QUARTET
by Robert Healy
A group discussion. Three strangers sit on folding chairs and ask questions they would be better off directing at the mirror. There is no connected purpose for why they are here, in this musty church basement at the end of a long weekday, talking to each other. The illogical nature of each character's circumstances bear no consequences on the narrative.
--
MEL
An old woman. Spends her time looking out of windows, at neighbors and strangers.
GUY
A bald man. Dresses in black.
FATHER
A priest. Handsome. Wily.
LILY
A newlywed. Naive.
--
LILY arrives to find the others already seated, looking impatient.
LILY
Hi, I completely forgot about this, I am so sorry. Please, tell me what you've discussed so far.
The group mutters.
GUY
I, uh... Recently I've been feeling like I've been in such a state of focus. I've been in a jailbird's delight.
FATHER
What do you mean, "jailbird's delight"?
GUY
Well, I don't know. You ever have the feeling you're just surrounded by upkeep? Like your whole life is maintenance? I was thinking that someone in jail might not have that problem, seeing as most of their autonomy's been taken away. It's almost like autonomy is a burden, like there's a whole lot of work to be done just to say you're autonomous, and then you don't actually have much time to practice your autonomy; you're right back to maintaining it.
...
GUY (Continuing)
Have none of y'all ever felt that way?
The group allows no conclusions to be made.
LILY
When I arrived today I had an impulse to not enter immediately. I thought it would be better to arrive far too late than late by just a bit.
MEL
Ugh, it seems I've nothing to say. I come here each week and my brain feels like a small desert and my teeth feel like blisters. I'm sick of feeling like death, I want all of it or nothing. I feel as if I've never achieved my true potential and everyday I wait for its arrival and it seems to drift farther and farther away. Why do I live, then? Why do I persist if my best days are behind me? The profoud weakness of being washed up. The strong will of the purposeless.
GUY
Something as simple as steel can be sharpened.
So can you.
So can you.
FATHER
What you've hidden from yourself is unimaginable.
What you've hidden from yourself is unimaginable.
All out of fear and the silly thoughts we subsist with.
MEL
Tehehe. Tehehe. These silly words they tickle me. These things you choose to pity me with. Oh, relieve me of this burden, it's burly and drab. You seem to speak of strange insecurities and rearranged decisions. Your will won't get rid of me. I'm stuck to this script like holsters or small chariots. I desire nothing but a rest, and a shower with shampoo.
FATHER
It seems your tiny mind requires maintenance. It seems your ethics have rusted.
MEL
I think of myself and I see myself dying. People all around stop and stare at my corpse. The grave in which I lie, like some magnet to the mourning. What do they know about me? What the fuck do they want with me? This is silly, petulant nonsense. I choose to go away.
GUY
What could time be orbiting?
FATHER
Hmmm...
GUY
These simple silly things are what I think about.
LILY
Theory.
FATHER
What will come of these musings?
MEL
Misery. Murder. Mystery. Something very wicked.
GUY
Haha. This small life of mine. Where am I running?
FATHER
Do you ruminate?
Do you associate sex with aggression?
What's been created doesn't matter half as much as what's been destroyed.
These are silly things to think about.
MEL
These are small children in a meak puddle.
LILY
I want a downpour.
FATHER
Why don't you stand up? Why don't you look at life from above?
No, you'll spend your days fanning the refrigerator, looking as if time meant nothing at all. Do you want for a will? Are you perturbed by your passiveness? You seem to steal.
GUY
I didn't steal one salty dime. Loathing is hardly easy. Loathing is hard work. Don't you see my sweat?
MEL
We embody empty forms. We sit in this basement each and every week with nothing to say and no direction for discourse. I'm sick of it.
LILY
What do you wish to do instead? Don't you realize you have nothing to say? Be okay with it.
FATHER
These times call for tin men.
GUY
The goal is to pull away from structure. Don't you realize that a pattern is an indication of energy? Are you simply here to be a creature of adaptations? Are you simply here to accumulate them like trinkets? Don't you wish for more than your routines?
MEL
I existed and now I am dead and seeking privileges.
LILY
I believe it would be helpful for you to breathe. Anxiety is an accumulation of unresolved panic. You can regulate it through breathing.
GUY
What is the relationship between pleasure and virtue?
MEL
A macguffin. You cannot achieve anything in life. You are an endless chase and in death you will discover where your woes have taken you.
FATHER
I commit sin, I commit evil, and I have no woes. I have no shame or guilt or wish for penance. I am the power to abide or to disobey, and the sin you share with me is nothing more than a symbol. This semiotic life leads us into myth—leads into a race towards tomorrow for the sake of its possibilities. Awareness transforms the act; do you understand the masks you wear, do you put them on with pride? No, it seems you wear them with an unconventional lack of understanding, you are shallow in your self.
GUY
Because, as with all knowledge, the more you know the less you can. Know thyself, it has been said. The unexamined life is not worth living. Yes, but who am I to examine, and what perspective shall I do it from?
LILY
You know what to do? Push through fear. Push through thought and tiredness. Be the cowboy of your own mind.
MEL
Pish posh, Lily, pish posh. You reek of hope and I'm sick of it. Please, take your meandering optimism and shove it in the shadows, I can't stand the sight of it.
FATHER
You are misguided. You are troublesome. I sense someone who seeks tragedy. Your words are worth nothing. Penniless. Penniless is what you are.
MEL
Oh, be away with you, Father. Your spoiled sanctimony leaves me feeling drab and diseased. You scream of irrelevance, and your thinly veiled dialogue with ego bears no further mention.
GUY
It seems even ghosts talk in broken english. Even heaven has dirty janitors. The swamp is alive in all of us. Swarming, always swarming. Swarming, always swarming.
MEL
Our founding fathers lurk in the shadows. Our founding fathers are digging our dirt. Who in my family was a thief? Who in my family was a criminal?
GUY
The world moves to the rhythm you set for it, or at least that's what great music makes you feel like.
LILY
Guy, is it raining in your heart? Is it—
MEL (Interrupting)
Why don't you go and gather moss? Why don't you go and bleed? Why don't you go and bleed?
...
MEL (Continuing)
I can't explain the feeling it gives me. The feeling of failing to exist, of failing to fill our your own form. Am empty fantasy of ending things. I think of attending mass and murdering my beliefs on the pulpit while you praise my persistence. I'm ambivalent.
FATHER
Your diatribe is empty like an echo. Your words do nothing but drop as soon as they leave your lips. Your soliloquys are single minded. Do you know that maggots prefer filth?
GUY
Acceptance is the great lesson that suffering teaches. And yet, Mel, it seems your vitriol betrays this aphorism.
LILY
What do you have to say for yourself? I mean, what tribulations do you choose to dole out?
MEL
I feel sick about it, just sick. Sick and perturbed, you could say. Stay away from me, I'm tired and toxic. Self-denial, as you must know, is never easy.
Really I'm lucky. I don't follow the rules because I think I'm better than them. I don't actually perform that way, though, I perform lazily, I perform as if just awoken, with the fog of sleep still rusting in my eyelids; I perform like someone who doesn't need to. I perform like someone who can choose not to.
LILY
Do you feel like quitting? Do you feel like giving up? Good, then keep going. Good, then keep breathing. Good, that means you're making progress.
GUY
There are mountains and there are molehills, and what you make of them makes all the difference.
MEL (To herself)
Mangy dog, always muttering and pestering me, like I'm his mom.
MEL (To everyone)
Sadness fills me like water fills a drain, and it gurgles. Sadness sits within me, it sloshes around in my hips.
FATHER
I sense performance. I sense performance about you, Mel.
LILY
Do you play? Do you play pretend?
MEL
I am sad. I am sad. I feel alone and lonely. I feel alone and lonely.
GUY
Are you nourished? Are you nourished? Do you seek satiety?
FATHER
You are sad and why do you suppose? What soap boxes do you stand upon? You may not be able to change your own fate, but you can certainly change someone else's.
LILY
Perhaps you seek a patient life. One worth its weight in stillness.
FATHER
When you've been given a lot of rope it's easier to drown.
MEL
This conversation is a blind alley. This conversation leads me to nothing but waste. My dreams are dry and flaky.
The room is silent.
MEL
There's something in this silence that I can't quite take. Somthing to be considered, something sovereign, something sad that does not leave me be. It does not leave me be and it makes me cry. It makes me feel like crying and wanting to stare into the moonlight and say absolutely nothing; this is life; this must be, there's nothing else but darkness.
FATHER
And what is it you wish to see? Who is it you wish to be? Your word is my command, I can set you free.
Do you believe in ghost stories? Do you tell ghost stories? Have you seem them? Are you in the mood, are you so inclined? You poor tortured soul, you with all your sins and your wishes, you like a piece of cloth.
GUY
What do you want to be and when do you want to be it? Do you want to be god? Do you want to be everything? Then be everything. Do not label yourself; Mel, human, woman, animal, no, collect yourself and realize the labels you rain upon yourself only seek to confine you.
LILY
And do not throw away your tender love and affection for a bag of rocks.
MEL
Where are my imbalances? May I recognize them, with this tragic dust of self-defeat, I am limited, I am not whole.
FATHER
Do you have something to say for yourself?
MEL
Please, Father, do not patronize me. I know that life comes for its weakest links, I know I am on my way out.
GUY
Do you know that where there are currents there is life? Do you know that our souls nest in slight depressions called forms? Do you know that nothing you can express will come anywhere close to what you can't?
LILY
Are you afraid of your life? Are you afraid that people won't like it, won't find it funny, won't find it interesting?
MEL
I'm afraid of myself, and all my evil endeavors.
LILY
You know, now is not the time to give up on yourself. Now is not the time to run away.
GUY
Can you not be so down? Can you not be so dour?
MEL
I wish for no further conversation. I wish for nothing more than pain.
Pain and its misguided promise, pain with its rosies and posies, pain won't you please go away. Pain won't you please go away.
GUY
Do you find beauty in unusual forms, like Euler's equation? Have you read Epicurus?
MEL
Do you know what sickness smells like?
Dove. Five star reviews. Materialism.
LILY
Do you know that the abandonment of your goals has made you age quicker?
MEL
Yes, yes—small pieces of my day fall away like petals, like weeds, this lie I'm living—I've lost all control of it.
FATHER
Haha. Just in the moment you forgot to breathe, just like a small tree or an oyster, how can you explain how you arrived here, what map have you traveled upon? Weak, weak, weak, it sits in your bones. Weak, like small stones or shallow pockets, you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to hide, in the blended reality of morning, you sit in nothing.
LILY
Do you know that everything you perceive yourself to be is true?
GUY
Now, you must simply concentrate on a story and not the words within them.
MEL
Please do not predict sympathy. Please do not predict that things will be okay. I feel my teeth slipping from my gums like loose boulders or lumpy clay.
FATHER
I think you should pray. It seems you are belittled by your demons.
MEL
I find expression in pain. I find its secrets to be revealing. I wonder, why do we live with fear as a mentor, because it makes life so much more comfortable, the cozy lack of growth? These worries we use to develop ourselves, to plant our borders and determine where to go no further.
FATHER
Could it be Thatcher? Could it be Reagan? Introducing risk as obtuse and adverse. Dangerous. Stick to genericism, stick to the standard. If you're feeling depressed, go shopping. Fear is simply uncomfortability. Fear is simply a symptom of unconvention.
GUY
No one knows anything about anybody else because no one knows anything about themselves. If we stopped wrestling around in the mud for a moment we might find there's something really going on here.
LILY
Do you know Wassily Kandinsky? He said, "A line is the track made by the moving point... It is created by movement—specifically through the destruction of the intense, self-contained repose of the point."
In these words we may find advice for living—progress is determined by your ability to overcome yourself. Do not be lost in who you are, instead find progress in absolution.
MEL
The art, though, is clearly not about form, it is about the identity of form, the dissolution between object and idea. How can you identify with something you are not? Can it ever be that what you wish for does not leave you wanting?
LILY
You are not You, though; You do not exist purely and simply. Rather, you are everything that you are capable of doing in any particular situation.
MEL
It appeas to me to all be so fucking phony, this world we live in. This church and all its people, they mean me nothing but harm. They wish for me to sin and for me to recognize my sin so I am indebted to them forever, for they represent penance, they represent grace.
FATHER
No, no, no. Here is the problem, you see. You have no principles. You are living at the cost of the morning. Don't you understand what principles are? They allow for less thinking. They allow for a more free flow of action. You must have principles. Everyone should have principles.
GUY
You know, Lily, you spoke of art earlier. Robert Henri once wrote, "art when really understood is the province of every human being. It is simply a question of doing things, anything, well. It is not an outside, extra thing. When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressive creature. He becomes interesting to other people. He distrubs, upsets, enlightens, and he opens ways for a better understanding... He does not have to be a painter or sculptor to be an artist. He can work in any medium. He simply has to find the gain in the work itself, not outside it." Perhaps, Mel, you should seek the artist within yourself. Perhaps you have great capacity to create.
MEL
There's nothing but bones and sinew inside of me. And... and... and... I feel so broken.
LILY
Perhaps, then, you should explore new ways of understanding your world. Perhaps, then, you should learn a new language. Augusto Boal presents language learning as a way for a person to acquire new ways of knowing reality, and that "all languages complement each other in achieving the widest, most complete knowledge of what is real."
MEL
Advice, advice, advice. Is this all you people can give to me?
FATHER
Advice, one could say, is the first step towards a new reality. Advice is the sharing of perspective. Advice, one could say, is the key to a happy ending; for advice can contain the moral of a story.
MEL
A happy ending. A happy ending is the last thing I wish for. Oh, you talk of art. What about art indicates a happy ending? What about art leaves you feeling like things have been all wrapped up and put out to pasture? No, art is not happy, and there can be no end to it. Art and equillibrium do not equate. The artist must reveal the jagged edges, the pieces of instability that jut out of every corner of the mind and the medium they work within. Art is not happiness, art is not complete. Art is an organism of sorrow, of grief, of coming to terms with tomorrow's drudgery. You three seem to know nothing of art, and yet you speak blithely and with full confidence. Do you want art? Then let this end.
There is a pause, and the participants of this conversation sit in their sallow seats and ponder their words.
An hour has passed, and the congregation disappears. Off to their lives or their windows.
END.