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This one act play was mounted at Earl Haig Secondary School in the spring of 1993.
SCENE I: in Bartholomew's studio
BARTHOLOMEW is painting passionately behind a large canvas, while his lover TATYANA and their friend FLORIAN lounge about the studio. TATYANA stands facing the auditorium, a rumpled newspaper in her limp hand.
TATYANA: Listen: in just a short time, every human being on planet Earth is going to spontaneously evolve onto a higher plane of creation, existing only as pure thought. Think of that.
(Pause.)
BARTHOLOMEW (musing aloud): Look at the brush go. What's it carving? I'm watching images being revealed from the canvas -- they were in there all the time. They were hiding. From who? Artists. And why shouldn't they? I'm certainly scared of artists -- weird monsters; who are they that make pictures only for each other?
FLORIAN: Tatyana, pass the paper, please.
TATYANA: Bartholomew,
BARTHOLOMEW: Hush please, I'm painting.
TATYANA: Did you hear what I just said?
BARTHOLOMEW: Hold on -- I'm painting, I'm painting. I can't stop now.
TATYANA: This is important.
BARTHOLOMEW: You don't understand -- I've somehow managed to make a picture that will touch the eyes and hearts of humans everywhere. This can make the common folk love paintings again...
TATYANA: Bartholomew --
BARTHOLOMEW (playfully): I am Robin Hood. (Pause; realising with awe and humility:) Tatyana, somehow the meaning of life has been revealed on this canvas.
FLORIAN: Oh my God!
BARTHOLOMEW: No, that's not it.
FLORIAN: Oh my God oh my God oh my God!
TATYANA: Will you put down that brush for just one minute?
BARTHOLOMEW: Don't you get it? I've seriously discovered the the purpose of existence and it's depicted right over here.
FLORIAN: Have you read the paper today?
BARTHOLOMEW (sardonically): No, no I haven't Florian. I've been busy creating the greatest painting of profound truth and universality ever conceived. Why?
FLORIAN: We're all about to transform into creatures of Luminous Energy!
(Pause.)
BARTHOLOMEW (sardonically): Had to happen sooner or later.
FLORIAN: Wake up, you fool!
BARTHOLOMEW: Hey --
TATYANA: Bartholomew, listen.
BARTHOLOMEW: Hold it, hold it. You just read this in the paper? -- that we're all going to suddenly evolve? And you believe it, just like that?
FLORIAN: It's a reputable paper.
TATYANA: Bartholomew love, can't you see? This is the most glorious thing ever to happen to the human race. Our childhood's end! Think of what lies ahead of us! To learn for the sake of learning, to travel into new lairs of wisdom...
FLORIAN: ...To like boldly go where no one's gone before.
BARTHOLOMEW: Look, I may only be a character in a play but I do have some sense of reality, and this is totally absurd.
TATYANA: Oh Bartholomew it'll be just dreamy!
BARTHOLOMEW: Dreamy?
TATYANA (dreamily): Imagine -- we're about to expand our consciousness a millionfold...
FLORIAN: ...Learn the secrets of the universe,
TATYANA: Become enlightened beyond the limits of all corporeal knowledge...
FLORIAN (exuberantly): Swoon our mortal meat and become gods!
BARTHOLOMEW: Mercy.
FLORIAN: I can't believe it, I mean, it's really going to happen. Does it say when? (Rifles through newspaper.) "Scientists cannot pinpoint the time precisely, but anticipate the metamorphosis to commence approximately mid-day..."
BARTHOLOMEW (darkly): Twelve-thirty in Newfoundland.
TATYANA: Violence, hunger, thirst, disease, rape -- all products of our stupid, depraved, bestial bodies. Aren't you tired of being controlled by blood, bile, sugar and sperm?
FLORIAN (sputtering with excitement): ...Yes, yes Tatyana's right, Bart. I mean, we spend like one-third of our lives lying down with our eyes closed, not doing anything. What a waste of time!
BARTHOLOMEW: This is, of course, completely insane. I've just painted the most important painting in history -- in itself a stretch of the old suspension of disbelief -- and you're telling me that the media has leaked a mass evolution into magical space-beings at lunchtime?
FLORIAN: That's basically it, yes.
BARTHOLOMEW: Well I'm not going.
(Pause.)
TATYANA: What the hell do you mean you're not going?
BARTHOLOMEW: I'm not ready to divorce my biology and my mind. I'm just not going.
FLORIAN: Why not, for Christ's sake?
BARTHOLOMEW: Well, I may live up here in my skull, but I'm as much in my guts and juices as in my brain. (Hesitation.) I'm afraid to find out how much of my soul is made up of instinct and chemicals. You see, I don't think there'd be very much of me left if I were pure thought.
FLORIAN: That's nuts. We're not unthinking animals: we're sentient, we've got free-will to choose.
BARTHOLOMEW: Are you sure? Are you sure we can do without bodies, that there'd be enough of us left?
FLORIAN: Well, of course they'd be.
TATYANA: We're ready to move on.
BARTHOLOMEW: Don't you understand that we're nothing but babies? We're not finished learning our lessons about being the way we are yet, so how can we expect to move on to being something else?
FLORIAN: Look, you can't just refuse to evolve.
BARTHOLOMEW: Watch me.
FLORIAN: Sober up, man! Why are you babbling on like this? This is the like most important thing in all of our lives.
BARTHOLOMEW: This is the end of our lives. Lives which are full of important things we forget, or ignore, or lose...
FLORIAN: Nothing important has ever happened to me before.
BARTHOLOMEW: If you believe that, Florian, then your life ended a long time ago.
TATYANA: Everything is falling apart here, Bartholomew. Everyone is poor and wretched and miserable, but that can all change. (Pause.) I love you Bartholomew Cubbins, and I want you to be with me as naked souls.
FLORIAN (lecherously): ...Naked souls,
BARTHOLOMEW: I love you too, Tatyana Aleksandrovna Barikovsky, because I'm a human machine. Love's the emotional expression of a complicated chemical plot attempting to meot squirt jissom into your uterus.
TATYANA: Are you saying our relationship is purely physical? What kind of crap is that?
BARTHOLOMEW: No, I'm saying that all we are is corporeal -- is bodies. Don't you get it? Without my body, I just wouldn't be me. I'm complex machine whose concepts of pleasure or pain, joy or misery, are based on my living as a human being. If I didn't have the body that defines me, I would cease to be human. I, as I know myself, would die.
FLORIAN: But what is all that supposed to mean?
BARTHOLOMEW: I love you not for what you do, Tatyana, but for who you are. That's how stupid a machine I am -- I was attracted to you for all of the smart and creative and noble things you did and then I fell in love with you. You could kick me in the head, and I would go right on loving you. That's the sort of silliness being human is all about.
TATYANA: That exactly the sort of silliness we can leave behind.
BARTHOLOMEW: It's exactly the sort of silliness we have to understand and resolve. My friend Nietzsche says that humanity is something to be surmounted, not skipped over. I've been wronged again and again by lofty notions of objectivity and intelligence. I've been hurt. I can't follow you to a place made up of those notions.
TATYANA: I've been wronged, too; everyone has. That why we've got to shed our criminal bodies, so that we'll never wrong each other with them again.
BARTHOLOMEW: If we become pure thought, we won't be ourselves anymore. (Pause.) You know, this is all starting to seem like a very symbolic coming-of-age play.
FLORIAN: Look, you're upsetting her Bart, you'd better lay off.
TATYANA: What the hell are you talking about, you ass? I'll take care of myself.
FLORIAN: I was just trying to be helpful.
TATYANA: Then get out of the patriarchy. (To Bartholomew:) I need time to work all this out, I'll be back. (Exit.)
BARTHOLOMEW: Tatyana...
FLORIAN: You've got a lot of thinking to do, Bart. I mean, you're really being an ass-hole. (Exit.)
SCENE II: in a cafe
BARTHOLOMEW is seated at a small table, staring morosely at a cup of tea. I think it's Earl Grey, but I'm not sure. OLD JACK TROUT is seated across from him, watching.
JACK: Cubbins my boy, you've gone mad.
BARTHOLOMEW: Oh, I imagine...
JACK: This talk of slavery and genital-mechanics, makes an old man's head hurt. We've been invited back to Eden and it's all you can do to look it in the mouth. You listen to Old Jack Trout, boy, and embrace epiphanies -- they're few and far between.
BARTHOLOMEW: But my painting, Jack, what about my painting?
JACK: Painting? God's Balls! -- who can stop to think about some damn painting? My, I'm constipated.
BARTHOLOMEW: Jack, I've somehow managed to create the most significant painting ever.
JACK: Cheese.
BARTHOLOMEW: -- What?
JACK: Cheese. I've been eating too much damn Cheese. That's why I'm so constipated.
BARTHOLOMEW: Aren't you listening to me?
JACK: What I need is a nice hot cup of coffee. Where's the damn waitress? God's Balls!
BARTHOLOMEW: Jack, this painting can save humanity.
JACK: Eh? Humanity? Who cares about humanity? We'll be done with that mess before lunch.
BARTHOLOMEW: Mess? I love being human.
JACK: You're young, yet.
BARTHOLOMEW: I always will be young.
JACK: You'll learn, boy, don't you fret. The time'll come when you'll be a tired old poop like myself, and you'll be looking back on your pathetic sexcapade of a life and mutter, "Now just what in the hell was all that for?"
BARTHOLOMEW: I'm not ready to become pure thought...I'm not even ready to become messy thought.
JACK: Why not? Why be suspect of elysium?
BARTHOLOMEW: Because who I am and how I think is intrinsically meshed with what I am and what I do.
JACK: ...You mean like "you are what you eat"?
BARTHOLOMEW: No, nothing like that. I mean that my universe is anthropomorphic!
JACK: Anthrax-Po-Who? Blatherscythe, boy -- get your head out of your nethers and listen to Old Jack: Death is nothingness, this is somethingness; and a strange and exciting somethingness at that. Waitress! Waitress!
BARTHOLOMEW: There's so much here...
JACK (whispering harshly): I've pissed my life away, Cubbins -- I'm an old man, an old man. And I don't want to die.
BARTHOLOMEW: I can't go...I just can't go.
JACK: You've got to get over this fear of the unknown, boy.
BARTHOLOMEW: Fear of the unknown? Jack, I'm still pretty intimidated by most of the known.
JACK: That's nonsense.
BARTHOLOMEW: Most things are.
JACK: Not here. There's no time for pointless nonsense on the stage.
BARTHOLOMEW: What are you talking about?
JACK: It's nothing, nothing. Ooh, there was a mean cramp...
BARTHOLOMEW: Let me tell you about my painting, my great painting.
JACK: No point, no point. It's obsolete. Everyone's too busy getting ready for this metamorphosis to care.
BARTHOLOMEW: Everyone is too busy to be human.
JACK: May be so, Cubbins. But whatever which way it lies in the end, everybody is leaving this play for good.
BARTHOLOMEW: ...Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated...
JACK (calling): Waitress!
BARTHOLOMEW (darkly): Waitresses are an urban myth. They're like the tooth færie: no such thing.
JACK (calling): Can we have a little coffee at table seven? Is there anybody out there?
(Enter FLORIAN.)
JACK: Florian Beer -- how arz ya, my boy!
FLORIAN: Very well thank you, Mister Trout. How are you.
JACK: Oh, about the same. But God's Balls am I as constipated as a cat on glass!
BARTHOLOMEW: A cat...?
FLORIAN: I'm sorry to hear that.
JACK: Sit thee doon!
FLORIAN: In just a few hours you'll never have to worry about the perils of aging again.
JACK: Aye, aye...that's so, young Mister Beer.
FLORIAN: You don't have to worry about getting a cup of coffee in the shadow of the benign apocalypse. This is a time of celebration, our very blood our champagne, inebriating us with its fond farewell.
JACK: That was very poetic.
FLORIAN: Thank you, Mister Trout.
BARTHOLOMEW: Can we get back to my painting?
JACK: No, no, out of time, Cubbins. I have to be off. Can't laze about drinking coffee all day, oh no, not at my age.
BARTHOLOMEW: Laze about? Coffee? Jack -- I need somebody to talk to about this.
JACK: Well, talk to young Florian Beer here. God's Balls, I'm a newspaper repairman, not a philosopher. (Exit.)
FLORIAN: Are you still going on about that damned painting, Bart?
BARTHOLOMEW: Um.
FLORIAN: I've been trying to calm Tatyana down --
BARTHOLOMEW: Don't be an idiot. She'll calm down when she feels like it and not a second before.
FLORIAN: Maybe that's been your experience. Maybe she didn't feel close enough to you to let you calm her, you know.
BARTHOLOMEW: What do you want, Florian? Tatyana's the humanitarian and activist; you've always been a fountain of apathy. Why the sudden fervour?
FLORIAN: I'm here to try to talk some sense into you. It's very important to me that you don't make a big mistake here.
BARTHOLOMEW: I'm glad you've finally found a hobby.
FLORIAN: I'm trying to do something good and useful for once. I'm trying to help people see what a like glorious gift we've been given.
BARTHOLOMEW: I dub thee Florian Christ.
FLORIAN: Aw man, enough! I'm trying to prepare people for the Transformation and I could use the help of a leader like Tatyana -- but she's too busy agonising over you. And what're you doing? You're wanking on about art with Old Jack Trout in an abandoned cafe.
BARTHOLOMEW: You don't understand how important this painting is. I've inexplicable come out with something more universally true and moving than the Ninth Symphony.
FLORIAN: And you don't understand how like important you are to Tatyana. You don't deserve her.
BARTHOLOMEW: Deserve her? Florian, I don't own her.
FLORIAN: She needs somebody who can take care of her -- somebody with his priorities in line.
BARTHOLOMEW: Or her.
FLORIAN: What?
BARTHOLOMEW: His or her priorities in line. Or were you specifically thinking of yourself as a prime candidate for replacement?
FLORIAN: What are you talking about? I mean, I'm far too busy working for this transformation to deal with your like petty jealousies.
BARTHOLOMEW: Don't start martyring yourself too soon, Florian, you're not even on the cross, yet.
FLORIAN: Is that all you can do? Make jokes?
BARTHOLOMEW: I juggle.
FLORIAN: You're a fool!
BARTHOLOMEW: I am Bartholomew Cubbins -- fool and dreamer, painter, thinker, lover, monster, android!
FLORIAN: You're crazy, Bart.
BARTHOLOMEW: Not crazy enough to try to seduce my friend's lover by aggressively empathising with this cause.
FLORIAN: That's it, I've had it! You won't listen to reason.
BARTHOLOMEW: Reason? You gibbon, reason is what won't let me go! Everything I am tell me one thing, everything I love begs me to do another.
FLORIAN: So what is everything you are? I mean, it can't be human, because all of the humans have elected to become pure thought.
BARTHOLOMEW: Well, to err is human.
FLORIAN: And that's your petty defense? Nonsense and ridicule?
BARTHOLOMEW: I'm a curious beast -- if I couldn't paint and laugh about what pains me most I'd lose my mind...much as you're planning to do in a little over an hour.
FLORIAN: It pains me that you don't want to come with us.
BARTHOLOMEW: It pains you? With all due respect, when did you start caring about others?
FLORIAN (frustrated): Since I've found a purpose -- everyone needs a purpose, Bart, and there's like no purpose to eating and sleeping and working and all that unless you're some kind of priest or rabbi or hare-krishna. I'm bringing meaning to my life, I'm making a difference.
BARTHOLOMEW: You can't flee from futility.
FLORIAN (angry): Look, go back to your studio and like stare at your fucking deep painting until the sea boils and pig fly! Just don't start shooting off your mouth and trying to get people to listen to you. It's hard enough as it is giving them courage to go with this. (Exit.)
(Pause.)
BARTHOLOMEW: "The time has come," the Walrus said, "to talk of many things: of shoes -- and ships -- and sealing-wax -- of cabbages and kings..."
SCENE III: in Bartholomew's studio, later
BARTHOLOMEW stands alone in the middle of his studio. He is looking over at his easel and the painting thereupon.
BARTHOLOMEW (mockingly): O lonely paint on lonely life!
O, now I feel your topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. To the last, I grapple with your composition; my brush spits her last paint at you. Sink all souls to one common pool, and since they will not be mine, let me then fall to pieces, while still painting you, though tied to you, you damned painting.
Thus, I give up the Brush!
(BARTHOLOMEW shifts his gaze to the auditorium.)
And who's due to look on you? Nobody's left. They've all transmuted into immaculate energy, away in the æther. And why not? What do I know why not? I'm just a little baby like everyone else.
Wait, there -- there's one baglady. Is she going to be my only company, on Earth, for the rest of my life? (Pause; sadly:) No. There she goes, turning into a swirling column of light and diffusing away; fly away baglady, fly away home.
I'm all alone.
(Enter TATYANA.)
TATYANA (softly): Honey...I'm home.
BARTHOLOMEW: Tatyana Aleksandrovna, my love.
TATYANA: What's for dinner?
BARTHOLOMEW (sardonically): Death, I'm afraid.
(They embrace.)
How did you get away from Florian?
TATYANA: It wasn't easy. He's like a religious zealot.
BARTHOLOMEW: He's enjoying caring about this. He's never really cared about anything before.
TATYANA: And you, what do you care about, Bartholomew?
BARTHOLOMEW: Where should I start?
TATYANA: With me, with you.
BARTHOLOMEW: To myself I say this: above all, to thine own self be true -- but of course that's a quote. And to you, fondest T, I have this to say: I can no more defy what I truly believe in than you can.
TATYANA: And what does that mean?
BARTHOLOMEW: It means I can no more become a being of pure thought than you can not do so.
TATYANA: But Bartholomew, why? Why do you think our love is about molecules instead of spirits, and why do you think we're all babies and machines?
(Pause.)
Bartholomew?
BARTHOLOMEW: Tatyana, it's now time for the sad story that impacted the main character in such a way as to form an integral part of him. It's probably even a metaphor.
TATYANA: What?
BARTHOLOMEW: You've known me as a painter of pictures, but I was once an artist.
I thought then that art was humanity's highest achievement; a sublime and elegant thing, a thing of which surely only the cleverest creatures could be capable. Who else could appreciate the barren perfection of two lines, placed just thus to balance so?
I thought that art showed how smart we were. And I wanted a part.
So I worked and sweated over a series of pictures. Pictures that were the very me in essence. I discovered wonderful and horrible truths about myself, and put them in. I unfolded everything I was and laid it flat on paper.
TATYANA: And...?
BARTHOLOMEW: And I was told that my pictures were immature and unsophisticated and a cliché. Everything I was, was laid out flat on that paper -- it oozed with life. I promise. And everything I was, was immature and unsophisticated and a cliché. I had been as honest and open and truthful as was in me, and I was told to contrive something artistically challenging.
Artistically challenging.
My insides died that day; I had expressed the most intimate truths I had, and no one cared. As I lay in my coffin, I thought about humanity's highest achievement. Art was just an imbred and incestuous industry with itself as its sole product and consumer. Humanity's highest achievement had its head shoved up its own ass-hole.
TATYANA: Yes...
BARTHOLOMEW: The things we hold the most sacred are the most silly. The things we think are evidence of how far we've come are really testaments to how backward we are.
How can I believe our minds are really so clear and precise as we think? For if we do, all of those myopic, heartless, futile things we do are exactly what they seem to be. And if they are as they seem to be, are we the sort of creature that deserves to be some sort of all-powerful vapour traveling through the cosmos? If we're really that mean, do we deserve to be pure thought?
(Long pause.)
If you're wondering, humanity's real highest achievement is math. But most of us don't understand what that's all about.
TATYANA: Math?
BARTHOLOMEW: It's the closest thing to untainted truth we've got.
TATYANA: I don't understand.
BARTHOLOMEW: I've always thought understanding was overrated.
TATYANA: You're being foolish.
BARTHOLOMEW: Don't be foolish, don't be crazy, don't speak nonsense, Baby Bartholomew Cubbins. Everyone is asking me not to be human. But our interactions are based in our mutual humanity.
TATYANA: I don't why you being upset by those critics makes it wrong for us to be beyond bodies.
BARTHOLOMEW: Because being alive is nothing more than what I put on that paper, but that isn't enough for some, who're so busy each day trying to feel useful and productive. What was on that paper was raw, juicy and wet; it was primal and it was passionate.
(Pause.)
TATYANA: 'Come now, let us speak of steam amd milk and butterflies. Consider light, music and magic, consider the colour blue. As I feel and lust after feeling, as I am passionate, I fold and shape the universe about me. I am a maker and a tool. I accomplish in respiration, I succeed by the mere beating of my heart.'
BARTHOLOMEW: What's that?
TATYANA: It's part of a letter you once wrote me.
BARTHOLOMEW: I'd forgotten.
TATYANA: I'd been feeling depressed about genocide and fascism and brassieres -- the fundements of our culture. I felt impotent and tired -- I couldn't do anything anymore. And you wrote me that letter. I thought it was just about happiness, but it was more, wasn't it?
BARTHOLOMEW: Or less.
TATYANA: It was about being human. It was about what you did every day, when I occasionally thought you were wasting time.
BARTHOLOMEW: ...'Come now, let us speak of steam...'
TATYANA: Being alive to you is a quest in itself.
BARTHOLOMEW: '...and milk, and butterflies...'
TATYANA: While I cared about politics and justice and science, you cared about living. Holy Thoreau!
BARTHOLOMEW: '...consider light, music and magic, consider the colour blue.' And are we really so different?
TATYANA: Yes...?
BARTHOLOMEW: No, Tatyana! We are a yin and yang, one another's complement. I love you, Tatyana.
TATYANA: Love...
BARTHOLOMEW: Steam. Milk. Butterflies.
TATYANA: Death...
BARTHOLOMEW: Shoes. Ships. Sealing-wax. -- Tatyana, I don't know what to do. I can't go, but I can't possibly stay.
TATYANA: Stay with me.
BARTHOLOMEW (regarding his body): You are the devil, aren't you? You want us to go, don't you? You want us to be with her.
TATYANA: I love you.
BARTHOLOMEW: Blind body, you kill us!
TATYANA: Bodies are fragile. Bodies get bruised.
BARTHOLOMEW: Is your body bruised?
TATYANA: It remembers.
BARTHOLOMEW: Whose bruise?
TATYANA: Mine. It remembers being bruised by papa, and by angry bitches and bullies, and lusty suitors and rusty, crusty old men.
BARTHOLOMEW: Don't start speaking all rhymie. It reminds me of ears, which enjoy nice sounds.
TATYANA: You speak all rhymie.
BARTHOLOMEW: I also plan to keep my ears. (Breath.) Won't you do one thing for me? Please, Tatyana Aleksandrovna, won't you come to look at my painting?
(Pause.)
If it's the last thing you ever do on this Earth for me, please come to see what I've done?
TATYANA: Okay.
(They come together, and begin to move toward the easel.
A knock sounds. Enter FLORIAN and JACK.)
BARTHOLOMEW: ...Please, come in.
FLORIAN: Have you yet joined our like blessed number, my innocent friend?
JACK: Would you happen to have any bran?
BARTHOLOMEW: Uh, no and in the cupboard.
FLORIAN: My people, the time is like ripe for our ascention. Madam Barikovsky: I thought I would find you here.
TATYANA: You're a rocket-scientist.
FLORIAN: If this like unfortunate heathen will not come with us, give him up for dead and like stand by my side, eh?
TATYANA: What?
FLORIAN: Let those who had faith in the transformative evolution like charitably pity the lost soul of Bartholomew C, infant and android.
BARTHOLOMEW (sardonically): Most kind, Father Florian.
FLORIAN: There's none left but we four. Are you going to keep scorning your embracing race and this like miraculous occasion for the swilly slums of a human life?
JACK: Nice image, boy.
FLORIAN: Thank you, Mister Trout.
TATYANA: Florian: I think you should listen to Bartholomew, to hear him out.
FLORIAN: Damn you Bart, I told you not to poison this girl's mind with your ridiculous ideas and that's just what you've done! This is the right thing to happen, you know? And more than that, it's inevitable.
TATYANA: I poison my own mind, thank you very much.
JACK: It is inevitable.
BARTHOLOMEW: But why? Why is it inevitable?
JACK: Because you'll be the only one left, boy, and being human is all about community. God's Balls, don't you get it, Cubbins? This play isn't science fiction; it's got nothing to do with becoming pure thought.
BARTHOLOMEW: What?
JACK: It's allegorical, boy, allegorical.
BARTHOLOMEW: Everyone's grown up, and I've grown away.
JACK: So it goes.
FLORIAN: The time is drawing near.
BARTHOLOMEW: Pigs overhead!
TATYANA: Bartholomew: this is your last chance. Come with me!
FLORIAN: Come with us.
JACK: Hey, is this that painting? (JACK wanders to the front of the easel.)
FLORIAN: Stay back from that tainted easel, Mister Trout! That's his totem, and his anchor.
(To Bartholomew:) And what do you plan to do with your painting once we're all gone? You have your choice of any museum on the planet, right? What prestige!
BARTHOLOMEW: I thought, actually, that I'd burn it.
TATYANA: What the hell do you mean, burn it?
BARTHOLOMEW: It was a painting painted for humans, and all the humans are gone. It was only its creation that mattered, now.
JACK (awed): This is the most moving, most perfect painting I have ever seen in my life! Bartholomew --, Bartholomew... (JACK begins to cry.)
FLORIAN: It appeals to baser things! Turn away, Mister Trout.
BARTHOLOMEW: Jack, do you understand me?
FLORIAN: Turn away!
JACK (weeping): Oh, I feel I feel -- !
FLORIAN (raging): Get away from that painting, you idiot!
(The Metamorphosis begins. How does it begin? I don't really know. Maybe with cool lighting effects and that smoke that smells like chalk; maybe with fireworks and laser beams and dancers in reflective leotards; maybe with a ponderous farting noise.)
JACK: O, light and taste! O, babies and crones and flesh and sinews -- O, make me young, make me young!
TATYANA: Let us speak of steam and milk and butterflies!
BARTHOLOMEW: Consider light, music and magic! Consider the colour blue!
FLORIAN (desperately): We're like running out of time! I mean we've got to go now!
TATYANA: I have to see that painting, Florian -- let me go!
(Light and sound herald the full power of the Metamorphosis. Be sure to include clouds of fire, erotic shadow-puppets, dancing bears, &c. )
FLORIAN (booming): Away! Away! The Sun has reached its zenith, melting away out mortal meat and sending us into infinite consciousness!
TATYANA: Bartholomew, Bartholomew!
FLORIAN (booming): Away! Away! Our flesh aches to peel from our souls and set them like free to roam the realm the pure thought!
(The company sways and moves with increasing energy, possessed by a greater power. Small cameo by God.)
BARTHOLOMEW (anguished): Tatyana!
FLORIAN (booming): Away! Away! (Metamorphosises and exits.)
JACK: Youth...! (Metamorphosises and exits.)
TATYANA: Bartholomew! (Metamorphosises and exits.)
(Pause.)
BARTHOLOMEW: ...As I feel and lust after feeling, as I am passionate, I fold and shape the universe about me. I am a maker and a tool. I am a dreamer, a painter, a thinker, a lover, a monster...an android. (Hesitation.)
Tatyana! (Metamorphosises and exits.)
(Curtain.)
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