Topiary & Sonotube (for Michael Arndt)
J.T. Ledbetter
CHARACTERS
(STAGE PROPS) TOPIARY, a tree, & SONOTUBE, a nice column.
SCENE:
Opening (and closing) night of Henry James’ adaptation of Romeo & Juliet.
(As shadows draw across the stage TOPIARY lifts his branches to her in the gloom.)
TOPIARY: (suffering from ennui) It is more than one can bear, is it not?
SONOTUBE: (stiffly, being a tube) Yes. It is, yes . . . Je suis fatigué . . .
(Geese glide across a glassy pond trailing their pink legs, the water running in a V behind them. Not so much behind them, as following them, much as a wake of water might follow geese.)
TOPIARY: On stage, as in life, one waits for something, some sign to speak.
SONOTUBE: Have you been to the DMV?
(Both move slowly, as a tree and column would, downstage. Their fingers touch across a Rosy Dresden desk. N.B. It MUST be Rosy Dresden-my aunt has a very nice one. Their talk solemn, dreadful, inordinately soft.)
TOPIARY: But soft! Shall we, are we not destined, driven-how to put it? LOVE?
(The question asked, TOPIARY lifts a branch in the dark, questing—but he touches nothing, the stage being dark you see.)
SONOTUBE: I see no blue water on lovely legs, no cloaked Arabs in mind-bending sun. Just a postcard backstage, showing a large lady working her toes in the sand, her massive haunches ponderously rhythmical, intense, her dirty gauntlets billowing beside a colorless sea.
TOPIARY: (scratches his terminal bud) What?
SONOTUBE: What dim light breaks in your faux fern-like head?
(She yearns to climb his branches, but hears instead the lap of water, and sees, across a bay, trimmed trees, like espaliers against a pearly sky. Stage hands must be in black.)
TOPIARY: Aprés agrèment, paix!
(Having none, and not bloody likely to get any, the line is delivered with a sardonic toss of leaves)
SONOTUBE: Yo, Top: your slender branches rise! Given the Bard's script, it
does seem an unseemly waste of bark and sap!
TOPIARY: (Notes she is leaning, much like that hideous thing in Pisa)
Are you, in a word-but what word,?—are you, not to put too fine a point
on it, dreaming of those columnar days of the Greeks and Romans?
SONOTUBE: Pithee, drink this potion. (She watches his branches go limp.)
We are star-crossed lovers. I drink to the fickle-finger of fate!
TOPIARY: (Not affected by the poison, he springs across the stage to her)
I feel pretty, I feel bushy, I . . . but soft, what pile of rubble is this?
Ah, Sonotube, the bird ‘wert’ (Homage to Shelley) will nest nevermore
in my branches. But wait! The cruel draught works. Alas, I am
firewood . . . but she was some column, that one. Geeze! what a tube.
(Hautbois play off stage [far off stage] as lights dim to black, leaving them alone on a darkened stage full of silence, to great rhetorical effect.)
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