Vaclav Havel wrote: "We live in a time of struggle between two ways of thinking: thinking evasively and thinking to the point. Between half-baked thinking and consistent thinking. We live in a time when reality is in conflict with platitude, when a fact is in conflict with an a priori interpretation of it, when common sense is in conflict with a distorted rationality." From On Evasive Thinking, 1965.
Fiery Voices at a
Site of Man-Made Poison
(One scene in a longer play called Ecology Rituals)
This performance will happen best at noon on a hot summer day. Choose
public ground outside a site where humans have done terrible things: the edge
of a polluted river with many chemical or industrial factories near its banks,
a nature preserve near Joliet with its stunted and leafless trees and its acrid
smell from the munitions and petroleum facilities nearby, or the seemingly
innocuous ground within sight of a nuclear reactor whose swimming pools of
perpetually and terrifyingly lethal radioactive poison are hidden underground.
Or perform this piece near land that has known above-ground nuclear testing, or
on a stretch of highway outside an active landfill site. Or at the foot of a
mountain whose top has been sheered away to get at the coal beneath its
surface.
Performance facilitators lead audience members to the performance site.
It is all right if the audience feels there is no real place for them to stand
or sit. It is all right if they find themselves congregating in awkward
bunches, wherever there is room for them. It is all right if their numbers
spill into a street and hinder traffic. It is all right if some audience
members, searching for a place to stand, are forced to share the playing area
with the performers.
The facilitators pass out little pads of paper and pencils. They
encourage audience members to write words or draw pictures that represent how
they feel standing in this place. Then they invite audience members to describe
what they have written down. Facilitators may share their own feelings and
thoughts if they think that will help audience members to begin. When this
process has been given enough time:
The performers will erupt into the playing space, four of them carrying
the rigid body of HOWLING MAN. He is carried upside-down, arms rigid at
shoulder level, legs held stiffly apart. He howls as they rush him onto the
stage. He remains suspended upside-down as the piece begins.
HOWLING MAN
Aau-ooooooooooooooooooo!
Aau-ooooooooooooooooo!
The other four performers hold him by his arms and legs, which are all
outstretched so he looks like an inverted Da Vinci man. All of them wear
blindfolds.
HOWLING MAN
I
do not want to be here! I do not want to see! (The other four performers begin to swing Howling until he rises as
high as their heads and shoulders. Even blindfolded, Howling reacts as if he
can see the polluted site(s) behind them.) Aaaaaaaah! (Howling man fights free of the four performers and cowers on the
ground. The four who held him recoil as if they’ve touched something intensely
vile.) I didn’t do it. I didn’t pour it in the river, belch it into the
sky, bury it in the ground. I didn’t build the god damn drums and pits and
stacks and pipes that were supposed to hold the stuff. It wasn’t me!
(As HOWLING MAN continues to
speak, the other four performers begin to whisper a litany that they repeat
over and over as HOWLING MAN speaks):
ALL BUT HOWLING MAN
See, smell, feel, listen. (Repeated.)
HOWLING MAN
I just live
here. Do my work. Keep my lawn mowed. Pay my bills. Feed my kids. I just wanted
a little fun once in a while. I didn’t want to think about it, O.K.! I trusted
them! They said it was O.K.! They said it was necessary! Safe, but necessary!
They said the country would fall apart if they weren’t here. Our town would
fall apart. I’d lose my home!
(All fall silent.)
MOURNING PERFORMER
He was two
when I first heard that cough. A barking, deep cough and the wheezing at night
when he fought to breathe. He got over that one. But then it came again and
again, until I heard his lungs whistle almost every day. Why didn’t we turn our
back on this place? Why didn’t we run! Why didn’t I ask what was stealing my
beautiful boy from me!
PERFORMER WITH LOTS OF WORDS
Yes, there was
pollution, but I bought property upwind of the site. We installed air and water
purifiers in the house. All our garden soil was trucked in from out of town. We
never bought food grown around here. And I did what I could. We had a list of
environmental groups that got checks from us every year. Not huge amounts, you
know, but regular contributions. They could count on our checks. I thought at
the time, “People in this country are smart. They’re not knowingly going to
harm themselves. Or us.” Then they found the cancer. It had spread throughout
my body. Too late, they said. We’ll make you as comfortable as we can, they
said. That’s what they said.
QUIET PERFORMER
I
worked over there. People were jealous of my job because it paid so well. There
were monthly safety meetings and I went to every one. We had to. They wrote us
up if we weren’t there. What they didn’t want was for us to do any thinking on
our own. Oh, no. That was verboten. That’d get you fired. Or black-balled if
you made enough of a stink. What would you do? Who’s gonna thank you for
standing up? Nobody. Absolutely nobody.
SMILING PERFORMER
Once I had a busy
practice in town. I used to feel badly for the delays we’d have in the waiting
room. My nurses were always trying to keep the patients patient, if you know
what I mean, because I liked to talk with them. Spend time with them. . . .
There was a time when I knew the family health history for every one of them.
Whose father and mother suffered from heart disease and what kind, the families
struggling with diabetes, or cancer. Our office absolutely demanded that each
patient fill out a detailed family medical history and I went over the
information they provided very carefully. Did preventive diagnostic tests when
the history warranted that. Took precautions . . . . I had this pewter Porsche.
I always rode with the windows up, the heat or the air on. Vivaldi playing on
the CD. Or Brahms. My wife packed these sweet vegetarian sandwiches with
organic produce. . . . I drove right down the highway past this plant to get to
my office every day for twenty years. I saw it all right, but I was busy with
other matters. My patients. . . . My dying patients. . . . Last year I sold the
practice.
(Simultaneously, all four stand and rip off their blindfolds. They
speak the lines that follow in voices that grow savage by the last repetition)
ALL PERFORMERS
Now I see. Now I see. Now I see.
Now I see! Now I see!
NOW I SEE! (On the last repetition they wheel around to
SMILING PERFORMER
The
air I’m breathing, have been breathing for fifty years, is filling my lungs
with poison.
MOURNING PERFORMER
When
I shower with city water the poison in it soaks into my pores. I drink in this
polluted water every day.
QUIET
PERFORMER
People in those
buildings back there have raked in the dough because they were allowed by me
and my government to poison this place.
PERFORMER WHO CAN STILL TALK LIKE
US
The
ground underneath my shoes is so contaminated that touching it puts toxins on
my skin.
The next five lines overlap and are repeated as the performers
eventually convert the words to howls that build and then stop abruptly.
HOWLING MAN
So—o-o-o-o?!
What no-o-o-o-w?! Now that I get it, what do I
do-o-o-o-o?!
MOURNING PERFORMER
Where do I
go-o-o-o?
I-I-I-I
ha-a-a-te this!
PERFORMER WHO CAN STILL TALK LIKE
US
Where’s the
sense—where’s the sense—where’s the sense!
QUIET PERFORMER
Oh-my-God—oh-my-God—oh-my-God—oh-my-God
. . .
Just as suddenly as they appeared, they drop to all fours and scuttle
away from the playing space, howling and barking and crying as they run off
into the distance.
Performance facilitators invite audience members to voice their
responses to what they have done, seen, heard, felt and thought during the
performance. The facilitators may ask audience members what should be done with
the notes they have made. Some may wish to keep the pieces of paper. Others may
wish to burn them. To wear them or to throw them away. The facilitators should
make it possible for the audience members to do with the papers what they would
like to do. Then, together, facilitators and audience members will leave the
performance area.
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