CURTAIN
On the stage in the darkness sits a ragtag troupe of Gypsy musicians are warming up with a soft melodic tune. Behind them is a large VIDEO SCREEN.
Sitting slightly apart from the gypsies is a WOMAN. She has her head down as she writes in a large leather bound book.
VIDEO: The screen flickers to life. A grainy black and white home movie begins. In it there is a YOUNG BOY no older than 6 playing with his MOTHER.
VIDEO: The scenes on the screen jump around, childhood memories spliced together - Mother and Son happy together.
VIDEO: The young boy being tucked into bed as his Mother stands above him.
SFX: (The Lullaby) Their voices are heard as the gypsy band plays a childlike melody.
THE LINE GOES DOWN. THE HOOK GOES DOWN.
THE SHIP GOES DOWN TO THE WATER.
THE NET GOES DOWN. THE FISH GOES DOWN.
I'M GOING DOWN TO THE WATER.
HALLELUJAH AMEN. HALLELUJAH AMEN.
HALLELUJAH AMEN. TO THE WATER.
VIDEO: She finishes singing as the boy falls asleep. She turns and leaves the room.
SFX: There is a sound effect of rushing water.
VIDEO: There is now an image of the Mother floating in water. Then there are strange voices heard singing out over the sound system.
VIDEO: The boy from the images now stands alone at the edge of an immense lake.
The sound fades. One of the Gypsies sits next to an old STEAMER TRUNK. He stands and walks downstage. He is TRUELOVE. He speaks to the audience.
TRUELOVE
Let us commence this fractured tale of a man in crisis.The tortured child of Virginia Woolf. The doomed poet who succumbed to suicide by drowning, leaving her child orphaned at a young age. He was raised by a nomadic tribe of mystical gypsies. There.
Truelove points upstage to the group of gypsies. The gypsies shout obscenities in another language back at him.
TRUELOVE (cont'd)
This life gained him no roots, but filled him with an artistic curiosity.
Feeling an unbearable responsibility for the agony and lament his Mother must have felt, every spare moment is spent devouring the works of the world's most tormented writers and artists.
His only companions, their hidden messages of esoteric knowledge, music, and art.
VIDEO: An image of the young boy climbing aboard a gypsy caravan.
VIDEO: Images of Goethe, Nietzche, Kant, Schoepenhauer, Dostoyevsky, Hesse, and other esoteric thinkers flicker on the screen. The images FADE TO BLACK.
TRUELOVE (cont'd)
He grew to be an ambitious young man. What he lacked in parental nurturing, he made up for in the pursuit of fame, fortune, and power.
He now stands at the precipice of his lonely existence.
At the dark root of the dream. I give you Mr. E.
A spotlight swings from Truelove stage left to a crumpled figure fast asleep in a chair. This is MR. E. The white light startles him as he is jolted awake. He is dressed in a dusty velvet Edwardian frock coat and has a wild mane of hair. He is totally bewildered.
