The Final Performance, Text, Sound and Images

Braving cold and snow and snow and cold, the YWP Players -- P-T, Usagi, Qwerty, Peaches, Geist, Special and Bailyrae -- did a fantastic job at First Night in Burlington Friday. Remarkable writing and editing; rehearsed and performed in an incredibly short time frame. I was proud to be a part of it. Many accolades from folks in the audience, including some surprise luminaries of Burlington. Nice job, folks. Special thanks to Robin Fawcett for her amazing coaching. And special thanks to all of you who contributed 6-word visions of 2110. Here are the script, sound and images. Click here for Gallery. Video to come in a few days. -- gg

All: What will it look like in 100 years? What will be confirmed, our hopes or our fears?

Nick:(Cautiously optimistic) Will politics matter, will we have privacy left?
Will we still have emotions, or bore ourselves to death?

Bridget(Crotchety; past is best): What will we do on a Saturday night, go out, have a party, get drunk, start a fight? And how will the houses and buildings be built, of concrete and metal, of ashes and guilt?

Baily:(Smooth, salesman)M/i> Will we still have religion? A woman is Pope?
Will the still have the basics, like toothpaste and soap?

Anna: (The Ditz) And what will we wear and what will we eat, will teens disappear, what will be elite?

Sauce:(The Artiste ) And will there be rivers, and oceans and lakes
And if there are not will we admit our mistakes?

Georgia: (The Panicked OneM/i>) Will we still have love, romance and guitars?
Will we still have gas to power our cars?

Liz: (The Hypocrite) What will it look like in 100 years? What will be confirmed, our hopes or our fears?

Bridget: A prediction of a future like the present like the past like the future's now the present 'cause the present never lasts and the future in a century with all this new technology but the people of the future are the same--That doesn't change--

Different people, same voices, still sleeping.

Georgia: We control the future, we control the present, we control the past but forget 1984 since everything’s much beyond the reasons for that. See, the bells are still ringing and the bells still sound but the bells don’t have any more reason to stop from going down, drown into all the noise that no one cares for anymore. We’re half underwater and way over our heads in the heat and the ice and the summer days that just ain’t so freaking nice. The mountains were beautiful too, you know— but they’re gone, so gone so helplessly ironed down.

Baily: When will you people realize the uselessness of lumpy landscapes, this jagged geography, is no surface for building a city! Besides, who needs a mountain without snow?

(Liz:--no snow?)

Come on people! Global warming was introduced years ago!
It will only be a matter of time Before we need some redefined skylines!

Georgia: Skip out on the skylines, people expect the chrome
I’d hate to see the sky to go to waste but there’s no saying it’s not too late

Anna: You guys are such PITAs and I DNC. I mean, DILLIGAF?

Georgia: What happened to language, what happened to life?

Anna: Oh, SU, the language is there, so great, it’s all our new creation! Forget the definitions that tie you down when you can like say a lot more... That’s why we say “pain in the a--“

Georgia: Achoo! Sorry, must be the dust in my pocket I hoped to leave behind.

Anna: for PITA and DILLIGAF is like so shorter than “do I look like I give a f—“

Georgia: FINE! Pick up and go and leave the pencils behind while you’re at it, there’s nothing more to write than what we wish we saw when everything was so much more than the waste on the ground and the pain of the sky and the time when all the birds remembered how to fly.

Liz: Houses, apartments, offices, malls, everyone sees them, everyone falls into their clutches, into their grasp, into their clutches and pour on the gas 'cause marketing's marketing --

(Baily: we all need a job)

-- and no one can save them, and no one is god
we can make a difference, lets buy local-
grow corn and grow melons, and wear local sheep
we're snug in our beds and we're all fast asleep
to the problems we see now, What happened to books?
And local libraries and crannies and nooks
and indie tea houses and indie rock bands

(Nick: who cares where they went
Sauce: it's out of our hands.)

But we can start armies we can paint the world green
Let’s stand up against this, Let’s be a team-

Sauce: The hues of poetry
And the tones of personality
and all the different
Shades of fall
Because soon world will be dark
And the mountains steel And art forgotten
And the sun Dead
And we will be nothing and no one
But everyone else-
I am lost in a vision of a world where
Nothing is
Beautiful.

Nick: Rockets scream across the blood-lit sky

Sauce: And the ground beneath our
Feet is dead; cold.
The very air we breathe- stale
And all we see: simulated Sun;
perfection with an absence of Grace.
It takes several years to paint
A world onto
A paper of nothing

Nick: Alright, that's nice and all, but I think things are calming down,
no buildings falling down no governments toppling around our heads with the end in sight. No judgment days have come or gone save the ones we make ourselves,
and we have the common sense to keep the peace, keep our species,
contain technology, don't we?
It's been done before- when they made the radio the VCR the television
the computer screen the nuclear bomb
-MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION!-
people thought the world would cut itself off from reality from sensuality
from feeling and living and loving but hey, we haven't yet,
have we?

Baily: No No No Ya got it all wrong!
We are on the perfect path the prime direction.
I'll tell you what will be going on! Big business Corporate giants. The perfect products for every eager client. From cars that fly to dogs that don't die. From self-organizing bookshelves to shoe laces that tie themselves. I am TELLING you there will be a whole new set of demands to tend to. With disposable computers being sold Hard drives will be digital gold and the public can be convinced there isn't much to spare so the prices will rise and no one will care They'll be forking over the change to keep their greedy little brains believing happiness is worth their dough. And that's all they'll need to know. As long as we keep a cash flow big enough to accommodate my rapidly growing real estate. Hey, maybe then there will be people living in space. All the more room for a growing human race! And hotels on the moon will have tourists booking rooms So oxygen will be a thing of the past.

Anna: They say this like, "consumerism" thing is like, bad. It's like, stuff Who doesn't like stuff? Hollister, Abercrombie, Walmart, Macdonalds! Macdonalds! Fast food! Food that's like, fast! No waiting. The future of nutrition!
Those skinny super models? A thing of the past! Everyone's going to look at like, a size 12 girl and think like, "dayum. She is like, thin." Anorexia's like, not a problem here. Walmart! Everything you could ever like want or need, all in like, one place! Twitter updates like, tell me what to get- when to get it. Always the like, newest, the best.

Bridget: Am I the only one who misses things a hundred years ago? Back when we had huge clunky computers & keyboards--when was the last time you used a keyboard? Snowboard? Phone cord? Record? ...not record. --Back when we had snow. Back when people wrote their thoughts & their thoughts were worth writing, back when people fought for rights, not just for the sake of fighting, back when things had meaning. The advent of technology & the golden age of reasoning, of inspiration, of internet dialogue--the renaissance of blogs. An era of--of beauty! (To Artist:) You know. Of actual communication, of creation, elation! ...No? Don't you remember? When we had books, we read books, we bought books, books with pages you could feel, you could turn--What happened to the tangible? What happened to the real? We've learned to interact through (To Ditz) cell phones, through IM, through the narcissistic egotistic self-obsessive & excessive PROFILE UPDATES.
I don't. care. Come back when you learn how to communicate.

Baily: The seeds we planted became towers.

Sauce: They will burn the canvasses of master pieces to
fuel the flames that forge their metal homes. And instead of a world where hills roll like rhymes off of tongues there will only be your cities of cement and the ruin of
expression. And you see, the world is dark because
even bathed in the illumination of our own making we
have no notion of the vastness of the sun and the walls
of this social isolation are cutting out the voice of the past. The future is doomed, my friends, let us watch it die.

Anna: These boots? I got them like, this morning and they're like, already going out of style! But we're not going to like, NEED boots anyway. See, this "global warming" thing, it's going to be like, great. The sun like, shining all year round! 89 degrees in like, February!
We can go like, tanning! I In February! What about that isn't fantastic? And can we talk for like, a minute about trees? These stupid trees like, keep blocking my cell phone coverage. We don't like, get great service in the first place and then there are all these trees!
They're just like, there. I don't even really see the point in them. I mean, they're like... green. They block the sun!

Baily: Exactly, and in 100 years there will be bigger fears
than choppy coverage because some trees got in the way
once we learn how to teleport Poor service won't mean a dropped call it'll mean your body ends up in Texas And your head is in Zimbabwe!

Liz: Gotta about peace gotta talk about freedom
Gotta teach all the kids will someone please lead them
Back to a place where they can play in the grass
Without searching the lot for sharp pieces of glass
And where a ball is a real thing, somethin’ you can throw
And hit with a bat, just like baseball you know,
But the sports are all dead, the playing fields too
They’ve all been cleared away to build robotic zoos
And lets talk about that, this technology,
Its taken over our lives so un-naturally,
Did you read the news? I thought not, it’s extinct-
Instead weve got ticker-tapes (BAM) so succinct
“No more crude oil”, we see it go by,
we see it against the dark smog in the sky
No more info’s offered, not who is so blame
Or the fact that this drilling has all been a game
We’ve lost our resources, were making fresh-water
You go to the store to get a son or a daughter

Bridget: Why can't we return to how things used to be? Before innovation sapped all creativity. Before we all turned into (To Ditz) you. Yes, we've always been this petty, but we once had better things to do. Don't you remember? When worth was what we made, not just what we spent, not what we could sell, not the pretty lies we learned to tell (at Salesman). Back before the government went bankrupt & was bought by Google which was bought by Wal-Mart which was bought by Amazon which tried to give personalized recommendations to everyone &, well, you can guess how that went. Don't you remember when we were more than our possessions, our Facebook obsessions--when we had individuality? Don't you remember REALITY?

All: (in overlapping controlled chaos)

Nick: People thought the world would cut itself off from reality but it hasn’t.

Georgia: It’s all sort of frozen in time like we have to make it stop.

Sauce: No notion of the vastness of the sun.

Liz: We’re tucked in our beds but we’re all fast asleep to the problems we see now.

Baily: Big business, corporate giants, the perfect product for every eager client.

Anna: Twitter updates like tell me what to get when to get it.

Georgia: There’s gotta be more! Something that makes me more value, more substance than crazy, paranoid, thirsty, bored, exhausted, insomniac,
 desperate, ugly of mind, beautiful of brain, excited, seeking perfection, sick, deranged, depressed, nostalgic, shaking, spinning, dizzy, misses the birds,
loves the sky, falling apart, mathematician, pure brilliance, curious, learning how to fly. After all, flights are delayed from here to infinity. Fourteen going on forty and ninety but seven minus two times negative thirty-three is the age I claim to be for WHAT? So I can sink into the ground and forget all I’ve found in the early days when everything was—dare I say it—simple?

Baily: For a simple low rate and you can edit out your flaws and anything else about yourself you hate! and our bodies will be GREAT! yeah plastic surgeons have been raking in the cash for years by then everyone will be walking around like a robot Brittany spears!

CM 4: How will our era be known?

Anna: Thoughts? You think we'll need to think!?
What do you think machines are for? Robots that do our homework and even arms that pick out our outfits.
Shopping will all happen from the comfort of your living room, turn on the TV, pick something out, there it is!

CM 5: No individuality, only conformity, nothing new

Sauce: Let us capture truth/art/sanity before they dim
and life before it fades. I am unique- but Never again. Can’t you see? A future where individuality Is nonexistent and the opinions of one will be the opinions of all. Nothing abstract- where’s the Interpretation? Oh! I
Know what art is- this is art, look! The world is doomed The world is doomed

CM 6: Los-angeles-like world- nobody happy

Georgia: Stare right out the window and pray right now for snow. At least this time there’s no hope & disappointment’s just a dream. Plastic bubbles all over the state, way up, up high, but still with a restriction. With my thirsty hands I tried to burst the bubble, getting friction. Vermont has become immune to all the pain—sovereign! Thank Gods for all those new painkillers. Lake Champlain sunrise, metal glinting overhead. Robot marriage legalized but nobody is dead—we’re all half bionic and could surely live forever. But what’s forever good for when you’re really living…never?

CM 7: Fat people playing games on TV.

Nick: Look, you already exist, you're in my head-
these things you say, I've heard.
You (to Ditz), you're in my future.
And you (to Artist), you're here and there, too.
All of you, everybody will have their influence-
in what's to come, we'll all get our dues.

(Asides end… everyone gets on stage…)

Sauce: We will all go out in a
Clatter of paint brushes
Left on the floor and an
Explosion- of sorts- in
Which all creativity is lain to
Rubble. I can see- with
A pen or a brush
In my hand the future of us
Is at hand. Here. Nothing

Nick: Extremes are not a basis
for any kinda analysis.
Replace perspective with fact,
observe the objectivities and you'll see:
the future will be today
plus a little history.

All: Maybe we’ll just wait and see ...