The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [221]
and parted friends. The audience members also gradually come to realize that there are no seats and no stage. There are no designated places for anyone to sit or stand, nowhere to hang their coats, and no clear place for them to look toward. This is because the entire room functions as both audience and stage. Now beneath their feet, they feel a ground that is not hard, but soft and pliant, which gives beneath their shoes. Some of them bend down to feel the floor beneath them, and their fingers touch sand. Some of them pick up fistfuls of sand that they let sift out between loosely closed fingers. The floor is covered in so much sand that they cannot feel any flatness underneath it, the texture of the floor feels exactly like a beach. That’s because it is a beach. Some people sit down in the sand. Some take off their shoes and socks, and dig their feet into the beach to feel the cool silky sand slithering between their bare toes. As they begin to spread out and wander around the room, some of them discover water. For there is water—real water—lapping at the edge of the sand. They kneel down to feel it with their fingers, or the ones who have taken off their shoes and socks dabble their toes in it, or they hike up skirts and roll up pant legs to go splash around in it. Yes, it is real, and not some elaborate illusion. What’s more, it is saltwater. The whole room smells like the sea—although the audience has by now forgotten that they are in a room at all. The water spills onto the beach and draws back again in authentic waves. The quivering globs of jellyfish that have washed ashore lay scattered about the beach, and a few crabs click and scuttle in and out of the foaming surf. The people call out across the water, and they do not hear any echoes. They are answered only by the crash and roar of the open ocean, stretching far out into the indiscernible distance. Look!—they say to one another, strangers turning to strangers, pointing and whispering in voices hushed with bewitchment—look!—there’s the moon, rising above the water. Is it a cardboard cutout moon, hoisted up on fiberglass wires by an unseen crane? Is it a light projection on a wall, issuing from some hidden lens? It is so real-looking that it hardly matters whether it is real or illusory, for the effect is the same. Even if it is a false moon, it looks real enough to render the question of its realness irrelevant to the senses. The people look around them and, their eyes now aided by the moonlight, they perceive a jungle all around them. A wildly overgrown tropical jungle, resplendent with palm trees, with strange bushes exploding with bright flowers and dripping with vines, exotically shaped trees whose branches droop low with alien fruit, some of which the braver people reach out and pluck, and take bites out of, and find delicious, though it tastes like no earthly fruit they have ever experienced. The people run their hands over the leaves and stalks and trunks of the plants and the trees, and their fingers are shocked to be met not with the brittle dryness of plastic leaves or fabric petals, but with the unmistakably authentic fat wet honest kisses of vegetative life. They smell the flowers, they rip handfuls of leaves from the trees, astonished that it is all real. The air is steamy and hot. People take off their coats and jackets and hang them on tree branches. They look up: stars. Stars! Stars! STARS! Some ingenious artist has populated the ceiling’s firmament with thousands of glittering lights, again so perfectly mimicking nature that it hardly matters whether or not it is artifice: above them is the night sky of some unknown mythopoetic landscape. Tropical birds croak and whistle in the trees. Frogs hop, insects zither around their heads. When the play begins, the room is crowded, but it is impossible for anyone to tell how many people are there, or even where the boundaries of the interior space lie. Interior has become exterior to them. The atmosphere is equally as thick with enchantment as with fear. Now a strange and solemn music begins to play. The