold, exposed to the biting air.

The earth embraces her child, comforting him, swallowing him in suffocating silence. He rests his head upon the ground.

I’m so fucking confused. Why doesn’t he speak? Why doesn’t he argue? Reason his logic out, follow his problems through? And can he turn the damn record off!

To dust he came and to dust he shall return. There’s a reason why bones sink in the earth. It’s in its nature.

I’m done. I’m fucking done with this play. It’s past midnight and THAT’S IT. I’m going to send an email to the writer who wasted the worst part of my night. I want to yell—no, I want to be THE MAN and yell on his behalf and scream till my lungs and mind are empty, but the script keeps us bound in this sick dance of wretched silence. I feel like an amateur Thomas Novachek, reckoning with the unactable force of his shitty play.

… fuck, this isn’t even my play!

~~~

1:13 am

To whom it may concern,

Unfortunately, I can't take on another project right now.

I’m having trouble parsing your meaning

I’m struggling to see the point of a play in which there are no words

I have no words, to tell you the truth

What are you trying to say with this?

I don’t know what to fucking do with it! At all!

I can’t even write this email. I don’t have the words to put my reservations into.

I want to rip the script up and scream at it or at least add some damn words to it, but I won’t, I just know this is not my play to change, but every time I turn away from it I feel like it’s watching me and when i turn back i forget what i was going to say about it—

what even was my problem with the play anyway? i really can’t put it into words.

There’s that sound of shuffling again. It always happens when he’s working through something new. A bang. A curse. An indignantly loud retort by way of a record starting mid-song. And then the shuffling, like he’s looking for something he thought he knew the whereabouts of. Frantic, like if he searches faster, he’ll find it.

Every time, the shuffling crescendoes to a frustrated stop. Even the record finishes its song in time. It’s a heavy, loud absence, one that lays thick over the scene like a greying cloud.

The street is quiet again. Its preferred state.

~~~

1:48 am

could not for the life of me find where my bourbon was, so I grabbed a second bottle.

i actually think the alcohol is helping. shutting my mouth up at least. thinking about the play clearer than i was an hour ago, at least.

my head is spinning though. i feel like the floor is caving in and i’m falling into a sinkhole. but i think that adds to the man’s character (falling and falling and falling) and i still don’t know how to get the guy from his pompous nose-turned-upwards posture at the start of the scene to a genuflect one in the span of three pages. the only action that logically follows suit for me afterwards is to bash my head on the ground in front of me because this is wrong, wrong and all wrong and where is that damn music playing from—

shit, my head is really pounding now

i think im gonna lie down. get some air. rest my head, on the ground.

they say that works

~~~

2:35 am

It’s warm under the black moonlight. The rain hisses as water meets steaming pavement, and it almost looks like something’s being suspended on air. The man is back again, but seemingly much worse off. The booze clinging to his exhale joins the foggy night air in a hazy collective.

He falls prostrate, knees meeting earth. Knees sinking into soft indents in the soil. Was it his knees that put them there? He can’t really remember where he was before; he can’t really remember where he is now; he only knows the heat of the dirt under him, the heavy thickness of the rain pressing into his shoulders. Deeper and deeper.

As he kneels there, feeling the soil shift under his weight, he thinks he’ll let the soil shift more. Let it form a turret of earth and humidity around his body and entomb him in its gravitational pull. It’s in the nature of bones to sink into dirt—that’s what it said. So he digs his hands into the soil, he lets his fingers slither through its grains, sifting them through with a sound like a quiet sigh. He feels the rain seep into his shirt as he slowly, slowly lets his head fall

and fall

and fall

fallen to the ground, between his knees. It’s more comfortable to rest his head on the ground. Otherwise the harsh headlights will burn into his retinas and force him to turn away, to look to the ground. Keep looking into the source of the silence that confronts and comforts so.

Inside, the song without words ends quietly, and begins to play again.