THE
WONDER
A
play in five scenes
by
Kier Peters
Wonder: English
language definition:
b. To be in a state of surprise. 2. To feel curiosity or doubt.
Upon a stage fifteen
citizens, women and men, all dressed in black, silk shirts and what appear to
be harem pants, stand with legs apart. The mirrored floor reflects back their
stances into a diamond pattern.
These men and women cry out, moan, laugh,
sigh, scream, giggle, gurgle, and cough, but each in a different order.
These are the citizens of an imaginary
hill city in Turkmenistan.
When the cacophony eventually dissipates,
the first citizen steps forward into a spotlight:
first [female] citizen: (singing but not to Bernstein's tune) Why-o-why-o-why-o?
[Some
citizens moan.]
second [male] citizen: No constellation is present in its
entirety. Or visible. Or restored to an earlier state.
third [female] citizen: Never again.
first [female] citizen: What is interesting is not interesting.
fourth [male] citizen: Or interesting in a different manner.
fifth [female] citizen: (to the
group of early speakers) Why are you speaking English?
second [male] citizen: Why shouldn't we?
third [female] citizen: Because no one understands Turkmen.
second [male] citizen: Because no one ever understands. No
constellation is present in its entirety.
first [female] citizen: Or visible. Why-o-why-o-why-o?
[Citizens
moan.]
sixth [male] citizen: When the tree sees with its eyes
open....
seventh [female] citizen: When the tree is shaken by
inevitable cataclysms....
eighth [male]
citizen: When the tree gives into its desires....
third [female] citizen: We will not have to concern ourselves with
risk-taking.
first [female] citizen: Man can go back to being a plant.
second [male] citizen: Let me explain. It began with all the angry
clouds. Not a single good cloud in the lot. It rained for forty days and a few
more nights and everything and everyone about these parts drowned and drowned
and drowned, reared up, tormenting, bile overhead, shuddering, trembling,
frothing, seeking, alarmed, dead.
eighth [male]
citizen: (bowing his head in
reverence for the dead) Rum-tum-tum.
second [male] citizen: We have made the cloud for you to benefit
from, the Gods said.
third [female] citizen: U stands!
first [female] citizen: And I!
second [male] citizen: And I!
third [female] citizen: U binds time. U bends the circle. U souls the
spirit. U gazes the look.
second [male] citizen:
In
short, we survived, we wondrously survived.
ninth [female] citizen: Here in Turkmenistan, upon the
mythical hill where we now stand.
third [female] citizen: Covered with black sand.
seventh
[female] citizen:
Surrendering to a cruel and flawless disorder every day, every night.
third [female] citizen: I know it sounds like we're living in the
past, long in the past, but you have to understand....
second [male] citizen: Because no one ever understands. No
constellation is present in its entirety.
tenth [male] citizen: I am going to shout. Hold me
back!
(Several citizens rush to his rescue, holding
him, one gently patting his head until he becomes calm.)
first [female] citizen: What is interesting is not interesting.
eleventh [female] citizen: But let us
entertain you...or at least try.
second [male] citizen: Whoever you
are.
seventh [female] citizen: You pick up a tennis ball in
your right hand, spin it in the tips of your fingers for a few seconds before
you sink your teeth deep into its skin. Why?
eleventh [female] citizen: Why aren't you
somebody else?
seventh [female] citizen: Or you squeezed my knuckles,
hungry with desire. I could see your teeth as your little white hand shook with
the anticipation of....
twelfth [male] citizen: (Passionately stepping forward, staring into the audience) You're so
quiet. I like it when people are quiet. I don't like anxious people watching
me. Noisy folks, with their fingers in their noses, ready to snore at any
moment or sneeze, cough, clap their hands for absolutely no good reason. Women
who come to the theater in the flames of sinister perfumes dressed in goose
feathers.
This afternoon I will be walking among
planted trees that betray a large nicotine stain on the back of the swan.
(Set assistants rush forward with planted trees and a
painted swan.)
(twelfth [male] citizen begins
his walk, turning back, skipping, breaking
into dance.)
twelfth [male] citizen: My nervous system is a finely
tuned arabesque.
seventh [female] citizen: (to
second [male] citizen) Will you get the door?
(Door bell rings.)
second [male] citizen: Whoever you
are.
thirteenth [female] citizen: I am sorry, but
it is against the law the teach the customs or the language of Belly Ache.
second [male] citizen: You mean Baloch?
seventh [female] citizen: Who is it dear?
thirteenth [female] citizen: I mean Belly Ache. You are under arrest.
second [male] citizen: I was only recounting our history, our more
recent, not ancient, encounters with the clouds and the rain. We are still in
shock.
thirteenth [female] citizen: Which is why we
must go forward, instead of back.
seventh [female] citizen: (Suddenly appearing on the scene) Never
mind, I found it...You know where it was? it was in the cupboard over the sink.
Right next to the Kandy Corn...
Who's
this....woman? And what's she doing here?
thirteenth [female] citizen: I have come to
tar-and-feather you in the name of the State.
I
don't mean any harm, Citizen 7. I do as I'm told. You are accused of teaching
the customs and the language of Belly Ache.
(second [male] citizen suddenly bolts off stage)
seventh [female] citizen: Dear, come back! Come back,
dear! (Turning to her accuser)
How
dare you? You...you....dapper clown! We saw you strutting round the town
square, barking your Teutonic orders..."Here's the soup! Here's the
vitamins! Here's the zwieback!" Why you should be ashamed.
(Suddenly it is the time of day when you can
see a full moon and the sun setting in the heavens. The path of the stars is
about to fall into space) [read over microphone]
(a full moon appears, with a setting sun in
the heavens. Stars shoot into space.)
second [male] citizen: I shaved my moustache. Did you
notice? Clean shave, clean smile. Ready for anything which I may face!
(thirteenth [female] citizen takes him by the arm and leads him off.)
second [male] citizen:
(rushing forward) Where's he
going? Where's he being taken?
thirteenth [female] citizen: Wonder—is not
precisely knowing.
second [male] citizen:
(head down, muttering to himself) This is the
Gnat that mangles men.
first [female] citizen: (singing but not to Bernstein's tune) Why-o-why-o-why-o?
[Some
citizens moan.]
second [male] citizen:
(Point to the setting sun) No
constellation is present in its entirety. Or visible. Or restored to an earlier
state.
fourteenth [male] citizen: Adult delight is
pain.
[Blackout]
SCENE
II
narrator:
Where
yon proud turrets crown the rock,
Seekest
thou a warrior stand?He fights to hear the castle clock
Say midnight is at hand.
It
strikes, and now his lady fair
Comes
tripping from her hall,Her heart is rend by deep despair,
And tears in torrents fall.
seventh [female] citizen: Surrendering to a cruel and
flawless disorder every day, every night I arrive yet again at the edge of
despair. Darkness, like a parachute unfurling and descending is uneven as my
feelings there.
tenth [male] citizen: I am going to shout. Hold me
back!
(Several citizens rush to his rescue, holding
him, one gently patting his head until he becomes calm.)
twelfth [male] citizen: (Passionately stepping forward, staring into the audience) Some
things are the very same here as in Belgium. I like the roads. The roads are
very wide. Roads should be wide and not narrow and dangerous as they are in some locations where you cannot take a car
very far. Many things are difficult to understand here, but you will come to
comprehend some very soon, I fear, and then perhaps you will begin to clap and cough and tear your hair.
first [female] citizen: What is interesting is not interesting.
eleventh [female] citizen: Like American
football.
third [female] citizen: Like a banker's wristwatch.
twelfth [male] citizen: Like a voyage to Spitzbergen.
third [female] citizen: He's guilty you know?
eleventh
[female] citizen: Who?
third [female] citizen: The man who said what he said.
first [female] citizen: Why-o-why-o-why-o?
fourth [male] citizen: I tell you, things are perfectly sound. Good
for investment.
People
are optimists here. People believe in new things.
twelfth [male] citizen: Some people make use of their
education, while others (looking toward
Citizen 2)...others are more difficult, the snake, the hyena.
eighth [male]
citizen: The gagged woman at the window is unfurling her hair in the
direction of the South Pole!
third [female] citizen: He's guilty you know?
eleventh [female] citizen: (to third
[female] citizen ) Why aren't you
somebody else?
eighth [male]
citizen: And in the city, time has come to milk the cows.
(Cows are carried forward, and several
citizens sit on small stools before them.)
eleventh [female] citizen: (between
squirts) Tomorrow we'll be having stew. Bet you never had it before. Lots
of garden vegetables, leeks and turnips and all mixed up.
twelfth [male] citizen: Tomorrow? Tomorrow?
eleventh [female] citizen: Yes, well every
day is a holiday. Know what I mean?
third [female] citizen: He's guilty you know?
twelfth [male] citizen: What's that noise
I hear all the time?
eleventh [female] citizen: All the time?
twelfth [male] citizen: Well, a lot of the time. Like
yesterday, and little while ago, and time and again.
eleventh [female] citizen: Oh, that's
citizen 3, doing her exercises I suspect. But don't tell her I told you or
there'll be trouble to pay that I might do without.
third [female] citizen: He's guilty you know?
seventh [female] citizen: Surrendering to a cruel and
flawless disorder every day, every night I arrive yet again at the edge of
despair. Citizen 13 wants my pajamas. She doesn't like me. She's a robber. She
works for the state. If the people from Mars only get here on time, they'll
take care of everything.
eleventh [female] citizen: (in wonderment) Like
American football.
third [female] citizen: (in
anticipation)
Like a banker's wristwatch.
twelfth [male] citizen: (with intense desire) Like a voyage
to Spitzbergen.
fourteenth [male] citizen: Adult delight is
pain.
second [male] citizen:
In
short, we survived, we wondrously survived.
fifteenth [female] citizen: Despite.
(blackout)
fifteenth [female] citizen: Despite. That
twine is a plastic impossible to cut. That I'm a bleeder desperate for a
band-aid. That nothing's too good for the founding fathers. That nothing's ever
ever resolved. That best friends bring high stakes. That I own a yellow
parakeet that I truly hate. So is the dangerous course pursued.
seventh [female] citizen:
Oh dear, I wish I hadn't cried so much. I shall be punished for it now,
I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears.
second [male]
citizen: Let me explain. It began with all the angry
clouds. Not a single good cloud in the lot. It rained for forty days and a few
more nights and everything and everyone about these parts drowned and drowned
and drowned, reared up, tormenting, bile overhead, shuddering, trembling,
frothing, seeking, alarmed, dead.
seventh [female] citizen:
That was not how it began. It
began with a jar of jam I had mistakenly put into the closet. It began with my
husband answering the door. (A doorbell
rings.) It began with a belly ache and a lot of hate. It began with a bear
hug and a trip to the doctors. It began with the cat building a pyramid of
chairs upon my bed. (Doorbell rings once
more.)
Without bearing in mind that all those
apartments which provide daily and nightly comfort by hanging in the air, I sank
the furniture into boiling waters. I thought that good and evil could be
dispersed from a pot a lot like a little bottle of India ink. Mozart had been
laid to rest. Suddenly in the sky was a raging storm of champagne. Champagne
was in my eyes, I was blinded by champagne! And there was nothing else to be
said.
(She answers the door. It is a mouse.)
Will
it be any use to speak to this mouse? I suppose he can talk like all the
citizens do. O, mouse, help me out.
(The mouse says nothing.)
Perhaps
it doesn't understand English. Perhaps it's a Turkmenistani mouse. Do you speak
Turkmen?
the mouse: Why yes, as a matter fact. I do. Why are
you speaking English?
second [male] citizen: Why shouldn't we?
third [female] citizen: Because no one understands Turkmen.
the mouse: I do! As I just said.
seventh [female] citizen:
Oh dear, I think I've forgotten it.
fourth [male] citizen: Me to.
third [female] citizen: Or never knew.
fourth [male] citizen: Certainly our playwright doesn't understand
the language.
seventh [female] citizen:
I don't think he's even been
here.
third [female] citizen: Doesn't matter. Speak in Kaz-akstani.
mouse: I
don’t like cats of any kind..
fourth [male] citizen: I don’t doubt that.
seventh [female] citizen:
Then you’ll have speak English, I’m afraid.
mouse: Why should you be afraid? I’m the one
who has to speak it.
third [female] citizen: And without any preparation.
seventh [female] citizen: What was it you wanted with me?
mouse: To come in. Simply to come in. I’m not
some dumb field mouse, but a house mouse who wants just a little hole in the
wall to crawl into each night.
seventh [female] citizen:
Oh, I haven’t been a very nice host, have I? But I don’t know what my husband
might think of all this. He’s being tortured at the moment. But I’ll probably
be lonely later on. Come in, come in! (She
gives the mouse a little peck on the neck).
(She closes the door.)
third [female] citizen: Well, what do you think of that?
fourth [male] citizen: No constellation is present in
its entirety. Or visible.
third [female] citizen: Well, I saw what I saw.
twelfth [male] citizen: (Passionately stepping forward, staring into the audience) Some
things are the very same here as in Belgium.
narrator: It strikes, and now his lady fair
Comes
tripping from her hall,
(Blackout)
SCENE
IV
sixth [male] citizen: When the tree sees with its eyes
open....
seventh [female] citizen: When the tree is shaken by
inevitable cataclysms....
eighth [male]
citizen: When the tree gives into its desires....
(The wall of a prison cell is brought
forward, second [male] citizen within)
second [male] citizen : I am number 84. So for the
first time I shall see his true hangman’s face. A man who, even now is correct,
long-distance cruel, watches me from his watch-tower.
A monk, that’s what I am. More than a
clerk. I’ve woken up. Above my head in the wavy, scaling skin of ceiling paint:
all those cracks, grooves, crevices, fissures, lips, hairs. I am assaulted from
within. My hangman is there too, in the cracks. I smell his breath.
third [female] citizen: U binds time. U bends the circle. U souls the
spirit. U gazes the look.
hangman: Citizen No. 2, we’ve just arrested your
wife.
second [male] citizen: My wife?
She has nothing to do with this. With me! Nothing!
hangman: We know that. Her criminal act is far
more serious. She has been arrested for an act of U peck.
second [male] citizen: U peck? You must mean Ubek. I don’t think she
even knows the language.
hangman: No. She’s been pecking up a storm.
Kissing every man she sees for days. Even, so the story goes, pecking up a
mouse.
second [male] citizen: A mouse?
hangman: A
mouse! A second rate citizen! A nobody really. Out from some field, brought him
straight into the house.
second [male] citizen: I must be dreaming. Perhaps I’m
mad. You’ve gotten to me, made me lose my mid. My wife? No, I refuse to believe
it. She’s a saint. A saint.
hangman: Neighbors witnessed her activities. Citizen’s
arrest.
second [male] citizen: I refuse to believe it.
hangman: She admitted to the acts.
tenth [male] citizen: I am going to shout. Hold me
back!
(Several citizens rush to his rescue, holding
him, one gently patting his head until he becomes calm.)
first [female] citizen: What is interesting is not interesting.
fourth [male] citizen: Or interesting in a different manner.
Let me explain. Across passes, a device
of stasis in which the blue of so many suns not as in a garden regressing the
soil or slipping the wall onto the iris, but as the film between what leaves
and the classification of phylum. A finer is tucked to the gum of maple,
syrupy, slowly draining the drip against the grain of bark.
The dog jumps over the moon lit ditch. All
life traps surfaces, there to uncover the hieroglyphs of what was and will is,
continuing, throwing its shadows as a function of space. The fig pulled away
from the branches into the teeth is torn away, swallowed in delight. It’s true.
Clouds cover what’s left.
second [male] citizen: I refuse to believe it.
hangman: Doesn’t matter. She admitted the crime.
(Long pause) She was executed this
morning.
second [male] citizen: You what?
third [female] citizen: She's guilty you know?
second [male] citizen:
(screaming) Guilty of what?
fifteenth [female] citizen: I was watching this program, this nature
program. They had this whole sequence where a pack of hyenas surrounded a baby
water-buffalo or something, and they were running around, and the mother was
trying to chase them away, and finally one of them just grabs it by the throat
and pulls it down on the ground and then they were all over it. They showed one
of them running away with the whole hind leg ripped off and bleeding in its
mouth.
twelfth [male] citizen: Some people make use of their
education, while others (looking toward
Citizen 15)...others are more difficult, the snake, the hyena.
eleventh [female] citizen: We have arrived
at a point where you are already beginning to forget what you believe.
hangman: (to second
[male] citizen) You are free to go.
(The prisoner remains without moving.)
hangman: Did you hear me, sir? You are free to go.
(The prisoner remains without moving.)
twelfth [male] citizen: (Passionately stepping forward, staring into the audience) Some
things are the very same here as in Belgium.
eighth [male]
citizen: (bowing his head in
reverence for the dead) Rum-tum-tum.
(Blackout)
(Curtain quickly falls, before it five
singers)
THE
EXECUTIONER'S SONG
One
day you're in your house.
You
kiss your spouse,
Pet
your mouse.
Tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock
Knock!
Knock! Knock! Knock!
A
policeman is suddenly at your door.
You
awaken on a dungeon floor.
Rat-a-tat-tat.
Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat.
And
that's the end of that!
SCENE
V
The citizens
have gathered, just as in the first scene. They are now dressed in red silk
costumes just like those in the first scene.
These men and women cry out, moan, laugh,
sigh, scream, giggle, gurgle, and cough, but each in a different order.
These are the citizens of an imaginary hill
city in Turkmenistan.
END
_______
Copyright
©2013 by Douglas Messerli.
The
text of this play was suggested by words and sequences of words in works that
shared the words “wonder,” “wonderful,” “wonderment,” “wonders,” and
“wonderland” in their titles.
Among
the numerous texts consulted are:
Wonder by Hugo Claus,
trans. from the Dutch by Michael Henry Heim (Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2009)
Wonderful Town, a musical with
lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, book by Joseph Fields and Jerome
Chodorov (based on the play My Sister
Eileen by Jerome Chodorov), music by Leonard Bernstein
"Alice
in Wonderland," a poem by Enrique Gómez-Correa, trans. by Beatriz Zeller
"Wonder,"
a poem by August Stramm, trans. by Marshall Hyruick
"The
Wonders of the Earth at an Altitude of Thirty Meters," a poem Jorge
Cáceres, trans. by Beatriz Zeller
"The
Wonders of the Sea Thirty Meters Down," a poem Jorge Cáceres, trans. by
Beatriz Zeller
Theatre of
Wonders an
anthology of drama ed. by Mac Wellman (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1985)
The plays in that volume include:
"Gogol" by Len Jenkin
"Seventy Scenes of Halloween"
by Jeffrey Jones
"Leave It to Beaver Is Dead,"
by Des McAnuff
"Border" by Elizabeth Wray
"Forecast" by Elizabeth Wray
"The Proessional Frenchman" by
Mac Wellman
"Wonder—is
not precisely Knowing" a poem by Emily Dickinson
Tales of Wonder, ed. by Sir
Walter Scott
Alice in
Wonderland,
a fiction by Lewis Carroll
Wonderland, a film by Laurence Coriat (writer) and Michael
Winterbottom (director)
It’s a Wonderful
Life!,
a film by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Frank Capra, Jo Swerling and Michel
Wilson (writers) and Frank Capra (director)
Wonder Boys, a film by
Steve Kloves (writer, based on the novel by Michael Chabon) and Curtis Hanson
(director)
Wonder Bar, a film by Geza
Herczeg, Paul Farkas, Robert Katscher and Earl Baldwin (screenplay) and Lloyd
Bacon (director)
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