FUTILE ACT

a short play

(O and I in a place of toiling. An overgrown field and a room at once.
The ceiling feels almost too low. O and I face away from each other.)

O: There’s a bell hanging in the square. 

(Sound of slight rain.) 

I: The bell tolls 							            O: It dulls, tolls, dulls.
    and tolls every hour.

(Sound of rain growing. O and I listen to the rain, 
crane their heads toward the ceiling.) 

I: What’s funny is all the hours piling like crude slices of the day. 
    They sit there in the dirt with no sense, no shape. 

O: No sense of light. 

(The rain steadies. I begins clearing away the brush at their feet, 
kneeling toward the task. O keeps watching the ceiling.)

I: Might as well be slumped over in pain while you can.

O: Lack of pain equals a lack of what. 

I: You should focus less on lack and more on what can be done.

O: What can be done					
      is what lacks. 						                 I: Nevermind, nevermind 
                                                                                             whatever lacks. 

(Sound of steady rain. O watches, listens.
I plucks the weeds from their flimsy roots, straining.) 

O: I wanted a life that was neat at its edges. 

I: Might as well slump in pain when you can. 

O: I was a child and my father was a young man and the world
     was flush with things waiting to rot. 
     Not that rot itself is a force. 
     There were forces in that young man that that child couldn’t trace.
     Was it foolish of that child that I was 
     to be afraid of that man?

I: That man you would become? 

O: That’s not the way through the question, to ask another question. 

I: Most people like questions.

O: What’s funny is the answers never exactly lining up.
      Something, something, the perfect rings of Heaven.

(Sound of rain growing slightly. I cranes toward the sound,
still plucking the brush free, still kneeling.) 

I: Maybe you expect too much. There’s a kind of hollow wanting.

O: As a child I was numb all the time. Nothing could touch me. 

I: You have to fill that wanting space with meaningful things.
    Otherwise, you get swept up, become so small and jittery that you disappear. 

O: Nothing could touch me. 

I: What starts as a movement ends as its inverse. 

(Sound of rain growing.) 

I: The inverse of the rain, for instance. It always begins softly, then grows
    until it’s empty with itself. Then it softens, softens.

O: What’s funny is the end of rain is not a lack.

I: Before the rain is the lack of rain
    but in the rain is the lack of before.			      O: Lack of stillness,
 								                                   lack of quiet, 
                                                                                                   lack of warmth,
 								                                   lack of sun, 
                                                                                                   lack of sight,
                                                                                                   lack of reason, 
                                                                                                   lack of habit, 
                                                                                                   lack of––. 

(The rain punctuates everything.)