5 Minutes ABCDE

A. 1 Minute: The waitress stands in the far upstage left corner holding a clipboard. On the clipboard sits and egg timer. The customer sits downstage center in a chair at the table. The waitress sets the timer for one minute. As the minute goes, the customer holds up a menu and slowly scans it, eyes intensely focused, moving their head slowly from the left side of the menu to the right side of the menu in fifteen seconds. Then moving in the same way right to left in fifteen seconds. Repeat both directions once more.

B. 1 Minute: The waitress hovers over the customer who is running their finger around the rim of their coffee cup. The following is exchanged:

Waitress: I do not order your immortality. I can no longer live without you. That need overwhelms us. That’s why anguish bursts forth: because the need pushes us toward the realization – no matter what, yes, I must die.

Customer: There is no greater love than the love the wolf feels for the lamb it doesn’t eat. The other side of the scene is the paradoxical refined magnificent love of the wolf. It’s not difficult for the ewe to love the lamb. But for the wolf? The wolf’s love for the lamb is such a renunciation, it’s a Christ-like move, it’s the wolf’s sacrifice – it’s a love that could never be requited. This wolf that sacrifices its very definition for the lamb, this wolf that doesn’t eat the lamb, is it a wolf? Is it still a wolf?

Waitress: Why does the idea that you are going to eat me up fill me with such pleasure and such terror? It’s to get this pleasure that you need the wolf. The wolf is the truth of love, its cruelty, its fangs, its claws, our aptitude for ferocity.

C. 1 Minute: The waitress looks at a list – it could be compiled from our blog (descriptions of actions, objects, etc.). The customer now has the egg timer and sets it for one minute. The waitress reads the list. As the end of the list, the following line is read:

“Each morning, they would put on the masks and perform their roles for the neighborhood; a signpost to the world that everything was as it should be.”

Both the waitress and the customer put on rhinoceros (or other animal) masks.

D. 1 Minute:
From opposite ends of the stage, on a diagonal, the waitress and the customer alternately yell the following at one another. There should be a gulf of silence between the two lines.

I once had a healer tell me that guilt is a useless emotion. I believe her. But then I begin to feel guilty about not feeling guilty. What is this? Meta-guilt?

Is the guilt greater or lesser because of distance?


E. 1 Minute: On the telephone, Kimi gives directions to audience members. They repeat them to us and we perform them for one minute.