Prologue

 

CLOE and LARI stand hidden behind ANTHONY upstage.

 

ANTHONY:

A story on this stage will soon unfold.

            From love and lust and jealous thoughts

            This story will be told. Conceited Death

            Will wonder by and by, à perte de vue.

            (Cloe and Lari step out on both sides)

The stories that we wrote, my friends and I,

Were often told to children ‘cross the world

In remedied and regulated tones.

 

CLOE:

That which takes place here on is not alike.

Revive your childish vain audacity,

Allow your mind to fashion new conceits.

Be reborn and witness tragedy.

 

A lady enters.

LARI:

            You see the lady, cigarette in hand?

            She wanders lost; she’s looking for some thing.

            At least, she was - a worthless cause by now.

 

CLOE:

            Her high ambition driven to despair

            By loves unnecessary interject.

            One has a feel that death is imminent,

            When watching someone so inanimate.

 

ANTHONY:

            There’s many ways to end a lonely life.

            She wanders off –

 

The lady exits.

 

LARI:

                                           Her life could well consist

            Of greater fortune than that which we tell.

            She’s gone. You might suspect her brief entrance

            To be merely passing, of no insurgence.

            I decide the thread of someone’s life -

 

ANTHONY:

            And I decide their death. The lady dies.

            I daren’t say when -

 

CLOE:

                                              She lives, if not within

            The body she employs, within her child’s.

 

LARI:

            There’s one thread here whose weave is now complete

            That of the play and players you will meet.

            Events will here play live in your mind’s eye

            But fate now knows who live, and those who die.

 

CLOE:

            Unjust it could well seem, but fate is law,

            And now our tale begins.

 

ANTHONY:

            Look to the door –

Segue. The play begins:

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