Act Three - in which we
discover how the players
attained to their songs
- in memory of
Joe Strummer, and marking the
death of Derrida -
Dooley: Well, how do you like that? I’m the first one on stage.
At last, precedence yields something to age.
This rest has reduced my fatigue to a pittance.
Hey, Narrator – are you recording the minutes!
I wonder how I look upon the page.
Flex: You’re several paces ahead of me, old man.
You hardly left me any time to use the can.
Don’t forget I was hired to be your guide.
For the third act, I want you to help me decide,
should I be flexin’ my stuff like Stan or like Fran?
Clare: Again, our brave new world seems little changed.
When I get back home, will I be at all estranged?
Will I be able to stop myself from rhyming?
My only concern will be for timing.
They’ll say, “Clare, you’re much the same, but your mind’s deranged.”
Pluck: I’d like to make my entrance with ceremony.
But would the auditors find it phony?
I’d be flown in like Robin Hood on silken strings,
bearded like an emperor of dynastic Mings.
Then I’d start shooting like Al Capone.1
Heath: I have no recollection of the love we shared.
However, evidence suggests that we were paired.
Is there an after to this odd journey?
If so, will oblivion play my attorney?
Will any former commitments to love be spared?
Madge: This second break was quite restorative.
In this act, you’ll all find me rested and sportive.
A big question, Narrator: As we’re being trained,
I’m curious if anything is gained?
Is our knowledge cumulative or abortive?
______________________________________
1Mispronounced so as to rhyme with ceremony and phony.
________________________________________________
Freed: So I find myself again on this lacquered lawn.
I don’t know out of which well I’ve been drawn.
How long have I slept in this uncanvassed teepee?
Of the dwarves, I remind myself most of Sleepy.
[yawning] Pardon me for a second as I yawn.
Clare: Is this tempo marked stately or lugubrious?
Flex: Hey, Narrator – you up there or did you flee us?
Freed: Do you think he gets a similar break?
It could be he too has problems keeping awake.
Pluck: Do you suppose he’ll ever come out and meet us?
Madge: We haven’t brought up the obvious fact
that he said nothing at the end of the last act
about what we would be doing in the third one.
Dooley: Yeah, Flex wouldn’t let him get a word in.
Heath: Perhaps he’s letting us know how the lines are stacked.
Narrator: That, and where I insert my demarcating prong
as I attempt to guide your hopeful throng.
If you listen well, your task is well within reach.
The instructions I now give are the same for each.
You have found your name. Now look for your song.
[silence]
Freed: Then he climbed up Sinai and shut off his radar…
Heath: “…abandoning them to a lake of seething tar,”
as in an umpteenth ring of Dante’s hell.
Clare: Though fortunately here there’s no infernal smell.
Madge: We’d better begin, if we’re going to make par.
Pluck: So he expects us to just up and sing?
Freed: If so, then what sort of format – Mozart or swing?
Flex: Should I strut like James Brown or be chaste as a nun?
Dooley: Do we sing in chorus, or one by one?
Clare: And is it a capella, or plucked on a string?
Heath: Does the melody or does the lyric come first?
Pluck: Will it spill out at once or be rehearsed?
Madge: Narrator, I do think this requires explaining.
Does this sort of thing depend on former training?
Mustn’t musicality first be nursed?
Freed: For the past few seconds I’ve been ruminating.
It’s as if something’s been filtered through a grating.
I mean, I’ve been contemplating this tune
whose various parts in my inner ear are strewn.
Dooley: Well, let’s hear your little song. Don’t keep us waiting.
Freed: [singing] I’d been freed and I didn’t have a plan,
but found myself at the end of an expired span.
He’d waited, and he was the only one I’d told.
I was grateful and said, “Lo and behold,
lo and behold. Get me out of here, my dear man!”
Pluck: I don’t think I would call your tune a lovely one,
yet the words are mysterious and fun.
Freed: But it isn’t at all complete. It’s just a slice.
Narrator: It doesn’t need to be perfect. It will suffice.
Clare: Can you tell us in fact how it was spun?
Freed: Just something that was rolling around in my head…
although there was a feeling I was being led.
But I can’t tell you what the song’s about.
There really isn’t enough to figure it out.
Heath: It seems to be an expression of certain dread.
Flex: Man, Freed – have you been escapin’ hellfire?
It sounds like a situation that was real dire
‘til someone was good enough to rescue your ass.
Without him you’d have plunged right through the grass,
delivered unto the ghastly infernal sire.
Dooley: It’s like the latter end of an incomplete tale,
dropped in the dust of the chorus’ trail.
Madge: It churns up expectations it leaves in the cold –
a familiar story, but differently told.
Pluck: And Jill came down the hill without her pail!
Freed: It does seem odd, beginning thus with an escape,
the story’s tail where the head should be…or its nape.
Flex: And that makes Freed the scruffy mother cat.
Pluck: Is it then like a hairball coughed up on the mat?
Heath: Or a trinket that could be patched back up with tape.
Clare: Oh! I’m hearing something quite foreboding.
I’ll sing it out to keep my head from exploding.
It comes to me in an exactitude of pitch.
I think I’ll pull it off without a glitch.
Hang on a minute – it seems to be downloading.
Have you heard it correctly, this tale that I tell?
Did you seize and declare it where it fell?
Don’t suppose you’ve been left with no time to catch up,
but mark well your time by these memories dredged up,
forwarded to you in letters from Hell.
Flex: Seems I wasn’t far off on my observation
that we’ve got here somethin’ like death and tarnation…
like Robert Johnson ‘scapin’ the devil,
who ascends and waylays him on his own level,
forcin’ a pact at some crossroads or train station.
Pluck: Who’s Robert Johnson?
Flex: Guy who sang the blues.
Pluck: What’s the blues?
Flex: Like a waltz, but sung in 4’s and 2’s.
Dooley: Actually there, Flex, it swings along in 3’s.
Flex: I’m talkin’ basic meter, if you please.
You march in like a saint, then in triplets you cruise.
Heath: Again, a funny way to make a beginning.
Freed: It’s sung with a sort of evil grinning.
Madge: It’s like a warning about how to use one’s time…
Clare: …or maybe about shunning an accursed crime.
Pluck: It must have something to do with sinning.
Heath: You’ve got the concluding image of a letter…
Dooley: …and the speaker’s an ashen, hellish abettor.
Madge: Then there’s something about the memory
that accompanies one’s allotted century,
syncopating with it in a quiet patter.
Flex: Meanin’ you got two things – your life, your thought.
Clare: “What is” and “what one wants” syncopate in “what ought.”
Freed: But a lot depends on just what you remember,
what life retains from spring through November.
Heath: And what’s remembered can be lost but can’t be taught.
Dooley: Ah, come on. It’s not that overly didactic
or filled with fine sentiment. In fact, it
seems that the primary goal is simply to shock
with conventional references to time’s clock.
I don’t see there’s any other tactic.
Pluck: Do you think it’s a translation out of Russian?
Madge: There’s something we haven’t brought up for discussion.
Namely, how do these “songs” interrelate?
Between them, do they share a corresponding trait?
Clare: Just hold on one minute. Before we all rush in
and knock our heads against confusion’s wall,
I’ve an observation that just might shock you all.
Both our names, Freed and Clare, in our respective songs
are included therein as glowing prongs.
Flex: Lay that one out upon your interpretive sprawl!
Freed: “I’d been freed and I didn’t have a plan.” That’s right!
What a funny thing that you’ve brought to light.
Clare: My name, on the other hand, was changed to “declare.”
I certainly didn’t plan such a thing, I swear!
To sing about myself would sure seem trite.
Dooley: We Americans do it – Whitman, for instance.
Clare: Yes. You do it so much you make us British wince.
Pluck: Could you tell me, by the way, who’s Whitman?
Flex: Some “damn Yank,” my precious waif, who din’t like women.
Freed: Though some, I believe, maintain he “straddled the fence.”
Madge: But he did like women. He was just gay.
Flex:1 I’m tryin’ to make the matter a little gray.
You don’t know the sort of education she’s had.
Wouldn’t want her to think old Walt was bad.
Madge: Then why’d you tell her he hated women, I pray?
Dooley: Enough, for God’s sake…I’m on the track of something.
For the past few seconds it’s been humming.
Damn…I thought I had something, but now I’ve lost it.
My mind gets hold of a thing and then it drops it.
Yes, here it is…it’s coming, it’s coming…
Too much of nothing makes a man feel ill at ease.
One man’s temper might rise; another man’s might freeze.
Too much of zilch makes a man a liar,
causing him now to sleep on nails and now on fire.
Yet nothing is the means by which we’re duly pleased.
Heath: This one seems to steer an opposing tack.
Madge: Hmm. It’s not quite like the others. It’s not so black.
_____________________________________________
1Aside to Madge.
________________________________________________________
Clare: I will point out, though, it does make mention of fire.
But you’re right. It isn’t nearly so dire.
Pluck: Perhaps it’s meant to guide us to another track.
Heath: It’s got a colloquialism – “zilch” for “naught” –
which loosens it up and makes it less taut.
Madge: Using zilch in a sentence is really quite odd.
Freed: Most often it’s a single word, like “shucks” or “God”.
Clare: Does zilch here refer to life or to thought?
Madge: I’m not sure that our former conceptual pair
is still at all of relevance in Dooley’s air,
which doesn’t, in fact, mention thought or life –
though all three seem to have something to do with strife.
Dooley: Ah, hell…it’s just another trap – a five-lined snare.
Heath: Yes, that’s correct. They are all of five lines…
Clare: …although they are bound with variously lengthed twines.
Pluck: Dooley mentioned snares and traps. To me they’re cages
within which something horrible rages.
Dooley: Each is like a chicken coop…
Flex: …or a pen for swines.
Heath: The oddest bit is the phrase with your signature,
where the tune took on a modal tincture.
Clare: “Duly pleased.” Whatever in the world could that mean?
Madge: How about, “The pleasure due us we cannot glean
from things arrayed in their stolid fixture,
but is shifting and unstable as the weather.”
Heath: Thus joy can be neither horded nor sequestered.
Pleasure, true joy, is immaterial.
Flex: It ain’t no toy lodged in a box of cereal.
Clare: Nor is it stupid amusement from the jester.
Pluck: Then how is it nothing makes us feel bad?
Dooley: Your question is a subtle play on words, my lad.
Freed: Yes. “Nothingness,” I think, is what she has in mind.
Heath: I think it means the true fruit’s in the rind.
It’s peeling one’s way to the fruit that makes one glad.
Clare: Isn’t this, in fact, becoming awfully dull?
Freed: Actually I think we’re on a roll.
Dooley: Clare’s right. We’re sitting around like a bunch of fools,
unwinding our vain insights on metrical spools.
Clare: Occasionally Flex says something droll.
Dooley: And what’s the point of all this talk in the first place?
If each of us took parts and sang “Amazing Grace,”
he might be satisfied with that much wind
and no more.
Narrator: No. Each of you to your song is pinned,
to the same extent that one is pinned to one’s face.
Flex: The first time we heard from him in a while.
Clare: He’s the absconding narrator, and that’s his style.
Pluck: “Pinned to one’s face.” I confess I find that brutal.
Flex: Then why not tell him yourself, my poodle?
Pluck: To tell him what I think would be lacking in guile.
Heath: I think he hears everything we say as it is.
Dooley: But what about what we think?
Flex: That’s our biz.
Clare: I’m glad you think so. I’m not so optimistic.
Heath: Ah! You, who were formerly so realistic,
are now worried that our thoughts may indeed be his!
Clare: That’s not what I said at all…well, not precisely.
No. His interventions don’t at all entice me
to lend his existence any credence,
especially when all we have are these few hints.
Flex: Hey, I’ve got something!
Clare: Do try and sing it nicely.
Flex: After it had failed, what was there to tell?
We could do nothing besides watch it flex and swell.
Better unpack each of your things before it’s late.
We had a plan to meet again and wait.
We had a plan, if your memory serves you well.
Madge: So, who would like to be first to venture a guess?
Clare: I’m too bored to continue, I confess.
Freed: You think you can get out of this because you’ve passed.
But we’re obliged to help the rest. So not so fast.
Clare: That’s interpretation under duress!
Heath: It does seem to be something of a false belief
that we do as we like without coming to grief
at the fact of our narrator’s desire.
Madge: What he wants seems to be paramount.
Flex: He’s our sire.
Narrator: If you believe that, then be sure you’ve hit a reef.
Freed: And once again he airs his opinion
from high aloft in his towering dominion.
Dooley: He talks real fierce, but I’m sure up close he’s a klutz.
Probably can’t balance a checkbook.
Pluck: What’s
“dominion”?
Flex: Domain, my diminutive minion.
Clare: You’ve some vocabulary, despite all your ain’t’s.
Flex: Yeah. And I bring it on in sleights and feints.
Madge: Doesn’t anyone wish to say what it’s about?
Freed: The singer’s reprimanding someone with a pout.
Disappointment is the picture it paints.
Clare: Disappointment? Paint? Another bad metaphor.
You can paint a picture, let’s say, of “fury’s gore”
or “sorrow’s trials” or “arrested time”.
Your “disappointed picture” is just for the rhyme.
Freed: What’s my grade then? I feel like a college sophomore.
Pluck: A “C” for content, an “E” for effort.
Flex: You think you can get an “A”, my English heifer?
Pluck: You’ve called me your heifer, your waif and your poodle.
What else are you holding in your noodle?
Flex: Say something sly and sleek, I’ll call you a leopard.
Heath: She’s challenged you on your epithets. That’s quite sleek.
Flex: Ain’t nobody claimed the little tot’s meek.
Freed: Remember the part about things to be unpacked?
I’d like to mention, if it’s not a breach of tact,
Madge’s bag. We’ve scarcely taken a peek
into it, although at first it seemed a big deal,
as if we might find in it something of the real.
Madge: A good way to put it. Something solid.
Heath: A piece of reality, even if rotted.
Clare: Is it necessary to have approval’s seal?
I mean, don’t we need the narrator’s prompt?
Madge: Good question.
Flex: You got me.
Dooley: Hell if I know.
Freed: I’m stumped.
Clare: I see, anyway, we’re all chiming in on cue.
Flex: Dammit if this ain’t a Broadway revue!
Dooley: I’m still piecing together how the lines are clumped.
Heath: It doesn’t flow as it did in the first two acts.
Madge: That’s due, I think, to a couple of facts.
Have you noticed at each fifth line a sort of curb?
The flow of thought is periodically disturbed,
and what we speak piles up in five-line stacks.
Flex: Damn, Madge – how’d you figure that out? You got some ear.
Madge: Well, it’s just a matter of keeping to the rear
and paying attention to what we say –
to the choices we make so things don’t go astray.
What it means isn’t necessarily so clear –
or rather, I think it’s irrelevant.
Interpretation’s shoddy and inelegant.
Clare: In other words, these stupid “songs” don’t mean a thing.
Freed: Then why’s it so important that we sing?
Heath: It is important. Song’s our human element.
Dooley: Now we’re getting all philosophical again.
Madge: No. In fact, I’m trying to flee that den.
I’ve just put forth my opinion that meaning’s out –
that there’s probably nothing these songs are “about”.
Heath: It’s not unlike the fable with the hen
and the golden eggs.
Pluck: I think, in fact, it’s a goose.
Freed: So we slit the song’s throat to set its meaning loose?
Pluck: The song’s belly is what you meant to say.
Heath: It’s that the color of truest meaning is gray.
If you seek to drain it out through a gap or sluice,
it turns to a gaudy, primary shade.
Then it’s no longer free meaning, but something made.
Madge: But think: Though denial of meaning is mystic,
we’re accomplishing it through eristic.
Pluck: What’s eristic?
Heath: A logical way to persuade.
Madge: What sort of a luck goes from bad to ten times worse?
‘Twas filled with gold as if it were a purse.
I’d been put upon to play the part of a thief
and was fingered as the cause of their cherished grief.
They’ve decreed I’ll die of imagined thirst.
Clare: Well, that came on without a second of warning.
Madge: Yes. There was no embellishing or adorning.
It just came, and I had to sing it out.
I merely served as a more or less faithful spout.
Freed: This one touches on the themes of guilt and mourning.
Heath: Most striking, though, is the image of gold.
Our previous argument had hardly grown cold –
I mean the one about the “golden eggs” of song.
We’ve been auditing ourselves all along!
Our thoughts pour into our songs as into a fold.
Madge: Our gabbing is like preemptive commentary.
Dooley: Mere coincidence! It’s not so hairy.
Pluck: We’d probably have to go through them each by each,
then measure the words we had sung against our speech.
Flex: Right on, my precocious little fairy.
Clare: That would obviously take more time than we have.
I believe we’re already well beyond the half.
Flex: Damn, though, if that ain’t how it is with words.
Pluck:1 It’s a trick to maintain order among the herds
and be a good shepherdess.
Flex: Precisely, my calf.
Freed: Hey! Pardon if this sounds cool or frosty.
This mutual admiration may prove costly.
Clare: Yes. I’ll hire you as her caretaker if you like.
Flex: But I cross dress, I’m queer and I’m a dike!
Dooley: Clare’s saying it’s time to return to the posse.
Madge: We’ve completely ignored Freed’s point about the bag.
I do recall it was a lot to drag.
Heath: But mustn’t our curiosity coincide
with a nod from the narrator – some cue or flag?
Dooley: I agree with Heath. I’m entirely hesitant
to breach the rules on the stage where I’m resident.
Don’t know for how long we’ll call this our home.
Flex: Yeah. If we screw up, there ain’t nowhere else to roam.
Clare: Well, I’m beginning to find it rather pleasant.
Freed: You mean it’s better than London, with all its fogs?
Pluck: She means it beats your Kansas with its hogs.
Clare: I don’t yet regret the fact that nothing here chimes –
and yes, I’m rather getting used to rhymes.
Pluck: And it certainly beats L.A. with all its smogs!
Flex: Child, you can’t sum up Uncle Sam in a city.
Clare: America’s too big. What a pity.
_____________________________________
1As if cozying up with Flex.
______________________________________________
Freed: And Kansas is a bit too rural and remote.
Flex: Meanin’ you can’t get there from your London by boat.
Freed: But she could click her heels.
Dooley: Ha! That’s witty.
Madge: Let’s rest this feuding between our national bloods.
Flex: But the shots we’re aimin’ at each other are duds.
Heath: Yes, but it’s putting our time to poor use.
Soon we’ll suffer from more than each other’s abuse.
Flex: So, back to chewin’ them dialectical cuds.
Dooley: Yeah, insult’s funnier. You’ve got a point.
It’s good for this overly sanitary joint.
Heath: Our interest in meaning it seems has crumbled.
Freed: As the songs accumulate, they’re jumbled.
Madge: I’m eager to see how the final two are coined.
Clare: We fan ourselves with breathless anticipation
as two subjects of the English nation
wait “in the bull pen,” as you Americans say.
Heath: I’ve got it!
Clare: I hope it’s a melodious lay.
Heath: Here’s the tower of London, here its crumbling rocks.
Each single hour is marked by the chime of its clocks.
Does not this air anticipate a flood?
Is the music calling for a river of blood?
Let it flow, if it must, from the heath to the docks.
Madge: I think this time it’s absolutely clear.
Clare: It is. It’s simply impossible not to hear
echoes of what we’ve recently been conversing.
Pluck: It’s much as if we had been rehearsing!
Dooley: There is something like a tug, or maybe a veer…
a sort of vectoring towards what will be sung next.
One’s pulled in a direction one expects.
Heath: But where does it all stem from? Who is it prompts us?
Clare: I hope that nobody finds it presumptuous,
but I’ve a good suspicion that this text
is more our contrivance than we’d care to admit.
And, if we’re the objects of the narrator’s wit,
we all seem quite happy to play along.
Dooley: She’s right. It’s true of each question, each name, each song.
We’ve carefully manufactured this little skit.
Pluck: What else can we do? Burn down the stage?
Heath: Or grab each other’s throats in a spirit of rage?
Clare: Yes. I wonder how much that would entertain them.
Would it titillate or rather pain them?
Freed: Who?
Dooley: Why, the auditors up there, above this cage.1
Heath: What do you think would happen if we addressed them?
Freed: Any questions? Perhaps we could test them!
Clare: What do you suppose they’re looking for, anyway?
You think they get a break from this nocturnal day?
Narrator: They were not brought here to field your questions.
Dooley: Well, well. Our narrator’s their chaperone, their guard.
Clare: Yes. Access to them is most assuredly barred.
Pluck: Why do they sit there?
Freed: It’s likely their job.
___________________________________________
1The performers suddenly look confusedly into the audience, as if only now becoming aware of it.
______________________________________________________
Clare: They’re simply unfathomable. A speechless mob.
Freed: It’s like entertaining lions in your backyard.
You never know when one of them will spring.
Dooley: Or coyotes closing upon us in a ring.
Madge: Well, there’s no point in worrying about them now.
It’s apathy I read from brow to brow.
Freed: You suppose they’re being paid to be at this thing?
Clare: Who knows? Maybe they’ve been forced into it as well.
Heath: You’re forgetting it’s we who chose this hell.
Clare: I remember what he said. Who knows if it’s true?
If I doubt him, will he dismiss me from my pew?
Dooley: No, but just try and leave. He’ll surely yell.
Freed: Leave? Nobody’s suggested how that’s to be done.
Pluck: And nobody wants to leave, as we’re having fun.
Flex: Pluck rather fancies this circular rink.1
Pluck: It beats having to go to school or work, I think.
Heath: And there is no clock against which you’ve got to run.
Madge: Yes, there is. Only we can’t hear it tick.
Dooley: And you can’t absent yourself if you’re tired or sick.
Clare: We’re involved in a hackneyed metaphor for life,
a watered-down simulacrum of strife.
Dooley: And they wax the floor between sets so that it’s slick.
Madge: We’ve entirely lost interest in what they mean.
Freed: You changed our goal without venting your spleen.
__________________________________________
1Line spoken with a mock British accent.
_____________________________________________________
Heath: That’s due to Madge’s relative sobriety.
Her rebellion lacks any impropriety,
and she serves as a willing go-between.
Madge: Please don’t give me any more credit than I’m due.
I’m trying to get through this like the rest of you.
Pluck: Everybody…I think it’s now my turn!
Clare: Ah! The concluding song for which we all so yearn.
Freed: Another five lines and then, I suppose, we’re through.
Pluck: “Child, up and at ‘em. It’s time for the bus.
After all, it’s time for work and you’re one of us.”
Clocks tick and then they tock in every place of work.
Seconds trudge, minutes drag, and the hours jerk.
You can plod or pluck along, but you cannot cuss.
Freed: Completely different from the others in tone.
Flex: That’s because she’s young and otherwise prone.
Heath: This one, moreover, has nothing of mystery.
Dooley: How can it, as its singer has no history?
Madge: Again, we’re done before our time has flown.
Flex: So what do we do now – just sit around and gab?
Pluck: Or will the lines start walking backwards, like a crab?
Heath: Will they perambulate in retrograde?
Flex: And should we sit around and bullshit in the shade?
Clare: Ha! Your pun is not at all droll, but rather drab.
And there’s no shade here, for it’s all shadow.
No perspective to show how our minds do addle.
Freed: Au contraire. My mentality’s crisp and alert.
Flex: But I think by “crisp” you mean “fried”.
Clare: That’s pert.
Heath: Sadly enough, Madge, you’ve surrendered your paddle.
Clare’s sarcasm, that’s to say, has taken over.
Freed: It springs up through the floorboards like clover.
Flex: Man, that stinks!
Dooley: Yeah, Freed. That was really atrocious.
Clare: Believe me, it was uttered with halitosis.1
Pluck: That was even worse.
Flex: Touché, my plover!
Narrator: HUM! HUM! I intervene now to air my disgust.
The auditors only pass you because they must.
You’ve found your songs, and so your play endures.
But you’ve missed the essential point – just how they’re yours.
If Act Four is no better, you’ll have lost our trust.
Freed: And what will we have lost along with that?
Clare: Be careful how you address him, you simple prat!
Narrator: It’s not for me to say what and how much you’ll lose.
Just note that you’ll be coming on in twos.
And you’ll concentrate on keeping your speeches pat.
Dooley: What does he mean by “twos”?
Flex: Take one and double it.
Madge: Perhaps he’s referring to the couplet.
Pluck: What’s a couplet?
Heath: She means a pair of lines that rhyme.
Pluck: Narrator, could we stage one of our acts in mime?
Flex: That’s a lovely idea, my puppet!2
_____________________________________
1Clare has been standing next to Freed.
2Once again, with a British accent.
______________________________________________
Madge: Hey! Are you still up there, or have you gone away?
What we’re to do or to look for you’ve failed to say!
Narrator: You’re to find out precisely what I want.
Clare: You call that an instruction? I call it a taunt!
Narrator: That’s all. Goodbye until the next act of the play.
Freed: I thought he was beginning to like us.
Heath:1 How do the auditors hear us? Have they miked us?
Or do they employ other, more ominous tools?
Clare: I’m less credulous than you other fools.
I never doubted for a minute his bias
against us.
Madge: We’ve still got the question of this heap
to settle. Are there things inside to keep,
or is it all stuff that we’ll afterwards discard?
Dooley: I’m sure we’ll be informed by the hovering bard.
Or should I call him the hovering creep?
Freed: I’m under the impression that each time I leave,
I’m to pull a slick one-liner from out my sleeve.
Flex:2 That ain’t a one-liner. It’s made of two.
But I’ll add a pair to mine and make it a few…
which consists of at least three, or so I believe.
Pluck: Lovely! I’m the last to make an exit.
I hoped to observe which way he or she “flexed” it.
Unfortunately, “they” didn’t give me a clue.
Narrator: This is the stage whose north is never true.
Again, the auditors break until the next act.
_____________________________________
1Again, the performers exit individually upon completing their speeches.
2Pluck shadows Flex with curiosity.
[Next: Act Four]