Under "final scene"

This is the end, my only friend, the end.

I think it's in James Loxley's Performativity that there is a consideration of the performance of the marriage act. When someone is married, there is a script, there are roles that the bride and bridegroom play (not that there has to be a bride or a bridegroom to have a marriage, I just like the sound of the words!), and everything is rehearsed, just like one would expect of a play. The difference is that being married actually causes change to the people being married, even after the performance of being married is over. I wanted to capture an aspect of this here at the end of "Waiting for Gadot," as the play is in many ways about wanting to make such a connection with someone. Andrew Peters, the residential mystical writer of my collection of characters, was clearly the choice for holding these ceremonies.

The proposal that prefaces the marriages is an echo of something I witnessed in Italy back in June. I'm not sure if I wrote about it in one of these autopsies or if I'm telling you this for the first time, but I'll try my best to be clear and concise! My friend and I got a room in the city of Rome one night, which allowed us to stroll around the city in the wee hours without worrying about catching a train and bus back to where we were staying (an issue we ran into on a few different nights!). As that morning we had gone on an electric bike tour that passed by the Trevy Fountain where our tour guide pointed out how people come to this landmark at night, we hit the Colosseum and then made our way to the fountain. I'm not sure if it usually runs at night, but I can't explain why so many people would gather there if it didn't--what I do know is that the night we showed up about a quarter to midnight, the area around the fountain was full of people but the fountain was off. Weird, we thought. For some reason, I got the idea that something would happen at midnight--that everyone was waiting for something to happen at midnight. I envisioned the fountain being turned on in celebration of some Italian celebratory date. Midnight came and this didn't happen, because I'm obviously not psychic. But then, a few minutes passed and a ripple went through the crowd, my friend and I looked across the fountain to the other side of the intersection and saw that someone had proposed. A build-up of emotion went through the crowd as people waited on the answer to the proposal. When the "yes" came there was an explosion of cheers. While I don't think I literally felt that that would happen before when I made my prediction, I felt like including a proposal here to commemorate that event.

If this play were ever staged, I would want to leave it up to the director to decide how to handle the proposal and marriages. I have no problem with it all simply being actors performing fictional roles, but I think it would be incredible if a play--any play, not necessarily mine--could include a marriage or proposal scene that could actually at times be acted out by people actually proposing or being married. That would be such a perfect mixture of reality and fiction, ritual and original performance that I would find it quite striking in its execution. That's ultimately what I was going for here--the performance act of marrying--I would leave it to other plays and other works of art to address the ethics and importance of marriage in society, though I did purposely leave the descriptions of the people getting married ungendered (I've probably addressed this in other stuff I've written, as well, but it isn't a real consideration here). If the proposal and the marriages provide readers and/or the audience with a positive mood, they've done their job in the narrative.

I don't want to get too much into my character's speech. When I do show up as a character, I imagine my speech as almost Lucky's speech in Waiting for Godot. His thinking cap is placed on his head and he speaks one 700 word sentence until someone rips off the cap, everyone scared by his outburst. I think there's a lot of truth in what my character says, but I feel there's a need to have some levity to the scene as well, such as Carl's mocking of him once he returns to the podium. I will point people to Langston Hughes's poems "Harlem" and "I, Too, Sing America" for some of the inspiration behind my words there.

Which brings us to the climatic part of the play. Ironically, the play climaxes at the very end--there is no denouement. When my father got to this part, he audibly said, "Huh?" which I think is a fair reaction to how this scene reads. I hope that it would play a bit more viscerally on the stage, but in actually staging this scene, I realize that a director and set designer and who else it might involve would have to consider how to make what is essentially a car running into a mass of people safe for everyone involved (and yet still affecting). Once I've thrown away the fourth wall here, the problem is that I can't simply have the audience care what happens to the characters--now they care what happens to themselves!

I came up with the idea to end my play this way in the wake of the Charlottesville protest terrorist attack back in August. Unfortunately since then we have also had the terrible tragedy of the shooting in Las Vegas two weeks ago. Once again, I might have mentioned this before, but I recently attended a Green Day concert where the band called for the audience to see the show as almost a safe space free from depressing news and impotent politics--I can envision the "Superhumans for Humanity" cosplay event in this scene in a similar fashion, but I wanted to show that such spaces are still under attack from the outside world. I wanted my play to end with a contrast: the beauty of marriage and the power of people standing up together for change interrupted by the horror of violence and tragedy of murder and acts of terror. Hopefully staging an act like this in a play can work as a motivator for people to stand strong in the face of such horrible events, rather than to give in to a feeling of helplessness and fear, something I know it has been hard at times for myself to fight off.

For Pompo, this completes a transformation that is in some ways a long time coming and in others a relatively new idea. When I first created Pompo in middle school, I toyed with the idea that he would somehow become a bad guy, but it never got far (or my memory of it never got far!), but when I began "Waiting for Gadot," I had the idea that one of my characters would become a villain. I wanted this play about flawed and broken men to include a man who could stand for all the negativity that such men create in the world, either through rape threats on the internet or through events like Charlottesville and Las Vegas. When I came up with the idea that Pompo would put on the wig in one interview and become the Pozzo/Pompo hybrid of Pozmo, I realized it would be him who did this terrible act. I hadn't completely decided on this idea when I said in an earlier autopsy post that Pompo said a lot of the things I would say, that he quite often spoke in my voice, but I think this is quite fitting, because the character captures my feelings of complicity when I see where toxic masculinity can lead. I don't have any fears of becoming Pompo, but in following his narrative to this conclusion, I wanted to take myself to task for some of my own negative feelings. When Stephen King saw Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining where Jack Torrance, the Stephen King character, is pretty much the living embodiment of evil, he was obviously repelled and disliked the film. I actually wanted to experience something like that, in order to push myself to be a better person.

Ultimately, I realize that in discussing Pompo in such detail, it will seem like I am understating what happens to You, the character. When I came up with this ending, I realized that it would be a reason for You existing in the first scene (I've written about this before as a sort of play on Chekhov's gun). I'm not sure how well I accomplished my vision here, but I wanted "You dies" to read as a confusing sentence in a number of ways: first, as I discussed in the first scene with You, it throws off the reader because "You" as a name can be singular, while "you" is plural even when it is singular, and we expect to read "you die," but, also, and what I don't think I quite pulled off, I wanted the reader to think about You as an audience character, so You dying is, in a way, a vision of one's own death. If the perspective worked more effectively, I think this would create a space to consider victims in an empathetic fashion, rather than victims as other, the "there but for the grace of God go I" approach. I don't think I pulled it off and I still wonder if the Anthropologist was also there with You and a witness to the horrible event, but "what I have written, I have written," as Pilate once said.

Pompo's last words are inspired by something Roxane Gay said about internet trolls on NPR: she pities them. In this horrible act, I wanted to reduce Pompo to a despicable, but pitiful character. "Love me," he says, when what he has done will forever keep that love from him. The final line in the script of the play is inspired by the end of American Psycho, where Patrick Bateman looks at a sign that reads "This is not an exit." and the book ends. (While writing, I was thinking about the oddity that "exist" and "exits" are anagrams.) Once I'd walked the play out of the theatre, I thought, well, I have to end with a play on that, so "the curtain does not fall." I also meant for this to show that such terrible acts occur in real life as well as fiction, and that we cannot avoid them simply by closing the book or turning off the television.

So that's the end of "Waiting for Gadot." I think I have an idea for Pasha and Pandrio that I might write one day and it will probably touch on Fred and Andrew's stories as well (Fred's tale, "A Ghost Story," still seems to be something I might eventually get to write), and I want to return to Carl and Selena as well. When it comes to Pompo, I can only think to myself, what happened to his invisible or imaginary dog, Great?