A PLAY FOR DAR AL-ISLAM SCHOOL IN ABIQUIU,
NEW MEXICO

(based on a modern Dutch parable by Multatuli)

• Cast

• Introduction

• Scenery and Setting / Beginning

(Note: this play was commissioned for an all-girls school, but can easily be adapted for a cast of boys and girls.)

CAST

Narrator
Stonecutter
Angel
Servant(s) of rich woman
Musicians of rich woman (optional)
Trumpeter of Queen
Dancers of Queen (optional)
Chorus of Queen (2 or 3)
Servant/parasol carrier of Queen
2nd servant of Queen
Sun
Two flowers
Figures with sky, then flood cloths
Clouds (2 or 3)
Big cloud
2nd stonecutter (made to look like 1st)

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INTRODUCTION

The look of this play is like a children’s book of illustrations come to life, with folk stylization, or Kabuki-style acting and stylized props, simple sets. It is a play of transformations, so the stage itself is bare, with new elements introduced and removed. Props such as sun or clouds can be made of cardboard, large and simply drawn, to be carried and manipulated by actors. Much is made of such elements as sparkling white cloth, to be held rippling in front of the angel, or blue cloth for sky held taut across stage by two figures or stagehands, later multiplying to more cloths to suggest flooded waters. There is need for stagehands, conceived like those of Kabuki, to be visibly manipulating things on the stage, but wearing all black, so as to become more abstract, melting into the darkness of the background.

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SCENERY AND SETTING / BEGINNING

Lights go down. Spotlight on curtain. Narrator comes out and addresses audience.

NARRATOR:
     Bismillahi‘r-Rahmani‘r-Rahim
     Kan ma kan - The Stonecutter’s Dream...
     There was, there was not.
     What a creation we have got!
     Things come and pass away.
     Night takes place in endless day.
     There was, there was not.
     We’re not content with what we’ve got.
     When it’s cold we want it hot.
     One day rags, next day gold.
     Before we’re done we must grow old.
     Sitting here in our anxious selves
     Like dusty pots on dusty shelves,
     Are we happy with our lot?
     There was, there was not.
     Out of air I want to pick
     A story that will do the trick
     To show us all how we might praise
     The daily bounty of our days!   

(Narrator mimes using a pick the way the picture and the Stonecutter herself will look. Narrator bends down and brings up a frame from the floor in front of the curtain, in which, at the bottom of the frame space, is a silhouette of the large rock on the left and the Stonecutter in her position with pick raised above her head, bent toward the rock, in the same relationship as will show when curtain opens and actual rock and Stonecutter are shown).

(Narrator holds frame in front of her face as she speaks, and continues to hold the frame in this position even as she walks off stage left when she is done speaking, so that the whole play seems to come out of this frame)

NARRATOR:
     Once upon a time, I mutter,
     Lived a lady Stonecutter
     Who worked at grueling work all day
     For long hours and puny pay.
     Her job: to cut stones from a rock
     With pick and hammer, and to knock
     Small stones into shapes more like bricks
     To make walls of houses, thick
     Or thin, or walls along
     A road you might stroll full of song.
     But this stonecutter’s moans
     Reached the distant-most ozones.
     She wasn’t happy, not at all,
     She whined with every pickax fall,
     She swung and as her pickax struck
     She wailed and wheezed like a pickup truck!

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