Activities of Daily Life

A cacophonous shower of language, desire, and despair. For as many people as you are able to get onto the stage.

Activities of Daily Life
Written by Sean Dance Fannin

This play premiered on January 18, 2024 at Trap Door Theatre in Chicago, IL as the preshow for Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertol Brecht. 

This place is very full of many people completing the activities of daily life.

• I've restarted I've restarted I've reset I've reset reset I'm restarted reset as soon as I turned over I was set reset.
• There's a cream colored corner of my chest that crawls up my throat at the worst times of night.
• I am a good man.
• Reset restart begin began begin begin
• I know I am a good man.
• Golden goose only as good as the gut it used to make itself.
• Whose teeth are these?
• I cannot hold myself at my edges. I can only stand alone when I'm alone. And when I have to. My elbows are weak and I'm not hanging straight enough to relax. I'm upside down sometimes. I'm...careful with my feet. My fingers got filters on what they can take and it don't talk to me the way it used to. And that hurts. Hurts my teeth.
• Whose teeth are these?
• Recreate the restart that set my start set start crash state start reserve reserve reset reserve
• Gravity check.
• start set reset reset
• Holy holes hold holes on the whole of my wholes
• Green grass gravity green
• Stretch test
• Reset reset
• Wonderful wonders of wordful wanters
• I know I am a good man because I have done good things. Nominally it's irrelevant, the weight. The weight of wait. I'm gasping gasping gurgling for girth for warmth for telephone typewriters to try truth stuck stark between their teeth
• My teeth are missing
• Whose teeth are these
• Rock raft reset task set test reset
• I cannot hold it I cannot
• Smelt
• I'm washed together with my worries and beyond caring about the little stances between dances. Isn't it incomprehensibly incomparable that the wealth of my worth can't pay pages to purge their part in my start start start
• Restart
• Edge case catastrophe
• Every day is the worst day of someone's life
• I'm surrounded by smog
• Cribbage sheet critic creek
• What does it sound like when you separate your stealth? I came out to water and worked my wounds for the sake of negotiating my negligent identity.
• I don't have enough words
• I'm running out of words
• Whisper wilting
• Heart shell shocked
• Startled by starting
• Restart reset regain rest test reset
• Sutter flash wet winter
• Where's the weather when we all want wall waltzer wizards?
• Mange manage manager method
• Weak walking web
• Tangled
• Reset
• I've all got different wind under my toes and tumblers. It's my feet. My feet are tumblers
• Foot flight
• Reset
• How many more minute might murder my mind
• Altercation cramps
• I'm shivering
• Shelter
• Reset reset reset re
• Smart
• See.
• See me see
• I'm not worried
• See
• I'm not
• Reset
• I'm not worried about wanting.
• Good.
• I'm worried about worry though.
• Reset reset.
• What worry does
• Marathon magic makes mean men
• What worry is
• I can't stand being wondrous much more.
• I'm lost
• Don't
• Don't don't
• I've restarted I've restarted I've reset I've reset reset I'm restarted reset and as soon as I turned over I was set, reset.

Repeat the play until the intended effect is achieved.

Some Thoughts on the Competing Melancholy of Emil Cioran and Sarah Kane
Contains: Mentions of suicide

There's something so refreshing about melancholy. It's sadness, yes, but it's also the most socially acceptable sadness. Neither woe nor grief are public emotions; the most intense expression of these demand all, not just some, of the attention in a given space. Melancholy, however, can only be expressed publicly. No one can label themselves melancholy. It's like calling yourself humble: a self-defeating self-description. An actual melancholic would almost certainly recognize, intuitively, that melancholy remains sadness; it's not fun to experience. 

We admire characters in stories and people in our lives who are melancholic because their sadness is consuming, but not devastating. They are able to process, even actively, their despair because the despair is seemingly logical. They are not fighting the sadness, they have accepted. They're settled. Their pain tolerance has been rewarded with a curious scowl; scars of interesting frown lines. It's not a brutal sadness, it's an eloquent sadness.

Emil Cioran is the philosopher of satisfying melancholy. I do not have time to get into the layers of his philosophy, but his writing is among my favorite. He has quotes you may have heard of, most of them on suicide: "It's not worth the trouble of killing yourself, for you always kill yourself too late," "Only optimists kill themselves, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists," and "What do you do from morning until night? I endure myself." Brutal short pockets of words are his specialty. Unflinching in his perspective on pain. It reminds me, emotionally, of Sarah Kane's work.

Sarah Kane is far more brutal in her despair. I call her a "Stoic Brutalist" for her philosophy and style. If you're unfamiliar with Sarah Kane, I have an overview of her career on my podcast "Come and See" in a dedicated episode. She writes in similar fashion. There is no wasted space. Her first landmark play Blasted, begins with a character walking into a fairly nice hotel room and exclaiming,

IAN.   I've shat in better places than this. 

No wasted space. There's hardly exposition in her work. The most backstory you get is in her play Cleansed. (I'm not counting Phaedra's Love as it is adaptation.) You get some sense that two characters are siblings, two are lovers, but other than that - like all her work - you get nothing from these people than how they behave in each moment. This creates compelling drama because it is a sort of restricted writing. Without exposition, you have few things to do except push action. The correlation with Cioran's work goes further in Kane's themes, finding love hiding in the most apparently loveless places is a sort of acceptance. I say this a lot, but we are talking about fiction here. She could choose to write anything. What she chose was brutality layered in desperate swaths of pain over small seeds of love; it is always about finding it. 

There's a major, obvious, difference between these writers. Sarah Kane took her own life in 1999. Emil Cioran died of complications due to Alzheimers in 1995 (the year Blasted premiered in London.) They, ultimately, differed in their response to acceptance. Cioran's acceptance of an inability to understand the world assuaged his despair. Kane's similar acceptance drove a further acceptance of despair, most clearly seen in her final work 4.48 Psychosis. If I demonstrate this with examples now I will stray too far from the point. See the Sarah Kane episode of "Come and See" to learn more.

Most theatre is about the problem of pain and despair; human suffering. It's the background noise to everything else. I wanted to write a play that was completely theme driven, much like Sarah Kane's Crave. Emil Cioran, ever the buddhist, talks a lot about the relationship between desire and despair. I explored this by first and foremost being concerned with translating emotion, releasing plot and informational delivery as necessary tactics to do this. (Again, much like Kane does with Crave and 4.48 Psychosis.) Instead, I focused on rhythm, musicality, character, and word choice, sprinkled with a snake eating its tail concept. Curious as to how many times you could repeat this in a row before it became annoying, then meaningful again. It's a long thing to repeat. You might not even notice at first. Hopefully the deja vu and delirium would induce a similar type of existential anxiety that is a side-effect of the acceptance process. I also wonder how many voices could genuinely deliver this text before it loses meaning. 

This is one of my favorite things I've written recently. I may explore this theme and structure pairing further. 

SDF