(no subject)
SAMSON
a play in one act
(An art museum. A semicircle of enormous columns, with paintings in between covered by curtains, each with their label underneath. In the center, a wall with a sign on it. The sign, a label for a painting on the other side of the wall, reads “DELILAH” and under that, “KLARECO, Amedeo,” and beneath that the dates and materials for the painting. In the far distance there is a glowing red EXIT sign, and there are very dim lights over the stage that make it seem as if behind the audience is a large window, with the grey early morning light only just beginning to stream through. Other than that the stage is almost completely dark.
Off to the side of the wall, a little flame appears, a cigarette lighter being held by a GIRL, high school or college-age, with a small little face just barely illuminated by the light. There is the sound of footsteps echoing as if in a large gallery, and the little cigarette lighter flickers out. From somewhere in the wings a flashlight shines over the columns, and the wall, searching them. It flashes over HER face, and pauses there, a little spot of light in the darkness. SHE doesn’t move. The flashlight switches off, and the footsteps retreat into the distance.
There is a long moment, and then SHE walks forward, into the pale light. SHE’s dressed casually, almost like a tourist, jeans, a loose jacket, tennis shoes. SHE even has a backpack, which SHE sets down in the center of the semicircle of columns. SHE sits down beside the backpack and takes out a paraffin wax candle-and a holder for it as well, if it’s too narrow to stand up on its own-and sets it in front of her. The cigarette lighter comes out again, and she lights the camera. The pale grey morning light is already becoming stronger, but not so much that it overwhelms the candle flame.)
SHE
(Turning to the audience; very matter-of-fact)
I’m the last one who should be playing with matches.
I have... several pounds, I’m afraid I couldn’t really tell you the exact amount, of explosive... materials, trinitrotoluene, strapped to my body. Underneath the jacket. It’s timed to go off within fifteen minutes or so. I can’t tell you how it works. It’s not my design, but it’s very efficient.
So this is how we’re going to start out-I have the advantage over you, because I’ve made the first move. I have the ticking bomb. I literally am the ticking bomb. So you have to come up with something now. If you want to stop me.
But let’s be honest; it’s a good thing this isn’t going to take very long, because we know, don’t we, we know how this is going to end.
What confuses me so much is that a year ago I didn’t know I’d be here; a week ago I didn’t know I’d be here; when I was born, and they put me in the little cot and they wheeled me out of the operating room, they didn’t know and I didn’t know that the other end of my life was going to come so soon. Fifteen minutes. Maybe more, maybe less, I might have lost count.
So yes. The answer would be, Yes, this is a suicide bombing.
It’s all right, though, I don’t believe in my death any more than you do. I believe in the chemical fact of my death, of course I do, the physiological fact, that I will stop breathing and my insides will be ripped apart and my bones will shatter and I’ll be buried in a pile of rubble and the ashes of, as you see, paintings, and statues, and columns. I believe in that very strongly. Actually, you might say all of that is kind of the point.
But as much as I know that, as much as I imagine that, in fifteen minutes, happening to me, I somehow can’t believe that I won’t go on living, I can feel myself broken to pieces and I know what will happen to all my blood and at the same time I really can’t imagine that even after detonating several pounds of explosives all set around my heart, I can’t imagine that even after that I won’t be able to see.
So you’ll have to excuse me, if I seem strange, if you wanted more of a show, but this hasn’t dawned on me yet.
But it’s like-it’s like this one time, I was driving to my friend’s house in the country, he had invited me for the summer, and an officer came up beside my car and stopped me. And he tells me I ran through a place I was supposed to stop at, it’s a residential area and I’m going much too fast, I passed a car and I wasn’t supposed to pass it, half a billion things it seemed like, I did wrong. And he fined me a hundred. And the funny thing was, I didn’t even know I was doing it. I mean, when he told me I realized I’d sort of known something was wrong, but I don’t know what the problem was, I just kept going. And maybe that’s what this is like. Somewhere along the line, maybe years ago, maybe days or weeks ago, I made some sort of turning and now because of that I’m going to die in fifteen minutes in a comparatively small, unimportant art museum in a comparatively small, unimportant city, in a comparatively small, unimportant state.
This isn’t political, this isn’t social, this is only selfish. I used to read about suicide bombings in the news magazines I subscribed to, weekly, glossy two-page spreads of so much ruin and death, but when I looked at it, it was just a paper destruction, you would see the deaths of the children but they were only paper deaths. They were less than a tenth of a millimeter thick. I would say to myself, You’re eating your toast with jam, and you have your tea, and thousands of people are dead. I couldn’t make those two things come together. The deaths of thousands, and my breakfast. They died, and I got up in the morning. I was alive, and their bodies were rotting to pieces. I couldn’t understand that. I couldn’t make that real.
I think perhaps there’s strings among people that connect them to each other, and when I say strings to you I want you to see something visceral, like guts, like I’ve separated a single strand of the muscle of your heart and drawn it out of you and connected it to my heart, and when we part from each other this little thread is still alive and stretched to the breaking point. And I mean to say to you that I couldn’t feel those deaths, the photographs, but I could feel them pulling on my heart from great distances, from Atlantic Ocean distances, like my heart was wrapped around the world.
I was studying art history. I wanted to own a museum someday. That’s why I’m here right now. Renaissance art. Their faces are so perfect. The painting behind me, “Delilah,” fourteenth century. She’s with her lover Samson, and he’s asleep, and she’s cutting off his hair. He’s only powerful when he grows his hair long, it’s a sort of religious thing, and she’s taking it away and she’s making him as ordinary as anyone else. And when you look at the painting, he’s lying on the bed with his mouth open a little, so innocent and stupid, he has no idea, and she looks directly at you and
(A gesture like scissors)
snip.
Ever since I saw her I wanted to be her. She was so beautiful. They’re trapped in that one moment, in the painting, and their past is with them, and their future. He loved her, and she’s about to give him over to his enemies. She looks at you while she’s betraying him. She’s so real. She knows that in that second she has everything. And you can’t tell if she’s sorry or not.
(The same gesture)
Snip.
I wanted to own a museum but the fact was that my life already was a museum, it was a picture of itself instead of the real thing. It was like that painting, where the entire lives of two people are trapped in one moment. You could hang my entire life on the wall.
Samson, what happens to him is that she gives him over to his enemies, and they blind him. And God leaves him, and his honor leaves him, and his love leaves him. He’s like a slave. He has nothing left. They bring him into their temple so that they can make fun of him. Then he-he asks God to return him his strength, just for a moment, and God does, and Samson leans against the columns of the temple and he pulls them down and he and everyone in the temple dies.
This is the best temple I could find. I know that what’s going to happen is that-that it’ll go off, and the building will catch on fire, and some paintings and statues will burn. No one will die. Just pictures. And people will say, Thank God that nobody was hurt! The Renaissance will burn, and it’ll set the Enlightenment on fire, and then Modern Art in the next room over will burn too. And I know it doesn’t have a lot of significance. Things will go on as normal. It won’t make sense to people. They’ll say, But her life was so ordinary. She was as ordinary as anyone else.
Tomorrow’s paper hasn’t come out so you won’t know who I was yet, you won’t know about me, I’ll be a puzzle to you. But I can see myself remaining a puzzle to you, and I think I want it to be that way, because there are no strings between us.
What you are going to do is-the curtain will come down, and you’ll walk out of the theatre, and you’ll be all right. But at the same time-you might have been with me, you might have been me, and when the curtain drops, I’ll still be there for a single moment, and then there’ll be more light than I ever thought possible, there’ll be a sound so enormous I can’t hear it, a light so enormous I can’t see it, and I won’t see anything then. But even when you walk out of that theatre, alive, and healthy, you’ll be with me still, and you could have died here, you can’t imagine how much pain.
If there’s anything I want it’s for you to walk out, safe and sound, and know that had things gone differently you could have been me. I don’t know if you’d call it chance. If there’s movements to this, if this is planned. But we’re so separate, you and I, because you think I’m crazy, and right now this is art, onstage, and you’re only watching. But you’re art too, and I’m watching you. I’m the audience and you’re giving the play. The fact that I die at the end is only a mistake. It could have gone any other way. I think maybe I’m dying at the end just so I’ll have had a reason for being here.
I think that at the moment you shut your eyes, I’m gone.
(Throughout the play, the stage has become slowly and subtly brighter. By this time, it is almost completely lit by daylight streaming through the “window.”)
SHE
(Blows out the candle)
Any moment now, I think. I feel like we haven’t talked enough. I’m not afraid though. I don’t want you to think I’m afraid. I regret to tell you we have to part before the end. You and I. The curtain’s going to come down.
It’s funny. I never felt time going before. All my life it was running out, and I just didn’t know. I can’t imagine not being here. And I’m so glad.
(The curtain falls.)