DAMNED BE HIM THAT FIRST CRIES

Chara Kokkiou

Our beloved friend and passionate supporter of Thrausma (read her first contribution for us in Greek), Professor Chara Kokkiou is back with one more piece of Cinematic, Theatrical fiction, full of horror philosophical atmosphere, sensualism and compassion.

With her debut play/fiction “Monroe Gang” made the first step and today is commited to her writing catabasis in the lands of Beauty and Monstrosity coexistence. Enjoy here the first part of this spectacular novel experiment!

“Damned be him that first cries” (Macbeth, Act 5, scene 8)

[The scene depicts a large triangle. Two women are climbing it. One wears a long wedding dress. The other dons a short white dress. The first has long, blonde, straight hair; the second tousled, blonde curls. The former is crying, whispering, gasping; the latter is laughing out loud and yelling. Both pregnant and lonely. They hold mirrors of madness up to one another.]

Practice 1: Start and Ending

The director and the team (Nicholas, Jenni, Matt, Lydia) discuss the setting, the start, and the ending.

Lydia believes they should use Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory” as a background image and play the introductory part of the “Queen of the Night” aria with extremely fast runs, abruptly changing it into a slow-motion, distorted sound.

The director thinks that the play should end with a fire; burning the painting and leaving holes to the protagonists’ dresses; paralleling those in their souls. Everything starts to melt; the radio volume gradually increases, Diana Damrau’s voice dominates.

Before the volume increases, Matt

believes the first woman should whisper well-known lines from Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evilin French:

Bientôt nous plongerons dans les froides ténèbres;
Adieu, vive clarté de nos étés trop courts!
J’entends déjà tomber avec des chocs funèbres
Le bois retentissant sur le pavé des cours. (from: Chant d’automne)

– the other should scream the same verses in English:

Soon we shall plunge into the cold darkness;
Farewell, vivid brightness of our short-lived summers!
Already I hear the dismal sound of firewood
Falling with a clatter on the courtyard pavements.

Nicholas envisions the women exchanging bitter words until the end. The end could echo the title,evoking the famous scene from Macbeth: “They exit fighting. Alarums.”
The deep sleep of writing must be shattered, the night is broken, words cut deeper than knives, and death prevails.All must fall into darkness. Lights off.

Jenni thinks the women should stop

fighting immediately after the fire explosion. She thinks we need to create an immersive experience for the audience. She suggests scattering photos from their more glorious moments in life; these photos are being burned.

The actresses must start to bond over their shared mourning. They share their horror,then relief, and then horror again. They are saddened
now left with their insignificant, incomplete existences that are about to end. They start becoming transparent. The holes widen, their dresses shrink, they vanish; they are now utterly naked, fading out, until their bodies start to melt away.

The director wants to create frenzied chaos at the end– peak of the triangle: amid screams, loud laughter, fire, the women must share a moment of profound affection by admitting: “we’re coming from the cracks, we live in the margin of memory, but we’re dreamers.” It’s time to reveal their names. Ophelia and Marilyn.

Their bodies are covered in tattoos. They should stop fighting. They should start kissing. The fire–everything is now shrouded in smoke–they continue kissing; their kiss gives birth to a strange monster with snake hair that emits extremely loud, high-pitched tones from its alluring mouth. Each snake bites a word until it eats away the entire play.

But the sun will rise to hit their shadows as they all become fading creatures of the night. The play, having exhausted its secrets, falls back into a precocious sleep.

The director asks Lydia to choose a final quote for the play. Lydia makes history:

she proposes to cover the entire stage with a vast white canvas and writing on it: “empty space. loss of memory. void.”
A musician enters holding a violin, but not playing it. The ghosts of the night start to dance in waking consciousness, and the narrator’s voice is heard: “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”

End of practice 1, earlier than we thought-

(to be continued)