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underconstruction2017-blog · 8 years ago

Text

The Script

Under Construction by Charles Mee Reconstructed by Kaley Bunce, Sofia Cassidy, and Juliet Shelton

ORDER

Younger No Pig & Hairbrushing

Middle L.A. & The Woman in the Red Dress & Film Noir & Women

Older The Arts & Bad Stuff & I Remember & Mrs. Bridge

Younger Scenes:

Scene 68. No Pig

[A guy comes out to speak. After a few moments, while he speaks, another guy comes out and begins to dance— without any musical accompaniment— dancing not even to the spoken text, rather just dancing in his own quiet world.]

We ended up living in a tiny apartment in a house owned by an Indian couple in Flushing, Queens. My stepmother cried the whole first night. We've come to America, and look at this apartment! It was one of those Archie Bunker neighborhoods. You know when you watch All in the Family, that first aerial shot with all those tiny homes right next to each other? That's exactly where we lived.

I got left back a year at the local public school because I didn't know English. I didn't know how to say "May I go to the bathroom?'

or "I don't know what you're saying." My desk was right in front of the teacher's desk and I would sit there all day and not go to the bathroom until I went home. Then I got a little picture book and I would point to a picture of a toilet and the teacher would know, OK, it's time to go to the bathroom. My teacher told my stepmother at a parent-teacher conference that I wasn't learning English fast enough.

When I came home my father was extremely upset with me. He told me, in Farsi, that I must be stupid. I had the hardest time trying to tell the cafeteria lady that I couldn't eat pork. My father taught me how to say, NO PIG! NO PIG! It took about a month for the cafeteria lady to realize I couldn't eat pork. Whenever they were having pork products, she would make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which was horrible, because I hated peanut butter and jelly! So I didn't eat anything. Then my father told me to say chicken, but I would say "kitchen" instead of chicken. It took me so long to differentiate between the two. Imagine me: "KITCHEN! NO PIG! NO PIG!"

Scene 5. Hair Brushing

four women all brush one girl's hair and then each other's

SOMEONE SAYS What they say is there are rules. And everyone knows what they are. Number 1. Have dinner ready: Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal—on time. This is a way of letting him know that you have been thinking about him and are concerned about his needs.

SOMEONE ELSE SAYS Number 2. Prepare yourself. Take 15 minutes to rest so you will be refreshed when he arrives. Touch up your makeup

put a ribbon in your hair and be fresh looking. Be a little zestful and a little more interesting.

SOMEONE ELSE SAYS Number 3. Minimize the noise. At the time of his arrival eliminate all noise of washer, dryer, dishwasher or vacuum. Be happy to see him.

Greet him with a warm smile and be glad to see him.

And then there is a radio voiceover? and the girls answer variously yes, no, etc etc all in a jumbled unison

RADIO VOICE Are you fit for marriage? To help you decide for yourself, the author presents in this article several tests that are being used throughout the country to determine individual fitness for marriage. By taking the three tests that follow and studying the results, you can measure your own marital aptitudes. Give serious thought to the result and you will find it's likely taking out a personal love-insurance policy that pays dividends throughout your married life. Are you 21 or over?

VARIOUS VOICES Yes Yes No Yes No

RADIO VOICE Are or were your parents happily married?

VARIOUS VOICES Very happy Average Above average I'd say average Unhappy

Were you happy as a child? Very happy Unhappy Average Average To what degree were you punished as a child? Often and severely Rarely but severely Never Often but mildly Mildly Where did you first learn about sex? Don't remember From other children From strange adults books What is your present attitude toward sex? Disgust Necessary evil Indifferent Pleasant anticipation Intense interest Have you ever wanted to be of the opposite sex? Never as a child, yes As an adolescent As an adult As an adult? Yes! How do you rate with your partner in mental ability? Slightly inferior Definitely inferior Very similar Slightly superior Very superior How do you rate with your partner in willingness to cooperate? Definitely inferior Very similar Slightly superior Very superior Is your religion the same as your partner's?

Yes No Yes Yes No Have you a tendency to be careless or disorderly? Yes No Yes No Are you uncommonly bossy? Yes No Yes No Yes For the Man: Does he insist on having his own way? Always Frequently Occasionally Seldom Never For the woman: Has she a mean disposition? Frequently Seldom Never Never When his luck goes bad does he brood over it and look for your sympathy? Yes No Sometimes Yes No Does she try to please you? Always Frequently Occasionally Seldom Never Is he usually stubborn and insistent in his demands? Yes No sometimes Yes No Can you get him to change his mind? Always Frequently Occasionally Seldom Never Does she try to make you miserable if you so much as look at another woman? Yes No yes, no Yes Does he expect you to shower him with attention and affection in public? Yes No Yes No Yes Does she create scenes in public places?

Yes No Yes Yes Yes Do you believe implicitly in your partner's: Good Judgment? Yes No Yes No Honesty? Yes Yes Yes No Fidelity?

[silence]

Middle Scenes:

Scene 472. L.A.

This could be spoken by a man or a woman:

My head is a lot better in LA There's always a feeling when I am sitting here driving around in the car, coming back into the studio, in and out in my head, and in and out of reality.... If you know my work, you know that things are never finished.... so then you have a lot of narrative threads that interweave self-portraiture fictional characters cultural commentary and much more drama humor slapstick critique theatricality enrepreneurship attitude quests discoveries self-sampling internal recycling auto-cannibalism

revelations cosmologies. Coming together and coming apart and becoming something else free-form random non-hierarchical

everywhere and nowhere. And then you need an overview because or at least a point of view because all trees and no forest means there isn't any difference between here and there even though you still want to be everywhere and nowhere. It's all a blur and the blur could be permanent that would be OK a blur, that's a cool thing, too. I understand art as the pursuit of something. As it is pulling me in this direction I don't quite understand why I am going in this direction. It is important that each piece creates a territory for me to go in like a direction that is opening up. In this piece, which is called Perfect World, the thing is you can fall off of it and it can kill you. You can walk on this surface but it has these holes these cracks and then these soft spots, these traps, where it's just papered over. I wanted to build this thing which somehow mimics real life. I am not interested in artists who close things down, I am interested in situations which open things up. That is just an optimistic perspective. I want to build a work which includes the public but does not exclude the artist.

If you imagine you have children one is a drug-addict with crack one is a drug addict with ecstasy one is thirteen and has four kids and one is kind of a genius.

It is important to see each one in relationship to the other one in relationship to yourself. It is about seeing where all the positive parts are in the things that you have created.

You have to deal with them. You have to like them all the same. Because what we have come to learn is that the future is made not by arguing well but by speaking differently. And speaking differently: that's the job of poets. Because truth is not something we discover; truth is something we create. How it is to be a human being is something we decide not because of how it has always been but because whether or not it has ever been that way before, this is who we want to be and how we want to behave now. Just because, in the past, there have been slaveholders and patriarchs we are not destined to live the same way forever. The reason people study history is so that they can see the way things are is not the only way they have been or the only way that they can be. It is up to us to see what human nature can become.

Scene 92. The Woman in the Red Dress

music overwhelms the scene and the woman in the red dress enters dancing

then a guy enters another guy enters a bunch of people are entering from every direction wild music

unsynchronized frenzy until finally all 10 or 12 are making the same gesture together, scattered over the stage, but dancing the same gestures and moves and maybe this could happen, too:

at a certain point, a woman is lying on the floor a guy leans down and locks lips with her and raises her from the floor into a flamenco-like dance with lips permanently locked in a kiss they go on and on and on and on and on until he passes out and falls to the ground in a heap she turns to another guy and locks lips with him immediately and they dance but she stops them, interrupts the dance to tell him he is dancing the wrong way they lock lips and dance again she stops to correct him again ditto ditto until she spins around, grabs the sleeve of his shirt and rips it then he is pissed they argue they argue and argue and argue and argue and argue till the guy turns front and takes a dance posture and flexes his bicep he flexes his bicep to the music 5 guys join him in bicep flexing dance all in unison then they all do a hip thrust very macho then turns upstage and wiggle their butts (not SO macho) they move through other male display dance moves finger snapping,etc then three women step up and do the same male display moves

Scene 79. Film Noir

NARRATOR When they reached the dark hallway, she slowed their walk.

WESLEY Tired?

VANESSA No. It's just that I want to be kissed.

NARRATOR She looked at him gravely. He walked away, and she followed him. It was a long time before he spoke.

WESLEY When you get to be my age, you won't take things so lightly.

VANESSA I don't take them lightly now.

WESLEY You may be a minx, for all I know.

VANESSA I'm not sure what that means.

WESLEY Look it up. VANESSA Where?

WESLEY Well, I have a fine dictionary in my cabin. Let's both look it up.

NARRATOR He wished that he could have cut that last speech.

VANESSA Let's go to mine where there are no dictionaries at all.

NARRATOR With a surge of dizzying feeling he wanted her more than he had ever wanted anything. Vanessa led him toard her cabin. The night steward sitting in the corridor said, Good evening, and vanished.

She whispered:

VANESSA Won't you come in? I'll make you some scrambled eggs.

NARRATOR She laughed, stepped into the cabin, held open the door, and he was drawn magnetically in. She closed the door. They stood in the blackness and she waited a full minute before turning on a light. She moved to the table and fixed two drinks.

WESLEY Not until I know who you are.

NARRATOR She handed him his glass and took a thoughtful sip from her own.

VANESSA Vanessa Foley

NARRATOR she said

VANESSA and I'm sort of mad about you.

WELSEY Sort of.

VANESSA Really.

Another story:

NARRATOR They passed from the road into a meadow. The long grasses whispered to their slow tread. He ignored the heavy dew which soaked his shoes until he realized that he was not caring for her....

WILBUR Sakes alive! You'll catch your death of cold. Let's sit on this gate.

NARRATOR He had spoken so softly that the charm was not shattered, and, swathed in glory, they perched on the three-barred wooden gate of a barbed wire fence. She sat on a lower bar and leaned her head against his knee. He instinctively stroked her cheek.

WILBUR I've never felt so happy before. I don't want ever to lose you. Can't we be married? I'm not worthy....

MYRTLE Wilbur, you don't love me! It's just the moonlight and walking with a woman. You don't know what you want yet. You wouldn't propose to me if it were a hot afternoon, a muggy, wilty afternoon, and we were walking down Main Street.

WILBUR But you do like me. And when we're both lonely....

MYRTLE Probably no one will ever love me as I want. Why should they? I'm just a little hat trimmer with a love for tea and cats!

WILBUR You aren't. You are the one person I could love if you could only understand how much I mean it.

NARRATOR And as he said it he knew he didn't quite mean it; he knew he was merely living up to the magic moment, and he listened to his own high-pitched voice going on in poetic periods unnatural to him....

WILBUR When I look into your eyes I see all the fairy stories my mother used to read to me....

MYRTLE But you don't want a lady story teller. You want a nice home and somebody to send out the laundry for you. I understand. I often want a home myself. But I'm funny. I distrust sentimentality. You ought to think what you're saying....

NARRATOR Suddenly she was crying in sobs accumulated through years of loneliness. She crouched on the lower bar of the gate

and hid her eyes against his knee. Her hat fell off and her hair was a little disordered. Yet this touch of prosaicness did not shock him. It brought her near to him, made her not a moon wraith, but a person like himself. He patted her shoulder till she sat up and laughed a little, and they strolled back toward the town.

And he: the overwrought self that had sung of love and fairy tales was gone. But he felt toward her a sincere and eager affection.

Scene 103. Women

THE WOMAN SAYS The blue-collar worker is the backbone of our society, Society needs the services and products they provide, whether the workers themselves dream of something better or not. Many of them love their jobs, too— that doesn't change that quite a few of them aren't qualified to do much else. There's no shame in that.

Not that this is why I did it. Not that I am saying that. Luckily, that was never my reason. I was not forced into it in that way. It was my choice.

Not everyone can be a prostitute. You do need a special talent. It's definitely a hell of a hard, fucking job. You need enormous amounts of patience,

enormous amounts of compassion. You have to put up with a lot of shit. It's like being in a war— you're in a war zone.

You're in a society which is misogynistic and full of sexual guilt, and you take that shit on. It can get to you. I compare it a lot to being a nurse.

I had a transsexual, hermaphroditic lover for a while— a female to male, transsexual, surgically made hermaphrodite.

A new option for people. That's one of the great things about living these days. My new lover is totally androgynous. I think it's beautiful.

These days, you see men dressing as women wearing monkey boots, and women dressing as men but with false eyelashes. Now, everything's getting mixed together which I really like.

And strap-on dildos, of course, are really being used a lot to play with gender. Women are getting these big dicks— it's great. And they really know how to use them. It's so real. And of course it never gets soft.

My friend Trish is really good at thrusting. Women aren't generally as good at thrusting, but she has really got it down. Her dick is totally real to her

and I suck it like it's real and I feel like she feels everything that I do. It's just beautiful. The technology has vastly improved. When I first got into porno movies they were tied on with pieces of elastic and were really flimsy. These were invented by men, but now women are designing these fabulously beautiful leather strap-on things.

Older Scenes:

Scene 68. The Arts

A country store. A string quartet comes on, finds chairs, adjust their instruments, tune up, and we just listen to some beautiful Bach while how-to drawings from the Great Artists school or paint-by-numbers paintings are projected

And after a while, over the music, Bill Dow steps up and reads his poem:

BILL DOW Many people from many lands Are living here as one. They work together, learn together For them living is fun.

This nation of ours is a powerful one, It's known from shore to shore. But as it grows, as everyone knows, Cooperation is needed even more.

Rivers, valleys, mountains, plains, Make up our beautiful land. America is a wonderful place, Made by God's own hand.

Scene 49. Bad Stuff

A guy comes out with bloody hands, blood up to his elbows and he stands and shows them to the audience as three young women wearing Victoria's Secret lingerie are brought in on leashes by a guy with a whip and a black cripple, badly burned from head to foot, stumbles in, falls, and writhes on the ground and another guy brings in a guy on a leash who hops up and down and an old Mafia don comes in wearing sunglasses and stands there and a guy comes in on his knees,

walks on his knees along the front of the stage and goes out again all the while some great popular music is playing.

And it may be that on the rear wall is projected a still, or moving scroll with as much of this Jennie Holzer text on it as seems enough:

a little knowledge can go a long way a lot of professionals are crackpots a man can't know what it is to be a mother a positive attitude means all the difference in the world a sense of timing is the mark of genius a sincere effort is all you can ask all things are delicately interconnected ambivalence can ruin your life any surplus is immoral anything is a legitimate area of investigation at times your unconsciousness is truer than your conscious mind bad intentions can yield good results being alone with yourself is increasingly unpopular being happy is more important than anything else children are the hope of the future decency is a relative thing

don't place too much trust in experts eating too much is criminal enjoy yourself because you can't change anything anyway every achievement requires a sacrifice everyone's work is equally important exceptional people deserve special concessions good deeds eventually are rewarded grass roots agitation is the only hope if you live simply there is nothing to worry about ignoring enemies is the best way to fight illness is a state of mind it's better to be a good person than a famous person it's not good to operate on credit it's vital to live in harmony with nature just believing something can make it happen keep something in reserve for emergencies killing is unavoidable but nothing to be proud of listen when your body talks men are not monogamous by nature murder has its sexual side

pain can be a very positive thing people are responsible for what they do unless they are insane people won't behave if they have nothing to lose raise boys and girls the same way redistributing wealth is imperative religion causes as many problems as it solves remember you always have freedom of choice romantic love was invented to manipulate women sometimes science advances faster than it should sometimes things seem to happen of their own accord starvation is nature's way sterilization is a weapon of the rulers the desire to reproduce is a death wish the family is living on borrowed time the idea of revolution is an adolescent fantasy the new is nothing but a restatement of the old the only way to be pure is to stay by yourself true freedom is frightful you are a victim of the rules you live by you can't expect people to be something they're not

Scene 99. I Remember

While television news footage of war— and, or, if there is more than one screen, of war and race riots and other violence— is projected, this text is spoken by one man. or else one man begins and then one or two or three others join him.

I remember many Sunday afternoon dinners of fried chicken or pot roast.

I remember my father's collection of arrowheads.

I remember loafers with pennies in them.

I remember game rooms in basements.

I remember "come as you are" parties. Everybody cheated.

I remember drugstore counter stools with no backs, and swirling around and around on them.

I remember two-dollar bills. And silver dollars.

I remember "Double Bubble" gum comics and licking off the sweet "powder."

I remember catching myself with an expression on my face that doesn't relate to what's going on anymore.

I remember the little "thuds" of bugs bumping up against the screens at night.

I remember when polio was the worst thing in the world. I remember my first cigarette. It was a Kent. I remember my first erections.

I thought I had some terrible disease or something.

I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.

I remember when, in high school, if you wore green and yellow on Thursday it meant you were queer.

I remember an American history teacher who was always threatening to jump out the window if we didn't quiet down. (Second floor.)

I remember Liberace.

I remember pony tails.

I remember driftwood lamps.

I remember potato salad.

I remember salt on watermelon.

I remember lightning.

I remember my father in a tutu. As a ballerina dancer in a variety show at church.

I remember getting erections in school and the bell rings and how handy zipper notebooks were.

I remember not looking at crippled people. I remember chalk.

I remember daydreams of dying and how unhappy everybody would be.

I remember the sound of the ice cream man coming.

I remember once losing my nickel in the grass before he made it to my house.

I remember that life was just as serious then as it is now.

And then, at the end, hard rock music comes on, they all dance in the same way the women did at the beginning of the piece— a wild, ecstatic, enraged, abandoned, insane messy hair dance at the end of which they simply stop and walk off without ceremony.

Scene 36. Mrs. Bridge

woman in red dress entering, dancing solo with floor lamp looking for a place to put it no dialogue here, just music? Benny Goodman or Guy Lombardo or Bing Crosby trying the lamp here, not liking it,

trying it there, not liking it, trying it somewhere else, finally placing the lamp and exiting

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