Image from Wikimedia
The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give that away.– Pablo Picasso
I call for actors burning at the stakes, signaling on fluttering wings through the flames.
– Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double
TIME AND PLACE
Now. Gaza (and a little beyond).
CHARACTERS
MALAK (“Angel” or “Messenger” in Arabic ملاك), female, 16.
FATHER, Angel’s father.
SAWAD, Angel’s abusive husband.
UKHTI (“my sister” in Arabic), Angel’s somewhat older, more ingenuous, sister.
Two women in black; and two Israeli soldiers (one male, one female).
SCENE 1 – FIRST SHOOTING
Upstage right two rooms are raised on stilts or risers. The “Father’s room” is a one-window, dimly-lit room with holes shattered in the walls, debris on the floor, a mattress, a chair, and a damaged doorway. Stage left of it is the “Other room,” with a bed, table, and chair – serving first as Sawad’s bedroom, and later as a bedroom in the house of two of the Gaza humanitarian sisterhood. Outside, between the two rooms, are broken walls and rubble, likewise elevated.
Underneath is a secret tunnel from Gaza into Israel.
Night. Sounds of bombs exploding. Flashes of light. ANGEL, dressed in white, exits Father’s room to go to a nearby broken wall, where she rescues a bleeding child, and sits and cradles it in her arms, until a medic comes from behind the wall to carry the child offstage. ANGEL stands, goes back into Father’s room, fetches a backpack and a pair of paint guns, puts the paint guns into the backpack, and sits. A full moon comes out.
SCENE 2 – SECOND SHOOTING
Morning. ANGEL, dressed in black, the backpack on her back, climbs down to stage level from Father’s room. At center stage:
ANGEL
I paint, not to kill people but the plague that’s in them.
Like Picasso painting Guernica.
Past armies of rats.
Through a virus that destroys social order.
To the heart of hatred.
To the very swollen tongues of hatred.
And the soul of a contagion that must be eradicated.
I was named Malak.
Or messenger.
But naming me Malak hasn’t kept the scourge from touching me.
Names don’t protect people in this place. Titles don’t protect people in this place.
Nor does buying a seat on the last train into night.
Because there are no trains out of Gaza.
Behind ANGEL hangs a white sheet, down to and partially on the stage floor. On a signal from her, four individuals (dressed entirely in white scrubs, white masks, white gloves, and white bags over their feet) line up against the sheet. ANGEL sets her backpack down, pulls out the two paint guns, and spray paints the four of them in red. They fall to the ground.
ANGEL
I was born with a pillar inside me.
Allah’s pillar.
Inside me.
It’s what drew Allah into me.
Like a stone, which doesn’t come alive until it draws a master sculptor’s hands over its body.
I care for children. Not for men. It’s an angel’s blessing/curse upon me.
Civilized men are judged by their behavior, regardless of their power.
And what civilized man of power lives along our border?
On either side?
Gaza or Israel?
I haven’t met any. Not a one! None who care for children. Not like I do.
None but those who corrupt Allah’s divine poetry of life.
Children are the only real feeling left in the hollowness.
In this crumbling piece of salt where I’ve tried sixteen years to live.
Tried most of my sixteen years caring for children.
Keeping them alive.
Tried most of my sixteen years keeping my voice alive.
Unswallowed by the moral pollution of this place.
I need to stop rehearsing, and write things down.
Everything that has not yet been born can be brought to life in the theatre of the mind. Even hope. If it’s written down. And found.
The four painted victims rise and exit, taking the white sheet with them as ANGEL puts the guns back in the backpack.
ANGEL
Plagues, like those in Egypt at the time of Moses, like those during the Black Death, like Gaza, plagues describe more than simply the morbid. They describe the overwhelming, demoralizing effects produced on the minds of the victims.
It’s what I’ve been told, and it’s what I’ve seen.
The lies.
The depravity.
The hypocrisy.
The utter feeling of helplessness.
And that is why my paint….
And why theatre….
And why angels.
There is a second pillar in me.
It comes from the ground.
From the scorched soil.
From the almost unbearable pain of children dying in my arms.
From the hateful blackness of the plague.
From the diarrhea of words some might serve as poetry.