Created on Tuesday, 1 Oct 1996
The Skylight - A 20th century theatre play that “delves”
(curtains open)
(voiceover)
The night streams in through the glazed skylight. Starlight illuminates a dire chamber within a sombre dome. Beds lay astride a wall puckered with bizarre openings. A faint but astonishingly brilliant light pulses at irregular but seemingly recurrent hiatus through porthole like apertures. The luminosity of the radiation rotates from red hot to absolute zero (blue). Objects in the room wear away with cycles of extreme elasticity. There comes a crackling noise that switches the atmosphere of the chamber to that of a “notorious”-terrestrial world, that seemed quite as distant to an observer as it could have been when the witness to this weird escapade must've felt an alien.
A toilet-flush it was that sounded, followed by a latch that released to give way to a seal that was broken with a simple slide of a metal door. In a moment the metal, portholes, and all the placid but terrifyingly numinous facets of the dire and moderately spacious compartment transcended to an exceedingly familiar “room” that belonged to a young girl. The skylight, windows, berths and strikingly ambivalent pulsation transformed to common worldly objects. A “neatly unkempt” bed that had a little mobile phone lying on it, a desk with clattered objects that comprised a few pens, books, a little broken mirror and an unfinished cup of coffee...
(end of voice over)
Act I
A door (now wood) tilts ajar the next moment and in walks Amy-Rita, a girl of fifteen. She walks straight to the bed where she throws herself crossways chin down while she picks up the phone from below her chest effortlessly. She takes the phone up to her ear a second later and screams into it.
“Where have you been Mr. Puckerface?”
“All over your room.. Didn’t you notice? I decorated your walls.”
“I didn’t. Aunty Humbelly took care of it”.
“Ooh? Did she now? Aunty Humungous-Belly you mean?”
Amy giggles. “Why do you call her that? Wonder what you will say after ignition?”
“That’s her true name isn’t it?” Puckerface teases with mock disdain. "I wouldn'tt care any less in the wake of our reflection, anyway."
“The skylight has been inactive all evening. Do you know why?” Amy sounds worried, being distracted suddenly by a change of subjects.
“And it is Puckerface with a ‘ph’ ok? I’m growing tired of reminding you”
A pause follows, more like a frozen instant that holds Amy in an instant of an emotionless and expressionless existence. The deadpan ebullition of sorts outwears into a furious outburst.
“DOES IS MAKE A DIFFERENCE YOU PATHETIC SCUMBAG YOU?”
Act II
“Cut.. Cut.. Cut..!”
The room suddenly lights up with incandescent and bright white lights and a bustling and rummaging of myriad articles sound across the room.
“Don’t tell me. What went wrong this time?” A frustrated Courtney says mildly vociferous.
“This was the most perfect take in hours Courtney. I can’t even begin to tell you how proud I am right now”.
“Aw, cut short that blasphemous jargon! You just have to be reminded how you caused the poor girl to croon in shame with your uncouth commendations just short of cruel abuse just a while ago after the three hundred and twenty fifth take” says Parlowsky, the voice that Puckerface plays.
“And have I got to remind you that we just wrapped the scene? You don’t have to speak such indecipherable lingo in common situations”. The Director Freedman says standing up from his Director-chair.
“Look who’s talking”. Courtney says annoyed.
“Hey! I just gave you an A+! You can’t talk to me like that!” Freedman sounds confused and annoyed.
“Hah! I jut earned it. Beat that” Courtney and Parlowski slap their palms in a “high five”.
“I’m sulking.”
“Oh haven’t you ever!”
Coutney and Parlowski exclaim in unison, breaking it of with a loud giggle.
Act III
Murdock and Conrad look through a hatch-like opening with strange cryptic carvings on its edge, that is shaped like a hybrid of a sphere, triangle, rectangle, square and a few other polygons. Thick shiny translucent matter rises from below the sides of the hatch and obscures the view partially.
“Is this smoke or mist? Its cold if you ask me”
Conrad says and then pauses. Murdock returns an emotionless expression before Conrad continues
“No? You didn’t? But look! It doesn’t even serve the purpose of serving to make this whole element of spooky possible..” Conrad says while raising his fore and middle fingers of both hands in a ‘quote’ like expression.
“The activities in the cell are not clear” Murdock says before Conrad could have finished.
“That is exactly what I meant my..!” Conrad says bringing his palms together with an expression of momentary tranquillity on his face.
“But you didn’t say it” Murdock cuts in again.
“Look we aren’t even in the chamber that has a skylight in the centre with the benches arranged around yet” Martha says walking into the room with a cup of coffee on her head, now pouring down the sides of her forehead.
“Excuse me? We are in the chamber that a skylight in the centre with the benches arranged around. Are you blind?”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“I meant what I just said and not unlike the scene below inside the skylight, you simply lost track of everything that has come to pass since you waltzed right out of this chamber with the skylight in..a”
“Will you people just stay silent for a minute? I’m trying to figure how Martha thinks this is not that chamber. I mean we are in it, but she says we aren’t?” Murdock rolls his eyes in a tired and sarcastic expression.
“That’s where you are both wrong. The skylight is too mystic to achieve with such obtuse and irrelevant broken and disconnected expressions you men have emanate from those unkempt orifices. What is reality coming to?”
“Cut!”
“Not again?”
“’What is wrong with the world today? The government, the media, or your family? We’re going to infest! We’re getting in your head!’ that’s how you say it. Don’t you even read the script these days?”
“But I have to remind you and the financer that WE ARE NOT IN THE SKYLIGHT CHAMBER! WHY DON’T YOU LISTEN TO ME?”
“It doesn't make a difference Kate..”
“Oh, now I’m Kate?”
“Sorry, Martha, I..”
“What next?” and the lady storms out of the set. Some of the crew giggle.
“Yeah yeah yeah, keep on yakking, this is what you get for being famous”
The lady pauses outside and rushes back in. “Famous? Should I remind you what you ‘were’ before my father led you into this industry? A suffering caterpillar that was living on the feaces of its disgruntled predators”
“Not any more I'm not, oh ‘lady with a name that god know what is’. I'm a fully grown butterfly now. You have served your purpose. Grateful as I am, I do not comprehend how I can be of any further assistance to your dishonoured self.”
“This is growing more and more ridiculous. I would have never voted for you if I knew what you were becoming”.
“It’s too late now isn’t it? It’s just too bad isn't it?”
ignition
(Voiceover)
On and on went the cycles of reality fighting to be in the chamber with the skylight. The skylight was the epitome of a twisted pragma, within the confines of a terrestrial realm such as that found in the world of men. It was a reality that was never in harmony but a constantly augmenting fringe bordering the emotions of human existence. Love for instance had no place in it. Murdock had a perfect substance of the former to subsist in its confines because he was forever ambivalent about letting himself move on without its influence. “Burdening” Influence to be exact. Influences to be but acutely precise. He was in pieces, in tatters, in the most minuscule moments he had spent with, well, her. It all came down to that. Love. Why was it such a burden? Why was the most beautiful virtue to coexist with other “not-so-desirable” emotions, such a repellent to ambition? To duty? To dreams? The skylight held the answers. Wherever it was, in whatever reality, form or actuality, it was the solution. It was a bottomless pit in the belly of a beautiful emotion. The skylight they all craved to heed when they lost all hope. And the skylight they crave to heed when they lost all hope. It had to be stressed in such a fashion, twice, because it was hope after hope after hope that the skylight emanated from within. It was beautiful. Absolutely ravishing. But unattainable. Fiercely and undeniably beyond reach. Love is such an impotent device. Love is not emotionally possible. Dependency or the subsequent enslavement of the mind is. Fake in the making and equally, if at all ridiculously horrendous in the taking.
Love transcends every other emotion though. It obscures the truth of dependency being the true and pure factor just like the skylight signifies in this play of immortality. Dependency is the truth. Love is simply despondent. Tragically cruel.
The skylight holds the answers.
(end of voice over, curtains close
