Jonathan Ned Katz: "Comrades and Lovers," Act I
ENTRY IN CONSTRUCTION
Jonathan Ned Katz: "Comrades and Lovers"
- ACT I
- 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 WRITTEN 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.
