Dreamland
An Overture On the Nature of Eternal in Los Angeles
EMPTY STAGE—TIME UNKNOWN OR POSSIBLY ABSENT, AS IN A DREAM.
Scene begins as if following on from a pre-existing story; as if the audience has always been there but have only now taken their seats.
Stories like this revolve around the voiceless and so, without further ado, we will speak.
You will love us the way we deserve to be loved!
CHORUS #1
(—committed, inescapable, explicitly on the page.)
The sun breaks abruptly, sluicing a rosy glow over a yawning stretch of Hollywood Boulevard. An off-brand Buzz Lightyear ambles by, accompanied by the Batman. Do you smell urine? Maybe you do. Distantly, a jackhammer.
CHORUS #3
Time is a funny thing in Los Angeles, where the sun is nearly always shining—
CHORUS #1
—where weather is cyclical but unpredictable—
CHORUS #2
—where memory is long but inaccurate—
CHORUS #1
—where stars are interred in everlasting memory—
CHORUS #2
—but from day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute, lie trodden underfoot.
CHORUS #3
You could drive yourself mad in Los Angeles.
CHORUS #2
And you’d be lucky to do it!
CHORUS #1
This is a message.
CHORUS #2
This is a haunting!
CHORUS #1
This is mortality, the function of little lives and imperfect time.
CHORUS #3
A compounding series of lies, a headline splash, another, over and over, pictures too gruesome to share in the news—
CHORUS #1
Found Tuesday, 6:00 AM, on Sunset—
CHORUS #2
4:30 on Melrose—
CHORUS #3
5:15 on Highland—
CHORUS #1
The discovery of a body—
CHORUS #2
Of a body—
CHORUS #3
Of a body—
CHORUS #1
Mutilated—
CHORUS #2
Mutilated—
CHORUS #1
Asphyxiated—
CHORUS #2
Asphyxiated—
CHORUS #1
Bludgeoned—
CHORUS #2
Dismembered—
CHORUS #1
Drowned—
CHORUS #2
They will say, but what was she wearing?
CHORUS #1
They will say, but a man’s life is at stake!
CHORUS #2
But—!
CHORUS #1
But—!
CHORUS #2
But—!
CHORUS #1
But—!
CHORUS #3
We will not try to persuade you of our merits, nor our virtues;
CHORUS #1
We are not a new story.
CHORUS #2
We are not even a different story.
CHORUS #1
It is always this story for someone—
CHORUS #2
—whether you listen to it or not.
CHORUS #1
Love, he will call it, before you abruptly blink out.
CHORUS #3
The truth is: You die the moment they stop speaking your name. We speak ours now into the ether.
CHORUS, AS ONE
Listen closely now, closely.
You can hear it on the wind.