IT IS SOLVED BY WALKING
Catherine Banks
Playwrights Canada Press
Toronto
Other Books by Catherine Banks:
Bone Cage
To Claudia Mitchell and Tessa Mendel, with love and gratitude.
Contents
Title Page
Also by Catherine Banks
Dedication
Production Information
Notes
Characters
Set
It Is Solved by Walking
prologue
stanza i
stanza ii
stanza iii
stanza iv
stanza v
stanza vi
stanza vii
stanza viii
stanza ix
stanza x
stanza xi
stanza xii
stanza xiii
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
It Is Solved by Walking premiered on April 28, 2011, at the Pumphouse Theatre, Calgary, Alberta, in a production by Urban Curvz Theatre. The cast and creative team for the premiere were:
Margaret: Laura Parken
Wallace Stevens: Allan Morgan
Director: Kathryn Waters
Stage manager: Emma Brager
Set design: Cimmeron Meyer
Costume design: Tracey Glass
Sound design: Allison Lynch-Griffiths
Lighting design: Alexandra Prichard
Assistant director: Angela Valliant
Technical director: Sabrina Miko
Producer: Michelle Kneale
It Is Solved by Walking has been translated into Catalan by Elisabet Rafols of Tant per Tant for Connexio Canadence 2012, a reading series in Catalonia, Spain.
Notes
It Is Solved by Walking is a play in thirteen stanzas inspired by the poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens. Written before 1925, this poem is in the public domain, as is “Sunday Morning” and his essay “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” which are also quoted in the text.
Margaret, on occasion, calls up a memory of John and will speak to him as if he is present.
All stanzas/individual lines from “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and “Sunday Morning” are italicized.
Margaret thinks like a poem, so her lines often look like a poem on the page with extra spacing for breath and lines of different length as needed for emphasis/intensity.
The ellipses used in Margaret’s speech do not denote a hesitation or a dropped word, but serve to create an emphasis, rather like a rest between two notes in music. A single ellipsis (…) between words denotes that Margaret is trying to get her thoughts correct. Two ellipses (……) between words denotes that she is struggling to say something particularly painful and honest. An ellipsis at the beginning or end of a line indicates a thoughtful transition between the two characters.
When a line ends and drops down to the next line, it denotes a sense of waiting or that Margaret is going deep within.
Wallace is, of course, a voice in Margaret’s head, and where their thoughts are tumbling together a dash (—) appears at the end of a line. There are no capitals on lines that begin with a dash to indicate thoughts quickly following each other. (As when twins finish each other’s thoughts.)
Characters
Margaret—Margaret is not a faded beauty but grows into beauty during the course of the play. She is a believable fifty-three—greying hair, thickening waist rather than rail thin. She is a walker not a runner.
Wallace—Wallace Stevens as he exists in Margaret’s head, in his mid- to late-fifties. Occasionally Wallace speaks lines belonging to John from memories Margaret calls up.
Set
The stage is divided into three areas.
Space One
The walking area. Margaret walks along a beautiful coastal path. There is a far point where the rocks jut out to meet the sea. Close attention must be paid to the walking route, as it is integral and must be fluid.
Space Two
This space is a second-storey platform centre stage. This is the interior, the place where poems are created, which Wallace Stevens often occupies and Margaret strives to get to during the play. There is a beautiful rosewood desk and chair. The desk is lit with a table lamp circa 1940, but above the space is the sky with the moon, stars and sun. Sometimes Margaret’s walking route will take her under the platform and around the staircase.
Space Three
Margaret’s bedroom. There is a double bed in the centre of the third space. A tall three-panel screen provides a changing area for Margaret. There is a large, elegant armchair with a low table beside it. On the table is a bowl of twelve large oranges, by stanza nine the bowl has only one orange remaining.
First and foremost this play is about light.
And for what, except for you, do I feel love?
—Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction: To Henry Church”
but the doubly dead
who first went away
and then died,
like my husband—
those dead are harder to reach.
—Miriam Waddington, “The Dead”
Sex is a beautiful thing—with your husband.
—advice received at twelve
For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea.
—e.e. cummings, “maggie and milly and molly and may”
prologue
The stage is dark. MARGARET reads the poem without emotion, as she would have read it her very first time at the age of seventeen.
MARGARET: “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
by Wallace Stevens
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
stanza i
the only moving thing
The stage is dimly lit.
MARGARET is in bed completely hidden under the duvet. Into the darkness comes the sound of MARGARET gasping to catch her breath. Her grief leads to a wail in a pattern of a woman coming to a sexual climax—it is the sound of death and sex.
WALLACE sits at his desk in the dark, smoking a cigarette. As the wail begins to taper he snaps on the desk lamp. He puts out the cigarette in a heavy crystal ashtray. He unscrews his fountain pen and begins to write on the pad of legal paper before him.
The light on WALLACE fades as it comes up on MARGARET’s bed—but still it is early morning—the dawn is only now breaking.
MARGARET surfaces and searches around under the covers until she finds and pulls out a well-worn copy of The Palm at the End of the Mind. She props herself up with pillows, opens the book at random but she can’t concentrate. Finally she throws the book to the floor. Some of the pages scatter and MARGARET gets out of bed, stuffing the pages randomly into the book. As she reaches for a page under the bed her hand brushes a white shoebox.
She opens the shoebox, pulling out a beautiful beaded sari shawl of red silk. Slowly MARGARET wraps the shawl around her shoulders but is overwhelmed with its effect on her and she releases it.
MARGARET begins to pace the room until she is pacing under and around the spiral staircase. She stops, looking up. The sun is rising above WALLACE. It is the moment before the sun reaches the horizon. The red and orange light filters down between the floorboards, lighting MARGARET. MARGARET makes a fist and pounds on the unseen door.
The sound is huge and echoes.
MARGARET: Is there anybody there?
WALLACE stirs. There is the sound of a bird flying up and away. The sound is loud and echoes with MARGARET knocking on the door a second time.
Is there anybody there?
She stands listening intently as she looks up.
I came.
You didn’t answer.
I kept my word.
MARGARET walks away. The scraping of WALLACE pushing back his chair stops her. She stands waiting as he descends the staircase, his footsteps measured and heavy with disapproval.
MARGARET often does not look at him. He is her personal haunt. As he speaks the light changes to normal sunlight.
WALLACE: (painfully) “The Listeners?”
MARGARET: I can’t… think.
WALLACE: It has been quite some time, Margaret. I almost didn’t come.
Nice touch, the sound effects I mean.
MARGARET: Since the call… I haven’t been able to think.
WALLACE: But still (dismissive) Walter de la Mare. (sighs)
MARGARET: I can’t think… Except for…
WALLACE absorbs her thought.
WALLACE: The only moving thing
MARGARET: Not now… No… I don’t want to think of that now.
WALLACE: Good line that.
MARGARET: Blackbirds, blackbirds, blackbirds!
Why did you choose me?
WALLACE: (moan) That again.
MARGARET: You can’t help me.
WALLACE: Not me. Never Wallace Stevens, lawyer, vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company.
MARGARET: The poet, the Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry, 1955!
WALLACE: Oh that man can’t help you whatsoever.
MARGARET: Blackbirds then? Fucking blackbirds then?
WALLACE: What horrible thought are you hiding, Magpie?
MARGARET: Stop it. My husband—
WALLACE: —long-dead to you—
MARGARET: —has been killed in a—!
WALLACE: —yes. In a tragic traffic accident. So why sex, Magpie?
MARGARET: No.
WALLACE: Sex.
MARGARET moves about, restless with the possibility of this idea.
MARGARET: The poem cannot be reduced to epigrams…
WALLACE: …nor ideas.
WALLACE & MARGARET: Sensations.
WALLACE: The first time, Margaret.
MARGARET: What, that I read it?
WALLACE: You felt it.
MARGARET: Answer my question first.
WALLACE: Why you?
MARGARET: Yes.
WALLACE: You will get to the end.
MARGARET: Ha.
WALLACE: Yes. Of everything.
He goes up the stairs.
MARGARET: You chose poorly!
MARGARET goes out of the house, facing a cold wind. She pauses.
(whispers) Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
WALLACE: (formally) Among twenty snowy mountains,
MARGARET: The only moving thing
WALLACE: Was the eye of the blackbird.
MARGARET wants to walk but she can’t begin.
What is it you are waiting for?
MARGARET: I love this moment.
WALLACE: Yes?
MARGARET: This is the purest moment. The moment before the pen drops to the page to begin.
WALLACE: But that is a lie. It has already begun. It begins with the first thought.
MARGARET walks.
MARGARET: I remember that feeling… not that we had invented it… clearly there was sex in the world before we came together a bit drunkenly the first time, first date.
If I stood, feet planted firmly on the bed and looked back, sex rises like a mountain range back through all of time. A chain of sexual peaks—
WALLACE groans.
Bad pun noted, Mr. Stevens.
Food, shelter, sex that’s our only history. So we didn’t invent sex. We had been dating a few weeks when he had to go to India. Not for work but his sister’s wedding. I was working, I was beginning to work on my thesis.
WALLACE: “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”
MARGARET: Stanza one. I was glad of the time alone, the time to think, to work. The day he came home… when I returned from TA’ing he was already waiting naked in my bed. He had brought a gift in a white box, a beautiful sari shawl of red silk like the women there are draped in on their wedding day. When I was naked and on top of him, his neck tasting of curry and cinnamon, he wrapped me in the silk… I felt wrapped in a membrane of…… why can’t I find beautiful words?
MARGARET stops.
This is nothing like a poem. I’ve waited too long. The words have flown, no, they are too heavy to fly.
WALLACE: Sensation, Margaret.
MARGARET walks on.
MARGARET: This was the sensation. That no two people had ever fit together as our bodies did at that moment. I lay on the bed as he moves in me, the whole of the world outside frozen. The only thing is the movement of him inside of me. We are the only ones in the world since the beginning of time to move so. Achingly beautifully our bodies fit together so perfectly that to take them apart is to hear the sound of unlocking.
MARGARET makes a soft popping sound with her lips—rhythmically echoing the love-making in her head. She stops.
And then as we both climax… surely there is a better word for that moment… my heart moves. My language is leaving me.
My heart… moves… in my chest as it has never before.
She pauses at the door.
John, I lay beside you, beside you, my lips glazing your ear and I whisper,
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
MARGARET hurries back to her bedroom. She buries her face in the sari shawl and weeps—no sound, only the movements of weeping.
WALLACE returns to his desk and his writing.
stanza ii
three minds
WALLACE is dressed in full birding gear.
He looks around and peers at MARGARET through binoculars as she gets ready for a walk.
He speaks as though reading from a birding guidebook.
WALLACE: Blackbirds are solitary birds. The male blackbird establishes a territory during his first year that he will hold throughout his life. The territory is essential for pair formation and nesting. Territory boundaries break down when the adults moult. During this period, territory drive is very low and birds will feed outside their territories at abundant food sources.
MARGARET moves out of the house for a walk.
Say, at work or the gym or the faculty club.
MARGARET stops, clearly taken aback. WALLACE continues reading.
The male blackbird will re-establish its territory again in late autumn and defend it against all other blackbirds.