"When Story Stops, the Leak Begins" by John Sullivan (Part 2)
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: My personal history involves making a lot of live theatre and this hybrid text reflects that focus. When Story Stops, the Leak Begins is composed of poem-scripts, a format that combines poetry and spoken word (primarily as dialogue), the internal arrangement of a performance script, and a more or less omniscient fictional spy-eye lodged inside each character’s head. These poem-scripts — considered collectively, though not necessarily in consecutive order — comprise a story structured into three acts. This poem-script experiment stems from years of making non-representational performances where speech conveyed content, but also led another life as a form of gestural action. It helps to think of When Story Stops, the Leak Begins as a loose contemporary take on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
This excerpt is the second of a four-part series that previews When Story Stops, the Leak Begins.
Soren K, Just Go Away
(aka “Doc Benway” lays in a heap.
He wears his slouch hat & eponymous cheap sunglasses, with walking (magic) stick nearby. So is a large, empty, foul-smelling jug.)
(Miz’ Chan, Mr. Rougarou and the Right Reverend RSV stumble upon this phenomenon: a misplaced, disheveled, possibly comatose aka “Doc Benway.”
They collect data, assess the scene, deliberate, occasionally poking at what appears to be aka “Doc Benway’s” earthly remains like an abandoned vehicle.)
Mr. Rougarou
Ecstatic seizures of grief and disappointment?
Right Reverend RSV
(With toe-poke.)
Ectoplasmic murmurs of bereavement and over-ripe nostalgia?
Miz’ Chan
(A whiff off the empty jug knocks her clean a’back.)
Canned heat or just embalming fluid?
Either way a lot less ecstasy, a lot more infamy, or fear.
The ghosts of other sounds, music, voices, like - listen
all around - like Chaos calls the tune for Cosmos here.
(aka “Doc Benway” pops up into a full sit. Mr. Rougarou and the Right Reverend RSV prop him up to speak. Think: Marat in his bathtub before the lights go out for good. Miz’ Chan leans closer to aka “Doc Benway’s” face. Think: Charlotte Corday,
l'ange de l'assassinat. It’s July 13th 1793. Once again. A thick-dark sense of pervasive menace is palpable.)
(So where’s that infamous shiv, Miz’ Chan?)
aka “Doc Benway”
This I that I embody-in-life
was dreamed up by my enemies.
Sure as shootin’.
Miz’ Chan
Ah Misery Gee! You’ll always be
feathers and bones to me.
aka “Doc Benway”
Some ghosts want to drag us
into their world by the hair.
But I’m already well-haunted.
Mr. Rougarou
If you’re really a product of chance and just making do,
can you tell me the last time a ghost was wrong?
Aka “Doc Benway”
Dead leaves in my pockets … damn this dark stain!
Ghosts creep into ordinary chit-chat
like the residue of a dream … like, listen to this one.
(aka “Doc Benway” begins to talk-out the Brobdingnagian
dream-haunting that shook loose his very core.)
aka “Doc Benway’s” Origin-Song of the First Blue-Scream
I found a blue baby
Fallen down from the sky,
From a spider hole in a war zone
Washed up on the beach
A baby just as big as
A big old single shoe,
No bigger, light as air,
Blue, and still, alone,
So’s the surf snatched up this
Little blue baby, tossed it back
Into the water, like a bone, you know, but it
Could have been my unknown
Daughter, lost son, my
Seed, an early version
Of me – phy-lo-genetic-ally –
Bleeding back from yonder, or another
Future to be, a parallel track,
It could have been all
The music in the world
Yet to come
(The Right Reverend RSV, Miz’ Chan and Mr. Rougarou interrupt to interrogate the nasty first premise behind aka “Doc Benway’s” dream. Like: “let’s suppose this baby was mute, not inclined to music, or just so many strains of random proteins,
all jumbled up together in a sloppy knot.
Would that make this blue baby’s being moot?
Or not? Or what?)
Right Reverend RSV
Wow-Zaa, Sport! Where did you get that wound?
Miz’ Chan
That little blue baby was a being, real enough!
Not an It. Not just a skein of gene-stuff.
You didn’t try hard enough.
Now’s the time to cry, hard enough and long.
aka “Doc Benway”
Hey, that’s my being you’re bouncing
back and forth like a “shiny rubber ball.”
Miz’ Chan
His being he says, and
why does he be at all?
Mr. Rougarou
Why does he be so much
without even meaning to?
Right Reverend RSV
He bit the “Big Be,” once upon a time,
and then the “Big Be” bit him back.
Miz’ Chan
Now he’s preternaturally
scared: of not being at all.
aka “Doc Benway”
Been all the way to being
and back again to not.
Here, listen to me,
it’s a total immersion: we are all orphans.
Everyone can’t just die
and become more than a doomed arrested version.
(aka Doc Benway” resumes his blue-scream dream-talking:)
So’s I cast my net way out in the water
To catch up the little baby:
Cold, blue, bare, wan – maybe empty like my
Own eye – but my net couldn’t hold
The baby, forever, no, not even: It’s all
Written down, somewhere: bloody dazzle, screaming,
Atrocities – old ones and newer - but I couldn’t hold the baby … the baby …
and the blue baby was gone …
(Done with his dream-talk, aka “Doc Benway” probably expects some sympathy or, at the very least, an uncomfortable silence. That’s not to be the case, however.)
Mr. Rougarou
Your selfish genes, your hollow music,
You ought to be ashamed.
You need your own day of ire with that lost blue baby.
Miz’ Chan
Like try disremembering your own self, for a change.
Like loss, pain, the crush-stream story
Of what is / what might be hence just wriggled out
- de novo – from behind your eyes
like teensy little worms.
Right Reverend RSV
Before the neuron cascades commence
to crackle and fade, before the inevitable
jump-cut to dopamine drip: Do It!
Miz’ Chan
Love is selfish, too, and
greedy, anytime it’s starved.
Hang on, viejo: there’s a savage unraveling ahead for you.
Right Reverend RSV
And here is where “the wicked catch afraid.”
aka “Doc Benway”
And here is also where my own skull sings back to me:
the story of beginnings that crawled
inside my ears and, just, died there?
(Miz’ Chan, Mr. Rougarou and the Right Reverend RSV mosey along to somewhere else leaving aka “Doc Benway” alone, face-to-face with the import of both his dream and his / their reaction to it. So, of course, he bursts into song, as if we wouldn’t notice the lack of closure.)
aka “Doc Benway’s” Prelude to The Gloomy, Self- Absorbed,
“Worried Ol’ Hard Disease” Blues
Got this worried ol’ hard disease,
Got me walled up in a desert cave,
Got me collared, booked, and locked down
In a black box on the bottom of the sea
O save me do
O do save me
So’s I fell down to pray, so
At the first break of day, so
And these Furies with a warrant
And a writ to kill
Snuck up on me
Snuck up on me
And stole my spirit clean away, so
(aka “Doc Benway” enjoys a preposterously public private moment savoring his bogus-brazen (and silly-primitive) indication of something he (maybe) feels is deep and fully earned, or even logically warranted. Think: a thin wind barely strokes the skin of an opaque, muddy, mostly stagnant pond full of algae and bacteria, tires and the occasional stolen car. A quick take on this impression (just for the rest of us), and aka “Doc Benway” exits pursued by the world, the flesh and the devil.)
(& all the Big Who’s devil’s devils, too.)
JOHN SULLIVAN was an ACTF Playwriting finalist, received the 'Jack Kerouac Literary Prize,' the 'Writers Voice: New Voices of the West' Award, AZ Arts Fellowships (Poetry & Playwriting), an Artists Studio Center Fellowship, WESTAF Fellowship; he was also a featured playwright at Denver's Changing Scene Summer Playfest, an Eco-Arts Fellow with Earth Matters On Stage, Artistic Director of Theater Degree Zero, and directed the Augusto Boal / Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) wing at Seattle Public Theater. He and Sheli Rae (Producing Director: Theater Degree Zero) facilitated a series of acting/playwriting workshops inside the Pima County Jail in conjunction with the Pima County Library and the Tucson Writers Project. He uses TO with communities to promote dialogue on environmental and climate justice with environmental health scientists. His work has been published in a variety of print and online venues. Weasel Press (Manvel TX) published his first book, Bye-Bye No Fly Zone, in December 2019. When Story Stops, the Leak Begins came out from Unsolicited Press (Portland OR) in April 2020. A collection of performance pieces, Dire Moon Cartoons, was released by Weasel Press (now of Lansing MI) in October 2021.
