Scenarios for Three Video Installations

A FOREWORD As a playwright, my interest lay in the theatrical space as much as in the action that unfolded there - especially on the highly figurative, anti-naturalistic stages most often associated with the European avant garde and also with the vast spectacles of Robert Wilson. A shameless delight in theatrical artifice continues in my experimental fiction, whose formal organization and scale are varied and for which theater will often serve as theme or metaphor. Perhaps it was inevitable that I should have borrowed the practices of video-installation artists to conceptualize theatrical spaces of my own, intended for gallery or other exhibition sites - spaces constituted of theater's essences: a mise en scene, light, and a human voice. In these pieces, published in their entirety for the first time,* the actors and action of a play persist in the new form, however refined to suggest an elemental condition of the mind - its anxieties and desires. Written in 1998-1999, they owe much to Beckett's late prose and theater/video pieces such as /// Seen III Said, Ohio Impromptu, Rockaby, Ghost Trio, Nacht und Traume. I hoped that my scripts would capture something of the conscious and unconscious mind, the sensorium where all is always an unquenchable narrative, symbolic gesture, and the poetry of moving images. My hope in having them published here is that they will find their way at last to a realization at and by the hands of a collaborator. SCENARIO No. 1 ANNA SUFFERS FROM PRESENCES THAT THREATEN TO DISSOLVE HER SCENE A dark room. One wall covered by a viewing screen. On the screen, the image of a cloud slowly unfurling. In the room, a straight-backed chair, an inflated weather balloon tethered to the floor by a long cord. An ax has been driven into the floor. On a tall metal stand, a stainless-steel bowl gleams in a pinpoint of cold light shed from the ceiling. On a clear Plexiglas stand, a video monitor. VIDEO A woman in a steam-filled bathroom. We do not yet see that she is pregnant. She wipes the misted mirror. The camera does not dwell on her, but on the mirror in which we briefly see a part of her face before the mirror mists over once more. At a table she is cutting an apple. She is inattentive. She nicks her finger. She looks at the blood. She puts the knife down and absently sucks her finger. A doorway fills with red light that spills around her. Standing naked in the middle of a room, the woman pulls one piece of clothing after another from a dresser, dropping the pieces onto the floor. We see she is pregnant and that she is anxious because the clothes do not fit her body and because of something more disquieting we cannot identify. She picks up a red scarf and goes to the window with it. Behind her a glimpse of a hand reaching in from outside the room to turn off the light. She opens the window and lets the scarf fall. The camera dwells on the scarf, now gray and falling very slowly in the moonlight. We see the woman's ghostly hands, and again the moon - only now at the window as seen from inside the room. Its lights invades the otherwise dark room, turning the scene black and white. The camera retreats from the crooked face of the moon staring in at the window, dwells a moment on the belly of the woman, which is white and moonlike, then retreats again - backwards, step by step, toward the closed door until it can go no further. Now the camera hurries to the window, driving the moon back into the night sky, where a rag of cloud covers it. Blackness outside and inside the room. Inside and outside, the same. The door to the hall opens a little. A crack of white light. Slowly, the door closes. She is standing on the lawn in morning light. She wears an elegant robe or kimono, her feet are bare. At her feet hand-written letters on the wet grass. A wind comes and scatters them. She bends to pick one up. The camera dwells on this and on how the lines of ink run on the wet paper. …