It is Time

I wrote this in 2000, not too long after I joined the Company in 1999. It's about how frustrated I was with the people who had been in the Company longer than I, who seemed so rigid, controlling and unable to see their own folly. It's been on my mind lately because these days I'm part of the institution. I've woken up to find that a new generation of Neo-Futurists views me as part of the intractible Old School. Jeesh.

ANDY sits on stage with a copy of the book: 100 Neo-Futurist Plays From Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind (© 1993). He tears the pages out of it, slowly, each page torn to tiny bits.

ANDY:
I was thinking about death again, but this time I was thinking about ages come and gone, seasons come and past, that kind of death.

Every writer in history has spent more than a moment contemplating how finite their life's work really is. And every aging poet has looked with disgust on the new generation, that "rough beast who's hour's come round at last," so to speak.
It would be hard to imagine building something for years-- even five, seven, nine years--and then leaving that work to someone else. Or watching that work tampered with, held clumsily to the light, prodded with different hands, contemplated with different minds.

But everything we think we own, we will someday lose. And the moment something is fully realized, whatever that something may be, is the moment right before its death. There is no bringing that something back to life, there's only reinvention.

Whether you're an artist or not, the formula still applies: What's past is dead. What you have will die. What you want...is probably really stupid. And if you don't like what you have now, I suggest you learn to like it.

(ANDY scatters the tiny bits of paper onto the stage.)

CURTAIN.