Beat.
His face went all red.
Beat.
He got out of bed, and put his clothes on, and his sneakers on, and I just . . . watched him.
Beat.
Finally he said: “You’ve figured out that I love you, right?”
Beat.
I said: “That’s just what you’re calling the emotion you’re feeling because you’re not getting what you want.”
Beat.
Then he . . . left.
Beat.
I got on the phone with my big blond American friend, and I asked her what was happening and she said: “When guys—when anyone tells you they love you, you don’t listen, you don’t think it’s real, you don’t think it means anything, I don’t know why: probably because you’re fucked up.”
Beat.
Yep, that’s . . . what she uh . . .
Beat.
I told her she was a fucking American and what did she know?
Transition.
Interlude Act Two Scene Four–Five.
Scene Five.
We see elliot, carmen, and sarah jean.
elliot has tubes coming out of his nose.
He has a laptop beside him.
carmen: (to sarah jean) It’s okay, go ahead, you can talk to him.
sarah jean: Dad?
elliot: (low) Yeah?
sarah jean: Dad?
elliot: (low) Yeah?
sarah jean: I can’t hear you.
elliot pulls himself up.
He clears his throat a little.
elliot: I’m sorry.
sarah jean: What’s going to happen?
elliot: I’m going to eat some cherry-flavoured Jell-O.
sarah jean: And then?
elliot: I’m going to lie here and fall in and out of consciousness.
sarah jean: And then?
elliot: I’ll take some pills and talk to some doctors.
sarah jean: And then?
elliot: I’m going to kiss you and Mom.
sarah jean: And then?
elliot: I’m going to say goodbye.
sarah jean: And then?
elliot: I’m going to stop breathing and my limbs’ll stiffen.
sarah jean: And then the worms.
elliot: That’s right.
Beat.
sarah jean: Will I be able to see you.
elliot: No.
sarah jean: Why?
elliot: Because I’ll be buried in a box under the ground.
sarah jean: For how long?
elliot: How long will it take to bury the box?
sarah jean: Uh.
elliot: It takes about an hour. The hole the box is put into is six-feet deep, traditionally, but I don’t know if that’s still . . . ? Carmen?
carmen: Yeah?
elliot: Is the hole going to be six feet deep?
carmen: Yeah.
elliot: Why is that?
carmen: So wild animals can’t dig up the body.
elliot: So, Buster, the gravediggers dig a hole, they put the box in the hole, then they cover the box with the dirt they displaced to dig the hole.
sarah jean: When will I see you?
elliot: You won’t see me, Buster, because I’ll be in the box.
sarah jean: For how long.
elliot: Infinity. Or in theology: eternity.
Beat.
People die, Buster.
carmen: Honey, Dad needs some water. Could you go ask one of the nurses in the hallway for him?
sarah jean: Can I get a pop now?
carmen: Yeah.
sarah jean goes out.
elliot puts a hand over his face.
She’s drinking pop. I can’t say no to her right now.
Beat.
Elliot?
elliot: My . . . legs are cold: I think I’m losing circulation to them. There’s pressure behind my eye, it feels like my eye might get pushed out of its socket.
Beat.
I think I’m uh . . . I’m going to . . . go, soon . . .
carmen: (low) Yeah.
Beat.
Click for some morphine.
elliot clicks.
Silence.
elliot: I’m sorry for—for the ways I’ve disappointed you . . .
carmen: Yeah—?
elliot: I hope . . .
Beat.
carmen: You hope what?
Pause as elliot shakes his head, and then he puts a limp hand on his laptop.
elliot: Give it to my publisher.
Beat.
It’s finished.
Beat.
I’ve dedicated it to my mother.
elliot slowly, painfully, pushes his laptop towards carmen.
elliot lies there and closes his eyes.
carmen sits there.
Transition.
Interlude Act Two Scene Five–Six.
Scene Six.
sarah jean speaks to the audience.
sarah jean: K’an came back a couple of hours later, and he said in a very angry tone that he wants to marry me.
Beat.
And then the phone rang and K’an said: “Answer it, it might be Stanford, or, even better, that prof you fucked.”
Beat.
But it wasn’t, it was an officer from the Toronto Police Service, and he asked if my mother was named Carmen Green, and I said yes, and he asked me if I was by myself, and I said no, and he told me to sit down.
Beat.
I said to K’an: “The police are telling me to sit down,” and K’an, he . . . had this look on his face, when he realized what was happening, that was so . . .
Beat.
Haunting.
Beat.
I got off the phone, and he packed me a suitcase, and booked me a flight online.
He said: “I want to marry you” again at the airport when he dropped me off. But it . . . sounded less angry that time, more . . . resigned.
Beat.
Yeah.
Transition.
Interlude Act Two Scene Six–Seven.
Scene Seven.
sarah jean is standing still and listening intently. carmen is dressed in formal black.
carmen: Did you hear that lady who was crying: I kept looking over to see what was happening, she was standing over a grave the whole service, and just . . . bawling: it was very grating—she kept stopping and starting, stopping and starting—
sarah jean: I think she was sad.
Silence.
sarah jean is listening.
carmen looks at sarah jean.
carmen: (to sarah jean) What are you doing?
sarah jean: Listening.
carmen: To what?
sarah jean: Time.
Beat as sarah jean and carmen listen.
I can hear it.
Beat. Off carmen’s look:
I can hear it, Mom?
carmen: Okay, honey.
sarah jean: I can hear it.
carmen: Yeah?
sarah jean: Yes! Yes I can hear it!?
carmen: (impatient) How does it sound?
sarah jean: It’s like . . . ?
carmen: (impatient) Like a vacuum cleaner?
sarah jean: No.
carmen: (impatient) Like a mosquito?
sarah jean: No.
carmen: (impatient) Like a . . . harp?
sarah jean: No? No, more like a person.
carmen: A person . . . crying? A person crying in the distance, at a funeral? Like that lady at the cemetery today who wouldn’t shut up?
Beat.
Will you come take your bo
ots off? Come on: come take your boots off now.
sarah jean: But, Mom, can you hear it?
carmen: Hear what.
Two or three beats of sarah jean staring at carmen.
sarah jean: Can you hear it.
carmen: No?
sarah jean: can you hear it!
carmen: hear what no i can’t hear it?
sarah jean: hey can you hear it!
sarah jean starts violently kicking her boots off and wrecking anything in her reach. She doesn’t look at her mother. carmen starts trying to grab sarah jean, and sarah jean writhes away.
carmen: stop it! no stop it. stop it. / stop it.
sarah jean: you stop it you stop it. you stop it. you stop it. you stop it.
Pause.
There is a standoff: carmen and sarah jean stare at each other, panting.
It sounds like . . . like whispering . . . ?
Beat.
carmen: Yeah.
sarah jean: Yeah.
Pause.
They listen.
carmen: There: that . . . low register of . . . ?
sarah jean: Yeah.
sarah jean and carmen both stand still and listen.
sarah jean is smiling.
Pause.
carmen: That’s the furnace.
carmen exits.
sarah jean stops smiling.
Transition.
Scene Eight.
sarah jean regards us.
sarah jean smiles—with difficulty—at the audience.
Musical phrases and textual phrases intertwine, trading off with one another, dialogue filling the pauses in the music.
Finale Part 1.
sarah jean: My mom . . . drifted her car into the guardrail on a highway.
Beat.
She was in the ICU this week, holding on, and I’ve been living in the hospital waiting room.
Beat.
But, uh . . .
Beat.
But she died.
Beat.
It’s not certain if she . . . fell asleep or if she . . . did it . . . to herself, so . . .
Beat.
I’ve been trying to arrange her funeral. I asked her once what kind of funeral she wanted and all she said was: “I don’t know,” and then: “No lilies.” I talked to the funeral home about it. I took a cab home.
Beat. “Finale Part 1” music ends.
I should go and call K’an, and tell him I found a funeral home I like. And I should go . . . call back the cemetery, and I—I’m upset about . . . my big blond American friend is right, isn’t she? I’m very . . . fucked up about love—and it’s just—it’s so . . . sickening that she knows that about me, but somehow I don’t . . . know that . . . about myself, and I keep thinking about . . . my dad and his . . . theory of time and all the . . . (gestures) . . . hoopla about it after he died . . . for some . . . reason that . . . ?
sarah jean twitches her hand, listening to the music.
Music phrases and textual phrases intertwine, trading off with one another.
Finale Part 2.
As the music plays, sarah jean thinks very, very hard, twitching her fingers. Then:
Yeah: Dad went . . . through his whole life . . . thinking . . . time was just a persistent illusion, and then he was jarred by . . . death, in his case it was the approach of death, and “what if time isn’t mathematical: what if the old physics are wrong,” “what if the universe isn’t fixed and change is possible,” and yeah, yeah: you can suddenly know that the way in which you see . . . some . . . thing . . . You can know that some thing you’re fucked up about: some thing you thought was . . . fake, some thing you didn’t listen to, that you thought had no meaning is . . .
Beat.
Is real.
sarah jean looks at us.
It’s real.
Music.
elliot and carmen are there.
carmen: (very low and gently, at the level of a whisper) . . . Elliot . . . Elliot . . . Elliot . . . Elliot . . . Elliot . . . Elliot . . . (repeat until:)
elliot’s eyes close—love.
sarah jean turns to us. She smiles at us. Maybe she cries: relief.
“Finale Part 2” music ends.
sarah jean: It is . . . real.
End play.
Acknowledgements.
Lee Smolin, the renowned theoretical physicist, acted as the consulting physicist on Infinity. It would be hard to overestimate his influence. We have—with Lee’s permission—lifted ideas directly from his book, Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe, and incorporated them into the text. Lee wrote an eight-page biography for Elliot (the theoretical-physicist character in Infinity) that I have used to shape the play, and he has collaborated with me on the writing of the physics in the piece, revising the text with me. I am infinitely grateful to him. Huge thanks are due to Ross Manson, who commissioned this work and conceived of it with me. He has profoundly influenced its meanings. Thank you to Richard Rose and Andrea Romaldi for their (as always) deft dramaturgy. Thanks also to Kate Alton, Paul Braunstein, Njo Kong Kie, Isabelle Ly, Mariel Marshall, Haley McGee, Rebecca Picherack, Teresa Przybylski, Amy Rutherford, and Andréa Tyniec for their beautiful work and dramaturgical contributions to the text.
Hannah Moscovitch is the acclaimed author of East of Berlin, Little One & Other Plays, The Russian Play, This Is War, and several other works. She has written for TV, radio, and opera. Hannah has won multiple awards for her work, and was the first Canadian woman and Canadian playwright to win the prestigious Windham-Campbell Award and the first playwright to ever win the Trillium Book Award. She lives in Halifax.
Njo Kong Kie was born in Indonesia and grew up in Macau where he received his musical education from the Academia de Música São Pio X. Long-serving pianist and music director of La La La Human Steps, Kong Kie gave close to 600 performances with the company throughout Canada and abroad between 1996 and 2012. Music from his album of original compositions Picnic in the Cemetery has been used on the stages of the Nederlands Dans Theater, Ballet de l’Opéra national du Rhin, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Ballet British Columbia, and the Singapore Dance Theatre. He has created original soundtracks for the Silesian Dance Theatre (Poland), Point View Art Association (Macau), and for choreographer Anne Plamondon (Montreal) and filmmaker Alejandro Alvarez. His original creations for the stage include operas and musical theatre, such as knotty together (with Anna Chatterton), La Señorita Mundo (with Kico Gonzalez-Risso), The Futures Market (with Douglas Rodger), Mr. Shi and His Lover (with Wong Teng Chi), and the non-text based concert theatre Picnic in the Cemetery. He calls Toronto home.
Infinity © Copyright 2017 by Hannah Moscovitch
All music © Copyright 2017 by Njo Kong Kie
First edition: January 2017
Cover design by Monnet Design
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For music rights, please contact [email protected].
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Moscovitch, Hannah, author
Infinity / Hannah Moscovitch.
A play.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77091-734-7 (pa
perback).--ISBN 978-1-77091-735-4 (pdf).--
ISBN 978-1-77091-736-1 (epub).--ISBN 978-1-77091-737-8 (mobi)
I. Title.
PS8626.O837I54 2017 C812’.6 C2016-907312-2
C2016-907313-0
We acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.
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