"Waiting for Gadot" (complete)

I know clicking through a blog can be annoying, so I've stitched together all the posts that made up "Waiting for Gadot" here. I do think the best way to read the play is to read each scene/interlude and then, before moving on, reading the follow-up behind the scenes "autopsy" post where I reflect on what I've written so I've linked to these in between each scene or interlude.

[Read introduction post to play here.]

“Waiting for Gadot”

A play

Scene One

Open scene.

Curtain up on a room in a library. Carl is seated in a chair at a desk and is alone in room. Appears disheveled and largely incapable of productive human interaction. You enters the room and sits at a seat some distance from Carl. You removes study materials and begins to prepare for an exam.

Carl: I haven't written in a while, so I'm not sure if I can come up with an interesting way to address this at all, but I've been thinking about it and this is probably the best I'm going to get. [You looks up and appears confused as to whom Carl is speaking.] So, anyway, in many various relaunches, revamps, reboots... [No pause, but as Carl speaks, enter the Anthropologist who appears to be Carl in a meager disguise of fake glasses attached to a nose with mustache. This is over his real glasses and mustache.] ...of superhero characters, you find that the writer attempts to create a new-ness to it all... To make it cool. And they do this through sports... [Carl trails off.]

The Anthropologist: Relaunches, revamps, reboots? Really? Be a writer or be a poet. You can't focus on the language and the plot—you're just not good enough. [You appears struck by the resemblance between Carl and the Anthropologist. Facial expression is suspended between confusion, indifference, and annoyance.]

Carl: I can't remember if Morrison did it in his Action Comics run...

TA: [As Carl speaks, looks toward audience and begins speaking...] Oh, I get it...

Carl: but I know Straczynski did it in Superman: Earth One and man, there have to be some Batman comics that do this...

TA: [Gestures towards the glazing over eyes of the audience] C'mon, you idiot, you're losing them!

C: I was wondering if Wonder Woman was taken in this direction...

TA: [Muttered, as Carl speaks.] Good, no pun on "wondering" and "Wonder!"

C: ...would she play in a men's league or a women's league. [You puts away study materials. Facial expression now posed between exasperation and resignation.] Admittedly this is a combination of interests for me: comics and sports as well as gender concerns. I was once struck by a conversation between two sports anchors, one male and one female... [TA feigns a yawn] ...where the man was discussing the importance of women's sports in connection with his co-anchor and the woman pointed out that plenty of women have an interest in men's sports. That assuming a woman interested in sports would be particularly interested in women's sports was its own bizarre form of sexism. [TA appears to become aware of You for the first time.] The fact that women's sports are commonly considered inferior notwithstanding. [Carl pauses for thought.]

TA [to You]: I fear this is one of those plays where you wait the whole time for something to happen, for someone to show up, and nothing happens. But, unfortunately? Fortunately? This guy, this writer [word said with disgust, TA may feign typing at a computer in a comedic fashion] has no skill or passion or ability or well, shit, I'm doing his thing [points thumb to Carl] of finding the right word aloud instead of just editing... Let's just say he's uncomfortable with dialogue. [You just stares. Carl has begun speaking again during the second half of this interaction.]

C: Wonder Woman is what, really? Is she a wonder in itself or a wonder as a woman? I want to say the former, but in many ways doesn't the former make her also the latter? Is that wrong? Is it sexist? [Carl removes a paper plate and a Sharpie from his backpack.] It is sex-based reasoning, yes. But look at me! [Carl motions to his mass; he is fairly overweight.] Every woman is stronger and fitter than I am, but the strongest men are stronger... [Carl begins drawing a face on the paper plate. His artistic skills are not strong. Below the face which is likely simply two dots for eyes and a line for a mouth, he writes "Selena."] ...than the strongest women. I saw Elena Delle Donne discussing what I'm trying to grasp here—how she couldn't beat NBA players in one-on-one basketball, but she's going to trounce most men... [He places the plate marked Selena in the air and it sits there hovering in no apparently possible way.] ...Most every guy who even played in college...

Selena [a figure in shadow now appears behind the paper plate]: Treading on thin ice here, honey.

C: If Wonder Woman plays a sport, she's the best, right? She can beat LeBron, Brady, or Gretsky... So is that what she does? Does she merely stand as a wonder on the court, an astounding athlete? In the real world, yes, she could do that. Would she be beaten by Superman? [Carl pouts and looks at Selena. He speaks to her as a pause in his thought.] One of the things that really bothered me about The Big Bang Theory was the way it made it seem like all nerds were interested in questions like these. Would she? I. Don't. Care. The answer is just whatever a writer decides... [at the mention of writer TA nods his head] So let's just consider Wonder Woman in absentia, rather than debate which superhero is stronger or better or more powerful... [Carl looks away from Selena and returns to his initial thought.] If Wonder Woman is real, of course she could dominate every sport, but as a character, a fiction, should she?

S: Crash! [The paper plate falls to the table as if it has broken through a layer of thin ice and into the lake. The shadowy figure is nowhere to be found.]

C [to the paper plate now on table in front of him]: Don't be like that! [Looks away and continues contemplative speaking.] Should she? Wonder Woman as wonder or Wonder Woman as woman... Not as in lesser, but as in opportunity. Opportunity in at least two ways: (1) Wonder Woman draws attention to whatever it is of which she is a part and (2) she can exemplify everything society has decided women cannot, should not, or may not do. So you have her play women's sports and you are arguing the importance of having and supporting women's sports. You have her playing sports with other women and you have the chance to show the wonder of women playing that sport... [Carl makes a face.]

TA [to You, indifferent to Carl speaking]: You know, I'm dead. I think. I mean it's a bit unclear, because of some writer [awful expression]. Maybe I'm a vampire? Wait, aren't the undead like... Dead? More dead than alive people? I mean you're not dead, as in alive, but I'm much more dead than that, which makes me undead? Color me unconvinced!

C: What sport? [Scratches head.] Anyway, maybe I should explain why I'm focused on this. [He picks up the paper plate again and replaces it in the air where it hovers.] Wonder Woman comes out in a week and I'm wondering if she will play a sport in the film.

S: That's not the only thing you are wondering about! [Face looks down below table.]

C: It's set back during World War 1, so you might think that'd make any sort of sports element unlikely and I'll give you that, it will, but I'm reading about Wonder Woman right now... [Carl removes a book from his backpack. It is The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore.] ...and her creator William Moulton Marston was a football player in high school, although he gave it up in college. [Carl looks to Selena again.] Funnily enough, Wonder Woman was created in 1941 during World War 2, so to set the movie in World War 1 predates her first publication, but Marston's time at college led up to WW1. What if Wonder Woman were to reflect her creator, playing Amazonian sports in Themyscira and then trying to find her niche in man (and woman's) world (the emphasis is both genders, not just one!) [Carl smiles wryly at his last parenthetical.] Maybe she plays football or baseball. Basketball was still a new sport, invented in 1891...

TA: Writer, you just looked that up! [mimes typing again]

C: ...but she could be an early player of the sport! A montage of Wonder Woman, played by Gal Gadot, as people wonder at her skills in every sport!

TA: There's that pun!

S [to Carl]: You just want to wonder at Gadot running down a field or jumping for a ball!

C [blushing]: She's a superhero... [hesitates] ...heroine... [hesitates]

TA [to You]: There's a scene in Moonlight like this. It's better there. Everything in Moonlight is better than this.

C: ...hero... in an action movie! She certainly doesn't have to play sports to be running around and jumping. [He looks to Selena.] The real you isn't made so easily jealous!

TA [to You]: See, she's the manifestation of all his uncertainty about his relationship. What are you studying? [The Anthropologist gestures towards You's bookbag where study materials were returned.] Any psychology? I'm wondering if this is Freudian... She's the mental projection of Carl's girlfriend Selena in Carl's mind... Ironically, she's his woman side! I've always been uncomfortable with the idea of men and women both having a masculine and feminine side, because this builds up these gender concepts into concretized distinctions. Men who act a certain way shouldn't be tapping into some inner woman, just like tomboys shouldn't be considered less female, unless either identifies in that manner. [He notes You's growing indifference.] Or you don't study psychology...

S [to You]: It couldn't be that he's just not that interesting!

TA: ...but anyway, inside a person is the projection of other people, different personas that, in this case, Carl can imagine if he wishes, but that ultimately say more about him than these other people. Thus Selena is not jealous—Carl is guilty about his lust for other women.

S [nodding in agreement]: And I mean, seriously, she's a movie star no less! But I have to play my part in his head.

TA: Um, so that was more like the real Selena talking, but we're all just inside some writer's head anyway! [pounds table]

C: I'm waiting to see, I'm waiting for Gadot to see.

TA: I'm waiting for some gad-damn writer to finish with it all!

S [speaking as a paper plate]: I'm waiting to be thrown away.

You looks around the stage waiting for a moment of piece in which to resume (or should we say begin?) studying.

End scene.

[Read autopsy of "Scene One" here.] 

Open Interlude 

[Enter Pompo in front of curtain. Pompo appears quite similar to Carl but is wearing a shirt with the word Pompo on it and a cartoon version of his face, which somehow exaggerates his features to be unlike Carl's.]

Pompo: What if I am merely language? "I am merely" [Pompo makes air-quotes around these spoken words.] are just words. Just words, just words, the meanings abound. Which is the point of language. Meaning without certainty, a lack of fidelity. Adrienne Rich, yo Adrian [Pompo attempts a poor Sylvester Stallone accent], once wrote in a poem, "I dreamed you were a poem,/[Pompo makes a slash mark with his arm to symbolize the line break.] I say, a poem I wanted to show someone..." And you want to show people poetry because you want to see what they make of it... As in they make it, just as you did, only different. The sentence before in the poem, "You've kissed my hair/[Pompo runs his hands over his hair.] to wake me.", it becomes more important later. Did you know there was an Adrianne as Wonder Woman? Or what makes her Wonder Woman? Does she need a reader, a viewer, an observer? See, when we get away from language, it gets a bit more complicated! [Pompo makes an exasperated smile. He looks out into the audience and seems to focus on specific people.] You know what I mean. Adrianne Palicki played Wonder Woman in a pilot that never became a TV show. Anyway, if we were merely language, you would know that I've spoken of an A-dri-enne with two Es and two Ns, the poet, an A-dri-an, with a whole lot less letters, the girlfriend of Rocky Balboa, and finally, A-dri-anne, a combination of the two with two As and two Ns, the actress. Words, though, we are not! [Pompo looks down at his T-shirt emblazoned with his name. He once again looks out into the audience.] Are we? [He points to a person in the audience.] Do you think not? [The man in the audience stands up. He is wearing a hat and smoking a cigarette.]

Man: No. I think, therefore I am. [The Anthropologist peaks from behind the curtain.]

The Anthropologist: Oh noes, one of the writers! [He fearfully retreats back behind the camera. The smoking man approaches the stage. As he walks by an older man with a cane, he also stands, and follows the first man.]

Man 2: Such ego! It's you and only you that'll you'll ever know!

Pompo: You is a word! [There is a shimmer behind Pompo and a presence seems to form into the shape of a man. It makes as if to speak.]

Ghost: Yes, it is certainly that, but what about I?

Pompo: I is a letter. Is are hard to distinguish, when written, from lowercase Ls. And let's remember that. Adrianne, Adrian, Adrienne are not so hard to distinguish because they are more than words, more than names. [Pompo pauses as the two men approach him on the stage.] Wonder Woman is also more than words—she is not simply "wonder" or "woman" or some magical combination of the two. [The two men have passed Pompo and are pulling back a part of the curtain.]

Man 1: Okay, you old son of a bitch!

Man 2: Language! [Behind the curtain is a man at an easel. He is wearing a cheap mask with the face of H. G. Peter on it in black and white.]

Pompo: Wonder Woman is, first and foremost, not language like me—words on a page, a name on a shirt—she is art, drawing, an image! [A light shows on the easel and a drawing of Wonder Woman can be seen.] But what is lost here? That [He points at the drawing.] is Wonder Woman. Does that mean that you [He points at a random member of the audience.] are not? [He points to himself.] I am not? The words, the poetry, is made as we read it—that [pointing again to the easel] is not. And I wonder, is something lost? Behind those colors, that face, her eyes... A possibility. A potential.

Ghost: Does something die? [Visible behind the man with the easel, as Man 1 and Man 2 hold up the curtain, The Anthropologist, is running towards the stage. As he nears the curtain and enters the light showing on the easel he calls out.]

The Anthropologist: Writers, the all of them writers! (Even the ones who pretend to be artists!) [He jumps off the stage and continues running.] So many writers with their words, their directions, their commands. What's a man to do? All these words take away my choice, leaving me only one option! [He approaches an exit sign, but runs through an American flag that hangs from above the exit.] "I am nearly" are just words and I am nearly gone. [He runs out, now draped in the flag.]

End Interlude 

[Read autopsy of "Interlude" here.]

Scene Two

Open scene.

Curtain up on a book store. Carl sits at a chair with a foot stool he has used as a small table, stacked high with various comic book collections. He is reading one, holding it carefully in his hands perhaps a little too close to shut to be able to effectively see the artwork. He appears afraid of damaging the spine of the book and turns pages in an awkward, yet meticulous way.

Carl: I still damage some books so much that I actually buy them. [He looks at the stack in front of him.] Some. You can see with how many I read that cutting it down to some certainly helps the wallet. It allows me to keep those fat stacks. [Carl mimes sitting on a big wallet by raising one side of his body from his seat and patting his lower back.] It doesn’t help the ass though! I’ve always been a fan of the thin wallet, even with what that means as far as making ends meet. But… I’m rambling…

 You know, it’s not really my fault that I don’t pay for everything! [He looks down at the book he is reading. We cannot quite make out what it is, but perhaps can see Wonder Woman or her colors in different panels.] You know, DC has released what is it, four different origins of Wonder Woman in the last few years? And that isn’t counting a comic about the Amazons before she was around and a change to her very creation in yet another book! Not exactly that I’m complaining, I just can’t afford it all. I mean, do you ever see me doing anything for work these days? Two female cartoonists did stories of Diana’s youth that are both quite intriguing in their own ways, but the men who redid Wonder Woman did what men do: they got into a pissing contest.

[A door behind Carl opens and Pompo enters the room with the four men who joined him from the audience. They sit at a table with chairs positioned around it which they all move in order to view Carl as he speaks to the air around him.]

Carl: The problem with comics is so much just the problems with the world: capitalism, egos, people to bitumen, my dad always says “Another day, another fifty cents,” something he blames on inflation, only wouldn’t that be deflation?

Andrew: What is he on about?

Pompo: He’s making about as much sense as usual.

Carl: In response to Ultimate Marvel, a popular set of comics at DC’s rival that imagined their heroes as new characters without long stories varied in quality over decades that must be read to understand them, DC created two of their own imprints: All-Star and Earth One. All-Star Wonder Woman was discussed and never did quite get made, while Earth One is where the measuring of manhood began. Greg Rucka, a comics writer known for his work with female characters including Wonder Woman herself, was promised the book, only to find it given to popular, trippy rockstar writer Grant Morrison. [Pompo feels his head, running his hand over his hair.] Greg walks out on DC, probably vowing never to work for them again, in a Taylor Swift-like way. Obviously he comes back in the end. [Carl looks down at the book in his hands.] Grant isn’t a horrible fit for Wonder Woman, but his version of feminism is, let’s say, very showy.

Pandrio: Feminism.

Carl: [Carl is still looking down at the comic in his hands.] Wonder Woman’s invisible plane is supposedly yonic in Morrison’s book, a literal interpretation of female-focused comic, she flies around in a woman’s genitals. It’s a bit odd… You know, when I’m driving, even though I always name my car after a woman, I can’t help but think of the phallic nature of the gear shift, the turn signal, the wipers dial… Inside my car almost feels like what’s outside myself… [Carl coughs.]

Pandrio: I think all of my writing, all of my stories, are about sex.

Carl: There’s a bad joke that driving, working all these knobs, is just practice for another kind of work.

Pandrio: I once wrote in a story that the only thing the narrator loved anymore was his car. And then I realized that that might be true for me.

Pasha: If only…

Carl: Steve Trevor, Wonder Woman’s love interest, is a black man in Morrison’s book. I think the character is written well and the added diversity is interesting, but it still seems like a way to be hip and make a stir and it plays on a Morrison-ian flaw. Black and white, man and woman--Morrison seems to play too much into these dualities. Another character he wrote in the previous century is a mixture of a white man and a black woman, as if in this combination we have the all of human existence… [Andrew yawns.] If you put it like that, you see his flaw pretty cleanly.

Pandrio: Not that my stories were pornography. There’s very little sex in… Just, it’s all fantasies. It’s all fetish. It was a way of finding myself. There’s almost always a couple at the center--the moral is almost always “stay together.”

Carl: Years pass, DC brings Rucka back by offering him Wonder Woman after a line-wide revamp. Now he gets to tell his Earth One story in the actual comic. In the interim, another character has been revised; Etta Candy, rather than Steve Trevor, is black in Rucka’s book. This seems odd if only because he uses the established black female character Amanda Waller. Both women are shapely, could be seen as positive body image models, and, unfortunately, at times come across as interchangeable.

 Rucka’s book also seems to make a claim of ego: this new origin is tied with a story that recounts how all previous origins were false. This one must stand in as the true origin. It seems a weird claim, a 24 issue story that rejects a thousand other comics and seventy-five years of history. It includes a number of Rucka characters and becomes a celebration of his work in a sense. Throwing a bunch of different pieces together from his various DC works to see how they all work in one place.

Fred [in a ghostly voice]: Sounds familiar.

Carl: The book ultimately redeems itself, at least in my eyes. My eyes? [He looks up from the book. For the first time Carl seems aware of the audience. Suddenly he seems uncertain. He is like a paranoid man speaking to himself who learns that there have been people listening in all along.] What does it matter what I think? [He looks back down at the comic.]

Pasha: He looks back down at the comic. Hm… My work is often devoid of characters, or at least names, shadowy figures lie at the corner of the eye, the edge of vision, in the outskirts and far reaches of the campfire. My stories occur in the early morning, during staticky commercial breaks on the radio or illegal television stations. They end with the alarm clock, launching us out of nightmares.

[Carl fidgets in his seat like someone attempting to read with too much noise around or too much thoughts on the mind.]

Pandrio: So much of it was an expression of my hatred of a certain type of masculinity and use a romanticization of a certain type of woman.

Pasha: Woman…

Pandrio: I try to imagine writing a story that isn’t about desire. Lovecraft-ian terror. Like there’s an emotional necessity, take out the sex, plagued by the giant monsters of life, and our characters must go insane and hope for death.

Andrew [lighting a cigarette]: Bull shit. [Carl turns a page.] It’s all bullshit. Samuel R. Delany wrote a Wonder Woman issue once. Think about that, a gay black sci-fi writer wrote Wonder Woman in the early seventies. Ron Silliman would be proud.

Fred [ghostly but also groggily, speaking over Andrew]: Not making sense. Knot. May. King. Cents.

Andrew: It asks certain questions. Should Diana have powers? Doesn’t giving her powers make her not of this world?

Pasha: Not of this world, the point of fiction.

Carl [looking up at the audience, a new clarity in his eyes]: Wonder Woman, like Marvel’s Thor, frequently includes gods as characters. Of course pagan gods don’t really draw up the same stirring of emotions. And yet, the odd feeling of reading a character interacting with deities of immense power. Of creative potential. The superb oddity of meeting your maker.

Pandrio: When I created Carl he was a stand-in for me in a lot of ways. [Carl looks particularly uncomfortable.] Selena was a dream of a common language, one which I could actually use to talk to women.

Pasha: Women…

Pompo [removing a short pencil and notebook and turning to Pandrio]: Selena now is simply paper, like pages in a book. What does that mean?

Pandrio: Selena was fantasy that I found in fear. The original story involved some form of devotion Carl had… An over-devotion. I flirted with his end…

Andrew: That scene in The Omen where the woman says how much she cares for Damian as she kills herself…

Fred: That’s chilling, even for a ghost!

Carl: We think we understand this. It’s a common turn of phrase. So familiar that we refuse to acknowledge the true metaphysics of it. The grasp of such thought… and sure, comics never have to be self-serious, but the connections to mythology are obvious. We don’t consider the change in tense--the way that mythologies are never written in the present except as fictions… [Carl looks musingly down again. He removes from his bag a tape recorder, a baggie with marijuana, and a small bowl pipe.] But how vehemently atheist do I sound?

Pandrio: That’s the spirit! Exterminate the brutes of belief!

Pasha: Only a soulless person deals in absolutes.

Pandrio: Fuck you, Obi Wan! [turning to Pompo] In some ways, Selena was the most recent step in a constant walking off of my early stories. The vague misogyny of them, when I knew nothing of women, but rather of what men thought they knew of women. The disparaging inaccuracies that they were delighted to share of women… Growing up I… [he pauses, seems to look like a person unsure of continuing…]

Pasha: Growing up, once I realized it, I almost always identified with women. And not only that, but I hated men. I hated their humor, their toxicity, their complicity, their lack of multiplicity, the double standards that were always subliminally viewed in their logic. I hated the way men constantly felt progressive movements as a sort of loss. ...

Fred [interrupting, but Pasha does not react and keeps speaking]: You know...

Pasha: The way jokes about women voting were considered funny and not deeply disturbing.

It was a way to come to whiteness as well, as this was the masculinity I knew as a white man and as an observer of white men.

Fred: You know...

Pasha: The way no one seemed to remember that their fathers hung black men from trees. It was impossible not to hate your gender and race--they were easily, and simply toxic. And are. And unfortunately likely will be… [Pasha looks wistfully towards Pandrio who seems vaguely discomforted by his words.]

Fred [loudly, as if to speak over Pasha, who coincidentally has stopped speaking]: You know, that is why I killed myself!

Pandrio: Because you were one of us or one of them?

Andrew: Because he was always talked over and interrupted.

Carl [crinkling the bag as if to signal to the audience that he is about to partake in drugs]: Have you ever thought about how “You can’t smoke here” lines in television and movies are almost always presented simply to be walked back immediately? It’s like progress in America. We create these beautiful images of heaven, and then we walk back into hell. [He begins to pack the bowl and reaches in a pocket for a lighter.] Thomas Jefferson writes the Declaration of Independence, but doesn’t have the forethought to keep his lover and children from being sold at the block when he dies. So much of the work of Lincoln’s country already undone within little more of a decade, when Hayes gives it all up--back to the Democrats it goes. Which then meant plantation owners trying to hold onto what was left of slavery any way they could. How the world changes; Republicans had won the war!

Andrew [audibly sighs, loudly]: Politics.

Carl [speaking intermittently while hitting the pipe]: Women go to work in the 1940s only to be thrown out of jobs in the ‘50s. As if just to show that a step forward need not be permanent. And it’s a joke of a transition, sure, but Wonder Woman stands as this empowered female utopian thinker from a place without where, Themyscira, a place which, in some versions, exists in a perpetual stalemate against the very god of war. As if we were always so close to the end of conflict--makes you think of the forthcoming movie and Gal Gadot marching around a world fighting the very war to end all wars… Wonder Woman is ripped from this mythological utopia which should be probably Greek or Mediterranean above anything else, and she’s thrown into this international conflict, and inevitably draped in the colors of America, once again pulled back to the American mean, the dark reality after we wake up from the country’s dream. [Carl hits the tape recorder, but we cannot see if he is hitting stop or start.]

Andrew: This is not an exit.

End scene.

[Read autopsy of "Scene Two" here.]

Open Interlude 

[A few minutes pass behind the curtain. Then it is pulled open by someone on the other side. Pompo comes through the curtain. He now has a shaved head. He feels his head repeatedly during the monologue, as if this is a new style for him.] 

Pompo: I've been thinking a lot about hair lately. You might be able to guess why. Anyway, there's a certain... Don't laugh! There's a certain politics of hair... And I don't mean this in the sense of why I really like how hair becomes a metaphor for expression in Lady Gaga's song... "Hair." Har har har—don't laugh! Think about it! Hair is important, hair matters, and hair says things. If we're talking about Wonder Woman, let's think about her hair: there's this, well, I think it's a joke. Laugh, it's okay now. There's this joke that Superman's hair does all kinds of dumb things... Sorry, judgmental. All kinds of... silly things. It's so strong, how does he even shave? Laugh. It's okay now. (This telling you when I'm joking bit is funnier when Vonnegut does it... I'm kidding. I'm not kidding. I'm kidding that I'm kidding—a line from Das Racist, "We're not joking; just joking, we are joking; just joking, we're not joking.") My dad says to me yesterday in connection with a commercial for the film: "I don't remember Wonder Woman having super-strength..." I want to say "That's because she's a woman," just another expression of a misogyny that I admittedly have perhaps largely created in my view of him. (Later, I will find out that he probably thinks that because Wonder Woman's super strength was basically written away during the seventies. Delany refused to write the character with super strength because it just made her less like real women.) My father and I have a joke that physically our only difference is our hair color—if I dye my hair [he begins to rub his hand over his scalp again] I could go into work and do his job and who'd really know the difference? And people call me his brother all the time, so who knows? [Pompo puts a hand to his chin. He looks reflective. You can see that he doesn't really love this train of thought.] So our hair separates us physically and metaphysically we are so different that he's convinced that if he calls the sky blue, I'd say it's green... Our hair and we agree about oh so very little... [Pompo clears his throat. He looks uncomfortable, but if it is based on his hair cut or on his subject matter, we cannot be so sure. He seems to be cold on stage but does not shiver.] So... Do I keep saying "so"? Er... Wonder Woman, her hair, it's just a few scribbles on paper until, of course, suddenly, it isn't! Wonder Woman's hair becomes corporeal—can I get an etymology there? Am I saying "the hair made flesh"? Does that make sense? Anyway, so, [sighs] repetition, her hair is Lynda Carter's hair. Her hair is the hair of a million trick-or-treaters the world over, her hair is a paid cosplayer's hair who doesn't really like comics that much, but still becomes her. These are different people with different hair styled in different ways for different reasons. Do these differences in their hair underlie the same stark division as between me and my father? Hair har hair. Of course not; you can laugh. But what of Lynda Carter? She makes a commitment to a role and becomes (for a somewhat indefinite length of time) Wonder Woman through her acting, but, in another sense, Wonder Woman becomes her because the character is forever tied to her outfit, her lasso, her performance, her image, and, yes, her body and hair. The hair made flesh. Maybe that was right. Halloween costumes mean something completely different to everyone—reminds me of me and my father—one girl might want to grow up to be Wonder Woman, another might want to make a political statement about girls being powerful, yet another just to impress a boy or girl. A cosplayer could fall either way along this spectrum—a labor of love, a lifetime allegiance to the character, or a temporary acting job, not meaning all that much on its own. [He looks to the audience.] I see you seeing me and thinking "He's losing the track of it." This might have been the part of this race where the hare takes a nap and the tortoise takes the lead, but let's wake up the hair, get back to the hair—I'm struck with the notion of the hair made flesh being just a bunny rabbit—how do these various Wonder Women style their hair? How should they? Doesn't it seem a bit contrary to Wonder Woman's character that we even ask a question like this? "You have to do this a certain way," Wonder Woman hears this and lassos the speaker forcing him or her to speak truth, and she sings along as they say... [Pompo removes a tape recorder from his pocket and clicks a button.] 

Tape Recorder: [Lo-fi recording of Lady Gaga's "Hair" plays] I just wanna be myself/And I want you to love me for who I am/I just wanna be myself/And I want you to know, I am my hair. 

P: But note the pronouns. I, my, possessive. Lynda Carter's hair, Gal Gadot's hair, millions of women's heads of hair (that's a strange image), each different and yet represented by the same few lines sketched on a piece of paper. Think of the pressure H. G. Peter would feel if he were a time traveler sent back in time to draw those lines... Yet what is the pressure? Here's the crux of my point. [Pompo holds his head.] Why can't her hair change? Is it as strong as Superman's? If Diana Prince gets cancer will it fall out like my stepmother's did? Does she wear it long and then decide it's not worth the work and cut it short for a few years? Why can't it be blue this week, blonde the next? Where's the surprise? Shouldn't her hair make us wonder? [Pompo pauses. He begins pacing the stage.] 

P: I have visions of Wonder Woman's hair, but I'm no artist; it's still tied to the hair made flesh. Why is Laverne Cox's hair darker than she usually wears it when she poses as Wonder Woman? Is she her hair there or is she alienated? A part of her taken away and given to the character. I see an image of Amber Rose as Wonder Woman: she wears a red, white, and blue hoodie over most of her face, but it doesn't cover all of her hair, somewhat like mine... [Pompo reaches up to his head again; he begins to blush.] She claims it completely. I am drawn back to high school and a classmate dressed like Wonder Woman at lunch on Halloween and why was I so taken with her? Did she look more or less like herself? I can't remember what all she had done with her hair. [Pompo paces the stage.] Slow and steady... Slow and steady... Without the hair, I guess that's what I am. [Pompo exits.]

End Interlude

[Read autopsy of "Interlude" here.]

And now, the feature presentation…

Open Feature

[Curtain rises on a campus office. The Anthropologist is seated at a chair with his feet rested on a coffee table. He is not wearing his disguise from before and may be mistaken for Carl. The American flag is still draped around his shoulders like a blanket. He is furiously writing.]

The Anthropologist: Oh, um… [He looks down at his hands and his writing tablet. Unconvincingly, he speaks...] This isn’t what it looks like? Look, I’m the show man! I’m the filmmaker! All directors hate writers, but ideas, they come. I don’t have a better technology than written language quite yet. I’m not Justin Timberlake! [He appears to notice the continued use of exclamation points and clears his throat.] Anyway, we know what you are here for. [He gets up and walks to the side of the stage and begins to manipulate a machine offstage. A screen, similar to a film screen, slowly comes down from the roof.]

TA [as his head is eclipsed by the screen]: How do I look? [The screen places a black and white filter over the stage. The Anthropologist walks out from behind the screen, briefly getting caught in the side of the curtain on the edge of the stage. As he becomes visible again, the American flag around his shoulders is still black and white, as if changed by the filter.] How would our view of the past be different if black and white film never happened? [He picks up the flag with one hand and concentrates on it with his gaze.] And it’s such an odd thing, really. What’s the physics of it? And I’ve heard some people dream almost exclusively without color… What does black and white mean? Obviously age and a seriousness, I’d say. And with age comes death, so it all becomes funereal… Sometimes I think about current films set in the past, you know, stupendous period pieces... I think they are somehow surreal, popping with such sharp color. Something seems wrong. And contemporary films that use black and white somehow also seem false. It’s so funny to me, you know, theater was always in color. Ha, what if the remake of Psycho also used chocolate sauce for blood? Hm… Let’s think about Wonder Woman in a World War running out into battle in black and white. Does she stand for less or more? [He looks up from the flag and seems deep in thought. After a few moments he walks up to the front of the stage where a small box is visible. He begins speaking as he starts to bend down towards this box.] Sometimes I think Hollywood did something to America, damned it to forever see itself in black and white, rather than variants of color, to focus on those contrasts… [He makes a disgusting face.] Oh my god, I’m writing… [He hits a button on the box and jumps off the stage, running once again out of the theater.]

The screen now shows an empty campus office in black and white. Words begin to form on the screen as if being typed. This begins with two quotation marks: “” The letters and words that follow then become the quote.]

Screen: “You can see all of this from a great height” [Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” begins playing lightly in the background, midway through the song, as Thom Yorke sings “from a great height, from a great height.” As the message continues, the sound of typing can be heard and grows louder.]

Screen: “You can see all of this from a great height and zoom out until it is no longer visible or you can zoom in on the writing hand or the face of the dead, zoom in until it’s no longer a face. Or you can click on something and drag it. You can adjust the color” [A ripple goes through the screen and the stage appears briefly back in color before returning to black and white as the next sentence is typed.]

Screen: “You can see all of this from a great height and zoom out until it is no longer visible or you can zoom in on the writing hand or the face of the dead, zoom in until it’s no longer a face. Or you can click on something and drag it. You can adjust the color or you can make it black and white.” - Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station [The typing has grown quite loud, but ends as the message is completed.]

The message stays on screen for a moment. Suddenly the door to the office opens at the rear of the stage--the music and the message disappear in unison. In walks a man in his forties who looks vaguely like Jude Law.

Bill [to self]: I am the lie detector! [He takes off his hat and places it on the hat rack by his desk. He then sits down with his back to the audience. He mutters again...] I am the lie detector! [He removes papers from his desk and begins grading them, as I should be.] I am-- [His outburst is interrupted by a quick knock at the door. The back of Bill’s head appears quizzical, unsure of this new information as he continues to speak in confusion.] the lie detector? [A young woman enters the room, appearing somewhat like Alessia Cara. She wears large metal bracelets that appear heavy.]

Olive: Mr. Marston! Mr. Marston! [Bill jumps at his name each time.] I needed to talk to you about the extension on my paper.

Bill: Ms. Byrne, you were not at the lecture today--I had assumed you took that time to complete your work.

Olive: I was, I was! But I realized I had to change my conclusions!

Bill: Your cun clue shuns? [He seems atypically focused on the word.]

Olive: Yes, I realized that my assumptions about dominance and submission were based in large part on forced servitude. I had not considered the loving loss of one’s freedom, the way one gains a family and its needs. [Bill increasingly becomes agitated.] To give oneself up entirely, to become not-one with another… or more.

Bill: And in changing this conclusion, how does that impact the premise of your paper?

Olive: It causes ripples…

Bill: Ripples?

Olive: ...that run back through my consideration of gender. Gender as play--in either sense, as fun or theater!--when power becomes simply performance, gender, it finds itself all the more fluid. [As she speaks, above Bill on the screen an image appears of a thought bubble. In this bubble subsequent images appear.] I’ve become interested in the image of a man submitting himself to a woman, giving up himself in order to become one with her. [A whip appears in the bubble.] That is essentially what the jewelry [she fondles her bracelets as she speaks], ring is, [a diamond replaces the whip] a symbol of the man minimizing the importance of his work, a bowing down, metaphorically on one knee if you will. A giving up, an acceptance. [The diamond is replaced by an acceptance letter to university.]

Bill: Yes, well, and do you only consider man?

Olive [as she speaks, the letters appear on the screen in a similar fashion to the epigraph]: Yes, well [Olive mirrors Bill’s inflection], not even girls want to be girls as long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. [Bill becomes even more agitated than before.]

Bill: Wha--? Those are…

Olive: But I think, I think actually, that the archetype itself is the problem. That there isn’t a way we, and I certainly mean me and you [she gestures to Bill] should have to act. We are not simply statistics, we need not reflect medians, meanings, and modes.

Bill: Those are my words! [He gets up and moves toward his hat. As he reaches it, he removes a folded up piece of paper from within the bill. He looks over the paper and then turns to face Olive and the audience with a face of fury.] Who sent you?

Olive: I am here for myself. Or in some way, you sent me, or your office did, your position. I am here to ask for another extension.

Bill: Ex ten shun? No, you have stolen my words, who sent you?

Olive: Your words?

Bill: I am the lie detector. I will determine your true purpose.

Olive: Mr. Marston, I was inspired in part by your opening lecture in which you spoke of the standards our society has set for women, but you spoke then…

Bill [muttering]: Someone must have seen me writing. Why am I always writing? Only the suchest of idiots write! [Raising his voice.] They rejected my machine but hired you to come here and what? Drive me insane! [He enunciates the last word with emotion.]

Olive: In say in? [Bill begins to study Olive in detail.] Mr. Marston, you spoke then of the Platonic form of woman, the ideal woman, you said “Lilith or Eve?” you weren’t sure, you were being playful. I was reviewing my notes while I thought I was finalizing my paper…

Bill: I am the lie detector… and you… do not appear to be lying…

Olive: Lying?

Bill: I cannot know without my machine.

Olive: You said, were she real, oh how we would wonder over that Woman.

Bill: I must test you with my machine. [He opens a cabinet and removes a machine with wires coming off it.] Roll up your sleeves.

Olive: I thought, but what would be so wonderful about her then? She is wonder because we cannot conceive, we cannot know, she is inconceivable and that is the wonder. The unknown -- faith, love, and faith.

Bill: I must know the truth!

Olive: Can you not just believe in anything? [Bill moves across the table and begins to set up his machine.] Is it really so hard to imagine? A similar thought. There are only so many words. Monkeys, typewriters, and Shakespeare. You are not a snowflake. [Bill places a blood pressure cuff on her arm.] You get that she never comes right? That is the wonder.

Bill: This may feel slightly uncomfortable.

Olive: If I’m already lying, shouldn’t I lie down? [She gestures to the couch on the other side of the stage.] Think about it, you can’t even trust yourself. You think, “Did I have these thoughts before?” Did I share them? Who am I? Give yourself away. [She stands up, letting the cuff fall to the floor.] At least in one way I will be lying! [She moves to the couch and lies down.]

Bill: But if it’s true, belief, faith, god… If it’s true it’s god. How many words? The permutations. Absolute proof of the existence of the divine. I am the lie detector. Yes, lie down. [He looks to Olive on the couch, then he turns back to the audience.] Aside: But I’ve always been so sure of my life. [He looks desperate as he speaks.] This could make it all come down. [He nearly sobs…] What do I do?

Olive: Mr. Marston, let’s see your lie detector, let’s see your machine!

Bill: I am the lie detector. I am… machine? [The curtain unceremoniously falls over the screen.]

End Feature

[Read autopsy of "Feature" here.]

Open Interlude

[Pompo walks out from behind the curtain. He is holding a glass of wine and a flashlight. The lighting remains low as he begins to speak.]

Pompo: Last night the power went out. It made me think about how a lot of the superpowers we think are really dumb could actually have been really quite useful for people for thousands of years. [He sips from the wine glass.] For example, one of the nonsensical aspects of the powers of the Iron Fist, a Marvel character, is that he can concentrate his life force into his fist and—this part is a bit more typical and useful, at least in a comic book, it becomes near invulnerable; he can punch bullets, block an incoming sword, he can do anything with it—but, also, full of his life energy, his hand glows! [In a derisive voice] So cool! [Moving back to his regular tone of voice] When you think about in detail, though, you see that this is in fact quite cool. The power of fire for most humans in our history was the power of light, in addition to the power of warmth and, possibly, the power to inflict pain, that we more likely associate it with today. The Iron Fist carries that power of light which brings with it, rhymingly, the power of sight, in the palm of his hand. You don’t think about this often! I didn’t think about it until last night, when the power went out. The power went out and I realized I couldn’t turn on a light! [He turns on the flashlight and passes it over his face.] Now I had to find a flashlight in the dark. How dumb of me to put myself in this position, but how prepared are we for such circumstances usually? [He sighs.] Being taken by surprise… This reminds me… [His voice trails off and he talks a long sip from his glass of wine. From the stage behind Pompo, the ghostly form of Fred also crosses onto the stage.] I used to think that Wonder Woman’s lasso was a stupid weapon—or rather tool, right?—for her to have. I didn’t see what was so important about it. How could the truth always set you free?

Fred [as he comes on stage]: You there! [He points down into the audience.] Have you ever had a lover? [He looks around in the crowd, pointing out different people.] Have you ever had a lover who cheated on you? Or have you cheated on someone? [Pompo finishes the glass of wine. As he speaks again, Fred continues, below.]

Pompo: Marston, of course, well, you know. He was obsessed with detecting lies. A man who raised oh how many of his own children under the lie that their real father was another man, an invented character, a lie. Just like Wonder Woman!

Fred [speaking over Pompo, above]: I think that’s where the importance of trust first started. Sex! But not in the sense that we think of it. Rather, sex as the cause of childbirth and the need to protect you and yours. Because you cannot save the whole world.

Pompo: And in a way, wouldn’t it be so odd if she were to rope the wrong person with the lasso and gets the response, “We’re all just characters in a comic book! None of this is real.” There isn’t some magical woman who can right every wrong! It’s disconcerting, reading fiction that uses the importance of truth as a theme or motivating force. But that’s not fair. It wasn’t even Marston’s own idea, or not solely his idea, to lie to his children. [Fred pulls down a smaller version of the black and white screen from the previous scene behind Pompo but in front of the curtain. At first the image appears blank, though rustling behind the curtain can be heard. Pompo appears lost in thought for a few minutes before speaking again.]

Pompo: Last night, I had another Gal Gadot dream. We met at the courtyard of my high school, near the roped off H that no one dare walk over [As he speaks, the screen lights up on what appears to be a cement table, with Carl wearing a bald cap so as to appear to be Pompo facing the audience, another person with long dark hair that appears to be a woman facing Carl, away from the audience, and a square on the floor with an H inside it that is surrounded by red velvet ropes.] Like usual, she was talking to me about Wonder Woman, what it took to get her into the character… She said…

Pompo as Gal Gadot [the words appear on the screen as they are spoken]: But the dream of America is so wonderful, so strong, so beautiful, [Carl as Pompo nods, and the words begin to disappear, to be replaced by…] you can see why Diana, why Wonder Woman would want to stand for that spirit, that hope, that belief. [Pompo coughs.]

Fred: If only America were telling the truth! If America would admit Thomas Jefferson’s the father!

Pompo: I’m always a bit frightened of women, of talking to women. But in dreams, you can just let it out… I replied…

Pompo as Carl as Pompo [Carl lip synchs as Pompo speaks]: What scares me is how the American Dream has grown this false history to it… There’s this appeal to a great nation of the past, when really, the past was absolutely awful. And people say how that was just the way things were done…

Fred: If Francis Scott Key told the truth…

PGG: Make America great again!

Fred: Land of the free, home of the slave!

PCP: Yes, because it was so great before we let women vote, when black people were merely labor animals, when there was no such thing as rape in a marriage. It’s like, if Wonder Woman were to wear the American flag, she would first have had to change America… To build something that held true to those ideals that were never actually upheld.

PGG: To earn the colors.

PCP: People say how freedom isn’t free, but when the cost of freedom is freedom itself, what is left? If this is what America is, then what does America mean?

Fred: Depends on who you ask.

PGG: Who dreams the American dream?

PCP: And is it simply a nightmare. [Fred pulls down on the screen and it retracts into itself.]

Pompo: So when there’s a power outage, you realize how useful a glowing fist would be. Maybe when the country loses sight of itself we need our symbols all the more: Captain America and Wonder Woman walking across states, being bad citizens, holding the country to standards that it was never interested in actually adhering to…

Fred: Except they aren’t real.

Pompo [voice raising as he speaks]: Not so much violence but potential, the dream deferred ready to explode, the implication, the sheer insistence of it all… Because no one is fucking listening!

Fred: Except they aren’t real. And you cannot…

Pompo: We don’t need to dream a new America, because the problem has never been the dream. [He coughs and reaches for something in his pocket.] But that we were so keen to let the dream wash away so quickly upon waking! But what about… What about [he pulls a particularly familiar wispy, blond toupee out of his pocket] hair?

Fred: You cannot save the whole world.

Pompo [putting the toupee on his head]: We are human. We are imperfect. There are questions we cannot answer, problems we cannot solve. [He shrugs while speaking.] So we just build giant walls around our castle and hide inside? Ignorance…

Fred: Bliss! [He falls through a trap door in the stage. Exit Pompo.]

End Interlude

[Read autopsy of "Interlude" here.]

Scene Three

Open scene.

[Curtain up on Carl in a room by himself. It appears to be a living room of a small apartment. He has a laptop on the desk in front of him, sitting next to a glass of water. He clicks a button on the laptop and then begins speaking.]

Carl: I think the thing that comics lack the most is sound. There’s a comics podcast that seems to reference this fact by being called “Word Balloon,” which seems like simply a comics term at first, but actually points out everything that’s different about comics and other visual media like television and media. A word balloon makes no sound, while a podcast is nothing but sound. To take the comparison further, comics have a real estate issue when it comes to sound: words are like buildings and the most important consideration is location, location, location. Where do you put the words you need to make the story function? You can’t just paper the art with text, because it not only slows down the book, but it literally covers what needs to be seen. [He bends forward and hits the same button on the computer.] Boring? Maybe try a more personal touch? [He presses the button again.] So I wanted to start my own comics podcast. To do that I had to practice getting used to my own voice—I like the idea of reducing myself to my voice, but I’m still alienated from my voice. We never feel like recordings of our voice sound right because somehow hearing your own words as you speak has some sort of feedback loop from your vocal cords through your mouth then back into your ears… [He hits the button again.] I don’t know… [He looks towards the side of the stage, making a wistful face. He leans back in his chair and closes his eyes.]

Enter Pandrio, Pasha, and Andrew. They walk around the stage as they speak.

Pandrio: “This is the way you wish your voice sounds…”

Pasha: “The little voice in my head won’t let me forget…”

Andrew: “I tried to pick his brains, still he wasn’t revealing, but I could feel the sense of panic in his voice…”

They exit.

Carl: It’s like having a song stuck in your head—whose voice are you hearing? Is it your own internal voice singing or are you imagining the actual song being heard, as the singer probably sings it better than you actually would… [He opens his eyes.] Maybe it started with this thought. I would catch myself lying in bed with a song stuck in my head and it seemed like it was coming from somewhere… Somewhere else… Then later I realized it wasn’t just songs in my head… [He sits up and hits the button another time.] One of the things I loved about comics was the way it controlled time and attribution. In comics, you never have to argue over who said what when, because it’s all there on the page (and, yes, I know, there’s a little wiggle room there when it comes to the “when”). Practically every argument I’ve ever been in in my life has at some point led to a debate over specific words used—imagine if you argued in a comic book and could just turn back the page to quote the previous point exactly! [He sighs.] It’s exactly what I don’t have here, because I’m not working from a full script to keep the normality of my voice… To make sure my words sound to myself like my own. That’s another of my concerns… [He sits back up and looks at the computer once again, but does not press the button.] Sometimes at night when I lie in bed I hear voices. Voices… in my head I guess. It’s almost like these characters show up when I close my eyes. How would you show that in a comic? Do you make the characters literal, show them walking around near my head, sometimes spouting song lyrics, did I say this already? It’s like when a song is stuck in your head, you can’t control it, but somehow it keeps on keeping on. Maybe I’m not thinking it through enough—maybe the page is simply my head… [he brackets his face with his hands] and it’s opened up like a dollhouse and inside it are all these people speaking. [He moves down his hands.] Is this normal?

Carl hits the button on the laptop again. He fidgets in his seat and appears uncomfortable. He takes a drink from the glass of water, makes a face, and sets it down. Then he hits the button again.

Carl: I don’t want to label it. I don’t know if it’s some kind of mental illness or just the sign of an overactive mind. I almost said “creative,” but I don’t know if I really am creative. When I was a little kid, my mom enrolled me in a building contest with Legos and I built… A wall. [He makes a wistful face.] A wall! It’s funny thinking about that these days… Everyone else built these incredible, um, things… Look, I don’t remember, but I built a wall (so memorable!), because I just didn’t get it. I built Lego models based on the directions. I liked being told what to do. I still do, but I used to, too. Sorry, stolen joke. Nervousness. But maybe I do mean “creative,” because I think I’ve always been creative with language, with words. Not with anything real! Just words, words, words! (That’s a twist on Shakespeare, mind you.) So maybe it’s a sign of an overactive, creative mind, hearing these voices in my head as I fall asleep. Maybe it’s a kind of dreaming. Maybe I’m such a non-visual person that I dream in language… [He sighs and then he laughs.]

Carl: Non-visual. Comics. Idiot. Hm, let me explain. I am enough of a visual learner, I love visuals, and I try my best to appreciate the art in comics, but yes. Non-visual. It’s really hard for me to construct visuals in my head. In elementary school the teacher used to say “imagine you are at the beach, looking out over the water,” and I would try. And I would fail. Which, admittedly, was uncommon for me at school. I was good at school, but I could never really do this—visualize in my imagination. Maybe that’s why I like comics—you don’t have to do the visual part. Yeah, that seems right; for example, Michael Chabon is a novelist who wrote a novel about comics creators, so people in comics know him a lot. I’d actually read Chabon before comics was my life, so this should be a match made in heaven. And then with that book about comics creators, Kavalier and Clay, he moves into third person and for some reason, all of a sudden, I can’t read him. I’ve tried and failed. Funny, failure, again. Failure, comics, me… This podcast. [He pauses.]

The pause is so long it needs an extra line. It’s awkward to imagine it being taped.

Carl: This idea of people talking to you is what writers say a lot, that they write to the point where the characters can take over and speak for themselves. Not something I’ve ever felt, which might just be a negative comment on my skill, but think about that… It’s scary, isn’t it? All these people inside you trying to talk, trying to speak up. And here you are, yourself, waiting for a real human being to show up in your life. Failure, comics, me, this podcast… Yeah, that seems about right. [He drinks the rest of the glass of water at once, stands up, walks to the side of the stage, turns off the light, and exits.]

From the other side of the stage, the Anthropologist walks out.

The Anthropologist: What if we only had silent film. Throw away the words. Precision, gone; all’s left is mood. Moody mood. [Miming a cow.] Mooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooood.

End scene.

[Read autopsy of "Scene Three" here.]

Open Interlude

Pompo walks on stage still bewigged, carrying a leash that isn’t attached to a dog. He walks with it as if there were a dog at the end of it and there is a hard collar attached at the end that mimes the presence of an animal.

Pompo: Get out! Get out! [He waves his hands to the audience as he walks to the front of the stage, attempting to herd them towards the exit.] We have to go! [He comes to the front of the stage and jumps down to the floor, continuing to call for the audience to get up and follow him. He looks at a specific group of people.] Be careful! He’s wicked. [He motions towards the leash.] With strangers. [The audience begins to get up as Pompo walks through the theatre. Some may get up before he reaches him and begin to leave the theatre. Pompo moves within the mass of people. He continues to speak, raising his voice as the people move around him.] There’s someone on my land! My land! They just keep coming in, onto my land! [As the crowd leaves the theatre, there is a roped off space in front of them. In this area, Pandrio and Pasha now stand dressed in tattered clothes. They appear less sure of themselves than usual. As Pompo leaves the theatre, he approaches this area, while the audience stays back. Once Pompo becomes visible to them, Pandrio and Pasha begin to converse.]

Pandrio: [undertone] Is that… him?

Pasha: Um… a man? [He pauses, apparently thinking of a name.]

Pandrio: Gadot?

Pasha: Yes.

Pompo: I present myself: Pozmo.

Pandrio: [looking Pompo up and down with a frown] Not at all!

Pasha: He said Pompo.

Pandrio: You’re not Ms. Gadot, sir?

Pompo: [nearly screaming] I am Pozmo! [He pauses.] Pozmo! You don’t even know my name?!

[Pandrio and Pasha look at each questioningly. They appear to be afraid of acting.]

Pandrio: Gizmo?

Pasha: Venmo?

Pompo: PPPOZZZMO! [Continuing in a smaller voice.] Pozmo? [He lifts his hands as he again shouts.] POZMO!

Pandrio: There was that one movie once with a Gizmo…

Pasha: We’re not from these parts, Sir.

Pompo: You are human beings none the less. Men like me! [He lifts the leash for emphasis.] Made in God’s image! [He points to the end of the leash.] This is Great.

Pasha: It’s great?

Pompo: My dog is Great.

Pandrio: I think it’s a name.

Pompo: Who is Gadot?

Pandrio and Pasha look at him quizzically.

Pompo: As I came here with Great, as we walked up here, you mistook me for Gadot.

Pandrio: Could never!

Pasha: We’ve been in the sun. [He wipes his forehead.] We have been waiting.

Pompo: Waiting? On my land?

Pandrio: We stand in the road.

Pompo: The road? Dangerous. You must step up! [He motions to part of the area in which they are standing.] You need not wait in the road.

Pasha: In the sun, you from a distance. Maybe due to part of how you walk…

Pompo: How I walk? Pozmo, walking Great?

Pasha: It’s maybe a bit…

Pompo: Yes?

Pasha: Effeminate…

Pompo [raising his hands as he speaks]: Effeminate? Pozmo! Great! Effeminate?! [He throws the leash.]

Pandrio [under his breath]: That’s animal cruelty. That’s worse than the dogs in the backs of cars going seventy on the highway…

Pompo: What?

Pandrio: Why so mean to your dog? To Great?

Pompo: He’s wicked. They’re all wicked once they disappoint me.

Pasha: They?

Pompo: People. [He thinks for a minute.] You were waiting?

Pandrio: Yes.

Pasha: Every day we wait.

Pompo: Every day, why?

Pasha: He’s in love.

Pompo: Waiting? Love? On my land? Here in my land? Who could have imagined…

Pandrio: We’re just waiting. She said she would come.

Pompo: Waiting? For how long?

Pandrio: Let me count the days.

A dog barks in the distance. Pompo leaves Pandrio and Pasha moving toward the sound.

Pompo [Looking back over his shoulder]: They disappoint me, yet they always need me. [He turns to the sound.] You son of a bitch! [He begins to run as the dog barking becomes more desperate. Turning back over his shoulder again as he runs, he shouts.] Remember, POOOOOOOMMPOOOOOOO! [He turns back around but then pauses. He turns around completely.] Pompo? [He raises his hands up to his mouth and screams.] POOOZZZMOOO!

Pasha: That was Pompo?

Pandrio: Is she coming?

Pasha: Not today, my friend, not, I think, today.

End interlude.

[Read autopsy of "Interlude" here.]

***

Coming out of character, Pandrio and Pasha remove their current clothing, showing regular clothes under the tatters. They appear much more in control now, out of character. They address the audience and call for their help in restaging the scene. A number of people are selected from the audience to put on costumes and take part in the next scene. You comes out into view in a superhero outfit.

***

[Read autopsy of shift in the play here.]

Final Scene

Open Scene

You can be seen in the crowd. Carl appears in the distance. (Director may choose to use a musical cue or neon sign to spread the knowledge that the final scene is beginning through the crowd—ideally this is done in an understated fashion or not at all.) He approaches a podium, set up in the middle of the staging area constructed by the audience alongside Pandrio and Pasha. (The writers have left as the set has been finalized. The set construction team are in simple dress and may blend in with crowd.) Carl wears a simple superhero costume, perhaps a Cyclops X-Men mask, while members of the crowd are also dressed in superhero outfits of various detail.

Carl: [upon reaching the podium] Welcome! Welcome! One and all! Welcome to the first annual Superhumans for Humanity event here at State College. This is Cosplay [he gestures towards his mask] for a Cause! Unfortunately, Ms. Gadot cannot be here, so you’re left with me [he now gestures to his whole body], a poor replacement. Yet this changes not the reason we are here: we’ve come here to fight the forces of evil in this world, one measly money-raising relay event at a time! We are here to raise money for [insert good cause here] and to show our support to the countless struggles we face in this nation today. Why, though, must we dwell on the negative? We are here to show our power, to be empowered, to make a difference… We are here [he stands up straight] to make a stand. Years later, we will look back and think, “We mattered.”

A commotion goes through the crowd and Carl stops speaking, realizing that he is no longer the center of attention. He has an uncertain smile on his face and is thinking of something, but I’m being too much of a writer here. Across from Carl, a person is down on one knee in front of another person, asking for a commitment to their love. After the response, the audience around them cheers briefly, perhaps wondering if this is an actual proposal or part of the play. It’s not necessarily either. Carl begins to speak again some minutes later.

Carl: Now, there we go! Let’s think about the good things. That’s how we’re going to get through dark times—turn up the contrast and see the light, beautiful moments that still exist in life. Now we’re not going to take up too much of your precious time here, but we do have a few people who have a few things they’d like to say before we get out there and start running laps! Let me bring up our first speaker, a high school teacher and graduate from this university, Peter Andriotis!

Peter: [approaching the podium as Carl exits] Thank you, Carl! Let me begin by asking a silly question: Can art make a difference? I think a lot of artists ask this question, but it’s almost always internal. I can ask it about myself as an artist—I can mock myself for calling myself an artist—but I can also put on a Bloc Party album and never think while listening to it, “Does this matter?” Of course it does. You can’t read the poetry of Langston Hughes and say “Can art make a difference?” It can. Maybe we need to ask another question: Can heart make a difference? I could make a pun here, noting how we need to hear art in order to take it to heart, take it to he’art, but I won’t do that. (I just did it, didn’t I?) Art and heart can both make a difference, but only with effort and faith. That’s the great power of Hughes’s poetry: he speaks of the struggles of the America he lived in and then he sings of the beautiful future he can imagine. It’s hard for me to imagine that future these days. The one where we actually find the American dream, that myth of equality and actuality. The meritocracy. What we maybe don’t do enough, though, is consider something that I personally have no business ignoring. As I teach my students, you cannot write a great essay without planning it beforehand. Well, you can’t change the world without planning, without imagining, the new world. “Be the change you want to see in the world.” The funniest part about the quote is that it’s sometimes so hard to see that change I want. (Maybe it’s my difficulty with visualization, maybe it’s just cynicism.) So I’m going to try to do it, imagine a future of which I could be proud.

                It’s hard for me to even speak of this, because I am a superposition of privilege. Another cis straight white man—what can he really have to say? Not much, I’m sure, but let me tell you two stories. When I was really young, my mother worked as a secretary in a construction company. She was a member of a group called Women in Construction (WIC for short). Let’s think about this for a minute: Women in Construction… I could start a gender constructivist lecture here, “Women in Construction,” constructing women. I could talk about how Miley Cyrus’s lyric “I’m a female rebel” can either position her as taking the archetypal male role of “the rebel” for women or as rebelling from establishment expectations for the feminine. Women in construction because women working in the field of construction is so unexpected that it could possibly require constructing new expectations of women, where hopefully we do not simply view women as only capable of so-called women’s work. I could give you a whole lecture on this, but who am I to do this? [He motions to himself.] I don’t work in construction! [He laughs.] There’s another way to read WIC, Women in Construction; I think it’s the way most people would initially read it, but, you know, I’m weird. [He laughs awkwardly.] Women in Construction. A safe space for the discussion of the trials and tribulations faced by women in this largely male industry. Why would such a group need form? Because the concerns, one would assume, of women in construction, would often fall on deaf, male ears. Because men in construction did not consider or care for the perspectives of women. Women in Construction—these labels don’t simply appear out of thin air. Let’s remember that.

                When I was in college, I took a course in African American history. My stepfather questioned it, “Why would a class only consider African American history?” Because that history is not present in your average American history class. The class I took wasn’t the problem, it was the solution. It gives voice to a history of the country that is so frequently swept under the rug. Avoided, disputed, and ignored. People ask the same question now, in a new context. “Why black lives matter when all lives matter?” And I think back and I remember, the labels don’t come from nowhere. African American history was silenced and black lives have so often been treated as if they don’t matter, as if only certain types of death are met with any value. The fact that we see organized debate against people saying a simple fact, “Black Lives Matter,” seems to speak for itself.

                There’s a movement in our culture at this moment against what is called identity politics. As if we shouldn’t be interested in who we are as individuals! What’s interesting about this push is how easily it forgets why identities and labels formed in the first place. So now I can bring us back to a plan for America, a dream for America, ironically no different than the American Dream ever really has been, the dream, in many ways, of Martin Luther King, Jr., that these labels, these identities, need not be politicized. That people of color and white people would embrace one another and value what each and every one of us has to give to our country. But politics does not exist in a vacuum, and there is a reason that we wage this political battle over women’s rights, minority rights, LGBTQ rights. I see an America where the melting pot metaphor doesn’t mean that all claims to heritage are abandoned and everyone embraces baseball, the hot dog, and apple pie. I see an America where women need not expect to be judged on their appearance in every situation they face. I see an America where the country is much more interested in what people can do for their country, rather than what they can do to themselves in order live a more pleasant life. I see this America… I see it even with my poor visual imagination… Which is to say it’s not easy to see. I have to focus on it, to concentrate, to think, and to believe. “Tomorrow,” in the words of Langston Hughes, tomorrow it’ll come. We’ll “see how beautiful” America is in all its diversity. And, looking back, we’ll “be ashamed” of all that we have denied the country, the dreams we have deferred. Thank you. [He walks off the podium.]

Carl: Thanks, Peter. Well, that’s enough of that nonsense. [He smiles comedically, spinning a finger around his ear.] Now for something entirely different! The man who needs no introduction, the Dragon himself, Andrew Peters! [Andrew, wearing a cheap Dragon Ball Z costume, approaches the podium and takes the microphone from Carl.]

Andrew: [smiling] Fuck you, Carl! There’s a magic to us all coming together for this event. A type of magic that is sorely needed in the world right now. Some of you among us have chosen to hold onto that magic, to celebrate and commemorate it for years on end. Come forward!

Couples in the audience come forward and are commended by Andrew. The number of people varies based on the director’s wishes and the size and participation of the audience. Andrew performs a marriage ceremony for each couple in their turn, cheered on by the crowd. At the end of the ceremonies, he returns the microphone to Carl.

Carl: Beautiful! Beautiful! Now, join me in walking our ceremonial first lap in this Superhuman for Humanity event. Those of you who have pledges based on your number of laps, please make sure you register at our lap counters’ booth. [He pulls the microphone free from the podium and walks down to the ground and over to the track.] We’ll be here through the afternoon, into the evening, and going strong into tomorrow morning. All those night owls out there, we need you all to keep up the energy. [He begins to walk along the track and various people from the crowd join him.] I’m sure you will all pass me on this track soon, but remember that we run, walk, or crawl for the journey, not for the destination. The time we spend going the distance matters oh so much more than where we end up. We— [A commotion goes through the crowd on the opposite side of the field from Carl.] What the fuck?

Across the field, a car barrels into a group of participants preparing to begin walking. Several are injured. You dies. A wave of shock spreads throughout the characters and audience. The car stops in the distance and Pompo gets out of the car.

Pompo: [breathing heavily, speaking under his breath] Love me. Love me.

The curtain does not fall.

-fin-

 [Read autopsy of "Final Scene" here.]

One character didn't let me wrap up completely without hearing from him again. As you'll see, this scene seems to be filmed rather than staged for theatre.

After Credits Scene

Open Scene

The Anthropologist approaches the camera. He taps the lens with a finger.

The Anthropologist: Sigh... I blame the writers.