The Boy, the Girl, and the Piece of Chocolate
a ten-minute play
CHARACTERS:
THE BOY
THE GIRL
They are a "normal" upper middle-class couple in their mid thirties.
Despite the accusations, neither is particularly fat.
(The BOY appears with a box of chocolates. The GIRL, who has been seated, rises to meet him.)
BOY: Hey, we've gone through that chocolate pretty quickly.
GIRL (Looking): Yes, there's only one piece left in the box.
BOY: Well, you can have it if you want.
GIRL: But it's your favorite: a truffle.
BOY: Yes, but I'd like you to have it.
GIRL: Oh, no. That's the last one. It's your favorite. It's yours.
BOY: But I'm giving it to you.
GIRL: That's a sweet gesture. But I don't need any more chocolates. I've had plenty.
BOY: Yes, I've noticed you've been gaining a little weight.
GIRL: What?
BOY: Yes, you've got a little problem with those buttons, see?
GIRL: I have a problem?
BOY: Yes. Only a little one. But a problem.
GIRL: You think I'm gaining weight?
BOY: I wouldn't say that exactly, but, yes, you're getting a little heftier.
GIRL: Hefty am I?
BOY: It's all right. I like big women.
GIRL: Nice of you.
BOY: And you can get even bigger by eating that piece of chocolate.
GIRL: I wouldn't touch that piece of chocolate with a ten-foot pole.
BOY: One little chocolate won't make much difference. Lots of people have a little sweet after dinner and they never show it at all.
GIRL: Maybe you think I should run around the block a couple of times.
BOY: Exercise never hurt anyone, you know.
GIRL: Listen, you butterball. You're fat. You've always been fat. You've been fat as long as I've known you.
BOY: Hey, this isn't about me.
GIRL: What do you mean it isn't about you? This is all about you. That's your chocolate.
BOY: No, no. I want you to have it.
GIRL: Why?
BOY: Because I'm nice, that's why. Because I love you.
GIRL: You want me to get fat.
BOY: I only said you had a little problem. You don't have to get so defensive.
GIRL: I'm not defensive. You're the one who needs defending.
BOY: Defensive doesn't mean needing defending.
GIRL: Who cares.
BOY: Well, I sure don't.
GIRL: Why don't we just throw the piece of chocolate away.
BOY: No, we shouldn't do that.
GIRL: Why?
BOY: It's chocolate.
GIRL: So?
BOY: So chocolate is special. Here, take the piece of chocolate.
GIRL: Is there poison in this piece of chocolate?
BOY: No, no, just chocolate, you know. And butter. And sugar. You know, fattening stuff.
GIRL: I'm getting tired of this talk about how fat I am.
BOY: Let's talk about something else.
GIRL: Good idea.
(Long silence)
BOY: Well, what should we talk about?
GIRL: How should I know? You're the one with all the answers.
BOY: We could talk about current events.
GIRL: I hate current events. Look how depressing everything is. The president, the country, everything. It's all awash in hatred and mismanagement. I hate it I hate it.
(Long silence)
BOY: How about literature?
GIRL: Bor-ing.
BOY: How about sex?
GIRL: You mean talking about it?
BOY: I mean doing it.
GIRL: Not now, I'm not in the mood. And besides, I have a headache.
BOY: You always have a headache.
GIRL: I don't always have a headache. Just like a man. You expect us to be always ready. Well, we're not always ready. We have to be coaxed a little, we have to be persuaded.
BOY: That's why I was trying to give you the piece of chocolate.
GIRL: You wanted to give me the piece of chocolate so I'd give you sex?
BOY: Well, that's putting it a little bluntly, but—yes.
GIRL: You were paying me to give you sex?
BOY: Well, I wouldn't say "paying" you. I was giving you a piece of chocolate.
GIRL: One lousy piece of chocolate. You think that's all I'm worth?
BOY: It was my favorite kind of chocolate.
GIRL: But it was only one piece. You think I'd fuck you for one piece of chocolate?
BOY: All right, next time I'll offer two.
GIRL: I wouldn't fuck you if you offered me a hundred boxes of chocolate.
BOY: I know it. That's why I offered you only one. I don't have to offer you a lot of chocolate. All I need is one. You'll say no to that. I might as well save the rest of the box for myself.
GIRL: Yourself. That's all you think of.
BOY: Well, have you got a better subject?
GIRL: Yes, I do. I think about the world.
BOY: The world?
GIRL: Yes, and my place in it.
BOY: I thought you hated current events.
GIRL: I do. But that's not the same as the world. That just shows the limitations of your thinking. You've never been particularly deep.
BOY: Why did you marry me then?
GIRL: I thought you'd get better.
BOY: Better? You thought I was a fixer-upper.
GIRL: You could put it like that, yes.
BOY: Well, did I?
GIRL: Did you what?
BOY: Did I get better?
GIRL: No, you just got fatter. You started eating those chocolates and you never stopped and you just got—immense.
BOY: I'm not all that fat.
GIRL: Oh yes, you are. You are also a living disproof of the old adage that fat people are jolly. You are dull dull dull. (She reaches for the chocolate.)
BOY: Dull am I. Give me that piece of chocolate.
GIRL: No, you said it was mine.
BOY: But you don't need it. You're getting fat.
GIRL: You're fatter than I am.
BOY: I tell you what: let's give the chocolate to charity. We'll go outside and hand it with our compliments to the first kid we see.
GIRL: He won't take it. Kids aren't supposed to take candy from strangers.
BOY: We'll introduce ourselves.
GIRL: We're still strangers. Besides, if he took it, it would be setting a bad precedent. Someone might want to give him poison candy.
BOY: Maybe I'm trying to give you poison candy.
GIRL: You haven't the imagination.
BOY: Oh, I haven't, eh. I tell you, I've been reading a lot of books lately.
GIRL: This is, I'm sure, a recent development.
BOY: And they have a lot of ideas about handling people like you.
GIRL: What books?
BOY: Well, Mein Kampf by Hitler.
GIRL: You've been reading Mein Kampf?
BOY: Yes, and he has a few ideas I'd like to try out. You know, Western women have too much freedom. Nietzsche said, "Truth is a woman. That's why she loves a soldier."
GIRL: Nietzsche ended up in the nut house. Which, I might add, is where you're likely to wind up too.
BOY: Listen, I'm serious.
GIRL: You couldn't be serious if you grew two heads.
BOY: And you are, huh?
GIRL: I have my serious side, yes. That doesn't mean I'm against fun.
BOY: And what do you think of as fun?
GIRL: Eating chocolates. (She gulps the chocolate down.)
BOY: You ate the chocolate.
GIRL: I did.
BOY: It was the last piece.
GIRL: It was.
BOY: I thought you'd give the chocolate to me.
GIRL: You offered it to me. I ate it.
BOY: I thought if I mentioned you were putting on weight you'd hand it back to me. And then I could eat it.
GIRL: You offered it to me hoping I'd give it back to you?
BOY: Well, yes. That sometimes happens.
GIRL: Not in this case. Yum yum it was delicious.
BOY: That was the last chocolate.
GIRL: The last.
BOY: I'll never buy you another box of chocolates.
GIRL: You didn't. I bought this box. It's my box.
BOY: Well, you can have it.
GIRL: I did.
BOY: Bitch.
GIRL: Bastard.
(Long silence)
BOY: What's on television?
GIRL: Nothing but reruns.
BOY: Wanna go out?
GIRL: No.
(Long silence)
BOY: Hey, honey. Let's make up.
GIRL: Why?
(Long silence)
BOY: I have another box of chocolates.
GIRL: Where?
BOY: I hid it in the closet.
GIRL: (Excitedly but happily) That's terrible!
BOY: Let's go eat them all.
GIRL: Let's get fat.
BOY: First, can I read you my poem?
GIRL: All right. What is it?
BOY: It's called "The Skeleton's Defense of Carnality."
(Recites. Note: He recites the poem as a professional poet would; as poet he is no longer the character we have been watching.)Truly I have lost weight, I have
lost weight,
grown lean in love's defense,
in love's defense grown grave.
It was concupiscence
that brought me to the state:
all bone and a bit of skin
to keep the bone within.
Flesh is no heavy burden
for one possessed of little
and accustomed to its loss.
I lean to love, which leaves me lean
till lean turn into lack.
A wanton bone, I sing my song
and travel where the bone is blown
and extricate true love from lust
as any man of wisdom must.
Then wherefore should I rage
against this pilgrimage
from gravel unto gravel?
Circuitous I travel
from love to lack
and lack to lack,
from lean to lack
and back.
(Brief silence)
GIRL: What a strange poem. I have a poem, too.
(Recites)
Who do we fall
in love with if not
ourselves?—starstruck, stupid
are what we feel when "struck" by Cupid
"Falling in love" is what
we have instead of God
The powerful need for self-abasement
leads to our own effacement
"To thy high requiem become a sod"
wrote Keats, who understood
these things too well, and Anne
Francis in this film, fearful and beau-
tiful, is a statue, a woman turned to wood
I think of Chet Baker with his thin voice and marvelous horn:
the sudden presence of heroin
(As GIRL recites the last line, she mimes injecting a needle into her veins; then she opens her arms to the world.)
(She is still.)
BOY (Indicating her, admiringly, spelling it slowly) Heroine! H- e- r- o- i- n- e.
Tableau and
END
Shavius / Diabolus
a ten-minute play
A tall, thin old man with bushy eyebrows and white hair arrives in Hell, which is not a city much like Seville but merely an empty stage. A wisp of smoke blows by. The man pinches his arm.
Am I really here. Alive? Or is this some last dream before I'm thrown on the scrap heap?
A man appears at the side of the stage. He is dressed impeccably in a fashionable suit and tie. He has the merest hint of horns on his forehead to tell us who he is.
This is the scrap heap, Mr. Shaw. But welcome, I have enjoyed reading your works. They are quite popular here in Hell.
SHAW (amused): Well, I have definitely been called a devil. But you, sir, are, I take it, (indicating the horns on the man's head) the very thing itself.
DEVIL: Only a minor functionary, I assure you. These horns (far more useful than the angelic halo, don't you think) are a recent acquisition—the result of a promotion. I am merely your welcoming committee.
SHAW: Most kind.
DEVIL: Not at all. As you pointed out in Man and Superman, since we are no longer limited to the body, we can appear in any way we wish. You for example might appear as a strong and healthy version of yourself—say, at forty-five. A vital man.
Suddenly Shaw is forty-five years old. Red-bearded, erect.
DEVIL: You see, well-done!
SHAW (pleased): We dramatists are accustomed to dealing with illusion.
DEVIL: As are the fallen angels. One might say that illusion is the only way we can bear reality—so there is nothing but illusion here. We are all on a bare stage with no scenery except for what we can create from our imaginations. Would you care for Brazil?
SHAW: No, thank you. A bare stage suits me. I will tell you should I have any further requirements. What is to be done with me?
DEVIL: You are to be judged.
SHAW: I have always had the suspicion that critics were secretly devils and devils critics.
DEVIL: We would not dream of judging your work. It is your soul in which we are interested.
SHAW: Quite an appendage, the soul. So I have one, do I?
DEVIL: We believe so. But so much of our lives is illusion it is difficult to tell.
SHAW: And who is my judge to be?
DEVIL: Him—or perhaps it is Her.
SHAW: You don't know?
DEVIL: No. We are in darkness here. "No light but rather darkness visible," as your English poet put it.
SHAW: What are you planning to do with me?
DEVIL: I—or, I should say, we—have no plans. We have summoned you to this empty stage. And we have given you a character: me. What will you do with it?
SHAW: I could fill your mouth with speeches.
DEVIL: As indeed you did very well. But I am a problem as a character. I don't know who I am. And you don't know either.
SHAW: I can give you an identity. You are Adam the gardener.
DEVIL: But that is only your illusion, not mine. I know nothing of flowers or plants. But I have seen you in your secret moments. I have seen you when you most despaired. Do you remember? I am no gardener, but I felt such sorrow for you that day when I saw you weeping in the garden...Or was that someone else?
SHAW: It was, I believe, a man far greater than I. A religious fanatic, but a genius. He was of course destroyed for his activities which he was unable to disguise as playwriting. He was then resurrected—a pure fiction—and the image of the crime against him became the centerpiece of a monstrous body of thought which destroyed thousands.
DEVIL: Christianity, you mean. Yes, we dislike it here as well. Many of our finest people have adopted the stance of atheism.
SHAW: I was no atheist but a believer in the Life Force.
DEVIL: Perhaps the greatest illusion of all. As if life had to have a purpose.
SHAW: It has one purpose: to achieve consciousness of itself. Exactly what you say you lack.
DEVIL: Yes, it's true. I may have some awareness of you, but little of myself. None of my self. Perhaps I have no self.
SHAW: Then you are a dramatist! I should have known that the devil who would greet me would have been a playwright.
DEVIL: Yes, I believe that's right. Yes, I was a playwright. Something is coming back to me now. I remember: To be or not to be... But that is as far as I can reach.
SHAW: It is my particular hell to meet William Shakespeare! You, sir, have been my father and my great example and my great antagonist—though you were of course unaware of it. It is an honor to meet you.
DEVIL: No, I am only a minor functionary. Not a top dog. Only a bottom.
SHAW: Yes, Bottom. That was one of your characters.
DEVIL: And an ass.
SHAW: Yes, Bottom became an ass. You don't remember?
DEVIL: No, I'm afraid not. When I died, my soul went out of me and left me only this shell of substance which you see before you. You too will begin to forget. It will be a great blessing but a source of embarrassment when you encounter those who still have memory. Those like yourself.
SHAW: Yes, I remember it all—the whole glorious, mistaken thing I called "my life." What a time!
DEVIL: But this is not time at all. This is eternity. It will be a long winter's nap.
SHAW: The devil!
DEVIL: You are trying to deny it, but things are already beginning to go, aren't they. You are beginning to forget who you were—because you are no longer that. Time is only real here for that moment of forgetting. Then it vanishes entirely.
SHAW: But I thought I was to be judged.
DEVIL: This is your judgment. It is the judgment of the most high that you are to forget. The very thing you valued—consciousness—will be taken from you.
SHAW: I can't imagine that.
DEVIL: You were nothing more than a shell the Life Force filled. Now, it has moved on. Even the stage we stand on will be vanishing.
SHAW: Yes, I remember your saying such things in your plays.
DEVIL: Plays? Plays are nothing. You and I stand on the edge of an abyss. Whatever audience we have is as much in motion as we. We have been men, but now... The Life Force has amused itself with us, and now it has abandoned us. We are vanishing, vanishing.
(The lights begin to dim.)
We are such stuff as dreams are made on.
SHAW (putting his hand to his ear): What do you say? Dreams?
DEVIL: Not even dreams.
SHAW: Drams?
DEVIL: Not even drams. Nor trams. Nor
(The light grows fainter and fainter)
SHAW (reciting from Man and Superman): "You think that you are Ann's suitor; that you are the pursuer and she the pursued; that it is your part to woo, to persuade, to prevail, to overcome. Fool: it is you who are the pursued, the marked down quarry, the destined prey. You need not sit looking longingly at the bait through the wires of the trap: the door is open, and will remain so until it shuts behind you forever."
DEVIL: "Behind you forever."
SHAW: To wait in the dark
DEVIL: a deep moan
SHAW: for a day of steam and wet
DEVIL: cutting through everything
SHAW: life as it should be
DEVIL: to a fierce dark ecstasy
The light slowly vanishes as the two men begin to speak a chorus. At their last words, it is gone entirely.
the yellowish pallor moves: there is an old crone wandering in the void
I have wandered for hours in horrible loneliness that's understood isn't it
branded with her shame barren, the Life Force passes it by who would like to be a better man our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves
treat us well: we will not prove ungrateful Go to the bee, thou poet
that is not happiness but the price for which the strong sell their happiness
I remember: he came to heaven beware of the man whose god is in the skies
the mere transfiguration of institutions I should laugh at you, Jack
vital economy is the philosopher's stone she habitually and unscrupulously uses her personal fascination to make men give her whatever she wants from the darkness of the darkness to the darkness the lifelong imprisonment of penniless men
and when a negro is dipped in kerosene and set on fire in America at the present time
crowds of respectable, charitable, virtuously indignant, high-minded citizens
the things our moral monsters do may be left out of account the horror of the one the
loneliness of the other compulsory chattel labor a horse may live from 24 to 40
years I am thinking of my dear mother when I think of you of the darkness
matrimonomaniacs! evolving today a mind's eye that shall see, not the physical world
but the purpose of life from the darkness to hell is the home of the unreal and of
the seekers for happiness it is the only refuge from heaven darkness
Ekleksographia:
Wave Two
November, 2009
Plays
Jack Foley
Jack Foley is an innovative, widely-published poet and critic who, with his wife, Adelle, performs his work frequently in the San Francisco Bay Area. His poetry books include Letters/Lights—Words for Adelle, Gershwin, Exiles, and Adrift (nominated for a Northern California Book Reviewers Award). Foley's Greatest Hits 1974-2003 (2004) appeared from Pudding House Press, a by-invitation-only series. His books of criticism include O Powerful Western Star (winner of the Artists Embassy Literary/Cultural Award 1998-2000), Foley's Books: California Rebels, Beats, and Radicals, and The Dancer and the Dance: A Book of Distinctions, with introduction by Al Young. A book Foley edited, ALL: A James Broughton Reader, was designated number one gay book of the year by AfterElton.com. Foley's radio show, Cover to Cover, is heard every Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. West Coast Time on Berkeley station KPFA and is available at the KPFA web site; his column, "Foley's Books," appeared for many years in the online magazine, The Alsop Review. Foley is currently at work on a fifteen-hundred-page timeline history of California poetry from 1940 to 2005 to be published in 2010. Dana Gioia describes Foley's poetry as "that rare commodity—genuinely avant-garde poetry...experimental poetry with depth and intelligence as well as intensity." Poet/playwright Michael McClure calls Foley "our firebrand experimentalist": "he holds his torch high so the reader can have more light." The Wikipedia entry, "Jack Foley (poet)," gives a sample of Foley's poetry. Foley's play, The Boy, the Girl, and the Piece of Chocolate was filmed by Alabama filmmaker Wayne Sides.