Draft Nearly Final

DRAFT NEARLY FINAL

PLATONOV

OR THE DISINHERITED, AFTER CHEKHOV’S 300 PAGE FRAGMENT

by Jay Scheib

Cast of characters. And etc.

Platonov is thirty something years old, like Hamlet or Jesus. At a crossroads. Fed up with working full time as a country school teacher and still unable to afford that extra chord of firewood that would transform the damp cold living quarters into something that would at least be warm. Life has passed him by or he was just sleeping it through and he can feel it brutally inside of him like a boat steaming doggedly against the all too powerful currents of want not, want not.

Sasha is different. Sasha is content, in part, and able to be happy just taking long walks in the forest or bathing in the many cold clean streams. She has no need for fame and doesn’t fear she’ll pass without having been written about sufficiently or photographed enough.

Something of a contradictory personality, Sasha’s sister Nicole Triletsky is a disillusioned family practitioner with an unmatched sarcasm who tends to drown his insecurities on most days first with coffee and then with vodka.

Anna Voynitsev is an arrestingly or asymmetrically elegant woman in her late forties. She is the unreasonably attractive widow and owner of a soon to be bankrupt estate. Anyway up for an affair, Anna’s sexual frustration shows in her every smile—she’s a super intelligent, soon to be homeless woman who finds herself painted into a corner by a society whose evolution will thoroughly exclude her.

Sergey laughs like one who will not survive being cuckolded. Like precisely the inferior that will implode like a lesser satellite. He is not much younger than his stepmother, Anna, and secretly loves her madly—though she treats him like an imbecile and in truth she enforces passively that he remain, sadly, a real imbecile.

Jacob is really the only individual here with a job. She is the only one who really knows what it means to work. She is a housekeeper, and a caterer, and a musician and will do any odd job that comes her way. Oh and eventually she will own the place. She is also recovering from years of bad decisions and years of having had her self-taught capitalist talent blown sidewise and without an education, and without concrete prospects she finds herself right where she wants / needs to be—at the bottom of the food chain where the slate is clean and her host of odds jobs brace her against radical memories of loss.

Porfiry Glagolyev is a real protagonist. He is very wealthy investor. He’ll suffer a mild heart attack in act two, because his ability to feel is too great to ever possibly endure. A lesser human being would have exploded a long time ago. He’s the last person on the planet who capable of truly selfless love. But when his heart is broken, and when his dreams are dashed—he exacts the most painful revenge imaginable. Not out of malice but because another’s acts reflected back redouble in severity and cause world altering pain.

Sonya thought to herself one day, oh shit. Everything has been a blast but life too has blasted or is blasting its way past. She settles for a stable, unthreatening man who’s sure to inherit a beautiful estate so who cares I guess—she’ll start a family. Maybe it’s better he’s a bore if there’ll be kids. But then that ache never really went away and here she is, encountering an old flame, encountering the flame that once burned so bright between them that she had to shield her eyes from its glare—and run away. Now that she sees it again, she’s loathe let it slip once more. Her laugh is a death rattle deep, deep in her chest.

Osip is a self-described scoundrel, thief and garden-variety lowlife. He or she is lynched by the townspeople in the end but she, or he, is also the moral backbone of this otherwisevalueless society.

PROLOGUE DIE KUNST HAT MICH GERETTET

Prologue in loving memory of Christophe Schlingensief to whom this play is dedicated and in whose honor so many things are cited herein.

Under the terrible glare of styrofoam cups and acidic coffee a group assembled in a semi-circle listen under a light so brutal as to make us think that in fact Dan Flavin was either collected here, or spent too much time being inspired here. Jacob stands at the microphone. Jacob is really the only individual here who has a job and knows how to work. Or work it. She is a housekeeper, and a caterer, and a musician and will do any odd job that comes her way. Eventually she will own the place. She is also recovering from years of bad decisions and years of having had her self-taught capitalist talent blown sidewise and without an education, and without concrete prospects she finds herself right where she wants / needs to be—at the bottom of the food chain where the slate is clean and her host of odd jobs brace her against radical memories of loss. Aw come on let her speak for herself as the scene settles into this warm midsummer night.

JACOB

I must have been like fourteen, you know, that first time, the first time I got really, really hammered. It was like 1989? At a concert in Omaha for a band called Nirvana. There were like fifty people there? thirty of whom split after the first two songs. But it didn’t matter because the concert was over thirty minutes later after the singer, Kurt, smashed his forehead against his guitar and started bleeding until he couldn’t see anymore and that was that for Nirvana in 1989 in Nebraska, Chad Channing still on drums. But before they finally gave up and shut off the amps Kurt ripped a string off of his guitar and threw it at the crowd. I mean. There were like eight of us left. But I picked it up off the floor it and took it home with me. It was like the prize at the end of my first super cool night in a club.

JACOB (CONT’D)

Five years later Nirvana booked the Nebraska State Fair and played for like fifteen thousand people. It was so beautiful. They were the most famous band in America and I was the coolest nineteen year old on the planet because I saw them with ten people in the audience when they were nothing. Like Really just like me somehow Nobody. And I had a guitar string stained with his blood! 5 April 1994 Kurt Cobain shot himself in Seattle. He left a lot behind: a bag of heroin, a a beautiful daughter, three insanely important albums, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic and a guitar string in my top dresser drawer. Let’s go in the other room.

JACOB (CONT’D)

Then and there I made a decision to live my life with my eyes open — I would be awake and savor every ounce of every moment. I went for it. I wanted to know what society had to offer and I wanted to be out front. I got involved in the internet, founded a startup, got some capital and was pretty much goddamn rich in like a year. I was twenty or twenty one. It was like 1996? And man that was a very good, very strong feeling. I had a company, I was writing for magazines, I had a column in Wired, I wrote for Paper, I commented on shit for the New York Times, I even testified before a house senate committee on violence and first person shooter video games. People listened to my opinions.

JACOB (CONT’D)

And I met this girl, Rachael. Rachael was an artist. A visionary. And she needed me, she was amazing but she needed somebody to I don’t know, work with her, encourage her. She was like one of these super sensitive artists who are so open to the world that anything that comes at them they just sort fall in you know, she wouldn’t say no, and she was beautiful and eloquent, and I had good taste (which not many people actually have) and I had a very good business situation and was basically an authority on like Life-Style stuff, literature, music, film and we were electric together. And in 2000 Elka entered the world. We got ourselves pregnant and that, was the most wonderful, the great really the great wonder of my life.

JACOB (CONT’D)

She looked like Rachael, had Rachael's eyes and nose and long extraordinary fingers and my brother was the donor and so it’s kind of weird (Porfiry: That’s not weird.) but fuck it I loved her so much. She was a real person with skin and hair and she was our daughter in the end and more or less the sum of our genes. Crazy.

JACOB (CONT’D)

Anyway. I had a lot going on in those days. I was in my early twenties, we had a great apartment, and sort of slowly and sort of fast the entire dot com floor fell out and we started to eat assets in a serious free-fall kind of way. There was no stopping any of it. And the point is that sometimes I was drinking too much. Actually, I was really drinking many too much more or less most of the time.

JACOB (CONT’D)

At openings, or premieres or whatever already middle of the afternoon I had this sip or that bottle of champagne...Shit, I drank like a pipe. Every day. Every night I was completely bashed out of my mind and every morning completely hungover. So hungover that most mornings I had to drink more just to get shit done. Basically there was working and then there was drinking. And I was in trouble financially but I was goddamn cool as shit. I remember one day Rachael disappeared with Elka. I was so fucked I thought, oh yeah I forgot maybe, they’re visiting grandma this weekend — two weeks went by and it dawned on me that they weren’t coming back. If it had been me I would have split with Elka way earlier. But Rachael's not as phlegmatic as I am you know? She’s patient and totally not a diva. Rachael figured it was basically her fault that I was completely blowing it.

JACOB (CONT’D)

One night I came home and uhm from Soho House at like four in the morning, and I was fuckin’ drunk, and the door to the loft was kicked in. Basically some repo company had come and reclaimed most of my shit because I hadn’t opened the mail in months and basically had not paid the mortgage in like almost a year and I owed like 80 thousand dollars in fees, interest and penalties alone. They took my stove? They actually disconnected and drove away with this beautiful Morice stove from France that I had charged to my credit card, and an amazing espresso machine that I had ordered directly from Italy. They took the computer, and my family was anyway also already history and it all caught up with me. I laid on the floor. Four AM on the floor and staring at the ceiling and wishing that it would turn into the sky and I cannot describe what that’s like? That deep dark thing. That terribly much absolute nothing nothing right there. Right here me nobody.

JACOB (CONT’D)

Fuck my life. I went into the bed room and searched my pockets for some coke. Found none but groping through my dresser I came across that crazy guitar string. It seemed strong, I made a noose and I climbed up on my desk, put the noose over my head and slipped the loop on the other end over the hook in the ceiling where that awesome Poulsen lamp hung before they repossessed it. I looked around the room and watched my life like a film unfurl — this beautiful life that I had lived moment to moment — the life I wanted as an 18 year old suddenly headed for the dumpster. I stepped off the desk between thoughts and felt a pain in my neck so bad I saw stars and my mind leapt from my grandparents in Minnesota, my brother in Des Moines, and my sister in Omaha the pain a deep yellow with gold squares and that was it. I hoped that Rachael would forgive and would understand the kind of stress that came with wanting to be great, wanting to be genius was more than the sum of me. It’s a lot of stress. I hope she will understand. And I hope my parents will understand that I was really going for it! I wanted something better. And the last thing that I saw before I lost consciousness, was Kurt Cobain’s face being blown off. His blood and his brains everywhere and I blacked straight away out.

JACOB (CONT’D)

When I woke up it was snowing. I thought I was dead but it was plaster. The ceiling had collapsed and there I was on my back again, staring at a huge hole in the ceiling. And I wasn’t dead, but I had a headache like really extra bad.

JACOB (CONT’D)

So that was it. I quit smoking. Hell I run marathons now and only eat sustainable foods. I’m serious. No shit. Seriously. I finally put myself through school playing in a band, catering, serving. I studied Comparative Media Studies and now I’m a critic on the side for an actual newspaper where I write about actual art. I don’t even feel addiction anymore. I don’t feel it in my body, anymore. I just get drunk on art. Recently I had such a death defying hangover after what had to be the worst rock-and-roll-concert-as-performance-art-exhibition-ever-no-joke. I actually threw up in the cab. When I got home, I cleaned the puke of my one-of-kind dress and typed all night. I wrote with the intention to maim. I wrote hard enough to separate the soul from the artist and I’m telling you that idiot will never make anyone puke like that after a vernissage ever ever again. Jesus there is some seriously shitty art on walls out there. And I am here to prevail! I will prevail!

JACOB (CONT’D)

I am an Alcoholic. I am an Alcoholic. See? I can say it without feeling like an idiot or feeling like a failure or whatever. Works of art make me high now. It’s the Art. Art saved me. Art saved my life.

(Jacob has an epileptic seizure. It’s just a joke.)

JACOB

I was just joking, I’m sorry, I was just kidding.

SASHA

Are you serious? That’s not funny! That’s fucked up! Get on the floor and shake bitch!

JACOB

I’m acting, just not in this.

THIS HOUSE IS FALLING APART LIKE THIS WHOLE LIFE FEELS LIKE IT IS FALLING APART BUT FROM THE INSIDE

An estate sliding irrevocably toward the disrepair that precedes bankruptcy. Emotionally or psychically. Formerly forward-thinking luxury on a downward spiral. Leather sofa set onto the veranda that spills from the living room like a carpet of rare hardwood flooring rolled over the lawn. A large hand-cranked-canopy extends over the well-worn wooden floor as far as the swimming pool. A swimming pool. A sauna. A brushed aluminum picnic table. This is like one of those homes made of customized-retrofitted sea-containers stacked strangely one upon the next. A triumph of modern architecture. 20k in materials and a million in ideas. Or maybe it’s just a trailer that’s been pulled out of the trailer park and behind the trailer—the real mansion is still a ruin in the making. Only half built when the money ran out. And now just there. Rotting without ever having been more than the sum of this board or that staircase. But the trailer / shipping container is still sort of fashionable with its seamless transition from interior to exterior. Beyond it the stand of trees and beyond that the Voynitsev Drive-in Movie Theater. Some of the furniture has been long ago drug outdoors and several of the pieces and especially the magazine rack shows signs of having lived through many a rainstorm. In the summers (like now) it is sometimes such fun to sit on the veranda, tune-in via fm transmitter and watch whatever recent action film might be playing at the drive-in that’s here visible just above the treeline. Ah, what a night.

WHO WILL ADMIRE EVERYTHING FOR EVER ACTUALLY? NO ONE PROBABLY OR FORGET IT ALL ANYWAY.

Porfiry.Anna, Anna, come on outside.

Sergey.Porfiry, I'm telling you, if you're afraid of loneliness, whatever you do, don't get married.

Anna.Sergey, don't give into nonsense Sergey.

Sergey and Porfiry eating chicken. A romantic at heart in the most classical sense, Porfiry Glagolyev is a real protagonist. He’ll suffer a mild heart attack in act two, because his ability to feel is too great for most to ever possibly endure. A lesser human being would explode. He is the last person on the planet who is truly capable of truly selfless love. But when his heart is broken, and when his dreams are dashed—he exacts the most painful revenge imaginable. Not out of malice but because another’s acts reflected back redouble in severity and cause world altering pain. Porfiry pauses by a table and picks up an empty envelope addressed to Anna—from him. He notices the giant adolescentesque spit wad that has landed where Anna spat it up and does all he can to chase it from his suspicion. What could be more sad?