MLKBLDMCBETH
Working Script
February 23st, 2016
0. THE HALLWAY/ CHRIS ON THE PHONE, LARS LOOKING THAT WAY
Lady Macbeth glides about the natural world.
Full to the brim milk of human kindness, or...
She surveys you, ordinary people, doing everyday things.
She charms. She rearranges the atoms of the air with her presence.
A beginning of an al/chemical shift in the density of our surroundings, somehow.
She sees beyond the ephemeral... A kind of future, transcendent.
Through the steel of the doorknob.
You feel that you are to begin to perform something but...
She knocks on the door.
She enters the space. Rendering it a place upon the grace of her presence.
The Porter escorts you with his flimsy lighter under the ladder.
You opposite the curtained mirror.
In a row of chairs behind a line drawn by an electrical cord.
Specifically infinite constellationscape of glow tape. Thick night.
Marks recording past rehearsals and future trajectory of the play.
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Charged by the fluorescent institution of yesterday,
a horizon of potential energy and ruminations on...
1. THE INVOCATION
An invocation. A Spanish lullaby and shards of an aria,
defiant stomps like a tango like a drill sergeant punctuating ruins of history.
The walls and floors of the room resonating from reverberations from
the insides of the container of her body.
Sneaks in echoes, iterations, forecasting of the whispering,
somewhere from the direction of the curtain and the mirror,
from the vertical chart of spike marks, maybe...
The breaths and gulps accumulate flesh.
Flashes of hysteria.
Each syllabic particle casting a spell on the space-body and the body and the bodies.
1.25. ACT ONE, SCENE ONE/ THE WITCHES’ SPELL
A clearing of the throat, a leavening of grounds, warming up the windpipes,
an elasticizing of the capacity of this machine.
A raven croaking hoarse.
The witch of milk draining out gradually yet surely,
the witch of blood thickening, pumping up jagged.
The witch of loneliness seeing through the curtain through the mirror to a...
a kind of future inside Lady Macbeth’s eyelids.
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When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
When the hurlyburly's done,
When the battle's lost and won.
That will be ere the set of sun.
Where the place?
Upon the heath.
There to meet with Macbeth.
I come, Graymalkin!
Paddock calls.
Anon.
Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
1.5. UNSEX ME/ THE EMPTYING AND FILLING
The procedure. A biological and metaphysical process of
emptying and filling of breaths and liquids, an act of
the supernatural through making metaphors concrete,
the very act of al/chemy.
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The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
A sudden implosion of loneliness punctures the curtained future.
This contained infinity explodes into an eternal night sky.
Lady Macbeth’s compulsive futurism finally finding a site of
grasping upon the sleek yet deep surface of the mirror.
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry 'Hold, hold!'
1. 75. HOLD, HOLD AND PLACES/ A RESETTING OF THE WORLD
The first interjection.
Hold, hold.
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The Porter suspends by means of the rude fluorescents.
The choreography and life of the dark caught in action,
and time begins to become on a different clock.
You thought perhaps that this play would go on in this poignant way.
A paralysis of the al/chemical process at the same time a
burst of reverse magnetism unto the witch and Lady Macbeth,
those who feel this future in this sliver of infinite infinity.
An impromptu ecstasy of a wedding in which the father is the daughter.
At once we look at the Porter, then Macbeth, then somehow, you...
the first murderer.
The indecisive duo audition their souls to each other
for the first time in this comma.
The Porter sets the ladder for “top of play.” Lays down a new cord,
to away from the mirror or to suggest a new, flat kind of horizon?
Where depth is overtaken by an expanse of a magnetic field
in front of you...
Blood rotates with the turning axis of perspective at your foot.
And milk busily reorients you from here to there, which is now here,
performing her daily domestic chores that prisons her.
Come, come, come...
Before we have started, somehow time is already running ahead of us,
and he calls places before we are ready.
Places.
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The witch strolls luxuriously, up til a quick hop over the ladder,
to begin this fucking play. Everyone else, sedimenting into their place.
Warming up.
Once she is settled to give birth to this beauty,
resuming of the invocation, but with the new insight into a slice of what it could be...
1.9. THE INTERPELLATION
The sliver of eternal life once again beckons.
Now that the fabric of the world is ready for an ascension or
a progression...
The factory of placemaking in full commission.
Those who know scream the neon sign together.
Great Glamis! worthy Cawdor!
Greater than both, by the all-hail hereafter!
Thy letters have transported me beyond
This ignorant present, and I feel now
The future in the instant.
And I feel now the future in the instant.
1.95. FLASH OF FUTURE/ OUT, DAMN SPOT/ MEN-CHILDREN DYING IN FUTURE-PRESENT
A sudden flash of future.
Men-children dropping dead on hands of you the first murderer.
Dying where you are supposed to be dying.
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Each Banquo implicating their untimely passing upon you.
The Porter gives light and takes it away as these men die. He can’t look, he
makes you look and not look.
The witch births a light of poignancy from her womb.
So she can emulate this object of beauty, so she can show her to you.
A request for illumination, a getting, then the extinguishing of soul:
Give us a light there, ho!
A light, a light!
Who did strike out the light?
Lady Macduff’s last cry for help; the witch of milk’s last warning:
Out, damned spot! out, I say!--One: two: why,
then, 'tis time to do't.--Hell is murky!--Fie, my
lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we
fear who knows it, when none can call our power to
account?--Yet who would have thought the old man
to have had so much blood in him.
The thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?-What, will these hands ne'er be clean?--No more o'
that, my lord, no more o' that: you mar all with
this starting.
One by one, as Banquo and Macbeth perform their deaths,
and become resurrected in time,
They pick up the spike of where they are supposed to die, where they died,
and doctor it on the body of this future Lady Macbeth.
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Excising her body, aiding her ridding herself.
An act of self-cannibalism where nothing becomes nothing.
Here's the smell of the blood still: all the
perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little
hand. Oh, oh, oh!
I tell you yet again, Banquo's buried; he
cannot come out on's grave.
The light born from the witches insides now discovers Lady Macbeth,
magnetizing her from the abstract of future to this ladder that brings forth.
To bed, to bed! there's knocking at the gate.
come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What's
done cannot be undone.--To bed, to bed, to bed!
2. TO BE OR NOT TO BE/ ANXIETY ATTACK IN THE KITCHEN/ INDECISION SPEECH
Macbeth is a container as well.
He has stepped out of dinner to have an anxiety attack on the kitchen counter.
Blood dripping up thick from the earth and
milk spilling in a way that could never be recorporealized.
His ghost limbs perform for him as he insists on paralysis.
Blood of his potentially valiant arms, milk of his wobbly knees...
The witch perches at the tip of the ladder.
Lady Macbeth plays a game of war and a game of house simultaneously.
A little girl and a little boy plays with the ladder-object
as a strap-on, a penis, a vagina all at once. Sounds of childish amusement.
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The witch conducts this opera of innocuous murder plot,
one hand lighting her play and another hand tracing her ploy.
The Porter speaks into the light of his lighter, mirroring Macbeth,
murmuring echoes of his indecision, processing it into further
indecision and occasionally crystalizing it into decision.
If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly: if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'ld jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice
To our own lips. He's here in double trust;
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off;
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
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That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself
And falls on the other.
2.5 LADDER AS RAILWAY TO A NOWHERE-SOMEWHERE
An abrupt breath-taking of time.
Signing off the plan. The bottom line of this document.
Macbeth’s arms become men, and the rest of his body has spilled out.
Imprints in time, they remain as photographic evidence
while Macbeth escapes the anchor of being and move onto becoming.
Ladder becomes a thing, more than shape.
Though it lies flat. The tip a simulacrum of an ambition’s end,
the act of ascension one of informed delusion...
A fleshier invocation dance. Puncturing, punctuating each parallelogram.
Macbeth approaches, extending the suspension of time for a bit longer.
Then, eyes meet, and indecision and decisiveness colliding at once...
How now! what news?
He has almost supp'd: why have you left the chamber?
Hath he ask'd for me?
Know you not he has?
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We will proceed no further in this business:
Macbeth grabs Lady Macbeth’s arm. Like a foreplay to
some sexual or some violence something something.
The Porter turns on the institutional searchlight upon this prospect.
The players look at him, then at you... the first murderer.
After 10 seconds, the witch regenerates the atmosphere.
He hath honour'd me of late; and I have bought
Golden opinions from all sorts of people,
Which would be worn now in their newest gloss,
Not cast aside so soon.
Deflation, then inflation.
Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dress'd yourself? hath it slept since?
And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely? From this time
Such I account thy love. Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem,
Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,'
Like the poor cat i' the adage?
Prithee, peace:
Another prospect of a kind of violence. The Porter interrupts.
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A repetition and revision of assignment of responsibility.
A more electric act of seeing into your eyes for 20 seconds.
Release of paralysis and recapturing by the witch again.
The Porter leaves. To... recuperate? What to reset?
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none.
What beast was't, then,
That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
Milk and blood seep toward them on the diagonal, horizontal
plane following the natural order of gravity which finds its Earth’s
core upon Lady Macbeth’s womb, obviously.
On the diagonal planes that dissect through space, beams
projecting out from the rungs of the ladder.
Milk spilling, more spilling and a curious cannibal just about to bite,
to eat space, to eat her, to eat up what cannot remain...
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both:
They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
Does unmake you. I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
The Porter returns to usurp the light that sculpts the scene of beauty.
Now in the dark, spike marks mark the trajectory of
cannibalism and stillbirth. An exploded photo album, stacks, panning...
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Lady Macbeth entirely becoming cyborg, in that of course
I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess.
An origin story of a dictator, birth of a man-child, a man.
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.
If we should fail?
The light finds them again. Milk has curdled, into
an abject head.
An irreversible act of still/birth has taken place,
a Styrofoam child of infertility now a third player to
the duo, and a second head to the looming Banquo.
Lady Macbeth mothers the head and mothers the head of Macbeth.
The head stalks Macbeth as he tries to evade its gaze.
We fail!
But screw your courage to the sticking-place,
And we'll not fail. When Duncan is asleep-Whereto the rather shall his day's hard journey
Soundly invite him--his two chamberlains
Will I with wine and wassail so convince
That memory, the warder of the brain,
Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason
A limbeck only: when in swinish sleep
Their drenched natures lie as in a death,
What cannot you and I perform upon
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The unguarded Duncan? what not put upon
His spongy officers, who shall bear the guilt
Of our great quell?
The stark materiality of the Styrofoam demands more from Macbeth.
Its empty eyes calling Macbeth’s pupils to fix them on them
as to produce a new world through this contact.
Bring forth men-children only;
For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males. Will it not be received,
When we have mark'd with blood those sleepy two
Of his own chamber and used their very daggers,
That they have done't?
Who dares receive it other,
As we shall make our griefs and clamour roar
Upon his death?
The newly future, male, futilely infertile pair ascends the yet-erect ladder,
moving forward on the railway of flat still ambition.
The witch provides a guiding light on their journey past the
paralyzed diagram of ambition, ushering them to the royal balcony
from where they now watch the performance of the erection.
I am settled, and bend up
Each corporal agent to this terrible feat.
Away, and mock the time with fairest show:
False face must hide what the false heart doth know.
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3. ERECTION/ SHOSTACHOVICH UNDER STALIN’S SHADOW
A family portrait of Macbeth, Lady Macbeth as accompanied by
the witch and her steady hand at the light. They pose to be captured in this
newly-minted marriage as a family, and they clap for those who erect
the Tower of Babel.
The unlucky lady slithers underneath the ladder then is banished to the
shadow realm. Banquo madly dances with the newborn lover.
3.1. THE LADDER-DAGGER AND ITS DOUBLE
Upon the erection the spouses as one discover it. Lady Macbeth
drawn to it in its flesh and Macbeth contorting his physique to conform
to the petite, pithy shadow that Lady Macbeth casts and briskly
transfigures.
Lady Macbeth clutches at the utility and materiality both of the
ascension machine. Perhaps the sightless substances corporealizing
in a way that sight is not so completely futile for the first time.
Although whether the ladder or its flickering double is the illusion
is...
The shadow prison cell rapidly compresses Lady Macduff,
a most epic iteration of milk spilling, in spurts, distorting its
container into fractured impressions of its former self in its exile.
The unforgiving horizon of the center rung cuts through her neck.
As Lady Macbeth touches the ladder, a certain electricity
runs through her, her body completing a circuit. Macbeth
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digs his limbs into the mesh wall to capture its shadow in
some dimensional way, but is sprung back by the rash flatness.
Lady Macbeth climbs.
The witch lights her faithfully.
Approaching it, in the ruthless suspension of breath as she
walks into see a Rodin sculpture and she wants to be like it and
show you it.
Once on top penetrating the windows of the rungs
trampling upon the air of mere mortals beneath her establishment.
Macbeth goes from trying to fit in the shadow of her body
to pinning down a place she is reaching in its shadow counterpart.
The Styrofoam head begins to dance Banquo, not the other way around.
A magnetic pull from inside the head somewhere, which compels
Banquo to kiss it, and when that becomes not enough, bite into it,
consume it to become it and for it to become it. To become heavy,
to put weight unto the world. To choke until speech has to become a
labor of extrusion.
Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
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Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still,
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. There's no such thing:
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes.
The witch shares with you her perfect encapsulation of the
wonder of this utopia in her face.
Now o'er the one halfworld
Nature
3.25. FIRST MURDERER KILLS BANQUO
Banquo calls the performance to a sudden halt.
He tries to speak but first the Styrofoam that stuffs his throat
must be spitted out, violating the innocently forgotten spilled milk.
Hold, take my sword. There's husbandry in heaven;
Their candles are all out. Take thee that too.
A heavy summons lies like lead upon me,
And yet I would not sleep: merciful powers,
Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature
Gives way to in repose!
Then you, the first murderer, finally murder him somewhere
in the string that connects your eyes to his. He asks for light,
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when there is a dictatorship of light reigning overhead, for what
kind of light?
Give us a light there, ho!
A light, a light!
Who did strike out the light?
He is murdered to the place of the wry mirror, the kind that
looks at you at 3am forever murdering sleep.
Somehow the witch keeps her light-child, the only child not
affected by Sudden Infant Death Syndrome yet, as an extracted
essence of this world of beauty. Cradling it, lulling it through her
last strain of supernatural resilience.
3.5. LADY MACBETH KILLS NATURE/ ATOMIC BOMB
Upon the act of murder and subsequent gain of physical weight
of this world Lady Macbeth jumps down to under the ladder.
A calculated attack of an atomic bomb. An im/explosion of the head.
An annihilation of a symbolic and reality of reproductive potential.
Yet she roosts on the ruins of her innards.
She powers through. Spilled milk gradually emulates Lady Macbeth’s
gesture of resolution. Macbeth emulates the tableau of masculinity
that was prescribed unto him during his indecision speech.
4. THE PORTER’S TURN
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The Porter observes this fantastic culmination of the schema,
clapping to acknowledge the absurd sterility and yet muting the
products of their windpipes. The world, its framing device of beauty
usurped from it and in its barenaked skeleton, attempts to persevere
through the potential energy of their hollow speech.
seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate's offerings, and wither'd murder,
Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace.
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,
Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives:
Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.
Yet an intrusion with a bravado that matches the resolution of the players
will not shut up this time. The Porter penetrates the “stage”
protected by a barricade of cords by thrashing a chair,
and somehow he is able to accomplish a real task with some
consequential stake unto the world.
I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.
The Porter’s turn to tell you that
perhaps you have been relying too much on your sight...
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that after all all the important parts of this “play” has been
taking place in the blanket of night. His final audition to try
for the role of Macbeth and perhaps he can change the story
of this eternal cycle of futile grappling at illusion of power that
excises all things in its way.
Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still,
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. There's no such thing:
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes. Now o'er the one halfworld
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate's offerings, and wither'd murder,
Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace.
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
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Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,
Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives:
Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.
To Macbeth, who is Duncan:
I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.
5. THE FAT MAN’S TROLLEY PROBLEM EXCEPT THE RAILWAY HAS GONE
The Porter points at Macbeth, interpellating him into Duncan,
who must be excised, but for him a necessary action of
restoring this eternal entropy into a beginning of a new system.
Macbeth/Duncan does not flinch.
The Ladies uncompromisingly fix eyes on The Porter,
occasionally not being able to continue ignoring the mass of
dead body, Banquo’s corpse at the mirror.
Nothing happens.
After an entire lifecycle, The Porter shifts his focus to you.
To implicate you now what he did not want to do or could not do,
and what he failed to mobilize the inactive Macbeth to do.
In this moment doing seems almost impossible, yet
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you are supposed to be doing. Something. Or not,
but yet you must feel some guilt about not doing,
or even better, not knowing what you are supposed to do,
or, now knowing whether you are supposed to do something or not.
This is the paranoia that has eroded the microcosms within
these people, their bodily fluids rotting away at their shells.
Now in your turn, you are finally the one not knowing
in a way that will kill you.
After yet another lifecycle, you, with Macbeth/Duncan
move the ladder atop Lady Macbeth. It did not happen smoothly.
You are not even sure if that’s what you were supposed to do
or who you want to please if anyone.
But somehow you have ended up, with Macbeth, folding the ladder
then placing it on Lady Macbeth’s body which pliantly placed itself
unto the unlucky place under it. And somehow you get a sense
that maybe you did this by yourself completely outside of the
scripted action and now the others are paralyzed in disbelief.
The play unable to move forward, the main actress who seemed
to be doing so well now in a violently compromising position,
and perhaps this is mostly if not entirely blood on your hands.
We all look at you.
5.25. IN THE MIDDLE OF IT/ A RE-RESETTING
The witch sings a Serbian lullaby to keep her light child alive,
to put it to sleep, and for it to be able to be put to sleep it must mean
that it is still somewhat alive.
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Lady Macduff moves you to a boxing ring, an arena for the next
battle or some kind of communion. Four chairs holding up the rectangle
of cords which The Porter has rearranged. Now they are in an island
in the middle and you all around it, with the Porter all around it.
Perhaps a new kind of play will start.
5.5. THE DAGGER SPEECH FOR THE THIRD TIME
Yet, the Porter begins the dagger speech yet again.
Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Which makes the previous world resurrect itself as the kindle
in the form of the witch’s baby sustained in its cradle all along.
Now the venerable and precious light seated atop the very chair
that previously penetrated this illusory sound and fury regarners
the alchemical control over the world, as Macbeth/Duncan provides
that loud darkness of the institutional light once again.
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5.6. THE PORTER BECOMES PORTER
The Porter becomes Porter... again or finally.
He has never successfully transposed his ontological self from
the natural world to inside the guard of the electrical cords.
Discovering a kind of madness, an exhaustion of the rational mind,
focusing on killing the source of light, the lightbulb the sentinel the wolf,
then, somehow turning to protect the horizontal beams of light
penetrating through your skin to your soul to cook it—for what?
Macbeth/Duncan intermittently oppresses the Porter’s brain with heat,
and as he gets cooked, in this instant...
And the ghost of Banquo comes to watch this miraculous spectacle...
Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes;
it provokes the desire, but it takes
away the performance: therefore, much drink
may be said to be an equivocator with lechery:
it makes him, and it mars him; it sets
him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him,
and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and
not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him
in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him.
The witch efficiently moves the seated light to your world with
the kind of ease that the Porter never achieved in his fervent struggles.
The blindfold that provided him assurance of futility of light now
is stuffed into his mouth by the witch, gagging him from attempt
at another action.
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6. THE WEDDING
The witch reinflates Lady Macbeth with a new substance, an alien
energy you will never know about. Escapes her from the ladder on
a journey to discover another vehicle and allegory.
Lady Macduff pulls opens the wretched curtains because the play
must move on. As she warned in a flash...
A wedding, as it happened before and before that many times,
but this time the daughter is the daughter and the father is the father.
A wedding to the night, the final comings that force the microcosmic deaths
to see themselves writhing in the goddamn mirror so clearly.
When the witch turns off the light now it is in wild hope for a new
iteration of a becoming and being.
7. COCAINE/ HOUSE OF MADNESS/ PARANOIA COLLAGE
And in the dark we hear an invocation.
Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
An invocation tangled up
in its own web of semantics. Slowly but surely heading towards a heat death
of the universe, a devolving of the concept of rationality. An invocation
that has cooked up the whispers from the first invocation into a
fleshy, guttural soundscape.
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The only thing the Porter can do is to do some blow so that it
can become him at least a little bit and he can become it...
It is some version of the dagger speech but all its intelligibility
has been spilled out, demented, fractured. The boundary of your space
and the stage are hopscotched by the witch in her newfound childhood.
Lady Macbeth chews a bubble gum metaphysically charming, molding
the bodies and energies of all the players, and perhaps you too.
Macbeth looks like a textbook diagram of the evolution of monkey to man.
The gestation has taken place and now he is becoming born,
as he have been men many times in the yesterdays, today he is becoming
tomorrow’s man.
Lady Macduff in hysteria demarcates a forwards and backwards
floor pattern upon her mountain of fallen civilians. Banquo tries to
fucking sleep and he must kill his bed or otherwise he will die.
The witch pulls him by the cord then she drags you out of your bed-chair.
Having decidedly spilled more of what could be spilled, the witch
resorts to the piano to underscore this ecstatic entropy. Playing
eerily children’s tunes and kind-of classical melodies...
The Porter tries to offset the volume of space inside and outside,
and in this act of desperate abjection, he orchestrates the chairs closer
together crumples the ecosystem. While Lady Macduff and Banquo join the
heap of dead bodies that rumble from underneath the floorboards,
Lady Macbeth and Macbeth somehow remain, even when they are finally
standing atop these bodies.
This new Macbeth finishes his dagger speech.
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With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,
Which now suits with it.
8. CAPITAL PUNISHMENT BY ELECTROCUTION/ TOMORROW TOMORROW TOMORROW/ SHE SHOULD HAVE DIED
HEREAFTER
Lady Macbeth surveys the mountain. She defers her lamp to
the ghost-corpse of Banquo. The witch underscores this new production
of this play with a characteristic beauty.
Lady Macbeth sits on chair 1.
Café.
The Porter attempts to mourn a series of imagined funerals at
the end of this new but the same play that is beginning yet again
and full force. No longer a prediction not because he is not a good-enough
Tiresias but because the male future, what it will become, is
always what it is.
The Porter prompts Macbeth to follow suit in ambition and
in death on Lady Macbeth’s fatal trajectory with his nostalgically
future lighter. Macbeth usurps each chair from Lady Macbeth.
Macbeth takes Throne 1, then Lady Macbeth glides to 2.
Lady Macbeth sits on chair 2, as Macbeth steals away the first one.
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Corazón.
These first two chairs are the waiting room, outside of the window
to the execution chamber. Waiting...
for the saline sponge, not too wet but just enough to be placed
on your head. The third chair begins a series of small shocks.
This capital punishment takes place in rounds. Always the Lady
first. Even with the next step performed in its full opera there is
no way to halt the procession.
Chair 4 triggers a series of extended shocks. Very close to...
And finally, Macbeth finds his way to the middle of it all,
sits himself down on an invisible—to you—chair, that is the final chair,
at least for now. Lady Macbeth sits on the chair that is Macbeth’s body,
which is actually the final final chair.
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
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This is when the circuit completes. To the heart or the brain,
a final aneurysm at least for now. All liquids draining out of their shells,
organs burning crisp black and crumbling into ash, skin breaking
and you would burn your fingers if you touched it.
Lady Macbeth deflates into a kind of nothing, yet Macbeth
continues to perform the vehicle of the electric chair...
until he cannot.
Signifying nothing.
9. A MILITARY FUNERAL/ YESTERDAY ALL MY TROUBLES SEEMED SO FAR AWAY
The witch, a wife of a Serbian dictator, also a hot pop star,
dances by herself in this whole new world. Listening to music that you
of course have no access to, lighting her face and it only with her
stupid iPhone light.
The Porter pays due to another failed evolutionary experiment.
A nation has died, but who? The people, the monarch? Regardless,
a military funeral has been called where all homogenize to march in place.
Until after a very long time they see that the barracks and the battlefield are
holograms and that the march has sped up to a fat man running on a treadmill,
they make a choice to stop one by one and walk out.
Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away.
Now it looks as though they're here to stay.
Oh, I believe in yesterday.
Suddenly I'm not half the man I used to be.
There's a shadow hanging over me.
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Oh, yesterday came suddenly.
Why she had to go, I don't know, she wouldn't say.
I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday.
Yesterday love was such an easy game to play.
Now I need a place to hide away.
Oh, I believe in yesterday.
Why she had to go, I don't know, she wouldn't say.
I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday.
Yesterday love was such an easy game to play.
Now I need a place to hide away.
Oh, I believe in yesterday.
Mm mm mm mm mm mm mm
But after everyone has walked out Macbeth continues to march.
Exhausted, exhausting. The witch and Macbeth are the two gears
still going and going.
9.9. IT ENDS AND IT BEGINS AGAIN
Lady Macbeth asks you for light. It is now your turn to turn on the
light in the room F100.
The witch stops dancing, but Macbeth continues to march,
becoming more man, and also eroding.
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And from the outside of the room, we hear the play begin
yet again.
In eerie identical fashion to the beginning of it all when you walked in
for the first time. But this time, the Porter is maybe the witch.
But just maybe...
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