"TRIPLETS ON AIRPLANE MODE"*
Author Benjamin Gavarre
Triplets in Airplane Mode is a surreal domestic farce and black comedy,
strictly engineered as a machine of physical and verbal exhaustion. What the
reader and future spectator will find in these pages is a head-on collision
between the grotesque hyperactivity of adolescence and the castrating
bureaucracy of the adult world, encapsulated in the pedagogical confinement of
three brothers. The text operates as a biomechanical score. It is a pivot for
the stage that demands from its performers (who, in production, may not share
the age—or gender—of the characters) sweat, rhythmic precision, and an absolute
mastery of farce and pantomime. The stage directions are not atmospheric
suggestions; they are exact choreographic markers—somatic contagions, physical
lazzi, three-headed amalgamations—designed to push the actors to the limits of
their endurance within a claustrophobic space. It is, in short, a frantic
theatrical artifact that detonates when bodies collide with the absurdity and
suffocation of emancipation.
CHARACTERS
- MARTY
(15): Firstborn triplet (escaped the womb two
minutes early by kicking his brothers in the kidneys). Sprouting a patchy,
pubescent goat-beard; perpetually sweaty, hyperactive, compulsive mime,
and official simultaneous interpreter of the Parental Dialect. Speaks in a
fast-talking blend of prep-school cynicism, blue-collar street slang, and
relentless anatomical double entendres. Suffers from a chronic,
metaphysical itch in his groin that forces him to readjust his trousers
every third sentence.
- LAZARUS
(15): Second triplet (born examining his own
umbilical cord like an ancient scroll). Wears clunky, triple-soled
orthopedic shoes that thud like courtroom gavels, knee-high socks with
school shorts, and thick round spectacles. A pale, Victorian old-child who
nurses a potted fern, collects dead moths, and worships cosmic horror,
bleak metaphysical verse, and subterranean conspiracy zines. Despises
domestic authority with every fiber of his frail constitution.
- CYCLOPS
/ GUS (15): Third triplet (born with forceps marks
on his temples). Wears a prep-school shirt petrified with historical
stains of fluorescent orange cheese dust, ranch dressing, and hot sauce.
His right hand is biologically fused to a gigantic, brick-like cellular phone
emitting a hypnotic electric-blue glow across his face. His thumb performs
a perpetual vertical scroll. Exhibits selective cybernetic autism: stares
blankly or grunts in monosyllables, then suddenly regurgitates high-speed
literary summaries, fast-food jingles, suburban cooking reels, therapy
podcasts, and multilingual system errors in English, French, and German.
- FATHER
AND MOTHER (Age indeterminate, between 45 and 800):
Towering, monolithic figures—ideally on hidden platform lifts—dressed in
identical slate-gray trench coats, oversized fedoras, and beige nylon
stockings stretched tight over their heads, flattening their noses and
lips like antique tailor mannequins. Until the final scene, they
articulate no human words: they emit only a nasal, metallic, bureaucratic
brass honk ("Mwah-mwah, mwah-mwah-mwah, quack-mwah"), an
impenetrable phonetic wall of parental sermonizing.
SETTING
A surreal, slightly warped upper-middle-class New England living room,
looking like a cross between The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and a stifling
Connecticut townhouse. Downstage left and right stand narrow school desks where
the parents force the boys to take private tutoring sessions from deranged
specialists. Upstage right hangs a cracked green chalkboard covered in chalk
scrawls, alongside a tutor’s desk crowned with a square globe. Center stage
sits an aggressively bright yellow vinyl sofa that squeaks obscenely at the
slightest movement. Crookedly hung on the upstage wall is a dusty cross-stitch
sampler reading: "HOME SWEET HOME". By the front door lies a
coarse coco-fiber doormat reading "WELCOME".
SCENE ONE: THE GALLEY OF
THE DESKS AND THE LANGUAGE OF THE TROMBONE
A sickly, yellowish overhead light, thick as cold chicken broth. Dead
silence as the curtain rises, broken only by a rhythmic three-part soundscape
that must be sustained and built for three full minutes by the clock before a
single word is spoken:
1. The amplified "click-shhh, click-shhh" of CYCLOPS’s thumb
frantically scrolling his glowing screen.2. The cavernous, rhythmic muttering
of LAZARUS, rocking his torso back and forth like a medieval monk while
whispering bleak verses and scraping his heavy orthopedic soles against the
metal leg of his desk.3. The sharp squeak of MARTY’s dress shoes and the
frantic rustle of wool trousers as his left hand dives into his pocket to
scratch his groin, while his right hand furiously scribbles punishment lines in
a composition book.
At the ninety-second mark, the first SOMATIC TRIPLET CONTAGION occurs:
Marty scratches himself so violently that an invisible electrical current jumps
through their shared genetic code. Lazarus, without looking up from his book,
begins scratching his own crotch to the exact same rhythm, while Cyclops
absentmindedly scrolls his thumb up and down his own zipper bathed in blue
light. Three seconds later, all three shudder simultaneously, spit an imaginary
hair off their tongues in unison, and resume their tasks.
MARTY: (Dropping his fountain pen with the groan of a
rheumatic octogenarian, holding up his cramped, claw-like fingers). Sweet
mother of carpal tunnel, my wrist just filed for bankruptcy! Three hundred
times! Three hundred goddamn times in Spencerian cursive without crossing the
margin: "I must not tell my beloved father that his face looks like a
constipated badger"! (He tries to stand, but the narrow wooden desk
remains wedged around his hips. He crab-walks sideways across the downstage
floor with the desk stuck to his pelvis until he bucks his hips and wrenches
himself free). Look at me! Fifteen blooming springs on this earth, six
quarts of high-octane testosterone boiling in my veins like radiator fluid, and
I’m doing hard labor in a Connecticut gulag because I told the old man his
aftershave smells like embalming fluid!
LAZARUS: (Without lifting his eyes from a thick
black-bound volume, declaiming in a lugubrious, hollow voice). Spare us
your melodrama, Marty. As the old Alexandrian poet warned in his verses on the
inescapable city: you can fantasize about sailing to another coast or fleeing
to a brighter harbor, yet this very townhouse will follow you like a shadow;
you will grow gray in these exact same hallways, and just as you wasted your
youth in this suffocating parlor, so have you ruined it across the entire
globe. We were ontologically doomed from the ultrasound, brother.
MARTY: (Clapping his hands over his ears). Shut
your crypt-keeper trap, Lazarus! You know I break out in scrotal hives when you
recite gloomy Greek guys before supper! I hate poetry and novels give me acid
reflux... Tell me that movie plot again—the one you watched at three in the
morning through the keyhole, directed by that Italian pasta guy... what was his
name, Botticelli? Ravioli? The one about the three Russian brothers who were
just as screwed as we are and wanted to whack their old man with a candlestick!
Keep your voice down, though, or my parents—or your parents, or this glowing
vegetable’s parents, who tragically happen to be the exact same two
wardens—will hear us! They buy off our free will with bargain-basement private
tutors hired off Craigslist just so they don't have to look at our acne! What
do you say, Cyclops? Manifest yourself, you cybernetic gargoyle! Disconnect
from the satellite!
CYCLOPS: (Eyes rolled back into his skull, face bathed
in cobalt light, thumb scrolling at supersonic speed, speaking in the flat,
chipper cadence of a 2x-speed YouTube summary). "Published in
eighteen-eighty, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov remains the
ultimate psychological murder-mystery exploring moral parricide among three
archetypes: Dmitri, the horny sensualist; Ivan, the suicidal rationalist; and
Alyosha, the trembling mystic... Smash that like button, hit the notification
bell, and enter promo code PATRICIDE20 at checkout for twenty percent off your
first month of online trauma therapy." (He makes a fleeting gesture of
slitting his throat from ear to ear with his tongue hanging out, emits a
microwave beep, and freezes again).
MARTY: Bingo! Give the zombie a cigar! We’re the
Karamazov brothers of New England: I’m the sensual stallion, you’re the
suicidal nerd who smells like mothballs, and Gus is the mystic of the
fiber-optic cable! We’re trapped in a pedagogical concentration camp run by
hourly mercenaries! Who are they sending over at five o'clock today? The
Actuarial Tables guy? The Quantum Calvinist? Or old Professor clammy-hands with
his Venn Diagrams? (Marty snatches a piece of chalk, leaps to the green
chalkboard, yanks his trousers up to his armpits, hunches his shoulders, and
mimics a wheezing, spit-spraying tutor). "Now pay attention, Sterling
triplets, or I shall deduct points from your trust-fund eligibility! The entire
cosmos is a Venn Diagram!" (He draws two massive overlapping circles
that look unmistakably like a giant pair of buttocks with a tiny shaded sliver
in the middle). "Circle A is Protestant Family Decency! Circle B is
Compound Interest! And do you see this microscopic, airless, dark little crack
squeezed right down the middle? That is where the three of you live, tightly
wedged between your parents' expectations, with zero mathematical probability
of intersecting with a cheerleader until the year twenty-fifty-five!"
LAZARUS: (Bolting upright, his orthopedic shoes slamming
the floorboards like cannonballs. He dishevels his hair and adopts a twitching,
hunchbacked posture). Wait, wait, let me do Dr. Pendelton, the Quantum
Physics and Original Sin tutor! (He stalks around the desks pointing a
trembling index finger at the ceiling). "Get it through your thick,
triplicated skulls, you embryonic parasites! The cat in the box is stone-cold
dead, stiff as a board, and reeking of sulfur! All that progressive nonsense
about the feline being simultaneously alive and dead is Marxist propaganda
invented so fifteen-year-olds have an excuse not to make their beds! As the
great German pessimist proved: human existence is merely a pendulum swinging
violently between the agony of trigonometry and the boredom of not being
allowed to touch your own pendulum! Ten demerits for the boy in the orthopedic
clodhoppers for breathing in two dimensions at once!"
MARTY: (Slapping his knee, howling). Spot on! You
even got his left-eyelid twitch! Come on, Cyclops, tag in! Do Mrs. Higgins, the
Home Economics and Doom-Prepping tutor!
CYCLOPS: (Without letting go of his gigantic phone, he
stands mechanically, props his left hand on his hip like a 1950s suburban
housewife on amphetamines, tilts his head with a terrifyingly vacant smile, and
speaks in a shrill falsetto). "Howdy-do, thrifty homemakers and
juveniles under house arrest! Today on Cooking for One on a Recession Budget,
we’re whipping up a scrumptious casserole out of boiled potato peels and
tap-water reduction! Remember, three growing boys can feast for a whole fiscal
quarter on four dollars andfifty cents if you chew each mouthful eighty-six
times while staring at the wallpaper! And if you have half a can of expired
tuna left over from the Eisenhower administration, suspend it in lime Jell-O
inside an empty margarine tub so your children experience profound existential
despair every time they open the fridge! Bon appétit, you little ingrates!"
(He drops back onto his chair like a sack of cement).
MARTY: (Clapping). Bravo! Pure Greek tragedy in
Tupperware! Though the tutors are a picnic compared to the six o'clock Gestapo
inspection...
A distorted grandfather clock chimes six times, sounding like a
strangled goose. The lights flicker three times and turn a bureaucratic
fluorescent green. In sheer panic, all three brothers dive for the yellow sofa
at once (The Triplet Sofa Lazzo), tangling their six legs together in a
frantic, silent wrestling match of elbows and knees before springing apart into
their respective desks a split second before the door swings open.
From stage left enters FATHER, marching in slow-motion goose-step. He
carries a rolled-up copy of the Wall Street Journal like a field marshal's
baton, his face flattened under the beige nylon stocking. He halts dead center,
swivels his neck ninety degrees toward the boys with a mechanical click, and
pops open a black umbrella indoors.
FATHER: Mwah-mwah, mwah-mwah-mwah! Quack-mwah, brrrr-mwah,
mwah-mwah!
MARTY vaults silently out of his desk and positions himself six inches
behind FATHER’s back without the giant noticing. He launches into a precision
mime routine: puffing out his cheeks like a bullfrog, marching with locked
knees like a constipated penguin, scratching his buttocks with his pinky finger
delicately extended, and translating every nasal honk aloud.
FATHER: Mwah-mwah, mwah-mwah-mwah, quack!
MARTY: (In the booming, pompous baritone of a 1950s
newsreel announcer). "You three clones had better keep your elbows off
the mahogany, your knees scab-free, and your ear canals scrubbed of wax,
because I slave away nine hours a day downtown foreclosing on widows and
sharpening paperclips with my teeth!"
FATHER: (Slamming the rolled-up newspaper against his
palm). Brrrr-mwah! Mwah-mwah-mwah, quack-quack, mwah!
MARTY: (Miming counting invisible pennies, licking
each one, and sniffing them with psychotic greed). "The electric bill
went up forty-two cents this quarter! Which one of you bolsheviks left the
little light inside the refrigerator glowing for four extra seconds? Do you
think I defecate treasury bonds when I sit on the porcelain throne, or what?! The
bond market is far too volatile for you three to be inhaling premium oxygen for
free!"
FATHER snaps the umbrella shut, executes a military about-face—Marty
pivoting glued to his spine like a shadow—and marches out stage right. The
instant his coat tails vanish, MOTHER enters from the exact same spot wielding
a wire rug-beater and an empty silver serving tray.
MOTHER: Mee-mee-mwah! Mwah-mwah-mwah, pee-pee-mwah!
MARTY: (Scurrying behind MOTHER, draping a dirty
chalkboard rag over his head like a tragic wig and tiptoeing like a ballerina
with bunions). "Oh, my sciatica, my fibromyalgia, my irritable bowel,
and my martyr complex! Pushing three big-headed boys out of the same birth
canal ruined my pelvic floor for eternity! I iron the creases into your
underwear, I tweeze the seeds out of the strawberries one by one, and I scrub
the lemons with a toothbrush and bleach! Do I get a salary? Do I get a Nobel
Peace Prize? No! Just wait until I drop dead in the laundry room and you have
to bury me in a Hefty trash bag, you ungrateful leeches!"
MOTHER: (Pointing the wire rug-beater directly at
Marty’s desk with a trembling arm). Mwah-mwah-quack-mwah! Pee-pee-pee,
mwah!
MARTY: (Collapsing in an operatic swoon across the
back of the yellow vinyl sofa, which lets out a long, flatulent squeak).
"And you, Martin Sterling the Third, take your filthy hand out of your
trousers in front of Great-Uncle Ezekiel’s portrait this instant! Only
degenerate juvenile delinquents fall asleep clutching their privates and
dreaming about cheerleaders on trampolines! Who do you think has to chisel your
stiff bedsheets off the mattress on Monday mornings when they look like sheets
of drywall?! Stop corrupting your brothers—Lazarus and Augustus are two
spotless little cherubs!"
MOTHER lifts her nylon-sheathed chin, pivots with icy dignity, and
exits, slamming the door so hard the "HOME SWEET HOME" sign swings
crookedly on its nail.
MARTY: (Flinging the rag to the floor, panting, hands
on hips). Did you hear that?! With your own six eardrums?! "Two
spotless little cherubs"! Saints in orthopedic shoes! Ha! As if these
plasterboard walls weren't paper-thin! The only reason she doesn't catch you
two in the bathroom is because you run the sink faucet at full blast to cover
up the rhythmic squeaking! Especially you, Cyclops—stop taking that glowing
brick into the shower to stream anatomical documentaries, or one of these days
you’re gonna short-circuit the water heater and electrocute yourself
mid-stroke!
CYCLOPS: (Without looking up from his screen, in a flat
encyclopedic monotone). "Fact-check: false. This device is IP68
water-resistant up to six meters for thirty minutes and fully sealed against
high-viscosity biological aerosols."
MARTY: Screw your factory warranty, you digital pervert!
I take the rap for every crime in this house! Well, I’ve had it with this
castrating domestic dictatorship! They don’t want me relieving my blood
pressure under their polyester sheets? Then the slave is officially off the
plantation! (He leaps onto the yellow sofa). As of this historic minute,
I declare a general strike of folded arms and occupied hands! I am not solving
another quadratic equation, memorizing another state capital, or diagramming
another participle! (He pulls a stub of white chalk from his pocket with a
lascivious conspiratorial grin). I am going to desecrate the temple of
pedagogy! I’m drawing an anatomical mural on that green chalkboard so
monumentally obscene it’ll make Pompeii look like Sunday school!
LAZARUS: (Springing up, his eyes gleaming behind his
round glasses). Count me into your pictorial blasphemy, brother! Hand me a
piece of chalk! While you sketch your primitive locker-room phalluses, I shall
crown them with the Tower of Babel crumbling into the jaws of Leviathan rising
from the primordial ooze! (He rushes to the chalkboard and, scrawling
frantic expressionist monsters and spirals beside Marty's vulgar doodles,
declaims in a cavernous voice): "Behold the soot-black brick sweating
the venom of the bat, where the fallen seraph plucks the feathers from his
loins to scrawl across the leaden sky the epitaph of Father! O geometry of the
abyss, gangrene of the grandfather clock, devouring the wooden desks where our
adolescence rots!"
CYCLOPS: (Infected by the meter of the poem, he raises
his giant phone like a liturgical censer and blasts a painfully cheerful
fast-food jingle in a cartoon falsetto). "Crispy tenders, bucket meal,
finger-lickin’ family deal! Dip it in the honey-mustard, make your grumpy daddy
flustered! Cluck-cluck-cluck, Hooray for Barnaby’s Fried Chicken!" (He
shimmies his shoulders for two seconds and powers back down).
MARTY: (Admiring the chalkboard covered in grotesque
faces, spirals, and winged anatomy). A masterpiece of degenerate modernism!
And tomorrow morning for my encore, I’m showering without flip-flops to catch
every fungus known to science, marching out buck-naked, and leaving a trail of
soapy puddles across the hallway so Dad’s wingtips hydroplane into the umbrella
stand! Better yet, I’m hiding behind the shower curtain with a disposable
Polaroid to document you two cherubs in flagrante delicto!
LAZARUS: (Clutching his potted fern to his chest with a
mystical sigh). Ah, the morning shower! The solitary porcelain sanctuary
where modern man escapes the panopticon of the family... It brings to mind that
forbidden, scandalously sensual free-verse ode by Barnaby Blackwood, the cursed
poet of Providence who drowned in a clawfoot tub in nineteen-twenty-nine...
Listen to the sheer epidermal metaphysics:(He declaims with trembling
adolescent solemnity): "The showerhead weeps its rosary of lukewarm
needles, and as the water courses down my belly of fifteen winters, there wakes
within the steamy tile the blind sea-serpent, the one-eyed mariner seeking his
harbor amid the ivory lather. O fraternal hand, O five fingers of solitary
mercy, redeeming the captive beneath the tyranny of the water meter, firing
into the municipal drain a galaxy of orphaned stars while outside the bathroom
door the mortgage barks!"
MARTY: (Wiping away a tear of genuine emotion).
Damn, Lazarus, when you talk dirty in iambic pentameter it’s downright
patriotic!
CYCLOPS: (In the soothing, NPR-style whisper of a
progressive wellness and adolescent psychology podcast). "Welcome back
to episode forty-two of Mindful Groin, Peaceful Home. Clinical studies
from the New England Institute of Endocrinology confirm that regular solo
stress-relief in fifteen-year-old males reduces the urge to set the living-room
curtains on fire by seventy-eight percent, floods the prefrontal cortex with
dopamine, clears up cystic acne, and sedates rebellious triplets faster than
two tranquilizer darts... Share this reel with your most repressed puritan
aunt."
The three brothers burst into conspiratorial laughter and high-five.
Suddenly, a subterranean boom shakes the theater. The floorboards rattle. The
lights slam into submarine-emergency red. An out-of-tune Prussian military
march plays on a rusty tuba and kazoo.
From upstage center, FATHER and MOTHER burst in simultaneously. Between
them they carry a mile-long scroll of butcher paper which they kick unrolled
across the stage; the heavy roll thunders over the yellow sofa, crashes between
the desks, and slams into the shins of the three brothers downstage.
FATHER AND MOTHER: (In unison, unleashing
a deafening, sixty-second symphony of bureaucratic brass honks accompanied by a
synchronized dictatorial choreography: pointing at the ceiling, miming locking
a padlock on their lips and swallowing the key, tapping their wristwatches,
slicing their throats, pointing with inquisitorial disgust at the boys'
crotches, pointing at the phone, the fern, the bathroom, and the chalkboard).
MWAH-MWAH-MWAH! QUACK-QUACK-BRRRR-MWAH! Beep-mwah, honk-mwah,
rat-tat-tat-tat-MWAH! Bark-mwah, wheeze-mwah, crack-crack-MWAH!
MWAH-MWAH-MWAH-MWAAAAAH!
With every "MWAH", the three brothers suffer a synchronized
physical breakdown:—MARTY’s jaw drops one inch lower per second while he
freezes on his left foot, his right leg suspended in mid-air and his left hand
trapped inside his pocket.—LAZARUS’s round spectacles fog up completely, his
knees knock together at an impossible angle, and he clutches his terracotta
fern pot while whimpering like a Victorian orphan.—CYCLOPS’s thumb stops dead
in its tracks—an unprecedented event in modern history—his screen flashes
crimson, and his lower jaw drops onto his collarbone.
FATHER: (A final, lapidary cannon-shot blast).
BOOM-MWAH!
MOTHER: (Shrill as a pressure-cooker whistle about to
blow the roof off). PEEEEEE-MWAH!
Both parents pivot on their heels with Swiss-clockwork precision and
march out. Outside, the deafening metallic clatter of three giant padlocks, an
anchor chain, and a steel deadbolt slams shut across the front door.
Dead silence for ten full seconds. The three brothers remain frozen like
gargoyles with their mouths gaping open like condemned mailboxes.
SCENE TWO: THE CHESSBOARD
OF THE INSURGENTS AND THE ORACLE OF THE THUMB
MARTY has to use both hands to manually push his lower jaw back into its
socket until it clicks. He paces around the butcher-paper scroll rubbing his
temples, eyes wild.
MARTY: Tell me I just had a stroke. Did you two decipher
what those two trench-coated Velociraptors just signed into law?!
LAZARUS: (In a trembling whisper, hugging his fern).
I... I followed the syntax up to the "quack-mwah-brrrr" clause
in the middle... They decreed they’re confiscating my weird fiction paperbacks
and my gloomy poetry anthologies to use as kindling for the fireplace! They’re
going to water my Boston fern with boiling bleach, shave my head with
sheep-shears, and enroll me in the Methodist handbell choir wearing a white
sailor suit! A sailor suit, Marty—for a disciple of the nocturnal abyss! ...
But what in heaven’s name was that "rat-tat-tat-tat-mwah" at
the end?! My auditory cortex blacked out!
MARTY: (Dropping to his knees beside the scroll and
reading the air as if translating cursed cuneiform tablets). Listen to the
verbatim translation of Martial Law Executive Order
Four-Thousand-Eight-Hundred: Article One: Blinking more than four times per
minute is strictly prohibited in order to conserve natural tear-duct lubricant
and prevent wear-and-tear on the living-room air. Article Two: Effective
immediately, instead of going to the park on Sunday afternoons, we will scrub
the mildew out of the bathroom tile grout using only our own eyelashes. Article
Three: Mandatory barbed-wire boxing gloves must be worn to bed every night,
strapped to the brass headboard above our heads to eliminate any seismic
activity under the blankets. And Article Four—the nuclear "rat-tat-tat-tat-mwah":
total, permanent confiscation and shutdown of the Wi-Fi router starting at
eight o'clock tonight until we turn forty-five and have prostates the size of
grapefruits!
At the words "shutdown of the Wi-Fi router," CYCLOPS lets out
the bloodcurdling screech of a 1995 dial-up modem, falls flat on his back stiff
as a plank, and pedals his legs frantically in the air like a cockroach sprayed
with Raid, still clutching his enormous phone.
CYCLOPS: (Pedaling on the floor, speaking through an
imaginary megaphone in the voice of a low-budget sci-fi resistance leader).
"Red Alert in Sector Seven! The Silicon Matrix has been severed! Liberté,
égalité, bande passante! Give me five bars of fiber-optic signal or give me
death! Better to die standing on unlimited data than live on our knees in
Airplane Mode! Down with the bourgeois firewall!"
LAZARUS: (Clapping his hands to his cheeks, stomping
around Cyclops in his heavy orthopedic shoes while declaiming at the top of his
lungs): "O ashen tyrants in water-repellent gabardine who starve us of
the cybernetic ether! You have snipped the coaxial umbilical cord that bound us
to the rotting stars! You have padlocked the fountainhead of our hormones, yet
from our repressed armpits shall sprout bespectacled scorpions to gnaw through
the legs of your Ethan Allen dining set!"
MARTY: (Vaulting onto the yellow sofa like Washington
crossing the Delaware). That’s the spirit, dammit! The sheep have finally
grown fangs! Passive resistance is dead! The hour of the Great Triplet
Insurrection has struck! As of right now, this living room is commandeered by
the Three-Headed High Command: this floor is no longer a suburban parlor—it is
the chessboard of total war!
MARTY leaps off the sofa, pulls a thick piece of white chalk from his
pocket, and frantically draws a giant grid and geometric lines directly across
the wooden floorboards. He grabs LAZARUS by the shoulders like a wooden saint
in a parade and lugs him—groaning under the weight of the orthopedic shoes—into
a diagonal corner square.
MARTY: You are the Black Bishop of the
Gothic-Expressionist Apocalypse! You stay planted right here on the diagonal,
aimed straight down the hallway toward the master bedroom! Put on your Edgar
Allan Poe face and sharpen your beak!
LAZARUS: (Pressing his hands together above his head
like a bishop’s miter and flapping his elbows like black wings). Like this,
General? Behold the midnight bird perched above the chamber door, glaring with
the eyeballs of a dreaming demon, croaking unto our parents’ sanity that it
shall rise from the floorboards... absolutely zero times more forever!
MARTY: Chilling! That’ll drop their blood pressure into
their socks! (He runs over to CYCLOPS, grabs him by the ankles like a
wheelbarrow, rolls him across the chalk lines on the floor, and props him
upright in the center square). And you, Gus, are the Telecommunications
Rook and the Trojan Knight rolled into one! The second the enemy shows a trench
coat around the corner, you jump in an "L" onto their bunions,
execute a violent Queenside castle with me, and we flank them with crossfire
tantrums!
LAZARUS: (Wavering in his diagonal square, hunching his
shoulders like a trapped beetle). Uh, Marty... looking at this through a
strictly Kafkaesque lens... I’m not sure my exoskeleton is built for frontline
combat. Right now I feel less like a Spartan hoplite and more like that
traveling salesman who woke up one morning transformed into a monstrous vermin:
my six little legs are wobbly, my belly is soft, and if Father hurls a Granny
Smith apple at me from the sideboard, it’s going to lodge in my carapace and
rot under the sofa! Besides, my orthopedic shoes weigh eight pounds apiece—I
can’t blitzkrieg in these!
Suddenly, CYCLOPS’s gigantic phone emits a mournful, descending
four-note chime ("Doo-doo-doo-pfff"). The electric-blue light that
has illuminated his face since the curtain rose dies completely. CYCLOPS stares
at the black screen, trembles, and plunges into apocalyptic panic.
CYCLOPS: (Running in circles, hair standing on end,
vomiting system alerts and melodramatic distress calls in four languages).
"Critical system failure! Battery at zero percent! Initiating emergency
shutdown!" I lost my bars, I’m outside the coverage zone, the screen
is dark! "Mon Dieu, plus de batterie! Le réseau est mort, nous sommes
perdus dans le désert numérique!" "Achtung! Achtung! Kein
Netz, keine Daten, der Untergang ist da! Nein, nein, nein!" My family
share-plan data is capped, the algorithm has forsaken me!
MARTY: (Grabbing him by the lapels). Don't
flatline on us now, soldier! Breathe analog oxygen! What is your silicon oracle
trying to warn us about?! Speak English or mime it, for crying out loud!
CYCLOPS inhales deeply, tucks the dead brick phone against his chest
like a tombstone, steps to the center of the chalk circle, and launches into
the GRAND PANTOMIME OF DOOM. He holds up two fingers.
MARTY: Two words! Book, movie, or domestic atrocity?!
CYCLOPS shakes his head violently, flashes five fingers, then ten, then
flashes all ten fingers ten times in a row and mimes a thermonuclear mushroom
cloud wiping out the tri-state area.
MARTY: A hundred words and a nuclear winter?! Boil it
down, Gus, we’re not filibustering the Senate! Give us the executive summary!
CYCLOPS points at the front door. He pulls an imaginary nylon stocking
over his nose, marches two goose-steps like Father, then mimes grabbing three
helpless boys by the scruff of the neck, stuffing all three into a giant
invisible kitchen blender, hitting "Liquefy," vibrating his entire
body like spinning blades, pouring the smoothie into a martini glass, gulping
it down, and spitting it in disgust into Lazarus’s potted fern.
LAZARUS: (Clapping his hands in scholarly delight).
Oh, brilliant! It’s a compressed existential parable mixed with classical
mythology: Cronus devouring his triplicate offspring in a Cuisinart, and when
we wake up from the nightmare, the prehistoric tyrannosaur is still sitting on
the living-room sofa!
MARTY: Forget the tyrannosaur, you bookworm! Our parents
are way worse than dinosaurs—they’re suburban homeowners with a pristine credit
score! Let me translate the mute’s syntax: Mom and Dad... walk through that
door... grab us by the windpipe... and puree our testicles in the Osterizer!
CYCLOPS nods frantically, pointing at Marty. Then he holds up one
warning finger: the worst is yet to come. He points to heaven, folds his hands
in sanctimonious prayer, shakes his head, points to hell, and puts devil horns
on his forehead. Next, he mimes welding iron shackles onto their ankles,
ripping off their prep-school blazers, putting Puritan bonnets on their heads,
handing them a microscopic toothbrush to scrub the floorboards, and—as a
blood-curdling finale—mimes grabbing their manhood, twisting it four times like
saltwater taffy, wrapping it in three rolls of industrial Gorilla Tape, and
taping it flat against their bellybuttons so they have to waddle sideways for
the rest of their natural lives.
MARTY: (Sweating ice water, clutching his crotch with
both hands as he translates at breakneck speed). Sweet merciful Mother of
God! He says if we stage an armed mutiny against the Supreme Decree, the
retaliation will make the Salem Witch Trials look like a day spa! They’re gonna
disinherit us, ship us off to a Calvinist military reformatory in Northern Montana
run by jujitsu deacons, confiscate our flannel boxers and our gonads, and
duct-tape our tallywhackers to our navels so we stay celibate, virgin, and
completely un-squeezed until we qualify for Medicare at sixty-five!
CYCLOPS collapses to his knees, exhausted by his dramatic tour de force,
points both index fingers at MARTY as if to say "Bullseye, you
idiot!", and reflexively swipes his thumb three times across his dead
black screen.
LAZARUS: (Breaking his bishop pose and rushing to center
stage). The dead-battery oracle speaks the gospel truth! If we charge them
head-on, they’ll neuter us with rusty hedge-clippers! Marty, use your cerebral
cortex instead of your endocrine system for ten seconds! Brute Spartan force is
suicide here—we need the Florentine cunning of Niccolò Machiavelli. We have to
butter their parsnips!
MARTY: Butter their parsnips?! Those two dry-ice
mannequins in trench coats?! They have pumice stones where their hearts should
be, Lazarus!
LAZARUS: Listen to me, you hormone with legs! Every
autocrat has an Achilles' heel: their insufferable pedagogical vanity! Why do
they blow half their pension hiring tutors in quantum physics, Venn diagrams,
and recession home economics? Because they want to brag at the country club
Christmas party that they sired three docile, Ivy-League-bound prodigies! If
they open that door and find us on our knees, reciting our tutors' lessons in
Elizabethan blank verse, swearing we loathe the internet, declaring that self-pollution
is a mortal sin against the Protestant work ethic, and weeping that our only
dream in life is to become certified public accountants just like Father...
their nylon stockings will melt with bureaucratic tenderness and they’ll hand
back the Wi-Fi router on a silver platter!
MARTY: (Gagging violently, sticking his tongue out to
his sternum and bracing himself against a school desk). I just threw up a
little bit in my esophagus! Play therepentant choirboys?! Kiss their orthopedic
galoshes?! My revolutionary manhood revolts at the very concept!
LAZARUS: Your revolutionary manhood doesn't have the Wi-Fi
password or the key to the front door, Marty! If your alpha-male pride condemns
me to scrubbing bathroom grout with my eyelashes until twenty-sixty, I will
personally strangle you with my orthopedic shoelaces while you sleep!
MARTY: (Narrowing his eyes like a cornered general).
Fine! I see the twisted Jesuit logic of your hypocrisy! We run your
"Operation Maple Syrup" as Plan A. How-ev-er! If within three
minutes those two wardens don't unlock the deadbolt and hand over the router,
we immediately trigger my Plan B: Operation Scorched-Earth Textile &
Plumbing Anarchy!
LAZARUS: (Swallowing hard). And what, pray tell,
does your Plan B entail?
MARTY: (With a satanic gleam in his eye). We go
full feral beast from the ninth circle of the pit! Step One: We raid the bottom
of the laundry hamper, pull out every pair of unwashed underwear from the last
month—especially mine, which still bear the historic double-skidmark from the
eighth-grade Appalachian Wilderness Camp—and hang them like celebratory bunting
from the chandelier, the walls, and the chalkboard! Step Two: We ambush the
tutor's desk, shred Father’s Wall Street Journals and our report cards into a
blizzard of confetti across the floorboards! And Step Three, as our Declaration
of Independence: I personally step up to the front door, unsheathe the
patriotic firehose, and christen the "WELCOME" mat with two quarts of
foaming sovereign mutiny!
LAZARUS: (Making an inverted sign of the cross). It
is of a nauseating vulgarity... yet it possesses a visceral theatrical violence
worthy of Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty!
CYCLOPS: (Raising his thumb in solemn Roman approval).
"Plan B ratified by unanimous shareholder vote. Let slip the dogs of
war."
SCENE THREE: THE
CONSERVATORY OF PROFANITY AND THE REHEARSAL OF SYCOPHANCY
MARTY: (Pacing in front of the yellow sofa like a
Marine drill instructor). Hold your horses! Before we rehearse the Little
Lord Fauntleroy routine, I need to know my platoon has the guts to execute Plan
B if diplomacy goes south! And total anarchy takes more than dirty briefs
hanging on the doors—it takes lungs of sandpaper! A revolutionary doesn't tell
his parents to shove it in the voice of a soprano recorder! You two need to
learn how to curse! How to hurl blue-collar profanity with grease on it! Stand
at attention and repeat after me from the diaphragm: "We’re fed up with
your fascist bullshit, you uptight geriatric bastards!"
LAZARUS and CYCLOPS exchange a terrified glance, wring their hands,
inhale timidly, and squeak in unison:
LAZARUS AND CYCLOPS: "We’re terribly cross
with your authoritarian... poopiness, you elderly... rascals."
MARTY: (Kicking an imaginary trash can across the
stage). "Poopiness"?! "Elderly rascals"?! No wonder
they’ve had us in a choke-hold since we were in the incubator! You sound like
two Victorian governesses asking for a loan! From the gut, dammit! With gravel!
Like an eighteen-wheeler trucker on the New Jersey Turnpike when a Prius cuts
him off in a snowstorm! Lazarus, you’re up: unleash a curse so filthy it peels
the wallpaper off this bourgeois parlor!
LAZARUS: (Pushing his round glasses up his nose, puffing
out his narrow chest, and declaiming in impeccable Oxford diction). Brace
yourself, brother, for the abyss opens! "O nefarious progenitors, spawn of
bureaucratic obtuseness: go hence and fornicate with the chimera of your own
fiscal mediocrity, and unhand our beleaguered gonads, ye pusillanimous
poltroons of water-repellent gabardine!" (He turns to Marty, beaming
with pride). Well? Did you feel the sheer lexical brutality of
"pusillanimous poltroons"?
MARTY: (Burying his face in his hands and flopping
face-first onto the yellow vinyl sofa, which emits a long, agonizing squeak).
Lord give me strength, or I’m gonna beat him to death with his own fern!
Lazarus, if you call Dad a "pusillanimous poltroon," he’s gonna give
you an SAT vocabulary medal and frame it in his office! That doesn't scare a
three-legged pigeon! Give me gutter! Give me diesel fumes and truck-stop urinal
cake! Try again or I swear I’ll tell Mom where you hide your gothic
vampire-lingerie zines!
LAZARUS: (Horrified by the blackmail, he turns beet-red,
clenches his fists by his ears, grits his teeth, and attempts to channel a
South Boston dockworker, though his erudition hijacks him halfway through).
Alright, alright, stand back! "Listen up, you mother-freaking...
metonymies of late-stage capitalism! You can kiss my entire... Peloponnesian
Doric column right on the plinth, you pair of asymmetrical, crepuscular...
sphincter-lord turd-wagons! Take your Homeowners Association bylaws and shove
'em sideways up your Jungian maternal archetype, you son-of-a-bitching iambic
pentameters!" (He doubles over in a violent coughing fit and puffs an
imaginary asthma inhaler).
MARTY: (Patting his back with pity). Well...
"crepuscular sphincter-lords" is getting warmer; sounds like a bar
fight in the Yale comparative literature department. Your turn, Cyclops! Redeem
the bloodline! You main-line the internet fourteen hours a day—people in gaming
lobbies wish leprosy on each other’s grandmothers over pixel graphics! Hit me
with a street-level, blood-curdling insult!
CYCLOPS: (Lowers his giant phone with dramatic slowness,
steps forward, plants his feet wide like a spaghetti-western gunfighter, spits
imaginary chewing tobacco to the side, scowls ferociously, and speaks in the
high-pitched, autotuned baby-voice of a TikTok filter). "Hey, you big
stinky poo-poo head! Your mama is so fat that when she fell out of bed she
rocked herself to sleep trying to get back up! You’re a level-one noob, total
cringe, touch grass, L plus ratio plus you have zero aura points, reported to
the moderators for toxic vibes, wah-wah, boohoo!"
MARTY: (Dropping to his knees, staring at the ceiling
in defeat). I’m leading an army of eunuchs! One curses in ancient Greek and
the other trash-talks like a lobotomized Teletubby! If George Washington had
crossed the Delaware with you two in the boat, we’d still be paying tea tax to
King George!
LAZARUS: (Placing a solemn hand on Marty's shoulder).
Keep the faith, brother. All great upheavals begin with diplomatic duplicity.
Since our street-profanity arsenal is still in beta testing, let us perfect
Plan A: the pageant of unconditional filial submission! If we hook their vanity
with our baroque contrition, your Appalachian Wilderness Camp underwear can
stay in the hamper.
MARTY: (Grumbling as he stands and readjusts his left
testicle). Fine, deal. But put it in the minutes that if pretending to be a
preppy angel gives me a bleeding ulcer, you two are buying my antacids out of
your allowance. How does your sickening tableau go?
LAZARUS: (Assuming the posture of a tyrannical
avant-garde stage director). Places, everyone! Tableau Vivant Number One: The
Baroque Altarpiece of the Repentant Triplets! (He drags MARTY to the
exact center of the yellow sofa, forces him to kneel, clasps his hands under
his chin, and cranks his neck forty-five degrees toward heaven). Smile,
Marty! Give me a toothy, high-fructose corn-syrup breakfast-cereal commercial
grin!
MARTY: (Baring every tooth in his head, including his
wisdom teeth and a crooked canine, with bloodshot, bulging eyes and his left
eyelid twitching like a telegraph key). How’s that for cherubic,
Shakespeare?
LAZARUS: (Recoiling in horror). Sweet Merciful
Providence, you look like a rabid raccoon guarding a meat carcass behind a
dumpster! Relax the masseter muscle! Unclench the brow! Think of Golden
Retriever puppies! Think of tax deductions! Think of the nineteen-year-old
lifeguard from the country club pool rubbing sunscreen on her shoulders!
MARTY: (His face instantly melting into a blissful,
dopey sigh). Oh, Wendy from the deep end... I’m pure butter now.
LAZARUS: And you, Cyclops, lower that glowing obelisk for
two minutes and kneel at Marty’s flank making heart-emoji hands! I shall crown
the apex as the Holy Ghost of Scholastic Obedience! When the lock turns, we
crawl toward them on our kneecaps like medieval flagellants and chant the Canon
of Filial Adoration!
Outside in the hallway, the heavy iron deadbolt and three padlocks
scrape open. Heavy military boot-steps thud across the floorboards, accompanied
by the unmistakable nasal sound of two authoritarian throats clearing in
unison: "Ahem-mwah! Ahem-quack-mwah!"
LAZARUS: (In a hysterical whisper, diving onto the sofa
beside them). The wardens approach! Battle stations of hypocrisy!
Professional boot-licker smiles! Three, two, one... syrup!
SCENE FOUR: THE UNDERWEAR
MUTINY AND THE ORPHANHOOD OF PROPERTY TAX
The front door swings open. FATHER and MOTHER march in from stage left
with their usual monolithic rigidity. Two steps into the room, however, they
freeze dead in their tracks at the sight before them: the three brothers are
kneeling in a tight human pyramid on the yellow sofa, grinning like embalmed
ventriloquist dummies, fluttering their eyelashes at ninety miles an hour, and
blowing loud, wet suction-cup kisses into the air.
LAZARUS: (Crawling forward on his knees with
outstretched arms, declaiming like a nineteenth-century Romantic tragedian).
O exalted authors of our biological existence! Sun of fiscal prudence and Moon
of domestic sanitation! What ineffable rapture, what celestial epiphany to
behold your august slate-gray trench coats gracing the threshold of our
unworthy cave!
MARTY: (Waddling forward on his knees while his left
eyelid twitches violently, surreptitiously rubbing his groin against Lazarus's
orthopedic heel). Daddykins, carved out of Mount Rushmore granite by the
founding fathers themselves! Mommy dearest, radiant queen of bleach and zero
cholesterol! We were just meditating on how we love you more than toasted
Pop-Tarts, more than Thanksgiving stuffing with extra gravy, and more than
Grandma’s green Jell-O mold with the little marshmallows floating inside! (He
mimes unzipping his ribcage, ripping his own beating heart out of his chest,
wrapping it in festive gift paper with a giant bow, and offering it to them on
a silver platter).
CYCLOPS: (Shuffling forward on his knees, pressing his
index fingers together and pouting with the syrupy voice of an algorithmic
inspirational reel). "If every drop of gratitude I feel for my parents
were a snowflake, we would be buried under a category-five blizzard of love. A
family that budgets together and unplugs the router together stays together.
Forward this message to twelve cousins in the next sixty seconds or suffer
seven years of bad credit. Smooch, sparkle-heart, blessed!"
LAZARUS: (Lunging forward to hug FATHER’s boots and
rubbing his cheek—glasses and all—against the gray wool trousers). We have
seen the glorious light of your pedagogical wisdom! We renounce the internet,
fresh air, peer groups, and unsupervised thoughts! Our sole ambition on this
mortal coil is to obey your bylaws! Let us scrub the bathroom grout with our
eyelashes starting tonight! Better yet, buy us coarse industrial sandpaper so
we may buff our kneecaps to the bone in honor of your 401(k)!
MARTY: (Sticking his thumb in his mouth and making
grotesque baby faces through his patchy fifteen-year-old beard). Yesh,
yesh, yesh! Three wittle babies wuv their dada and mama! Dada is the king of
the whole wide world and Mama is the empress of the washing machine! Goo-goo,
ga-ga, pat our wittle heads!
FATHER and MOTHER stand utterly motionless. Slowly, their nylon-covered
heads swivel to look at each other. The silence in the theater grows so thick
you could slice it with a hacksaw.
Suddenly, FATHER begins to emit a faint "Mwah-mwah...", then
stops mid-syllable. With terrifying slowness, both parents raise their gloved
hands to their necks, grip the hems of the beige nylon stockings that have
flattened their faces since the play began, and rip them off in one sharp yank.
Underneath are the ashen, hollow-eyed, exhausted, and glacially calm faces of
two suburban adults who have crossed the threshold of a nervous breakdown into
absolute clinical detachment.
FATHER: (In a crystal-clear, resonant, glacially
articulate human voice, completely devoid of the brass honk). Alright, hold
it right there. What kind of third-rate vaudeville freak show is this supposed
to be?
MOTHER: (In a crisp, icy, impeccably polite
upper-middle-class voice, brushing lint off her trench coat). Do the three
of you genuinely believe we fell off a turnip truck yesterday? "Dada is
the king of the whole wide world"? "Goo-goo, ga-ga"? Martin, for
the love of Christ, you have leg hair like barbed wire, you scratch your
scrotum every four seconds like a baboon at the Bronx Zoo, and you’re sucking
your thumb on the parlor rug? You make my skin crawl.
Hearing their parents speak articulate, crystalline English for the
first time in fifteen years, all three brothers suffer an instantaneous Somatic
Contagion shockwave, flying backward onto the yellow vinyl sofa in a tangled
heap of limbs, orthopedic shoes, potted fern, and giant phone.
LAZARUS: (Trembling on the sofa, his left hand raised to
his brow in horror). They spoke! Marty, they spoke in complete English
sentences! Not a single "mwah-mwah"! They sound like a
Lutheran magistrate in a bleak Scandinavian drama—or worse, two litigants in a
Connecticut probate court!
FATHER: Spare me your literary footnotes, you pompous
little troll in corrective shoes! For fifteen years your mother and I
deliberately communicated with you in foghorn noises hoping that, by pure
Pavlovian conditioning, you might absorb a basic household rule without talking
back! Well, the experiment is over! We are sick to death of paying ninety
dollars an hour to private tutors just so you can mock them behind their backs;
we are sick of finding petrified socks under your mattresses and listening to
you drain eighty gallons of hot water locked in the bathroom doing things you
idiotically assume we can’t hear through the heating ducts!
MOTHER: You think you’re terribly clever staging this
grotesque nativity play to get the Wi-Fi router back! Well, newsflash, my
little nest of vipers: we know a shakedown when we see one. You can kiss the
sun, your trust funds, your cell phone, and your weird little horror books
goodbye until the twenty-second century! We are done negotiating with three
cynical, lazy, over-hormonal degenerates!
MARTY slowly rises from the yellow sofa. The twitch in his left eye
jumps all the way to his earlobe. With gladiator fury, he yanks his striped
school tie loose and points a trembling finger at the parents.
MARTY: Oh, so that’s how the cookie crumbles! A man
swallows his alpha-male dignity, crawls on his knees, goes "goo-goo
ga-ga" until he dislocates his larynx, slathers you in Grade-A Vermont
maple syrup... and you still want to weld the padlock shut until the
twenty-second century?! And on top of that, you criminalize basic teenage
hydraulic maintenance in the shower and defend those half-wit tutors who
couldn't find their own asses with a Venn Diagram?! Then Versailles is
officially dead, you tyrants of the thirty-year fixed mortgage! Brothers of the
womb: Plan A is aborted! Code Red: total thermo-textile warfare! Man the barricades,
you crepuscular sphincter-lords!
LAZARUS: (Leaping up on the sofa, kicking his leg into
Marty's lap, transfigured by Dionysian wrath). Yes! Let New England burn to
the foundations! Down with the Apollonian tyranny of the Homeowners
Association, long live the primordial chaos of the pit! Hear my
turnpike-trucker roar, you nylon impostors: "You can polish my
Peloponnesian obelisk in low gear during a hailstorm, you pair of geriatric
turd-wagons!"
THE GRAND CHOREOGRAPHY OF THE MUTINY erupts (executed at breakneck
acrobatic speed, keeping the stage floor completely dry and littered only with
clothes and paper confetti):
MARTY: (Diving behind the yellow sofa, hauling out an
overflowing laundry hamper). Heavy textile artillery, fire at will! (He
hurls dozens of pairs of underwear, stretched-out briefs, and stiff argyle
socks into the air; they land draped over the doors, hanging from the moldings,
and dangling off the edge of the school desks). Behold our battle standard,
tyrants: my unwashed briefs from the eighth-grade Appalachian Wilderness Camp,
complete with dual-axle mud-tracks! Inhale the fragrance of insurgent youth!
CYCLOPS: (Unleashing a Viking battle cry mixed with an
emergency amber-alert tone, he grabs a stack of Father’s financial newspapers
and failed exam papers from the desks, leaps across the stage shredding them
with his teeth and bare hands, and blankets the wooden floor in a blizzard of
torn paper and colorful confetti while shouting in multilingual delirium).
"Error 404: Filial Respect Not Found! Formatting family hard drive! Liberté,
égalité, confetti! Eat your quarterly mutual-fund statements, you
authoritarian boomers! Control-Alt-Delete the patriarchy!"
MARTY: Lazarus: execute Hostile Action Number Four on the
center flank!
LAZARUS: (Stomping across the yellow sofa cushions in
his chunky orthopedic shoes, clutching his potted fern like a grenade while
screaming at the ceiling). Gym socks on the doorframes! Elastic-shot briefs
on the study desks! Obscene chalk monsters on the blackboard! F-minus in
deportment, F-minus in hygiene, A-plus in metaphysical insurrection! We are the
bastard triplets of Arthur Rimbaud and Attila the Hun!
MARTY: (Vaulting over the arm of the yellow sofa,
puffing out his chest, and grabbing the zipper of his gray school trousers with
the solemnity of a revolutionary monument). And now, as the crowning
signature on our Tripartite Declaration of Independence, I shall baptize the
"WELCOME" mat with a foaming geyser of sovereign liberty! Stand back,
brothers, I’ve been holding two quarts of boiling mutiny since third-period
algebra! (He strides like a colossus to the front door, turns his back to
the audience facing the doormat, and yanks down his zipper with an amplified
metallic rip).
Throughout the entire hurricane of flying socks and confetti, FATHER and
MOTHER have not moved a millimeter. With shredded newspaper confetti resting on
their hats and a striped sock hanging off Father’s shoulder, they watch in icy
silence.
FATHER: (Without blinking, folding his arms with
terrifying serenity). Go right ahead, Martin. Urinate. In fact, take the
real-estate section if you’d like to splatter the wainscoting while you’re at
it.
MARTY freezes with his zipper halfway down. Slowly, he looks back over
his shoulder, completely thrown off script.
MARTY: Huh? What do you mean, "go right ahead"?
Hey, hold on, that’s illegal! In the script of this family, you’re supposed to
turn purple, burst a carotid artery, and chase me around the sofa with your
alligator belt!
MOTHER: (With a glacial, country-club smile, pinching a
dirty argyle sock off her lapel with two fingers and dropping it onto the
confetti-strewn floor). Oh, is that what you expected? You three want to
live like feral raccoons in a dumpster? Marking your territory on the doormat,
festooning the doorways with your soiled undergarments, and turning our parlor
into a madhouse?
FATHER: By all means. In this progressive family
democracy, the will of the majority rules. You demanded absolute emancipation
from parental tyranny? We were stifling your artistic, cybernetic, poetic, and
urinary self-expression? Congratulations, gentlemen: you just won the war.
With cold, rehearsed precision, MOTHER reaches behind the doorway and
pulls out two rolling hardshell suitcases that were mysteriously packed and
waiting. FATHER adjusts his fedora, pulls a massive brass keyring holding forty
keys from his coat pocket, and drops it with a final, metallic clatter onto the
school desk.
MOTHER: We will never oppress you again. No more tutors,
no more curfews, no more bathroom schedules, no more sermons. Your father and I
have an Uber waiting at the curb to take us straight to the airport for an
adults-only luxury cruise to Key West, after which we are moving permanently
into a child-free gated retirement community in Boca Raton.
FATHER: The three of you are now the sole proprietors of
this pigsty. The house is yours. Have a wonderful time tomorrow morning at
eight o'clock when there are no groceries in the pantry and you have to unclog
the septic tank, pay the electric company, the water board, the gas bill, the
Homeowners Association assessment, the municipal property tax, and the family
data plan on Augustus’s phone. Oh, and one final detail before we cross this
threshold: all sales are final. You just burned your boats, boys. Enjoy your
sovereign jungle.
FATHER and MOTHER open the front door, step daintily over the
"WELCOME" mat without looking back, and exit, pulling the heavy door
shut with a dry, echoing thud. Three seconds later, a car engine starts outside
and purrs away into the night.
Dead silence in the living room. The three brothers freeze in grotesque
positions across the wrecked parlor:—MARTY remains by the door with both hands
inside his half-open fly.—LAZARUS stands petrified by the yellow sofa clutching
his fern with a pair of boxers dangling near his ear.—CYCLOPS sits frozen amid
the confetti and chalk circles, holding his dead brick phone up to the empty
room.
Fifteen full seconds of total immobility pass. Slowly, the three
brothers turn their heads to look at one another with eyes the size of dinner
plates. A cosmic chill—the sudden terror of economic and bureaucratic
orphanhood—ripples through all three bodies simultaneously.
LAZARUS: (In a hollow whisper). Marty... what in the
name of theElder Gods is a "municipal property tax"? Is that an
unpublished elegy by T. S. Eliot or an ancient Babylonian demon?
CYCLOPS: (Staring at his dark screen, speaking in a
miraculously clear, trembling fifteen-year-old boy’s voice stripped of all
filters). There’s... no... network. Look at the wall behind the desk...
There’s a clean square in the dust. They packed the Wi-Fi router in their
suitcase to Boca Raton!
MARTY: (Slowly zips up his trousers. Swallows audibly.
Walks over to the desk, stares at the ring of forty keys, looks at the socks
hanging from the doors, looks down at his own hairy legs. Suddenly, his face
contorts from abyssal terror into a nervous twitch, and from the twitch into a
demented, radiant, feverish grin of triumph). They left? Did you hear the
car pull away?! They actually abandoned ship forever! Nobody to check behind
our ears! I can wear the exact same pair of boxers until they fuse to my
epidermis! We can eat frozen Pop-Tarts dipped in mayonnaise and tomato juice
straight out of the carton for breakfast! We can streak through the parlor at
noon without hearing a single "mwah-mwah"!
LAZARUS: (Instantly infected by the manic euphoria of
denial, leaping onto the yellow sofa). He’s right! The curse of the gray
trench coats is broken! No one will ever force us to diagram a Venn circle
again! We shall transform this townhouse into an underground bohemian commune!
We’ll cultivate bioluminescent mushrooms in the bathtub, host midnight readings
of doomed verse, and charge the neighborhood delinquents rent in canned goods!
CYCLOPS: (Jumping onto the yellow sofa beside them,
waving his giant brick phone in the air). Yes! We’ll splice into the
neighbor’s Wi-Fi using a coat hanger wrapped in Reynolds Wrap! We’ll launch an
offshore pirate university from the living room: online masterclasses in gothic
despair, guilt-free adolescent ergonomics, and tax-evasion for minors! We have
the house, we’re fifteen years old, we have six testicles and zero adult
supervision! We own the century!
All three brothers scramble onto the yellow vinyl sofa, locking arms and
legs into the Three-Headed Beast one last time, bouncing up and down on the
squeaking cushions amid the snowstorm of shredded paper and hanging socks.
ALL THREE IN UNISON: HOORAY! LONG LIVE THE
TRIPLET REPUBLIC! HOORAY! WE ARE FINALLY FREE! WE ARE ABSOLUTELY FREEEEEE!
At the exact apex of their synchronized leap on the yellow sofa, with
their arms flung wide and maniacal grins frozen on their faces, a brutal
electrical snap echoes from the street utility pole outside—the municipal power
company remotely cutting off the electricity for non-payment—and the stage
slams into a:
BLACKOUT.
*NOTES:
1.
The Somatic Contagion
(Invisible Umbilical Cord Lazzo): Although they are
radically different in character, they were born from the same womb in the same
minute. Whenever one suffers an extreme physical spasm—Martin's groin itch,
Nazarene's Gothic shiver, or Cyclops' cybernetic thumb cramp—the sensation travels
like an electric shock to the other two, forcing them to execute the brother's
gesture against their will for ten seconds.
2.
The Three-Headed Beast: In moments of panic
or conspiracy, the three intertwine arms and legs to form a single six-legged,
three-headed organism that walks sideways like a giant crab, breathes in
unison, and speaks in canon.
3.
The Scenic Cleaning in the
Riot: The spillage of milk from the last frame was
eliminated to leave the floor clean and safe for the physical work of the
actors, replacing it with textile, sound and plastic vandalism of high visual
impact.
4.
Extended Physical Scores: Each tableau includes
grotesque pantomime sequences, imaginary trials, and parodic splits designed
for the three actors to exploit physical wear and tear in real time.
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