(fragment of a play)
(fragment of a play)
Characters:
A and B (indifferent, their voices almost declaimed), a choir of Absents (some dressed with orange pajamas – almost red – others with cups of coffee in their hands)
An Italian styled theater.
The stage is empty, almost without light, it’s visible some piled furniture in second plan.
A and B enter, they observe vaguely the furniture and then turn to the audience, but crossing it as if they were watching a projected movie beyond, or perhaps a giant stereogram.
A: It’s the images I told you about, of the city of… after the bombardments. They became common in the media (make a pause, as pondering) for a while. They are destroyed cities, forensic architectures.
B: They are keen to me, similar to the ones of all wars.
A: They are odd...
B: (interrupting) they are familiar guts, because they have been here all the time.
(pause)
A: I say that they are from… because I have faith in what I am told. It’s where I want to get. They can be from… as any other place. The information we get is always filtered.
B: They were found in the Internet and manipulated in Photoshop. It’s weirdly easy to change this kind of images without making them untrue. They are not faces.
A: They could be amazing parkour tracks.
B: Or of a fiction movie.
A: Ideal for fictions, physical exercises and street cats.
B: Do you put your faith on that? (laughs, then silence)
(the Absents enter)
Sings the choir of Absents: In the Gulag was the same thing! Nothing changed, we only ended to exist. And that’s it. Our blood is fluid and our images were pixelated. Our face is a smudge in your PC. Towards your victims, you became iconoclasts. (pause) Only the barbarians represent us?
(leaving)
A: I don’t get used to this warm breeze.
B: I’m tired of trying to see the images beyond the images… (stretches the arm towards the public, with the indicator finger pointing, as Columbus statue at Barcelona; then sits in the stage’s edge and keeps that way, with the legs moving back and forth). They are facts, now.
(dark)