Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

No curtains. Stage black. In the center, a cylindrical tank of water lit or composed to look like a cave. Go: inside. It is difficult after all these aeons to tell she is human. She is whittled to the necessary.

[Leo: The music begins so quietly it is mistaken for ambient sounds. Drips, rumbles from far off. Hissing, a windlike whistling. Shuffling. Heartbeat. Leathery wings. Fragments of music so filtered it is no longer music. Static of voices, as if through rock. One hopes for the audience talking, the sounds of people settling in deep into the score. The sounds gather a rhythm, a harmony, as they grow louder.]

In imperceptible increments, the lights brighten on the cave, darken on the house. The audience eventually quiets.

Go wakes, sits. She begins to sing her first aria, a lament, as she moves around her cave.

Surtitles in English projected above the proscenium arch. Go’s language is her own. Ancient Greek, stripped down, no verb tenses, no cases, no genders. Also warped by millennia of solitude, changed by the fragments of words that have filtered down to her from the world above, German and French and English. She is mad in both senses: angry and insane.

Go narrates how she lives as she moves: garden of moss and mushrooms to tend, worms to milk, garments of hair and spider silk to weave more of every day. Slow showers from the water that drips off the stalactites. Terrible loneliness. Bats with baby faces that she’d bred, unable to speak more than ten words, unsatisfying conversationalists. Go is not resigned to her fate. She speaks against the gods who cursed her with immortality; she had tried to hang herself but couldn’t. Woke up in shrouds with a rope burn on her neck and Haemon dead beside her. His bones she turned into the spoons and bowls she eats with. She holds her bowl, his skull, and becomes furious again, shouts imprecations against the gods.

Lights cut away from Go’s cave, up to the chorus, in god garb, small lights embedded in their garments so they’re almost painfully bright. They first appear to be six pillars in a half circle around her tank until we see the symbols that make them who they are: wings on the heels for Hermes, Mars’s gun, Minerva’s owl, et cetera.

They sing in English. They wanted to give Go immortality, a gift, but they put her in the cave until she showed gratitude. She has yet to show gratitude. Furious Go. Arrogant Go.

Flashback: the story of Antigone, in dance. The dancers are behind the tank so that the water magnifies their bodies and makes them wild and strange. They act out in a short mime how Antigone’s brothers, Polynices and Eteocles, fight on opposite sides, how both die, how Antigone buries Polynices twice, against Creon’s diktat, then Creon versus the gods, Antigone led away, hanging herself. Haemon killing himself, Eurydice killing herself, Creon dying. Bloodbath galore.

But one of the gods, Minerva, cuts Antigone down, revives her. Seals her into the cave.

The gods sing that they meant to let her, last root of a rotten house, daughter of incest, survive. All she had to do was to humble herself to them. But millennium upon millennium, she wouldn’t. Bow, Go, and you will be set free. For the gods are nothing if not kind.

Go: HA!

Lights return to Go, and she sings a new, swifter aria in her language: The gods forgot Go. Go would kill them with her hands. Chaos would be better than they. Curse the gods; Go curses them. The humans, Go knows, are growing hot, like a volcano; they will explode, sink to nothing. The end is upon them and they celebrate themselves. Who is worse: the gods or men? Go doesn’t care. Go doesn’t know.

[Entr’acte: ten-minute video overlying the stage. A sparse brown field with a single olive tree, time passing with radical swiftness. The tree grows, withers, dies, the field is covered with new trees that grow, wither, die, a house is built. An earthquake, house collapses, and Go’s cave is dislodged, begins to travel underground. Now the video pans. Cities are built, armies swarm, burn them to the ground. Under the Mediterranean for a few beats, sharks passing. Go’s cave travels under Italy as we see the earth changing from Roman empire, aqueducts and agriculture, Rome rebuilt, under the Alps, wolves, into France in the Dark Ages — quick scroll of time — and land through Eleanor of Aquitaine, Paris, under the Channel, into London burning in 1666, where the cave’s trajectory halts. We see the city’s organlike growth up to 1979.]

ACT II: DÉMO

[ Video narrows until it’s a thin band above Go’s cave, under the surtitles. Passionflower unfurling in real time. Forty-five minutes, bud to bloom. ]

Go does pull-ups inside her cave. Planks. She runs on a treadmill made of spider silk and stalagmites, to a ghostly, echoing, atonal music. Applause from the upside-down baby-faced bats.

She slowly strips naked and stands in a slow shower from a stalactite.

She hears something. Offstage, voices growing louder. Go presses her ear to the side of the cave, and the lights illumine a chorus of diggers in hard hats who have emerged. Their voices provide the rhythm and noises of digging, and a singing saw provides the melody. Out of the mass of working men, one, Ros, stands, taking a break: he is young, very handsome, dressed more neatly in his late-seventies clothes than the others. He is extremely tall with a full beard. The men sing about the Jubilee underground line and how the glory of mankind has killed the gods.

The gods are dead, they sing, in English. We have killed them. Humans have overcome them.

Go laughs with pleasure to hear voices so close, so clear.

But Ros breaks in with a counterpoint song, We, moles. Unthinking and blind. Stunted in the darkness. One can’t be good if one can’t see the sun. And what does it mean to be human if you can’t end your life better than how it began.

Go presses her whole body against the wall. There is something erotic in the way she moves.

Break time: a soprano offstage sings a lunch whistle. The men’s song ends. They huddle around, eating their lunch, except Ros, who sits with a book and a sandwich, apart from the others on the other side of the rock from Go.

She quietly tries to sing the song he sang. He hears and eagerly presses his ear up against the rock. He looks astounded, then afraid. Slowly, he begins to sing back to her. She modifies his song so that it becomes her own, as he and she sing quietly back and forth, in strange off harmony, Go transliterating into her own honed language, making entirely new meanings. [Surtitles are split in the middle, her translations in English, his actual words.] Their faces press at the same level, Go very shrunken, Ros on his knees. He introduces himself; she says, softly, that her name is Go.

The other men get up and work silently as Go and Ros sing louder, harder, the soprano singing a day’s-end whistle, breaking off the duet, and though Ros tries to stay, the foreman won’t let him. As they leave, the men modify their song to make fun of Ros: Ros is a dreamer, they sing. Dumb as the rocks around us. Useless book reader. Not a real man, Ros.

Go sings a love song, an aria, almost beautiful, and the cave music is less cacophonous behind her and seems to sing with her.

Ros returns and frantically tries to dig at the wall, not understanding that the rock has a curse on it and can’t be broken. Days pass, symbolized by the workers moving down the track, the soprano singing the end-of-day tone, and still Ros tries. The eroticism of their movements has turned to downright fornication with the walls. [Leo: the music aches with longing.] Ros sings over the days going by, more and more frantically, I won’t leave you, Go. I will get you out. He stops hiding what he’s doing and starts doing it openly, and the others surround him and put him in a straitjacket to drag him off. He tries to make them understand, but they become vicious. He sings his love song to Go as he is dragged away to the asylum, and she sings back. It seems as if only one other person might hear Go — there’s a flash of recognition — but he shrugs and helps drag Ros away.