The characters in this
Cezanne-derived play are:
1) A Sphere
2) A Cone
3) A Cylinder
All three of them talk.
SPHERE: Well,
here we are, the three mighty building blocks of the universe!
CONE: According to Cezanne anyhow.
CYLINDER: I
sometimes feel the old man was being perhaps a little hasty when he said that.
CONE: To be strictly correct about it, what he actually
suggested—and he didn’t say it, he wrote it in a letter to a fellow painter—was
that painters ought to “treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere and
the cone.”
SPHERE (a bit crestfallen): Oh. Well,
that’s quite different! “Treat
nature by means of….” That’s
not very grand! I thought he meant
we were the basis of everything!
CYLINDER (brightly):
Well, it’s not so bad, is it?
At least we’re a treat!
CONE: No, not like that. He only meant “treat” as in “contend with,” “carry on with,”
“proceed with.” You see?
SPHERE: Well
that doesn’t leave us much grandeur then.
CONE: No, not a lot.
CYLINDER (ever optimistic): But we are at least building blocks.
SPHERE (resigned):
Only until Albert Einstein comes along.
CONE: How long does that give us?
SPHERE (hastily calculating): Let me see now…oh, about twenty-five years.
CONE (reeling):
I feel faint.
(curtain)
