THOUGH I AM A WRITER OF MANY GENRES, I NEVER CONSIDERED MYSELF A PLAYWRIGHT. The closest I've come to the playwright title is when I wrote a few sketches for my final project at the Brave New Workshop a decade ago. Though I still jot down ideas for sketches, I mainly write for this blog and freelance for other publications.
Kari Mote, a friend of mine and Max's and director/producer from the Kokopelli Theatre Co., recently organized a night of short comedic plays on the theme of cannibalism called This Tastes Funny...The Cannibal Plays Festival. As a result, I collaborated on a short monologue with Max entitled I Will Eat Every One Of You. Max and I submitted our monologue and waited to see if it would be selected.
Mote accepted our submission and for five days beginning October 6, 2010, our short monologue was performed at The Shell Theatre in New York City -- just a block off of Times Square. St. Fortune Productions also brought their talents to this event.
Max, already an accomplished playwright, has had several productions of several of his plays. I, however, have had none until now. I'm pretty excited that my first play debuted in New York City and seemed to be an audience favorite. It is an adaptation of one of Max's short stories in a series entitled I'm Just A Bad Boy: Monologues From A Life Of Lies.
Download and read the monologue here or read below:
I WILL EAT EVERY ONE OF YOU: A MONOLOGUE
written by Bunny Sparber and Coco Mault
June 26, 2010
Copyright (c) 2010
All Rights Reserved
SPEAKER
Ladies and gentlemen of the press, thank you for coming, but
can I ask you to put your hand down? Put your hand down
please. You. Please. Put your hand down. I WILL NOT BE
TAKING ANY QUESTIONS UNTIL I HAVE FINISHED MY STATEMENT.
Apologies for being so abrupt, but this is a very difficult
it's a difficult embarrassing it's well, I'd just like to
get through this as quickly as possible with a minimum of
fuss. Perhaps you can understand. I have been in the public
eye for so long and it's hard enough to have your
triumphs -- well, there hadn't been many of those. Mostly
you've just covered my tragedies. And that's your job, yes,
I know. I know when I came down from that horrible incident
in the Andes, and I was the only survivor, I know there is a
natural human instinct to be curious. It was a story of
hardship and survival, but especially of hardship, and there
were morbid details, and I can't blame anybody for being
curious, for being morbidly curious. 120 in an accident, one
survivor, and the way the remains were found ... I'd be
curious, and you were just doing your job, and you were
there for me too, when I published my book about it, I Ate
Human Flesh. And you were there, too, when I retook my
position here at Yale, as an associate professor, and you
covered the controversy, unfair though it may have been. Let
me stray from my notes a moment just to say how hard, how
very hard, those months were. I was not much older than many
of the students, and I saw them more as friends than
anything else, and we were all looking forward to our trip
to Montevideo together, and the research that we would do,
and we talked excitedly about it, and I grieve for them, I
just grieve for them. I honor their sacrifice. I wouldn't be
here today if it was not for them. I understand their
parents not wanting me back at Yale, and I know it is your
job to write about such things, and you did so with tact,
all except you, and I know you didn't write the headlines,
but CANNIBAL TEACHER RETURNS TO YALE, seriously? What the
fuck was that, I mean --
(Beat)
No, let me get back to my notes. Because today I must sadly
resign my post at Yale, and I discussed it with the Dean,
and the school president, and we agreed, and they were
rather forceful about this, that a press conference would be
the best course of action, because I am already a public
figure, and because my return to Yale was so contentious, so
unnecessarily contentious, I mean, yes, I ate a few
students, but it was a survival situation. It's not like I
returned to Yale with a hunger for human flesh. You must
understand, or must try to. Perhaps you can't. Unless you
were on the mountain with me, crawling out of the wreckage,
and seeing the freezing remains, the hideous spectacle, the
horror of that day, and knowing you might starve. It was a
terrible decision I had to make, and I promised myself I
would not look back on it, but life does not allow you the
luxury of forgetting your past, does it? Especially college
life, where the climate is publish, publish, publish or
perish. And you must forgive us academics, as the search for
human knowledge requires dispassion and curiosity, and I may
have misjudged or forgotten the climate of my return. But I
am in the field of biology, god damn it, and my field of
study is predation, and the fact of the matter is, yes,
animals will hunt and kill their own kind. Yes, there is
cannibalism in the animal kingdom, and that is an aspect of
predation, and perhaps you can appreciate that because of my
experience, quite naturally because of my experience, quite
naturally this is where my research might lead. Quite
naturally this is the sort of thing I would publish,
especially since I have such unique and direct and well an
intimate knowledge of the subject. And because I am an
academic and because we can be a bit well a bit disconnected
from the shall we say the politics of these things, it
simply never occurred to me that publishing an essay on the
rendering of human fat, with explicit directions on how to
do it, and descriptions of my own experience, might generate
any controversy. I mean, for fuck's sake, the story was
accepted by Nature, and there isn't a more respected peer reviewed
journal in the world.
(Beat)
I have gone off my notes again. I apologize if I seemed
intemperate. You may appreciate the stress I have been
through. On the one hand, there is the push to publish, to
make your name as a researcher, and, on the other, there are
newspapers calling you a cannibal Yalie. I am aware that my
research, and my articles, might have seemed insensitive,
although I stress, and I am sure that you in the press can
appreciate this, that I DID NOT WRITE THE HEADLINES. "When
Bad Things happen to Delicious People," Journal of
Sociology, May. "Crash Course in Cannibalism," American
Journal of Physical Anthropology, June. Not my titles.
"Friends with Good Taste" -- that's a radically re-edited
version of one of my papers republished by Reader's Digest,
and, again, I did not author the headline. And I know, I
know, perhaps I could have weathered this, perhaps Yale
could have weathered it, were it not for these additional
charges, these nonsense charges, and I know you in the press
are responsible for covering the news, but, honestly,
honestly. Yes, the rescue boat that took me from the Andes
to Montevideo broke down on the Urubamba, and yes we were
forced to eat one of the crew. That was never a secret. And,
yes, there was that terrible incident in the Victoria Plaza
Hotel when I was trapped in the elevator for seven hours and
ate the bellhop. You must understand, though. It so
difficult, it's so very difficult, and embarrassing, yes,
but at the moment I was in a sort of panic. I had been
trapped before -- twice -- and in both cases had to do the
unspeakable, and instinct just took over. It's a basic
ecological interaction, and I assure you it happens millions
of times per day in the Animal Kingdom. Our instinct is to
survive, and I can assure you, were we trapped in this room
together for long enough without food or hope of rescue,
your fellow journalists would cease seeming like colleagues
and more like a buffet or perhaps a smorgasbord, I don't
know which term is most effective here ...
(Beat)
Where was in my notes? Oh, yes. I should not have kept the
bellboy a secret, and for that I deeply apologize. I simply
knew that it would not be understood, and when the hotel
offered to keep things quiet I simply went along, as they
did not want a scandal and they basically see bellboys as
disposable there anyway. But I should have known this news
would break, and I deeply apologize to Yale and to my
colleagues for the embarrassment I am sure it has caused
them, and I know that they could even have addressed that,
but were it not for my next actions. But as you know, I was
confronted by the father of one of my students in my office,
and he said terrible things and made terrible threats and
made absurd accusations. And I flew into a panic. And I
tried to leave, I swear to you I tried, but the lock on my
door broke, and I was trapped in the room with him. And
that's when my memory fails. The psychiatrist tells me I
went into some sort of psychotic dream state, where I was
not responsible for my actions, and that's what we will be
telling the court. But, of course, a career in Academics,
even at Yale, cannot survive such a thing. And so I met with
the Dean of my department, and the president of the school,
and it was a very emotional meeting, and there may have been
some shouting. But eventually I realized that it would now
be impossible for me to continue my research. Please, lower
your hand. I told you I would not be answering questions
yet. There will be no questions now. I don't know where the
Dean or the President are currently. I have told the police
this, and I do not intend to answer any more questions about
it on the advice of my lawyer. I am merely here to formally
make my resignation from Yale public, and leave it at that.
Please, stop shouting. I DON'T HAVE ANY ANSWERS. I WILL NOT
BE BULLIED. I know that you're just doing your jobs, but it
is a wretched job, you climb into people's lives and you
just dig and dig and you dig and you won't let up even when
somebody is trying to put their past behind them and it
won't do IT JUST WON'T DO AT ALL.
(Long beat)
Ha ha ha. Went off my notes again there. It's the stress.
You may sympathize. Now, understanding that there are
certain things I will not answer, on the advice of council,
I shall be available for questions, which I will be taking
in one on one interviews at a small room reserved
specifically for that purpose. I look forward to speaking
with you, and, when you come in, please be careful, as the
door tends to stick a little.
END
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