www.dramavirtual.org
presents
THE SEXY FARMER
"More Stable Than Your Ex"
A Short Play / Stand-Up Monologue
By Gavarre Benjamin
CHARACTER:
- BART: In his late 20s. Born and raised in Queens, NY. He currently
works at a high-end educational animal sanctuary in Upstate New York that
caters to wealthy city tourists. He is hyperactive, cynical, and highly
expressive. He wears a faded Mets cap, a heavy hoodie, and carries
a high-tech smartphone stabilizer (gimbal) like a shepherd's staff.
ACT I: THE ANCESTRY TRAINWRECK
(SETTING: A comedy club stage or black box theater.
Dim, smoky blue lighting. A heavy, boom-bap 90s Brooklyn hip-hop beat plays.
BART jogs onto the stage, nearly tripping over the microphone cord. He catches
the stand with practiced agility—a physical slapstick save. He adjusts his cap,
breathing heavily, looking out at the audience with an intense, wide-eyed
stare.)
BART:
(Into the mic, fast-paced)
What is up, New York? Good to be back in the concrete jungle! Look, look at me.
Take it all in. Yes, I am the guy from Queens who shovels goat manure for a
living. Do not look at me with that judgmental Broadway face! Let’s be honest:
the scent of organic sheep droppings is still a hundred times better than the
34th Street subway station in the middle of a July heatwave. It’s not even a
competition!
(He brandishes his smartphone gimbal like a weapon,
pointing it at the front row)
Everyone from outside the city has this delusional,
cinematic fantasy about New York. My family back in Mexico City? Every time we
FaceTime, their eyes light up and they ask: "Oh, Bartolo! Did you bump
into John Travolta walking down Broadway?!" And I have to break their
hearts! I tell them, "Listen, auntie, the closest thing we have to John
Travolta on the streets today is a homeless guy in his underwear doing the Saturday
Night Fever dance over a steaming manhole cover in Times Square."
That’s our Hollywood magic!
But look at my face. You’re trying to figure out what
I am, right? Am I Italian? Am I Scottish? For years, I thought I was the
ultimate European hybrid. My dad’s side claimed we were pure Italian royalty
from Sicily. My mom’s side swore we were fierce Scottish-Irish warriors.
Growing up, I felt like a walking stereotype. I wanted to colonize a
neighborhood but then immediately apologize for it while cooking a magnificent
plate of pasta. I managed to disappoint both cultures simultaneously. I can’t
drink whiskey, and I use store-bought marinara sauce. My ancestors are spinning
in their graves so fast you could plug them into the grid and power Long
Island!
(He stops, takes a deep breath, and deadpans)
Then, Christmas happened. My girlfriend bought me one
of those DNA saliva kits. You know the ones. You spit into a plastic tube, mail
it to a lab, and three weeks later a corporation shatters your entire identity.
I thought the results would say: "50% Cannoli, 50% Haggis."
Bro. The pie chart of my bloodline looks like a United
Nations general assembly meeting gone horribly wrong.
(He uses his hands to draw a chaotic pie chart in the
air)
I am four percent Jewish. Six percent Arabic. Twelve
percent Spanish. Two percent Cherokee Indian—because apparently every white
family in America needs that two percent to feel spiritual. And then, the grand
finale, the absolute climax of the lab report: twenty percent black.
Specifically from Gabon. Central Africa!
(He looks at his hands, then at his face in an
imaginary mirror)
Twenty percent! That is a significant chunk of a human
being! I don’t even know how to process that. I went to the mirror, looked at
my pale, anxious Queens face, and thought: "Wow. I am literally a
walking geopolitical conflict. If I argue with myself, the security council has
to get involved." I can’t even use any cultural slurs because I’d be
hate-criming myself! But hey, at least it explains my rhythm. I can’t dance to
save my life, but when I shovel that goat manure? There is a beautiful, primal,
twenty-percent-Gabonese syncopation to my swing!
(He mimics shoveling dirt to a rhythmic hip-hop beat,
hips swaying ridiculously, then stops abruptly)
ACT II: THE POP QUEEN AND THE URBAN CHOPPER
BART:
But look, the New York clichés do happen. A few weeks ago, I’m at a
Dunkin’ Donuts on the Upper West Side. It’s three in the morning. The door
opens, and the bell chimes. In walks this figure. Massive, oversized designer
sunglasses. A feather boa that looked like it cost three months of my rent. A
giant faux-fur coat.
She walks up to the counter dripping with an intense,
heavy cloud of pure New York guilt. The kind of guilt only a Manhattanite who
has been on a strict, ten-year keto-and-seltzer-water diet can experience. She
was staring at those glazed donuts like she was contemplating a federal crime.
She leans over the counter, looks at the
eighteen-year-old kid working the register, and in a raspy, hyper-whispered
voice, she goes: "Give me two Boston Kreme... and if my nutritionist
walks through that door, you don’t know me."
She slides her sunglasses down to check if they had
sprinkles... and boom. It’s Madonna. The actual, literal Queen of Pop.
Standing right next to me, sinning with trans fats in the dead of night. She
hands the kid a hundred-dollar bill, whispers, "Keep the change, you
saw nothing, bitch," puts the glasses back on, and vanishes into a
sleek black Uber. That is New York! Nowhere else on earth do you see a global
pop icon having a spiritual breakdown over a fried dough ring at three in the
morning next to a raccoon chewing on a lottery ticket.
(He does a physical gag: imitating Madonna’s
glamorous, mysterious walk, but aggressively stuffing an imaginary donut into
his mouth with absolute desperation).
That’s why I fled to the farm upstate. The city is too
intense. But let me tell you, the actual biological hazard up there? It’s not
the wildlife. It’s the Manhattan hipsters who come up for the weekend to
"connect with the soil." They wear pristine Timberland boots that
have never seen a speck of dust, and they think they’re shamans because they
drank a matcha latte.
Last weekend, this guy steps out of a Tesla. He’s
wearing transparent white linen pants—and let me tell you, you could see his
entire "real estate portfolio" swinging through the fabric. It was
aggressive. He walks up to me, swaying like he’s on mushrooms, and says:
(Imitates an insufferable, vocal-frying Williamsburg
hipster)
"Hey, Bart... bro... your goats have like... such
a grounding, organic frequency. I feel my throat chakra aligning with their
udder. What else do you have roaming around here that’s... wild?"
(Returns to his normal voice, stepping back with an
expression of pure disgust)
I had to look him dead in the eye and say, "Bro,
my goats are here to make artisanal cheese that we sell back to your mother at
Whole Foods for a three hundred percent markup. They are not here to fulfill
your rustic-erotic weekend fantasies! Back away from the livestock!" My
goat, Gary, has standards, alright? He doesn’t just align his
frequency with anyone!
ACT III: THE BROWNIE MELTDOWN
BART:
But I don’t just shovel dirt. I am a curator of high-value lost items left
behind by these wealthy idiots. Last month, I’m clearing the picnic area, and I
find a gold chain in the grass. Massive. (Gestures to a huge chain around
his neck) Pure Staten Island rapper bling. And right next to it? A pair of
vintage 1980s four-wheel roller skates.
The story writes itself, right? Some finance bro tried
to impress a girl from Bushwick by doing a retro trick, snapped his ankle on
the first attempt, and told her: "Babe, take the chain to pay for the
ambulance, but leave the skates, they’re a collector's item!"
But the real prize? Two days ago. I found a Ziploc
baggie hidden in the bushes. Inside were these dark, dense, homemade chocolate
brownies. They smelled like that legal dispensary weed—the kind that currently
makes the entire borough of Manhattan smell like a skunk burning in a dumpster.
I looked at the bag. I looked at the sky. I said, "Well, Bartolo...
you’re twenty percent Gabonese, six percent Arabic, and four percent Jewish.
Let’s see how this genetic cocktail handles the forbidden pastry."
I ate two of them.
(The stage lights shift drastically to a pulsing,
surreal red and purple. BART’s posture changes. He grips the microphone stand,
his eyes rolling back slightly as he enters a manic, climatic storytelling
mode. His voice drops an octave, echoing with theatrical intensity).
Oh my god, New York. It wasn't a high. It was a
prophetic, apocalyptic vision of our collective future.
I collapsed onto the barn floor, and my soul was
ripped out of my body! I was flying over Manhattan, but it wasn't the city we
know. It was the year 2045. The rent for my tiny studio apartment in Queens had
risen to forty-five thousand dollars a week! To afford it, the landlord forced
me to lease out the right side of my bed to a Wall Street AI robot that snored
in binary code!
(He starts pacing frantically, sweating, yelling at
the sky)
The buildings were so tall they were scraping the
satellites out of orbit! The streets weren't filled with cars—they were filled
with a massive, unstoppable stampede of human beings, all wearing dark
clothing, all with glowing airpods fused into their ear canals, sprinting at
supersonic speeds! Nobody was looking at each other!
I tried to cross Broadway, and a flock of delivery
drones tried to decapitate me! I screamed, "Stop your capitalistic
fury, you Amazon demons!" But they just dropped a package of organic
beard oil on my head and kept flying!
Everyone was running on a giant, invisible treadmill!
They were throwing wallets and diamond rings onto the pavement because if they
stopped for three seconds to pick them up, their productivity score would drop,
and the corporate algorithm would instantly vaporize their health insurance! It
was a dystopian nightmare of pure anxiety and oat milk!
(The pulsing lights snap back to the normal blue
comedy club lighting with a loud, theatrical slap sound effect. BART gasps for
air, clutching his chest, completely exhausted).
I woke up on the barn floor. Drenched in sweat.
Shaking. Terrified.
Do you know what the very first thing I did was? I
crawled across the dirt, I found my favorite goat, Gary, and I wrapped my arms
around his furry neck. I looked into his weird, horizontal pupil eyes, and I
said: "Oh, Gary, my beautiful, unaligned friend... thank God we are
here. Where the only danger is a thunderstorm, and where the highest piece of
technology available... is a bag of stray hípster brownies."
Thank you, New York! You’ve been terrifying!
Goodnight!
(The heavy hip-hop beat slams back on at maximum
volume. BART slams the microphone into the stand—a mic drop—flashes a double
peace sign, and runs off the stage with wide, comedic, high-stepping goat
strides).
THE
END
