Hannah Arendt Three People Doing Yoga

ON THINKING

By Mike Levin, et al.

CHARACTERS

Hannah Arendt Three People Doing Yoga

Rabbi Olivia

Soldier The Scientist

Young Hannah

Jack

Jennifer

Dr. Valentin Vassilev

Douglas

Dr. Franklin

Dr. Newall

Max

Nancy

Maurice

Martha

Teacher

Girl

Eichmann

Mall Worker 1

Mall Worker 2

Mary McCarthy

Heinrich Blucher

Blackout. In darkness, we hear the following.

What am I thinking? This is shit. You can’t do a play about thinking. It’s too out there. I don’t know jack squat about neuroscience. There’s no order, nothing makes sense. Some good scenes but that doesn’t make a script. Wait, yes it does. It doesn’t make a good script. There is no way a group of high school actors can pull off a play about Hannah Arendt. She’s too intense and she smoked like a fiend. I can’t write. I’m a hack. It’s going to be shit and the audience isn’t going to know what’s going on. I’m hungry even though I ate a bag of potato chips and a fake chicken sandwich. I’m so fat. Big fat fatty fat. I’m definitely hitting a wall. I see a bunch of gimmicks with dollops of truth. Dollops? Where’d that word come from? What is wrong with me? Okay, the next eighty minutes should be a thinking space and make us think. But a writer really shouldn’t take the opening moments of a play to tell the audience what to think. Should the writer really be in the play? I’m self-centered, egotistical. Shit. This has too much swearing already. Someone will complain. Someone always complains. This is no way to begin a production. Like sitting here in the dark is compelling theatre? It’s shit. Just start over. Okay, okay, read this for the read through, cut it for the production. I don’t want this to be avant-garde or metatheatre or something that’s too bizarre that the audience just thinks that’s too weird to even deal with. So they shut down. What is going on? What is going on? Plot is shit. Our lives aren’t plotted. Time is not making sense, I have to revise the way time works. Science moves chronologically forward but Jack and Jennifer are jumping around. So is Arendt. Don’t do this play. I’m depressed. I’m going to die. I need to exercise. I’m fatter than ever and I’m sitting here writing this, not exercising. Frickin love to eat. I’m way too self-reflective. I need to start living life and not thinking about it. People that aren’t self-reflective seem a lot happier. Skiddledeedootdootdahahhhhhhhhhhh. A play about thinking really needs to begin with Arendt.

Lights up as HANNAH walks on stage.

Prologue: Natality.

HANNAH

Where do we begin?

Now. Here: A beginning.

Here. Now. Another beginning.

Natality and the journey through mortality.

JACK, ill, is slowly (so slowly) wheeled out.

Reckless optimism and reckless despair.

Science

opens up infinite possibilities in knowledge and triumph and joy and doom.

In solitude there is silence.

In silence there is thoughtfulness.

In thoughtfulness there is freedom.

I adore my friends

and this humanity has never survived

the hour of liberation for so much

as a minute.

The hours.

The days.

To watch the Reichstag burn and do nothing?

I have a responsibility.

A people created who have the capacity to create the unprecedented.

Three minutes before death

I will laugh.

The beginning of beginning.

There are three basic mental activities:

thinking, willing, and judging.

Tonight, I will discuss thinking.

Ryoji Ikeda’s “data.reflex.”

The ensemble become neurons devising a dance. The following videos might be helpful:

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3TaMU_qXMc

2.http://www.slate.com/blogs/trending/2013/02/01/zebrafish_brain_footage_video_shows_first_ever_image_of_a_brain_forming.html

3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoJxgOdW3-Y

4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI388XoCp48

And a Rothko. What if the Rothko stays there a very long time? With Hannah thinking as the audience goes into the infinite?

JACK’S wife, JENNIFER, brings water. She eventually puts it to Jack’s lips. JACK and JENNIFER met and married. They danced in Central Park on their wedding night while Jennifer’s dad played the accordion. Six months after the ceremony, JACK got stomach cancer. He went through three years of radiation and chemotherapy. After three years, in the winter, his cancer metastasized into his bones, his liver, his brain. The last act before JACK died is Jennifer putting water to his lips. He will be dead by the end of this sequence. We experience these moments with Jennifer.

As we hear, in voice over, HANNAH’s thoughts:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun

Nor the furious winter’s rages.

I wish I met you for the first time every day.

It is natural for me and myself to talk – once we discover that we can.

“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”

The Athenians told Socrates that thinking was subversive, that the wind of thought was a hurricane sweeping away all the established signs by which men orient themselves, bringing disorder into the cities and confusing the citizens.

He’s every one of us potentially.

Why were we even put on this earth?

Thinking is always out of order.

The lonely stand in the darkness of the clouds in their hearts. I remember when I was a child. Grandfather. And our walks. While father was dying. For five years father was dying.

We’re entertaining Gray this weekend. I must plan some meals.

HEINRICH

Now, here and now,

As you and I are we,

Being so mine you will be me,

And yours so I, I must be you –

Then look, how now and here, live and true,

The miracle (our own!) of he and she.

You more Me than me,

I more You than you,

So I more Me than me

And you more You than you.

Perpetual motion, We,

Around eternity,

Thus help us THEY; this grant us HE.

With Heinrich, I got the love of my life and a oneness with myself.

Man is only the highest for now, until the next.

Sputnik is the dream to escape this earth. The desire to overcome our humanity. The event which brings us to k now that we can overcome our humanity. Divine. The eternal stars. The possibilities are extraordinary.

Could the activity of thinking make men abstain from evil-doing or actually condition them against it?

That thought that hasn’t been thought. What makes us think? Why don’t we work at it more?

& a RABBI enters. Somewhere in his speech, OLIVIA enters. She gets the call. We see her horror.

RABBI

This and that and this and this and that and this and that and you and me and here and there and forever here under there yes and no and perhaps now and this and that and that and always and now right now ad never again and perhaps not always and then and again always something never the right thing and again and again and then now and always and again and again and again and all that is ever was ever will be always at once all things going in and out and remembering and forgetting and into everything every bit of everything and here right here this moment right now nothing and all and always now. Forever and always now.

A woman from an internment camp comes out and stares at RABBI.

YOUNG HANNAH enters and drops her puppets. She looks terrified. She bursts into tears. And she cries and cries.

A person wearing a large paper mask made from a shopping bag, and then another, and then another. One is left, as the other two go off hand in hand.

A SOLDIER walking a bicycle crosses the stage. Stops. Pours a glass of milk and drinks it.

HANNAH

The desire to overcome humanity and the impossibility to overcome humanity.

FDR comes out, swiveling his torso while supporting himself with a cane and stands. Leaves with paper bag headed person.

The Internment Camp woman is left on her own. She dances at once, optimism, and then despair. She intermittently does chores in this play of time and space, she will not sit, she will not sit. While she dances, SOCRATES enters.

SOCRATES

When my sons are grown, I would ask you, my friends, to punish them; and I would have you trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing, - then reprove them, as I have reproved you, for not caring about that for which they ought to care, and thinking that they are something when they are really nothing. And if you do this, I and my sons will have received justice at your hands.

Now. Now the hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways – I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.

Socrates leads the woman from the Internment off or does she lead him off? Everything is quiet.

And we hear the audio of this transaction:

MAN: Karl Jaspers in his book on Marx the one that I’m referring to is Reason and Antireason

ARENDT: In his book on who?

MAN: On Marx Reason and Antireason

ARENDT: Oh yeah.

MAN: He stated in that book that the assumption that history was in its essence progressive and that therefore the ends justify the means rested on mistakenly connecting two terms dialectic and causality. My question is that if one makes this connection between dialectic and causality is it inevitable that one will also make the connection between violence and power?

ARENDT: That’s a very good question and give me one moment. [The sound of thinking.]

HANNAH

Thinking is difficult.

The conversation with oneself. To explore the possibilities.

Living together with others begins with living together with oneself in solitude (not loneliness).

Thinking prepares us ever anew to meet whatever we must meet in our daily lives.

In the Socratic sense – thinking is a midwifery.

That is, you bring out all your opinions, prejudices, what have you.

You remain in a way empty after thinking …

and once you are empty, then, in a way which is difficult to say,

you are prepared to judge. That is, without having any book of rules under which you

can subsume a particular case, you have got to say

“this is good,” “this is bad,” “this is right,” “this is wrong,” this is beautiful,” and “this is ugly.”

In the name of the world, it requires a distance from the world.

What I propose, therefore, is very simple:

It is nothing more than to think what we are doing.

Scene 1: Sputnik rises.

News studio. The sound of Sputnik.

DR. VALENTIN VASSILEV

Our space rocket is ready in the center of thecosmotry.The countdown begins.Now only a few moments remain.All eyes fixed on the clock. Thirty seconds. Ten seconds. The hand reaches vertical. The mighty roar, our rocket vibrates.White hot flame gushes downward, and the greatbeast lifts slowly from the Earth.We are about to create a new planet that we will call Sputnik. It is small this first satellite. But after it we will launch others. In the olden days, explorers like Vasco Di Gama and Columbus had the good fortune to open up the terrestrial globe. Now we have the good fortune to open up space and it is for those in the future to envy us our joy.

HANNAH

A tiny noise is heard from the vastness of space, a lonely and mysterious cry that separates the old from the new.

DR. VALENTIN VASSILEV

Mankind will not remain bound to the earth forever.

ANNOUNCER

CBS television presents a special report on Sputnik 1, the Soviet space satellite. Douglas Edwards reporting.

DR. VALENTIN VASSILEV

Moments of fare well.

DOUGLAS

Until two days ago that sound had never been heard on this earth. Suddenly it has become as much a part of twentieth century life as the whirr of your vacuum cleaner. It’s a report from man’s farthest frontier. A radio signal transmitted from the Soviet satellite Sputnik, the first manmade satellite as it passed over New York earlier today. I have with me astronomer Dr. Kenneth Franklin, an astronomer on the planetarium staff. Dr. Franklin can you tell us where the Sputnik is now and how it’s moving?

DR. FRANKLIN

Right now it’s north of Auckland New Zealand it’s moving southeast. It will be in ten minutes about 1500 miles north of Middle America and in about twenty-four minutes it will be over Santiago Chile. And in about fifty minutes from now it will be over Spain.

DOUGLAS

Well it looks as though it will be missing the United States on this trip.

DR. FRANKLIN

That’s quite correct. It will.

DOUGLAS

But it does come over here periodically does it not?

DR. FRANKLIN

It comes over here at least twice a day and maybe more.

DOUGLAS

Is it possible it is transmitting a code, not just a beep signal for radio listening?

DR. FRANKLIN

Yes it’s quite possible it’s transmitting a code but we don’t realize what the code is of course.

DOUGLAS

What precisely, what kinds of information do you want from this satellite? What is it set up to do?

DR. FRANKLIN

There are hundreds of problems we would like to solve with these satellites. Practically every scientist across the United States would like to have his pet problem pursued. No doubt early satellites will investigate temperature of outer space. Then also we will have weathermen will put photoelectric cells into some of the satellites and these will give us some idea of cloud cover all over the earth in a very short length of time. And then also we shall have the atomic scientists investigating the nature of cosmic particles.