***UPDATE – a slightly more polished and beautifully type-set version is part of the LOVE ETC book.
(made available to read online for free once-in-a-while or generally with a donation based password.)
[a male monologue in 3 Acts]
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CAST:
GUY : a distinctive male character whose appearance and performance change quite significantly for each of the three Acts – although a certain core-personality remains consistent throughout. He represents a Male Archetype, progressing through three different stages of Human Endeavour.
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Act 1
CAVE
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SETTING:
Prehistoric times. We look into the interior of a cave. Through the entrance in the background we can see volcanoes, reptilian birds and other out-worldly, strange animals. It is dawn. The sky has an eerie orange-violet tint. GUY is sitting in the centre of the cave, holding a raw stone-chalice in his hand. His feet are resting high on a table-like rock in front of him. He’s filthy, grumpy and hairy, only wearing a shabby fur loincloth.Clearly, he’s one of our early human ancestors.
AT RISE:
GUY sips on his drink which we can spot has a deep purply colour and a caustic consistency. It might as well be blood he’s drinking, we are thinking. Between each sip he vacantly stares into the air in front of him. Throughout the whole Act, his parts are mainly mumbled four-letter words which only after a while we recognise as actually being English.
GUY
Mmmhh. (He makes swallowing and gurgling noises.)
Nice, Nice. (Pause. He scratches his balls.)
Good – Drink – (Gulp, gulp) – Aahhhh. Mmmhh – Good – Strong – Juice. Aaaahh.
(He takes another big gulp but this time spills the drink. As the red liquid pours all-over his face and body we are certain that it is blood he’s been drinking.)
GUY
(Screaming.) Aaaaaaahhhh!!!! Shit – Fuck – Fuck – Cunt.
Prick – Shit – Blood – Cunt. Blood – Fuck – Hell.
(Totally upset he whirls around as if to perform a weird dance.)
(OUTSIDE the sky has blackened and rolling thunder approaches. The beginnings of a grand lightning flashes into the cave. GUY all of a sudden seems frightened and sinks down on his knees. His face is ecstatic, blood smeared all over. Erratic flashes light-up its chiselled and hairy features.)
GUY
God. (He whimpers, followed by a long pause. Thunder is rumbling through the cave.)
God. (Another pause.)
Death. Pain. (His voice trembles. Another series of lightning and almost immediately roaring thunders. Their base comes out so low through the speakers that it reverberates through the intestines of the audience.)
Death – … – . Death – Hell – Pain. (He utters into moments of silence.)
(GUY nervously crawls on his knees while the thunder and lightning continue. After a while he stumbles across SOMETHING crumpled away in a corner. His attention and mood shift as he’s inspecting the strange find. It is an INFLATABLE SEX DOLL.)
GUY
Hrrrnnnpff. (Becoming excited and agitated.)
Hump – Pussy – Fuck – Cunt.
(He tears the doll out of its corner and further inspects it. Straight after finding its mouthpiece he enthusiastically starts to blow on it. Every now and again, as he pauses for breath, he breaks into uncontrollable laughter and mumbles some of his four-letter words.)
GUY
Hohohoho – Nice – Pussy – Nice – … – Mmmhh.
Hump, Hump – Ooohhh – Aaaahh – Oooohhh.
(The more the doll takes-on its fully inflated state the more he gets carried away by it all.)
Nice – Pussy – Nice. Hohohoho – …
(While he continues to blow he fumbles on his penis underneath the loincloth so that as soon as the doll is fully erect it is also ready for action. He mounts the doll and starts thrusting away.)
GUY
Ooooaahh – Niiice – Pussy – Pussy – Aaaahh – Niiiice.
(He rides ‘her’ passionately, immersed in the act of copulation. The fear and misery from earlier-on are completely gone now. OUTSIDE the night has turned into peaceful, moonlit darkness with background-noises from various busy night animals. Some odd ones are roaring away to accompany the gasping, sticky sounds from the cave. Somewhere in perhaps another chamber of the cave, we hear water dripping down into what sounds like a puddle, echoing hollowly.)
GUY
Hrrmmppf.
(Squeezing and fingering the doll while his thrusts intensify.)
Hump, Hump, Pussy, Pussy – Hrrnnnf, Hrrnnnf.
Ohhhh – Aaahhh – Ooooaaahhhhh. (Brief pause, though his thrusts continue.)
Looove. (He finally utters.)
Looove – Hrrnnnppf – Oooaaaaahh.
(With climaxing passion, earlier words slip back into his vocabulary.)
God – Life – Pussy.
Love – God – Life. Pussy – Love – Lust. (Pause.)
Fuck – Drink – Hunger.
Thirst. Lust. God. Hunger. Love.
(The doll makes strangely moist noises as his penis slides in and out of the artificial vagina. It shakes awkwardly under his thrusts as if there was indeed life in it and his fingers produce disturbing screeching sounds as they rub over the sticky plastic. He’s just about to kiss the hole-shaped mouthpiece, as the doll all of a sudden – without any warning – explodes with a loud PANG! He is instantly, utterly devastated, left in a state of complete shock.)
GUY
NOOOOOO! God – Death – Pain – Love.
Pussy, Pussy – Noooooooo! (He holds the doll in his arms like a dead bride gunned-down on their wedding day.)
God – God – Hell – Pain.
Hate.
Death – Fuck – Fear – Life.
Love – … – Life.
AAAAAAARGHH!
(He breaks down, sobbing helplessly.)
(GUY raises his fists against the ceiling, blaming forces beyond his control for what has just happened. Flashes of lightning and thunder turn-up again, as if to respond to his curses. The sky opens its floodgates to release dark, heavy rain. Above the almost mute sobbing of GUY, the stormy weather is the only thing we hear for a while.)
GUY
Aaaaaaahhhh! – … – Aaaaaaaaaaaarghhhhh!
(He raises his fists against the sky, then breaks down again, breathing slowly and heavily.)
(Absentmindedly, his fingers wander across the limp doll until they discover a label sticking out from its side. He gathers his full attention to read what it says.)
GUY
(Not quite capable of reading, but trying hard.)
God … In – cor – … – po – … – ra – ted.
(Silence, only heavy rain and remote thunder OUTSIDE.)
Rea – li – ty – … – You – can – … – Trust.
(Silence again. He looks into nothingness. The implications of what he just read slowly dawn on him.)
God. In – corpo – … – rated.
(He unconsciously squeezes the dead doll between his fists, stands up and keeps looking into the black space in front of him. He’s getting very angry and really about to lose it.)
GUY
Fuck. Ass. (Pause. Then he’s throwing the limp doll in a remote corner of the cave.)
Death – Joke – Life – Love – Ass – Fuck – Loss.
(Rain is coming down heavily, patches of lightning pop-up with increasing intensity. He screams the last words well-over the top of the noise of the weather.)
Fuck – Ass – … – Grief.
Life. Hate. God. Joke. Death. Loss. (Pause.)
Asshole!
Curtain – end of Act 1
¶
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Act 2
CITY
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SETTING:
A very busy inner-city junction. Shops in the background, street-noises. GUY is standing there, well-groomed, wearing an immaculate business-suit with suitcase and tie, attempting to cross the street in front of him. But a never-ending stream of cars does not allow him to. A traffic-light seems to be consistently showing red. There are no other people on the street except him – despite the heavy noise he’s completely alone.
AT RISE:
GUY tries to step on the street once again but fails. It is simply impossible. He seems exhausted, yet composed. He puts down his suitcase and sighs.
GUY
I’m stuck. Here and now, as I’m facing yet another ludicrous obstacle to my miserable life. I finally realise that I don’t want to go home anymore. (Pause, a little pacing up and down.) What is my home anyway? I’m lost.
I’m trapped in a dark, hideous prison.
I’ve been turned into a complete slave.
(He laughs dryly, picks up his suitcase only to slam it against the traffic-light post.)
GUY
Goddamnit. There must be a way out. There must be a way to escape this bullet-proof shit-hole called Reality …
(More cars pass, also bigger ones – vans, lorries. We can clearly hear their Doppler effects whooshing through the theatre as they approach, pass, and fade away in the distance. GUY puts down his suitcase again, this time a lot angrier. He starts to undo his tie and collar.)
GUY
Is anybody there? Hello … can anybody hear me? See me? Do something?
(He turns round to look into all directions. No-one there. Utter loneliness in the midst of a buzzing city.)
Am I really THAT alone?
(He kicks his suitcase. Stacks of paper with numbers and pie-charts fall out, flutter into the audience over the noise of traffic.)
GUY
What can possibly be the point of all of this?
The exponential accumulation of pointless papers?
How could I ever fall into this trap?
Why am I born into such hypocrite fallacy?
(He pauses, pacing around in circles while the cars keep zipping past. The traffic-light is still showing red. A romantic violin tune slowly forms, clearly a piss-take to cheesy hollywood lovethemes. He bends down to sit on the pavement, with one hand carefully supporting himself like an old man. As the overall volume of the soundtrack fades, his voice becomes calmer too.)
GUY
Loss. (Pause.)
Losing your straight-laced, neat and sweet girlfriend one day – or wife even – after she’s always kept telling you with utmost sincerity how much she loves you, to another guy turning her overnight into a cocksucking, more-screaming whore. (Pause.)
Losing your best friend one day – or even brother – as he turns round with utmost sincerity to say “sorry”, before letting you down in exchange for the millions he’s just made through some outrageously daft business transaction.
All gone forever. Love does not exist.
You only played boyfriend and girlfriend, you only acted loving and caring – purely upon infantile programmes installed by your Mommy and Daddy or whoever else was put in charge to mentally, emotionally and sexually abuse you. In the end, what’s left is only the sad and bald football buddy starting to piss himself as he gets older – silently fading away.
(He picks up some of the strewn papers which contain sensitive company data and customer profiles. ‘Soap & Cream Media’ it says in a cute logo at the bottom right-hand corner on each leave. He crumbles them into paper balls and idly throws them into the audience. The music changes into something much darker while the car noises almost completely fade.)
GUY
I still fail to grasp that everything I’ve ever believed in was purely based on institutionalised, brainwashed lies.
Like everyone else I’ve been ruthlessly moulded into a thoroughly empty zombie. An ugly and cynical asshole. A killer monkey, trying to get out of his shit-hole at the expense of everyone else around him – whilst at the same time sucking-up to all the monkeys above.
It’s not even that the monkeys above have any power. They’re just successful at claiming it. The key to the world. The answers.
The ridiculous concepts of status and money. Ahahahahah. (He laughs drily.)
(Longer pause. He stops throwing paper balls and becomes more withdrawn instead. The music changes into something between funk and minimal.)
GUY
And then the whole ‘God’ thing. Yeah – religion. The spineless sell-out of consciousness and responsibility.
Even philosophy.All those little ideas about how reality is supposedly fabricated.What’s the fucking point to
subscribe to such bullshit if you can’t even see the reality right in front of you?
Look yourself in the mirror?
Face YOUR SELF.
(Pause. He addresses the audience on a different note.)
We eradicate each other, eat each other, devour the code of the scapegoated, so-called ‘enemy’.
All we do, day-in and day-out, is just add some more fuel to our constantly growing portfolio of mayhem. (Pause.)
And who knows, perhaps that’s really what we’re here for, live for, die for? Conquer or surrender.
Whether we surrender to Love or to Power – most ridiculously – doesn’t seem to matter at all.
Deep down we all probably want to be eaten.
We’re like black widows, striving to hand-over our self-indulgent genetic cargo to the all-powerful female (or male?) through the ritual of a Fuck and a subsequent Kill …
(GUY stands up and paces around nervously. He’s completely withdrawn in his own world now. The level of car-noises increases again. He takes off his shirt and unbuttons his trousers as if to go for a swim. His voice regains the momentum from the beginning of the Act, to rise above the level of street-noises.)
GUY
Whatever – I’m ready. I know where to go now.
I now know where my home is. (Completely naked he spreads his arms as if to fly. He closes his eyes.)
Whoever or whatever there is – take me to you.
(He steps off the pavement into the streams of passing cars. His eyes are still closed.)
I’m all Yours. Forever and Ever. Amen.
(He dives into his death. The spotlight which has illuminated him throughout the Act goes off and the sound changes into cars crashing. Horns toot, tires screech. Finally he’s getting noticed. The crash sounds go on for a while. There seem to be quite a few cars involved. Subtly, the ticking beeps of a heart-machine fade in, until they are clearly audible on top of everything else. As the heart beeps turn into the static bleep of death, the curtains fall and the theatre fades into silence and darkness.)
Curtain – end of Act 2
¶
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Act 3
HEAVEN
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SETTING:
The giant waiting lounge of an airport. We hear the sounds of planes landing and taking-off all the time. It says HEAVEN above one of the departure gates leading away from where GUY sits, alone. He appears to be extremely relaxed, wearing a white toga and sandals – like an angel, slouching comfortably, his arms spread across a long row of waiting-lounge seats. He looks sweet, sharp and gorgeous. The whole Act ambivalently fluctuates between existential drama and stand-up comedy.
AT RISE:
GUY changes his position into something even more comfortable and expresses his peace-of-mindedness with accompanying long sighs. Each sigh and word is followed by puffy clouds coming out of his mouth.Though his loose outfit and open body language would not suggest, it seems to be freezing cold in the hall.
GUY
Aaaaah – finally free. So unbelievably beautiful.
(Pause, steam comes out of his mouth with each breath.)
My ‘Paradise’ – shall I call the place where I’m going? (Two, three breaths again. Pause.) Or better where the essence of my cranium, the ghost in the shell, the teenyweeny particles of my yellow-grey brain pulp are going. The spirit, the energy. Me. My ‘soul’. Hahahaha. (He emphasises the exclamation marks of the word ‘soul’ with a tongue-in-cheek smile.)
(Another series of airplanes is starting and landing and flying by. It seems to be a really busy airport. GUY leans back deeper into his plushy waiting-lounge seat.)
GUY
I can’t tell you how glad I am that it’s all over. So good to be here now, hahaha. The life I’ve lived, the world I’ve seen. A complete disaster. An utterly pointless rat-race. My genetic code wants to survive. My ‘genes’. Whoa. Big deal.
And then what? Does sheer genetic survival really make me a happier and better man? (Pause.)
If I’m not busy fighting for food or for shelter, I’m otherwise trying to pass on those ‘genes’, find someone to fuck – and then what?
Feed any resulting offspring with my heinously patronising bullshit? Have them take-over family business, swallow my stubborn beliefs and agendas? And then what? The company will one day collapse. The kids will one day be fucked-up the arse.
And in the end, what’s left? Nothing.
The annals of recorded history? In a book, in a magazine, on a hard-drive, on a server?
Hahahaha. (He cracks-off laughing for a while.)
(GUY changes his sitting position into something more closed, arms and feet crossed.)
GUY
There really seems to be no fulfilment in our lives. Consummation takes place only at the time of our death. (Another series of planes.)
Death is what we’re ultimately here for – the Sun will eventually die. (Long pause.)
AND YET – perhaps Eternal Life IS the ultimate and achievable answer to our utterly insane Human Predicament.
Perhaps the Fear of Death only exists to compel us into such an ultimately required State of Being?
Would it be possible? By what means? At what cost? In which way? Together with whom? For what Ultimate Purpose? Or Reason?
(He changes his sitting position, opening up again. There is now almost complete silence at the airport.)
GUY
In a way, it would make sense, though. Molecules finding each other, forming something stable and yet flexible – PLOP! – and thus Life, DNA, is born.Well done, DNA. A double-helixed staircase to Heaven.
(Pause.)
But if it can assemble something so intricate and enormous, the Universe itself is actually already ‘life’ – in a way?
So when I die, ALL my particles, micro and macro, the ones not corroding or burning, will have to pop-back to where they originally came from, continue their flow in the Eternal Stream. Which means that even though I’m ‘dead’, I’m still, actually,‘alive’ – in a way.
I do certainly look different and my double-helixed spine has sadly expired. But it is still ‘me’ in the end, all part of what I originally was – before I was even born in my mother’s womb.
Is there also a Soul then? Maybe. But if there was, would it really make Death more comforting?
(Pause.)
It would still mean complete and utter surrender to whatever’s in charge of our day-to-day, tangible Existence. Surrender to what we can not ever remotely hope to grasp from where we look at in any way whatsoever. No one who’s ever been there, to the unfathomable mysteries of the thereafter, has ever come back, have they?
Except Jesus apparently, hahahaha.
(Pause.)
On the other hand, is such a belief in Eternal Life not just another trick our mind plays on us – cheeky bugger – to ease the most horrendously painful prospect of complete Annihilation? Like the hallucinations of torture-victims as they can not possibly cope with any further defilement of their infinitesimally frail nervous systems?
(Pause.)
But let’s also consider this:
Maybe all that remains from whatever we’ve attained in our lives are only the Imprints we’ve left in the Minds and Hearts of other People? And that’s it, end of the Story. There’s no such thing at all like an Afterlife – or any other Meaning. (Pause.)
On the other hand, what if there IS something like Retribution – not just in Heaven but actually spread-out across several Lives? (Pause.)
What about that?
(He gets up and starts to address the audience as if he was already in Heaven and they still trapped on Earth.)
GUY
Lots of questions. Lots of answers.
What to believe? What not to believe?
I haven’t left any children and I haven’t left any other historical imprints either. I’m a complete nobody, having achieved nothing.
And yet, I’ve made the decision to come here, in the most purified, dignified way. I’ve worked it through, my dear brothers and sisters, dug my way out of the shit-hole. (Pause.)
I feel beautiful.
I’m a solemn and indigenous Human Being.
(He paces up and down, all-the-while excitedly smiling .)
GUY
All the suffering, all the pain. They do finally make sense.
I’ve really done it. I can accept myself, love myself – BE myself.
I’ve become One and Unified. I’m completely CONTENT. (Pause.)
I’ve actually become Immortal.
(He turns to the exit-gate that says HEAVEN.)
GUY
So then I leave you all to it, my dear brothers and sisters. To bravely tackle your futile struggle. I know in my heart, you can also achieve it one day – the ultimate, final surrender. And when you’re there, laid bare, vulnerably and wonderfully, my Eternal Essence – or whatever remains once my body is gone – will be blissfully swirling and swooshing around you.
HEALING – my dear brothers and sisters.
From the deepest depths of my soul, I promise:
I’ll do whatever I can that by the time you die you’ll be ready and beautiful too.
(Before he enters the gate he turns around with a smile of elevated bliss. He looks completely at ease. Humble, strong and beautiful.)
GUY
Byeeee. (He waves his hand and enters the gate.)
(Soon after he’s gone, we hear another airplane rise-up into the sky. It slowly disappears with a deep SHOOOM! sound above the steady noise of the airport – reverberating in the theatre for a while – until everything fades with the curtain.)
Curtain – end of Act 3
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THE END
(Thanks go to Mr Hans Küng’s ‘Eternal Life?’ and Mr Li Hongzhi’s ‘Turning the Law Wheel’ to instil in me some of the spiritual insights for HEAVEN)
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second draft
london, july 2007 – april 2009
© 2007 – 2009, all rights reserved