The Star Rover by Kim Jackson

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This Play is the copyright of the Author and may not be performed, copied or sold without the Author's prior consent

Darrell Standing stands on chair centre stage.

DARRELL: All my life I have had the awareness of other times and
places. I have been aware of other persons in me. Oh and trust me,
so have you. You have forgotten much and yet you remember dimly the
hazy vistas of other worlds. They seem dreams to you today. Yet, if
they were dreams, whence the substance of them? Our dreams are
grotesquely compounded of the things we know. The stuff of our
sheerest dreams is the stuff of our experience. But as a child you
dreamed you fell great heights, you dreamed you flew through the air
as things of the air fly; you were vexed by crawling spiders and many
legged creatures of the slime; you heard other voices, saw other faces
nightmarishly familiar, and gazed upon sunrises and sunsets other than
you know now, looking back, you ever looked upon. From whence these
child glimpses of other worldness? Perhaps when you have heard all I
have to recount you will have answers to the perplexities I have
propounded to you.

Wordsworth knew. He was not seer nor prophet, but just ordinary man
like you. What he knew, you know and any man knows, "Our birth is
but a sleeping and a forgettingShades of the prison house begin to
close upon the growing boy"

I have forgotten much. I have sat in the halls of Kings, above the
salt and below the salt, been fool and jester, man at arms, clerk and
monk. I have worn the iron collar of the serf about my neck in cold
climes. I have loved princesses of royal houses in the tropic warmed
and sun scented nights.

I have forgotten much and so have you my friends

You too have been sailor, scholar and recluse. You have striven on
forgotten battle fields of the elder days. You! At giddy mast heads
oscillating above the decks ships. You! Toiled beyond the end of the
day among the vines and olives and drove in from pastures the bleating
goats and lowing kine.

He is hit from behind.
AV FX The pictures are frozen. The music stops. Silence. Darkness.

He is dragged into the Warden's office, he is beaten by the Guard
and Captain of the Yard. The Warden watches, he is examined between
beatings by the Doctor. A beating that is systematic, repetitious and
violent.

Back in the cell

DARRELL: I am Darrell Standing and as you can see I am an
incorrigible. Soon I will be taken from this place and hanged. For
what need not concern you, except that the hanging is not for the
crime that brought me here for that murder I was guilty, yes, but
it was not a capital offence.

And they think that I hold information that I do not have. That they
waste their time with their fists, with their jacket you shall soon
learn in such abundance.

He is suddenly hit from behind, in the small of the back.
On the edge of the light appear the Warden and Doctor.
Lights change to office.

AV FX The following scene is top and tailed by images and sounds of a
chair breaking under strain.

The Guard and Captain move in suddenly, pick him and smash him back
into the chair. They do this several times until the chair breaks or
becomes much weaker. The prisoner is half conscious.

WARDEN: Now, tell me all about it Standing. If you know what's
healthy for you, you'll spit it out.

DARRELL: I don't know anything of what has happened

They smash him again into the chair.

WARDEN: No nonsense Standing. Make a clean breast of it. Where is
the dynamite?

DARRELL: I don't know anything of any dynamite.

WARDEN: We know, we know, we've been informed. We know you were at
the heart of it. Come on. We could end this now. You can drink, eat,
sleep. Just tell us what you know.

DARRELL: I don't know anything of any dynamite.

He is repeatedly smashed into the chair until it breaks.

He is dragged back into the cell.

DARRELL: I am Darrel Standing. I am neither fool nor lunatic. But I
am an incorrigible. That they waste their time you shall soon learn.
For life persists, it is the thread of fire that persists through all
modes of matter. Life cannot be explained in intellectual terms
matter is mere illusion. It is life that is the reality and the
mystery. I know. I have lived ten thousand generations. I have
possessed many bodies. I, the possessor of these many bodies, have
persisted. I am life.

WARDEN: We know, we know, we've been informed. We know you were at
the heart of it. Come on. We could end this now. Just come across with
the dynamite.

DARRELL: I don't know anything of any dynamite.

He is jacketed. A light comes up on Philadelphia Red in an adjoining
cell.

Darrell screaming.

RED: Shut up. You make me tired

DARRELL: I'm dying

RED: No you're not it just feels like it. Is you heart
thumping?

DARRELL: Yes!

RED: Do your lungs feel as if they are unable to draw enough air for
your blood?

DARRELL: Yes!

RED: D'ya feel like you'll suffocate and that every thump of
your heart will burst your already bursting lungs?

DARRELL: Yes!

RED: And a sharp pain that stabs through you very heart?

DARRELL: Yes!

RED: Well welcome to the jacket. Now stop your hollering it only
makes it worse. Pound your ear and forget it soon enough a
tingling numbness will set in it starts with pins and needles like
prickling darts and then just the numbness remains.

DARRELL: But I am dying.

RED: Then why worry? You'll be dead pretty quick an out of it. Go
ahead and croak, but don't make such a noise about it. You're
interrupting my beauty sleep. I ain't more happy than you. My
jacket's just as tight as yourn, an' I want to sleep and forget
it.

DARRELL: How long have you been in?

RED: Since day before yesterday

DARRELL: I mean in the jacket?

RED: Since day before yesterday brother.

DARRELL: My God!

RED: Yes brother, fifty straight hours and you don't hear me
raisin a roar about it. They cinched me with their feet in my back. I
am some tight, believe me. You ain't the only one that's got
troubles. You ain't bin in an hour yet.

DARRELL: I've been in hours.

RED: Brother, you may think so, but it don't make it so. I'm
just telling you you ain't ben in an hour. I heard 'm lacin you.

DARRELL: How much longer are they going to keep you in?

RED: The Lord only knows. The Captain is real peeved with me an he
won't let me out until I'm about croakin. Now brother, I'm
going to give you the tip. The only was is shut your face and forget
it. Yelling and hollering don't win you no money in this joint.
Just get to remembering every girl you ever knew. That'll eat up
hours for you. Mebbe you'll feel yourself getting woozy. Well, get
woozy. You can't beat that for killing time. An' when the girls
won't hold you, get to thinking of the fellows you got it in for, an
what you'd do to 'em when you get that same chance.

Time passes.
The Captain begins to release Standing from the jacket.
Standing is released.

Well brother, you're still alive an kickin

CAPTAIN: Shut up you Red.

RED: Forget it.

CAPTAIN: I'll get you yet Red.

RED: Think so? Why you old stiff, you couldn't get nothing. You
couldn't get a free lunch, much less the job you got now if it
wasn't for your brother's pull. And I guess we all ain't
mistaking on the stink of the place where your brother's pull comes
from Well so long brother. Be good an love the warden. And if you
see 'em just tell em that you saw me but that you didn't see me
saw."

In cell

DARRELL: I emerged from that jacketing with a bitterness and
passionate hatred that has only increased through the years. Twenty
four hours in the jacket! Little I thought that morning when they
kicked me to my feet that the time would come when twenty four hours
in the jacket meant nothing; when a hundred hours in the jacket found
me smiling when they released me; when two hundred and forty hours
found the same smile on my lips. Ten days and ten nights in the
jacket. Of course such things are not done anywhere in the Christian
world nineteen hundred years after Christ. I don't ask you to
believe me. I don't believe it myself. I merely know that it was
done to me and that I learned to laugh at them. And how did I come to
be tortured in such a way? I have said that I was an incorrigible.
That I freely admit I was. But I was apparently guilty of other crimes
while in solitary, while in the jacket, while skin and bone and
beaten.

Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel. The men
over me from the warden down were stupid monsters.

Ladies and Gentlemen, 'The Dynamite'.

Lights on front of stage.
A dumb show

There was a poet in the prison, a convict, a weak chinned, broad
browed degenerate poet. He was a forger, he was a coward, he was a
snitcher, he was a stool. His name was Cecil Winwood and he was a
snivelling cur of a yellow dog.

In order to curry favour with the board of pardons and prison
directors, Cecil framed up a prison break. He approached the lifers
with his plan. They laughed. He approached them again and again.
"Show me how" they said. "Talk is cheap. Show us and we'll
talk business with you. Prove it by doping Barnum." Cecil needed
time to steal dope from the dispensary of which he had the run and a
week later he administered it to the guard on duty, Barnum.

Forty hard bitten lifers waited and watched Barnum go to sleep on his
shift and that was proof enough to convince the lifers but there was
also the Captain of the Yard to convince.

"Tonight" Winwood told the Captain "Summerface will bring in a
dozen 44 automatics for the prison break and he will turn them over to
me in the bakery". On that particular night in the bakery a big,
solid, paper wrapped bundle of innocent tobacco was delivered to
Winwood. The Captain, in hiding, saw the package delivered and
assumed it to be the automatics as Winwood had said.

But now to the stupid, silly melodramatic slip from Cecil Winwood
when he encounters the Captain of the yard. He was triumphant. His
imagination took the bit in its teeth.

CAPTAIN: Well the stuff came in all right as you said.

WINWOOD: And enough of it to blow the prison sky high.

CAPTAIN: Enough of what?

WINWOOD: Dynamite and detonators your stool saw Summerface pass
it over to me.

CAPTAIN: Where is it now? I want it take me to it at once!

DARRELL: And right there Cecil Winwood saw his mistake.

WINWOOD: I planted it, along with Darrell Standing, but he must
have moved it!

He points at Standing.

DARRELL: So I was named as the one who had helped hide the
non-existent thirty five pounds of high explosive. Cecil Winwood was
guilty of a slip that gave me five years of solitary confinement.

Lights change to indicate cell. They exit.

Solitary.

Lights change

It was very lonely. The hours were long. Time was marked by the
regular changing of the guard, and by the alternation of day and
night. In solitary the day was an ooze, a slimy seepage of light from
the bright outer world.

I was ever an active man, with an active brain. Sleep had always been
a burden and an inconvenience to me.

But I learnt the art of sleeping. First 5 hours, which was my habit,
then six, eight, twelve and eventually I managed fifteen out of the
twenty-four. I cultivated sleep.

Time.
Sleep.

Beyond 15 I could not go, so I would lie awake and think, and think.
And that way lies madness. But I was not to go mad, previously, I had
been a scientist, an agronomist and soon I applied a scientific mind.

Time.
Images/sounds of experiments.

I ran and re-ran my experiments in pentose and methyl-pentose
determination in grapes and wines. I worked on the detection of
phytosteral in mixtures of animal and vegetable fats. I thought on my
theory of the hydrolysis of casein by trypsin.

Time.
Images of figures.

I tried to square the circle. I squared and cubed long series of
numbers, and by concentration and will carried on most astonishing
geometric progressions.

Time.
Chess.

I played chess. By visualisation I constructed chess boards and
played both sides of long games to checkmate. I tried and tried vainly
to split my personality into two and to pit one against the other.
But ever I remained the one player with no planned ruse or strategy on
one side that the other side did not simultaneously apprehend. And so
it palled on me.

Time.
A fly buzz.

I played games with the ten or so flies that I shared my cell with,
and I learned that they possessed a sense of play. For instance, lying
on the cell floor, I established an arbitrary and imaginary line along
the wall some three feet above the floor. When they rested on the wall
above this line they were left in peace. The instance they lighted on
the wall below the line I tried to catch them. When they desired to
play they lighted below the line and often for a hour at a time a
single fly would engage in the sport. When it grew tired it would come
to rest in the safe territory above. Believe me I knew all the flies,
the nervous one, the phlegmatic one, even the grouchy one who refused
to indulge me in my exercises in territorial stratagems. There was the
little undersized one that would fly into real rages, sometimes with
me, sometimes with his fellows.

But flies are flies and I was a man with a man's brain, stuffed
with culture and science and always geared to a high tension of
eagerness to do. And there was nothing to do.

And the hours were long. And time was very heavy. And the world was
dead to me.

And yet not all was silence in solitary.

Sound: The noise of the prison

And yet all was not silence in solitary.

Early in my confinement I would hear faint low tappings. From further
away more low tappings. The snarling guard would interrupt them. On
occasion when the tappings were too persistent I knew by the sounds
that the men that tapped were being straightjacketed.

So here was knuckle-talk, and I knew as every other prisoner knew
that the two men in solitary were Ed Morrell and Jake Oppenheimer. And
I knew that these were the two men who tapped knuckle-talk to each
other and were punished for so doing.

I devoted many of my long hours to breaking the code. That it was
simple I had no doubt and yet it alluded me.

Sounds of knuckles on pipes

At first I could not make head nor tail of it. But simple it proved
to be, when I learned it and simplest of all proved the trick they had
employed which had so baffled me. Not only each day did they change
the point in the alphabet where the code initialled, but they changed
it every conversation, and often in the midst of a conversation.

Thus, there came a day when I caught the code at the right initial,
listened to two clear sentences of conversation and at the next time
they talked, failed to understand a word!

But the first time!

'Say Ed what would you give right now
for brown papers and sack of Bull Durham?'

Asked the one who tapped from further away.

I nearly cried with joy. Here was communication! Here was
companionship! I listened eagerly, and the nearer tapping, which I
guessed must be Ed Morrell's, replied:

'I would do twenty hours straight in - the
jacket for a five cent sack '

Then came the snarling interruption of the guard.

GUARD: Cut that out, Morrell!'

DARRELL: When the tapping resumed I was all at sea again. They had
changed the initial letter of the code. But I had caught the clue and
a number of days the same initial occurred again and I did not wait on
courtesy.

'Hello' I tapped

'Hello stranger' Morrell tapped back 'welcome to our city'.

He is dragged back to The Jacket.
Warden addresses Standing from front of stage.

WARDEN: Standing you're going to come across with that dynamite,
or I'll kill you in the jacket. Harder cases than you have come
across before I got done with them. You've got your choice
dynamite or curtains.

DARRELL: Then I guess its curtains because I don't know of any
dynamite.

WARDEN: These lean college guys 'd fool the devil. They're
tougher 'n raw hide. Just the same we'll wear him down. Standing,
you hear me. What you've got ain't a caution to what you're going
to get. You might as well come across now and save trouble. I'm a
man of my word. You've heard me say dynamite or curtains. Well
that stands. Take your choice."

DARRELL: Surely you don't think I'm holding out because I enjoy
it? There is nothing to confess. Why I'd cut off my right hand
right now to be able to lead you to any dynamite.

WARDEN: Why, I've seen your educated kind before. You get wheels
in your head, some of you that make you stick to any old idea. You get
baulky like horses. Tighter, that ain't half a cinch. Standing, if
you don't come across its curtains. I stick by that.

He is placed in the jacket.

Images of many cinchings.

Back in cell. Out of jacket.

Knuckle talk..

MORRELL: Think it is curtains?

DARRELL: It looks like it. They will get me if they keep it up much
longer.

MORRELL: Don't let them. There is a way. I learned it myself, down
in the dungeons, when Massie and I got ours good and plenty. I pulled
through but Massie croaked. If I hadn't learned the trick, I'd have
croaked along with him. You've got to be pretty weak first, to try it.
If you try it when you are strong, you make a failure of it, and that
queers you for ever after. I made the mistake of telling Jake the
trick when he was strong. He couldn't pull it off, and in the times
since when he did need it, it was too late, for his failure had
queered it. He won't even believe it now. He thinks I am kidding him,
ain't that right Jake?

JAKE: Don't swallow it, Darrell. It's a true fairy story.

DARRELL: Go on and tell me.

[end of extract]

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