Jonathan Ned Katz: "Comrades and Lovers," Act I

ENTRY IN CONSTRUCTION

Jonathan Ned Katz: "Comrades and Lovers"

ACT I, SCENE 1

[LIGHTS OFF; WHITMAN'S FIRST WORDS ARE HEARD IN THE DARK.]

WHITMAN: Love thoughts

SPEAKER 1: love-juice,

SPEAKER 2: love-odor,

SPEAKER 3: love-yielding,

SPEAKER 4: love-climbers,

WHITMAN: and the climbing sap,

SPEAKER 1: arms and hands of love,

SPEAKER 2: lips of love,

SPEAKER 3: phallic thumb of love,

SPEAKER 4: breasts of love,

WHITMAN: bellies pressed and glued together with love.

[LIGHTS ON, NIGHT.

SCENE TITLE, PROJECTED OR PRINTED ON PLACARD:

1 Walt Whitman, "Love-thoughts"

WHITMAN AND A "BOY" MOVE CLOSE TOGETHER, ADDRESS EACH OTHER.]

BOY: The wet of woods through the early hours.

WHITMAN: Two sleepers at night lying close together as they sleep,

BOY: One with an arm slanting down across and below the waist of the other.

WHITMAN: The smell of apples,

BOY: aromas from crushed sage plant,

WHITMAN: mint,

BOY: birch bark.

WHITMAN: The boy's longings, the glow and pressure as he confides to me what he was dreaming.

BOY: The dead leaf tallings its spiral whirl, falling still and content to the ground.

WHITMAN: The sensitive, orbic, underlapped brothers, that only privileged feelers may be intimate where they are.

BOY: The mystic amorous night.

WHITMAN: The curious roamer the hand, roaming allover the body,

BOY: the bashful withdrawing of flesh where the fingers soothingly pause and edge themselves.

WHITMAN: The limpid liquid within the young man,

BOY: the vex'd corrosion so pensive and painful,

WHITMAN: the torment,

BOY: the irritable tide that will not be at rest,

WHITMAN: the like of the same I feel, the like of the same in others.

[SCENE TITLE: 2 Rufus Griswold, "Once licentiousness"

RESPONDING TO THE EARLIER VERSE, GRISWOLD APPEARS WITH LEAVES OF GRASS, SPEAKS TO WHITMAN.]

GRISWOLD: Once licentiousness

shunned the light;

now it writes books

showing how grand and pure it is,

and prophecies

its own ultimate triumph.

[TO AUDIENCE, HOLDING UP LEAVES OF GRASS]

It is impossible to imagine

how any man's fancy

could have conceived

such a mass of stupid filth.

We leave this gathering of muck

to the laws

which have power to suppress

such gross obscenity.

[FIRE AND BR1MSTONE PROPHECY]

"Peccatum illud horribile,

inter Christianos non nominandum."

[WHISPERS TO WHITMAN]

(That vile sin among Christians not to be named.)

[WHITMAN AND SPEAKERS RESPOND TO GRISWOLD.

SCENE TITLE: 3 Walt Whitman, "Through me"]

WHITMAN: Through me many long dumb voices,

SPEAKER 1: voices of the interminable generations of slaves,

SPEAKER 2: voices of prostitutes and deformed persons,

SPEAKER 3: voices of the diseased and despairing,

SPEAKER 4: voices of wombs and the fatherstuff,

SPEAKER 1: voices of the rights of them the others are down upon.

WHITMAN: Through me forbidden voices,

SPEAKER 2: voices of sexes and lusts,

SPEAKER 3: voices veiled and I remove the veil,

SPEAKER 4: voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured.

WHITMAN: I do not press my finger across my mouth!

SPEAKER 1: keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,

SPEAKER 2: copulation is no more rank to me than death is.

SPEAKER 3: I believe in the flesh and the appetites,

SPEAKER 4: seeing, hearing, and feeling are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.

WHITMAN: [TO BRONSON ALCOTT AND HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WHO APPEAR IN THE NEXT SCENE]

If I worship any particular thing

it shall be some of the spread of my body;

SPEAKER 1: You my rich blood, your milky stream pale strippings of my life;

SPEAKER 2: Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you,

SPEAKER 3: Root of washed sweet-flag,

timorous pond-snipe,

nest of guarded duplicate eggs,

it shall be you,

SPEAKER 4: Mixed tussled hay of head and beard and brawn it shall be you,

WHITMAN: Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be. you;

SPEAKER 1: Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you,

SPEAKER 2: Broad muscular fields,

SPEAKER 3: branches of liveoak,

SPEAKER 4: loving lounger in my winding paths, it shall be you,

WHITMAN: Hands I have taken, face I have kissed, mortal I have ever touched, it shall be you.

[ALCOTT AND HENRY DAVID THOREAU RESPOND TO WHITMAN

SCENE TITLE: 4 Bronson Alcott: "This morning with Henry David Thoreau"

ALCOTT ADDRESSES AUDIENCE; THOREAU ACCOMPANIES HIM, FOCUSING ON WHITMAN]

ALCOTT: This morning

with Henry David Thoreau to Brooklyn,

to see Walt Whitman.

I find this Whitman

likely to make his mark on Young America he affirming himself

to be its representative man and poet.

[WHITMAN AND THOREAU EYE EACH OTHER SUSPICIOUSLY; ALCOTT OBSERVES]

Thoreau and Whitman

each seemed planted fast in reserve,