Prompt:
Find a nonfiction article in a newspaper or online. Circle/highlight five interesting words. Use these five words in your piece, weaving them together. -Shana Merlin, performer/improv trainer
Response: (my list of words is at the end)
TIM, 32, rides a stick horse around and around the stage.
TIM
(sing-song)
Dada, Dada, Dada, Dada, Dada, Dada....
DELILAH, 28, enters and stops and watches.
DELILAH
What the hell are you doing?
TIM
(proudly)
Riding a hobby horse to oblivion.
DELILAH
(muttering)
Mama said me there’d be days like this.
TIM
What?!
DELILAH
She said that if I got involved with a radical avant-garde artist that one day he would be riding around the apartment on a hobby horse.
TIM
(stopping)
She never said that.
DELILAH
I should have married the forestry student. I could be vacationing on South Padre rather than living in a dirty little apartment in the suburbs of Austin.
TIM
The apartment’s not dirty and a condo overlooking Lake Travis is hardly a little apartment in the suburbs.
DELILAH
Your a spoiled rich kid clinging to modernism...
TIM
(correcting)
Post-modernism...
DELILAH
Post-modernism?! You still think that Marcel Duchamp’s urinal is the greatest art ever created.
TIM
That piece revolutionized...
DELILAH
That was a hundred years ago!
TIM
And nothing greater has appeared since! It was incendiary and yet jocularly provocative.
DELILAH
It was a toilet! Are you telling me that Picasso, that Beckett, that Andy Warhol, that the Sad Donkey Tzara himself created nothing greater than a toilet!?
TIM
(dismissive)
You have no concept of art.
DELILAH
I have no concept of art?! I have no concept of art! I’ve sold more of my art than you have ever created!
TIM
And there it is! It always comes back to money with you. Van Gogh died before he ever sold a painting! Even you say he was one of the greatest artists of all time!
DELILAH
Completely missing the point as usual!
TIM
What point?!
DELILAH
Van Gogh may have failed to sell a painting, but at least he was always trying to sell something. You... you...
TIM
I’m an artist, not a marketing agent.
DELILAH
The two are not mutually exclusive!
TIM
(defeated)
They are to me.
Delilah sighs heavily. She knows she has hurt Tim. She goes to him.
DELILAH
I’m sorry. I know how hard it is for you.
TIM
I... I don’t want to seem like a... a...
DELILAH
...huckster?
Tim nods.
DELILAH
And you’re scared.
Tim nods.
DELILAH
I know.
She hugs him, then holds him at arms length. His head is down.
DELILAH
Will you let me try and sell your stuff?
Tim nods.
DELILAH
(hugging Tim again)
That’s my big boy.
The embrace ends. Tim looks at her and smiles.
TIM
(eager)
Want to see my new piece?
DELILAH
Sure.
Tim starts riding around on his stick horse.
TIM
Dada, Dada, Dada...
Delilah rolls her eyes.
Curtain.
Sad Donkey Tzara
forestry
modernism
radical avant-garde
vacationing
Dada Dada Dada Dada
hobby horse
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