Craig Smith

WOMAN:

It starts with traffic.

MAN:

On the stage.

WOMAN:

All the adults are leaving the city.

MAN:

On the stage. This is theatre.

WOMAN:

The children are non-verbal.

MAN:

Non-verbal or pre-verbal.

WOMAN:

What’s the difference?

MAN:

They won’t have any lines. That’s what you’re saying.

WOMAN:

The children have no lines.

MAN:

And when you say traffic.

WOMAN:

It isn’t just cars.

MAN:

Of course not.

WOMAN:

I’m reading buses, coaches, trains, airport shuttles.

MAN:

Why not blimps, hot air balloons, parasails.

WOMAN:

The sky is never described.

MAN:

No clouds, no descriptions of light. A blank on all atmospheric conditions. The sky is of no importance, this is what you’re saying.

WOMAN:

So far as I have read.

MAN:

And you have not read the whole thing.

WOMAN:

You know this, the play has just been handed to us.

MAN:

To you.

WOMAN:

To us.

MAN:

The traffic leaving the city, we show this how. Painted curtains, cardboard silhouettes. Don’t tell me smoke machines. What city is being described, are we talking a metropolis or a regional centre?

WOMAN:

There is a building.

MAN:

Oh it really is a city. A building, how inventive.  I can practically smell a Nobel Prize being awarded for this one. A profound meditation on the lost innocence of human subjectivity, wrought out of prose that enlivens the dignity of -

WOMAN:

The sky is described.

MAN:

Just when I thought all hope was lost.

WOMAN:

Toffee.

MAN:

Excuse me.

WOMAN:

The sky is toffee-toned.

MAN:

I’m leaving. I’ll see you around.

WOMAN:

It’s mid-morning. The children are outside, beneath the toffee-toned sky, balancing on state-built brickwork walls, crawling along a quarter of grass with a non-incidental incline.

MAN:

How young are the children?

WOMAN:

Notes say no older than four.

MAN:

And they are all alone in the city because the adults have abandoned them.

WOMAN:

It was mid-morning that captured you, wasn’t it. You could see the sky.

MAN:

Enough about the bloody sky. Go on.

WOMAN:

You know, blood on a glass panel with light shining through would approach the tone of sky toffee.

MAN:

Are you ready to be serious?

WOMAN:

The building is an aviary. It is described in terms of metabolic brutalism.

MAN:

Now I’m getting angry. Before I was aghast, but that’s not enough anymore.

WOMAN:

There is mention of radiolaria, of parametric designs that should play on the law of ruins.

MAN:

Albert Speer. Play how.

WOMAN:

The superstructure that comprises the aviary will disintegrate during the course of the play.

MAN:

Disintegrate. Turn to dust. I’ll phone the health and safety office and alert them that air filtration masks should be supplied to all theatre attendees.  You ring the prop department and tell them that we’ll require one incongruous building borne out of the recesses of an eccentric’s mind that will disintegrate on command.  Much like how his talent clearly disintegrated across the decades.

WOMAN:

Do you really believe that?

MAN:

Well come on. Radiolaria. Metabolic brutalism.

WOMAN:

Remember it is mid-morning.

MAN:

Listen, I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think there was something real at the heart of this.

WOMAN:

The recovered masterwork, mentioned in the journals of how many contemporaries over the years, how many interviews where the question was raised. Compiled from his final hard drive, a miracle of data restoration. His estate chose us.

MAN:

How can we be sure the data wasn’t subtly corrupted? Lost in translation, a zero instead of a one.

WOMAN:

The disintegrated splinters of the aviary are to be extracted through air conditioned ventilation.

MAN:

The particles will rise.

WOMAN:

A tower of light. Cyclonic. We could do this.

MAN:

Dust, not light.  I know what you’re going to say, but let’s remember this is disintegration, not the reverse.

WOMAN:

Does this relate to a biographical detail that I’m forgetting? One of his earlier works?

MAN:

The walks he took with his mother, when his father took him to a coastal ridge and said jump.

WOMAN:

The remark his mother made on the most referenced of those walks, his father’s embrace when he swam back to shore.

MAN:

What else?

WOMAN:

What else what?

MAN:

The next prompt. I’m seeing infants climbing on state-built brickwork, an exodus of adults via arterial roadways, parametric aviaries that crumble northward. Tell me about the birds.

WOMAN:

You can imagine.

MAN:

You’ll tell me if I get it wrong.

WOMAN:

The children save the birds. There is a diagram.

MAN:

Of how the stork narrative is reversed.

WOMAN:

An arrow circles back. The birds delivered the children and then, and now, as you can imagine.

MAN:

Fill in the blanks for me.

WOMAN:

What’s the point?

MAN:

No don’t give up on me now. Come on, I’m invested. You said mid-morning, I asked about the age of the children.  Now we’re dancing.

WOMAN:

An arrow circles back on dance steps. Close the left foot to the right. Step to the right and back in line with the midsection of the aviary. The children take the birds onto their backs. Cross the left foot over the right. The non-incidental incline of the grass allows the children to be funnelled away from the audience.

MAN:

Leaving a void, although not completely, we see the brick wall, the grass. I would say the sky but now I think of Goya’s dog, El Perro.

WOMAN:

It is not a void if we want something from it.

MAN:

Nobody ever talks about the silhouette hovering above the dog, coming out of the non-incidental incline, looking down slope. It looks to me as if Goya’s shadow was pressed into the wall there, gazing at his painted canine with infinite love.

WOMAN:

It is a stain, the result of extracting the work from the walls of his putrid cottage, this is well known. The final prompt is that the grass should shimmer and the wall should lower.

MAN:

What are the specifics?

WOMAN:

Grass shimmer, ambient blade ripple render, subterranean fold pressure, wall immersion.

MAN:

The grass turns to water and the brick wall descends like the lowering of a floodgate. Something is rising from beneath. There is a growth, a new force emerging. What’s the next prompt?

WOMAN:

That was the last one.

MAN:

There’s more. Look again, there’s always something more. You missed the sky at the beginning, take another look.

WOMAN:

I turn the page over and back again. There is nothing more.

MAN:

Please.

WOMAN:

I’m tired.

MAN:

Can you please check again? 

WOMAN:

I check again.

MAN:

What do you find?

WOMAN:

I want to say nothing.

MAN:

And yet.

WOMAN:

What if a pipeline rises?

MAN:

Don’t start with what if, please.

WOMAN:

A pipeline rises.

MAN:

Something for the adults to return to.

WOMAN:

Scaffolding emerges.

MAN:

Thank you, honestly.

WOMAN:

Broad metal pipeline snakes from shimmer, matrices of steel interpolate, volleyed by air from north vents.

MAN:

The air conditioning, it’s reverse cycle.

WOMAN:

Warbling of scaffold creates resonance akin loose vertical powerlines, singing. Are you crying?