Chapter XVIII: an Actor Out Alone

Nowhere

Playbill: ONE-MAN HAMLET

The Cast:

i. Hamlet...                          ...as Himself

ii. Claudius (the King)...      ...Stabbed/Poisoned

iii. Gertrude (the Queen)...            ...Poisoned

iv. Ophelia (the Rook)...                ...Drowned

v. Polonius (the Bishop)......Dead for a Ducat/Dead

vi. Laertes (the Knight)...    ... Poisoned/Stabbed

vii. Ghost (King).....(Foul and Unnatural Murder)ed

viii. Rozencrantz (the Pawn)...             ...Dead

ix. Guildenstern (the Pawn)...              ...Dead

x. Horatio/Tragedians/Pawns...        ..also Hamlet

About the Cast:

A Slaughterhouse -Eight corpses all told! Real Horror-show like. It's what actors do best. They have to exploit whatever talent is given to them, and their talent is dying. They can die heroically, comically, ironically, slowly, suddenly, disgustingly, charmingly, or from a great height.

About the Author:

The Works of William Shakespeare are credited to the Earl of Oxford, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Derby, William Shakespeare, and myself (depending on who you talk to).'William Shakespeare' appears in various spellings 6 times in a handwriting discontinued since the 1700s (see Ch. X). All things considered, it can be agreed the author is about as Dead as Elvis.

About the Director: 

Yeah, what about him?

The Play: ONE MAN HAMLET

Act I: Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune

Enter Hamlet.

Ham: There we were: demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance- Oh that this too, too solid flesh would meld, thaw and resolve itself into a dew! And every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air; we ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened! Don't you see? We're actors... We share an addiction: we're approval junkies. We're all in it for the slap on the back and the gold watch, the hip-hip-hoo-fuckin' rah, look at the clever boy with the badge, polishing his trophy! We follow directions. There is no choice involved. We pledged our identities, secure in the conventions of our trade, that someone would be watching. And then, gradually, no one was. We were caught, high and dry. It was not until after the murderer's long soliloquy that we were able to look around:

Reaching your head with the cold, 
sudden fury of a divine messenger

Let me tell you about heartache and the loss of God

Wandering, Wandering in hopeless night:

Out here in the perimeter there are no stars
Out here we IS stoned
Immaculate.

Blue Curtain.

Act II: The Death of a Salesman (Top of 16)

Enter Hamlet. 
He Fights. 
Collapses. 

Ham: In our experience, most things end in Death. Deaths for all ages and occasions! Deaths by suspension, convulsion, consumption, incision, execution, asphyxiation and malnutrition-! Climactic carnage, by poison and by steel-! 

Double deaths by duel-! So there's an end to that- it's commonplace: the rest is silence...

No.. no.. not for us, not like that. There are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreampt of in your philosophy: 

I'm talking about Death- and you've never experienced that. 
And you cannot act it. You die a thousand casual deaths- with none of that intensity which squeezes out life... and no blood runs cold anywhere. Because even as you die you know that you will come back in a different hat!
But no one gets up after death- there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that's death! Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... 

Death is not anything. 

Death is not.

It's the absence of presence, nothing more:

the endless time of never coming back, a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound.

Dies.

Black Curtain. 

ACT III: The Undiscovered Country (Thrity-Eight)

Enter Hamlet in different hat. 

Ham: I have heard, that guilty creatures sitting at a play have, by the very cunning of the scene, been struck so to the soul that presently that have claimed their malefactions. This is because you want people to know how good, attractive, generous, funny, wild and clever you really are: fear or revere me, but please, think I'm special. For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ. The bad end unhappily, the good, unluckily. That is what tragedy means. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come? When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause:




There is something about yourself that you don't know. Something that you will deny even exists, until it's too late to do anything about it. It's the only reason you get up in the morning. The only reason you suffer the shitty puss, the blood, the sweat and the tears. Shine on you crazy diamond, grunt and sweat under a weary life! Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, the enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action. You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I would more willingly part withal. 
Except my life. 
Except my life. 
Except my life. 
Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.  

Red Curtain.

This is NOT an Exit. 

Repeat.