The play is set in the house
of Dada artist Kurt Schwitters in Hannover, Germany, in 1919. The stage is essentially bare except
for a strange white column, rather ramshackle in appearance, and apparently
made mostly of wood and plaster.
The column—which fills the room it is in—features a good many apertures,
concavities and hollows, all of which hold, for Schwitters, a tender and
archival purpose.
When the play opens,
Schwitters is talking with Richard Huelsenbeck, one of the founders of the Dada
movement, now so noisily flowering at the Café Voltaire in Zurich. We can hear both men, Schwitters and
Huelsenbeck, but they remain offstage where we cannot see them. All we can see is the column.
Huelsenbeck: But why
a tower?
Schwitters: I refer
to it as a column.
Huelsenbeck: And here in your house!
Schwitters: Where
else should I build it?
H: At the rate you’re constructing it, the column will
take over everything! Pretty soon
there’ll be no space left for your wife or son.
S: That’s what they say too.
H: What is
it for? What’s its true purpose?
S: What
are your antics at the Café Voltaire for? What is your true purpose there?
H: We’re trying to inject some sensibility into an
unfeeling culture that thinks only of money and war.
S: Well, me
too.
H: But we are expansive, raucous, highly public. Your column is mute, secretive,
impassive, internal. It speaks
only to itself.
S: Oh
no. It speaks to me as well. And it’s useful. I store things in it. It has pockets and cavities and caves into
which I place memorial things…
H: What sort of memorial things?
S: Oh, letters, talismanic objects, lengths of bone and hanks
of hair. You can give me something
for it if you like.
H: But
nobody will ever see your project—unless you invite them here to your house, as
you have me.
S: That’s
fine. A few people are enough.
H: Does it have a title?
S: The
Cathedral of Erotic Misery.
H: Catchy.
S: It’s not
really true though.
H: I’m very glad to hear it!
S: Yes, the waves of its misery spread way beyond the
erotic.
(curtain)
