about the (re)making project

Please feel free to take the plays from this project and use them freely as a resource for your own work: that is to say, don't just make some cuts or rewrite a few passages or re-arrange them or put in a few texts that you like better, but pillage the plays as I have pillaged the structures and contents of the plays of Euripides and Brecht and stuff out of Soap Opera Digest and the evening news and the internet, and build your own, entirely new, piece--and then, please, put your own name to the work that results.
But, if you would like to perform the plays essentially or substantially as I have composed them, they are protected by copyright in the versions you read here, and you need to clear performance rights. For professional performance rights, contact Thomas Pearson of International Creative Management at tpearson@icmtalent.com or 212-556-5600. For amateur performance rights, contact Libby Edwards at charlesmeeplays@yahoo.com.
- Charles Mee

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Gone

by C H A R L E S L . M E E





SOPHOCLES
In childhood, in our father's house,
we live the happiest life, I think, of all mankind.
But when we have understanding
and have come to youthful vigor,
we are pushed out.
And this,
we must approve
and consider to be happiness.

No man was ever born
but he must suffer.
He buries his children and gets others in their place;
then dies himself.
And yet men bear it hard,
that only give dust to dust!
Life is a harvest that man must reap like ears of corn;
one grows, another falls.
Why should we moan at this,
the path of Nature that we must tread?

Heaven and earth were once a single form;
but when they were separated from each other into two,
they bore and delivered into the light all things:
trees, winged creatures,
beasts reared by the briny sea--
and the human race.

[A woman in a red silk dress enters,
stands a moment
and then begins to dance.]

Let any man get hold of as much pleasure as he can
as he lives his daily life;
the future will always be unknown.

The best thing is a life free from sickness,
the power each day
to take hold of what one desires.

The time of life is short,
and once a person is hidden beneath the earth
he lies there for all time.

A man is nothing but breath and shadow.

Time makes all things dark
and brings them to oblivion.

A cup without a bottom is not put on the table.

First you will see a crop in flower,
all white;
then a round mulberry
that has turned red;
lastly
old age
of Egyptian blackness
takes over.

[Music.
[A man enters
and dances with the woman.]


PROUST
For a long time
I used to go to bed early.
Sometimes, when I had put out my candle,
my eyes would close so quickly
that I had not even time to say "I'm going to sleep."
And half an hour later
the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me;
I would try to put away the book which,
I imagined,
was still in my hands,
and to blow out the light;
I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep,
of what I had just been reading,
but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own,
until I myself seemed actually to have become
the subject of my book:

a church,

a quartet,

the rivalry between François I and Charles V.

This impression would persist
for some moments after I was awake;
it did not disturb my mind,
but it lay like scales upon my eyes
and prevented them from registering the fact
that the candle was no longer burning.

Then it would begin to seem unintelligible,
as the thoughts of a former existence
must be to a reincarnate spirit;
the subject of my book
would separate itself from me,
leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no;
and at the same time
my sight would return

and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness,

pleasant and restful enough for the eyes,
and even more, perhaps, for my mind,
to which it appeared incomprehensible,
without a cause,
a matter dark indeed.

I would ask myself what o'clock it could be;
I could hear the whistling of trains,
which, now nearer and now farther off,
punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest,
shewed me in perspective the deserted countryside
through which a traveller would be hurrying
towards the nearest station:
the path that he followed being fixed for ever in his memory