Darren’s Ditherings

FEEDING YOU THE TRUTH LIKE A MAMA SEAGULL!!!!

Hey, Apple Crisponites. Thought I’d grant you a peek into my thoroughly disreputable past this time around. I haven’t always been Kingston’s unwavering bastion of conservative wisdom. In my painfully misguided youth, I fancied myself to be quite the avant-garde playwright. In my self-published manifesto “A List of Things Plebians Shall Never Understand”, I outlined the ways in which conventional theatrical modes merely reinforced hegemonic capitalist values and bourgeois prejudices. The new theatre I strove toward would be called “Theatre de la Merde”, or “Shit Theatre”, and instead of coherent dialogue and staging, it would feature nonsensical screaming, full audience/cattle interaction, and heavily sarcastic recitations of soap-opera transcripts by women wearing mismatched pantsuits while smearing raspberry jam on their armpits. I never actually had anything produced around town, although the then-house manager of the Wellington Street Theatre gave me a somewhat promising “This is… Jesus Christ, what the hell IS this?” The following short one-act piece is from my pre-Merde days, and is taken from a larger dramatic cycle entitled “Watch Without Living: Your Searing Pain is My Cornflakes”. The name of this particular segment: “World’s On Fire, So Slap Me Like You Mean It, Big Boy”.

(Lights come up to reveal a department-store mannequin dressed in fascist regalia, cobs of corn duct-taped to the top and sides of its head. Projected on a screen behind it are scenes of nuclear war, apocalypse, natural disasters. There should be a blaring fuzztone emitting from a guitar just offstage. The audience members should feel as if they are being stabbed in the eyes with the jagged shards of the broken truth. Ideally, they should be writhing in pain and vomiting on the floor. After two minutes, two figures walk onstage. From stage left, BOURGEOIS PIG BASTARD IDIOT SLAVE, about forty years old, with a thick handlebar mustache, dressed in a bowler hat and grey suit with bolo tie. From stage right, SUBURBAN CAPITALIST TV DINNER MORON, dressed in a grey sweater, shorts, and tennis shoes. They see each other, then convulse violently for five minutes. The audience members should be be weeping and threatening to eat each other for survival. Finally, the two men stop and look at each other again.)

SUBURBAN CAPITALIST TV DINNER MORON: Hello.
BOURGEOIS PIG BASTARD IDIOT SLAVE: Shut up.
SUBURBAN CAPITALIST TV DINNER MORON: You hate yourself.
BOURGEOIS PIG BASTARD IDIOT SLAVE: Of course. Why else do I live as I do?
SUBURBAN CAPITALIST TV DINNER MORON: I, meanwhile, am comfortable in my ignorance, and have nothing but contempt for the truth. Please validate my parking and recommend a reasonably priced steakhouse in the greater metropolitan area.
BOURGEOIS PIG BASTARD IDIOT SLAVE: (spits on SUBURBAN CAPITALIST TV DINNER MORON’s shoes) I hate us. We should kill ourselves for the good of all the various things and stuff that we do not know about because we wear the blinders of the middle class and are stupid.
SUBURBAN CAPITALIST TV DINNER MORON: (skips away) I am ever so happy. La la la dee dee. The state is my benevolent mother and shall ever be. (The slap of the blade of a hockey stick against a puck is heard offstage.) Ooh, a hockey game is being played elsewhere!
BOURGEOIS PIG BASTARD IDIOT SLAVE: (dancing a jig) Hockey has supplanted religion as the modern opiate of the masses. You are to be beaten, even if I am technically your pet monkey. Bow low, sir.
(SUBURBAN CAPITALIST TV DINNER MORON does as instructed, and is beaten about the neck and back for ten minutes. The audience members should be tearing out their hair and engaging in a hateful orgy of indiscriminate sexual acts. Finally, SUBURBAN CAPITALIST TV DINNER MORON shouts out:)
SUBURBAN CAPITALIST TV DINNER MORON: Wait, dear friend! (The beating ceases) I have realized that in what you refer to as the cryogenic chamber of modern society, in which true feeling and emotion lie frozen and inaccessible, the truest form of violence is passionate sex!
BOURGEOIS PIG BASTARD IDIOT SLAVE: Compadre! A new world has been forged!
(The two men begin to make love feverishly and violently as “It’s a Small World After All” plays offstage and eight children on bicycles ride onstage wielding sexual devices. The children circle the pair. The audience should have committed mass suicide at this point. Have plenty of paper towels on hand.)
THE END

‘Til next time!
Darren Springer