Photo by Roger Brown from Pexels
SCENE 1 – GRENDEL
Center stage (in front of a screen/scrim on which are hung papier-mâché bodies of dead birds) a white sheet covers a large object. GRENDEL, clad as the man-eating monster of the same name from Beowulf, enters in light dimmed like a shroud of darkness around him.
GRENDEL
[turning to face the audience] Scat! I’ve not come to devour you.
Go back to your mead halls, or canvases, or whatever.
Don’t let my appearance fool you. I’m no puppy.
I pull the heads off of puppies … and people, too. Especially painters.
Countless numbers of them. I’ve forgotten them all.
I chew on Van Gogh’s ear like gum.
I spit blood prettier than Audubon’s birds.
GRENDEL defiantly lifts a middle finger to the audience.
GRENDEL
This idiotic war.
This never ending war man wages against Nature.
Maybe I’ve changed my mind after all.
Maybe I will eat you. Later.
When the moon tires of spinning mindlessly over your heads.
When you are sufficiently pickled in your alcohol and your pride and your greed.
When the splintered sunlight reveals my gruesome face and the sickening stench of my breath suddenly in the morning, close enough to kiss you.
When I tire of watching you locked in your deadly progression of butchery and mayhem and rape.
Spring is coming.
As though that makes any difference to elephant-murderers.
Spring is coming and I can feel my anger surging, like an invisible fire in me.
Like the irreversible injustice of your faith in destroying Earth’s sacred creatures.
Raging inside me like the very sickness of consumption raging inside you.
I can see for miles, out from this shroud of darkness perpetually around me.
I can see what’s going on behind that white sheet over there.
See that? [indicating]
That’s an elephant. A dying elephant.
GRENDEL hammers the stage with his fists and lets out a howl so violent it could turn water to ice.
GRENDEL
Go ahead! Watch from the safety of your distance.
From the safety of your indifference.
That magnificent body of his, pierced by poisoned arrows.
Forty days ago. They’ve been tracking him. Relentlessly.
He hears them following. His strength …
His massive strength slowly ebbing away.
His mountain of awesome symmetry daily becoming more and more sluggish.
He was taught by his grandmother to listen for the rains.
For the rustling of the brush. For the sounds of flying death.
Poachers using poisoned arrows, not to be heard by the protectors of elephants.
Weeks until the animal finally succumbs.
And falls to his knees. And they rush him. Cut his tendons.
Cut his trunk, to bleed him to death faster.
As though elephants were not people like you.
Once there were millions in Africa.
Now, not as many as 425,000.
Their number falling by two-thirds in less than fifty years.
Falling toward annihilation.
Ivory is the name of the holocaust.
Ivory is the metaphor for greed, is the metaphor for exploitation.
Mountain to market to moral bankruptcy…. It’s a curse.
GRENDEL exits. The white sheet, and whatever was hidden behind it, are removed from the stage.
Photo from Wikimedia
