The Dying Joke

(Note: The actors, while they are not speaking, should appear posed, rigid, as if they were ice-sculptures or cold forms and shapes. While they speak, the actors should appear to break their forms with eccentric gestures. In fact, the gestures should appear so eccentric so as to seem obviously contrived. And these contrived or eccentric gestures should eventually in the course of the play appear as simply another kind of form or shape: a form in motion or, more simply, a pattern.)

(No set, white light throughout.)

(The three characters stand as if on the points of some triangle on the stage.)

(All speeches are directed to the audience. In other words, each character is in some sense a narrator.)

(David: stage center; Cain: stage right.)

DAVID (a student): Nothing so good and/or sensuous.

Nothing hits the spot of the flesh’s taste like a thorough back-rub.

Another’s hands, shoulders, wired-fingers unseen across the back’s flesh, into the back’s bones and fibered muscles. Her hands soothingly rippling some skin as if some wind across some sea, and pushing the waves deeper and deeper into the body, past the slimy roots of hairs, deeper and deeper, through the canals of the body where boats and gondolas are stroked by, farther and deeper until being stopped by a bone (in which case her hands leave and begin anew somewhere else) or by muscle-strings, compressed little threads which are so jumbled together that they appear one jumbo thread, in which case her hands cling as with teeth to the muscle, twisting and turning out contortions, using fingers, and knuckles, and dirty nails, and the palms which are leathery, tough, a genetic cross between scales and hide, and even using vibrations to wrestle the muscles down and to once again level out the flesh, the skin, the deep-diving wrinkles.

I appear stretched out, bare and innocent, lamb-like so immaculately unpretentious, as if under some sub-terranean palm, within a grove of sweet-smelling palm trees; and her digits are crawling over this, me, scooting down from the tree, slim and serpentine; she shimmers off the bark over me, my flesh, and through it all.

Her left hand begins two inches above my buttocks on my left side, chewing my flesh as if some jaw, opening and closing, grabbing and nibbling mounds and pounds of me, pulling folds of me as if by hooks to two, three inches away from my body’s warmth, then cramming it back deeper and deeper toward the muscle. This she does for about thirty strokes, and without, I am sure, ever watching what she is doing: all this coming quite naturally: the hand as a jaw is an innate configuration. Her right hand gnaws the right side of me.

Up the slopes of the torso, periodically digging in as if for some fight or epic battle, then lunging out and forward and up the slopes for arm-to-arm combat. Thumbs from nowhere, maybe hung from strings and only now being pulled and played, plunk against the spine, engendering a cool chill down my back: one part relaxing, one part sensuous. A growth into mountain ranges of goose bumps.

Either my neck or my legs are next, though I like it when my legs with their adjacent thighs are last, for this I savor the most. My head and brain get treated sometimes with the neck, and my buttocks sometimes with the legs and thighs.

She ends with her hands tight and cupped, whacking me with the sides of her hands, beating me as one might beat any old object one wishes to beat: the rhythmics of beating increasing all over, and while I cringe she stops. She an old fish-wife by the river; I, her pile of dirty laundry.

And currents of air set in across the flesh, over the mountains of spine, the hills of the waist, until I am feeling her hands as mine. My hands become hers, and hers mine, as if some mystical unity, Sufi or whatnot, were clasping us together. I at once beat myself and enjoy myself: famished, starving, devouring my own tail to quench my hunger and to kill my hunger pains.

This is my vision: the paradox of lethargy and ecstasy, a bliss which resembles the opening lines not of an epic with the calling forth of gods, heroes, great holy men, no such coronet fanfare now, but of an expressionistic tale — all delicacy, but like a waif, with feelings of bits, fragments, spottiness, and emptiness.

CAIN (a dog): Today a professor died. Or was it yesterday, I can’t remember. I can recall when I heard the news: my hair bristled, being in the cross currents of wind and in the patches of sun which pop hither-thither on the shadowed and iced snow of these three slothful months — around, me circumambulating, a sonorous yet spellbinding panorama — iced fingered pointing downward hailing no chimed hope, covering and implanting themselves upon the cold and symmetrical angles of stone buildings; very often snow jumped off the rooftops following the direction of the pointing fingers, falling deeper and farther, as if some muscular someone somewhere had started to push, and as if the icicles, because they aimed downwards, kept our attention away from the muscular pusher; and the paths which had run in every direction to all corners, where man had laughed from the tops of his toes until he cried, the paths were blown apart and buried, as if man’s tears could ever be lost like an early morning dew. Endless puffs of fog from my mouth marked the time and my incessant rustling; such as I recall was my place with all its veils and womanish vagary, for the setting was like a woman to my imagination; here my hair bristled from the cold, from the bitch I was copulating with in the quadrangle, from the news of a professor’s death.

Such was my position inside my bitch on the quadrangle under the winter’s sun’s blaze and soundless snowfall: snow like microscopic grains of corn swirled in patterns which to an outsider, a stranger, that man who is alone must seem 1) beautiful, and 2) foreboding.

DAVID (he is walking in place for a minute): I walk on the pathways of the college today with my boney- and brain-tendered head buried low, and with a cold heart because I have chosen to end my first love affair, to never see the woman I will always love ever again, and because a professor who once smiled to me had died.

I walk first with my right foot, then with my other foot, a dreaded and dragged out march like that of a mutilated foot-soldier: who having lost not only most of his toes at the toe hair-line, but like some vulture-eaten god had lost or had removed a fair-sized chunk of flesh off his flank and back-side, and who now looks neither crippled, nor an idiot, but only like a man leaning heavily forward, anxiously reaching for some goal or finish-line or like an excited child finding a quarter on the street.

I walk with an appearance that is neglected, as a ghostly and aimless figure, drifting or just about crawling with the many paths, posed as a status for the mutually miserable. Leering as if in some Danish castle from the torrents and into the winds. Others may have, but I will not curse my fate.

I walk in tattered and stained newly become rags strung loosely together across my chest and loins: becoming my appearance. In such a get-up, I approach her on the quadrangle. I looked cold, she said, and she as a mother or wife for a moment tried to button me up.

I walk to and fro with her paw-like hands on the buttons of my rag-a-muffin frock. We must look from a distance like one strange animal, almost beast, devouring itself without a struggle, or as two animals sensuously engaged. I cannot decide which we look like, though I lean toward the latter.

We walked after meeting, quite by accident or fate I thought, though she said that I had said to meet her here. I could not remember saying anything of the kind. We talked, I talked as a ruffian, almost as a slob, with my gut in my throat. She talked effortlessly. I said, I wanted to end this, and I said, I wanted to be the one who said I wanted to end this. She did not cry. That of course surprised the hell out of me.

I walk without thinking, without noticing the snow swirling through my naked hair, seeing my figure clearly, leering at the body’s forms and its evil which grabs me like fetters, and grabs my arms and pulls inward, inside where all is unruly fear, bubbling pools and arching labyrinths, inside to this nether world of evil and flux. I say, we must go and see for ourselves; I will lead you by the hand, I say, here take my hand as a child, and we will walk as on cobbled stones through the evil I have in mind.

SOLOMON (he enters from stage left; he is a professor and wears angel-wings): I am the professor, and the professor has died. We will spend our time today eulogizing the professor.

We first learn of Solomon, our dead teacher, as a young man, later as an older man, and finally as a very old man with strings of grey hair like those of a lute and pock-marks as big as dimples. And it is as a very old man that he died.

He lived in a land, not unlike most lands, where today we can still see the arches of ancient buildings, where the vegetation is as thick as bees. In fact, his land abounds with colorful growths, though not very many flowers: multi-colored leaves subbing for a wide variety of gory petals. And the leaves abound everywhere. Nature herself seems perpetually engendered, and bathed in sweet smells. The people here compliment Nature’s color-spectrum with wild clothes done in stripes and pleats, and stand posed as if on a medieval tapestry. All men wear hats, except when talking to the women who wear shawls like that of the Virgin Mary.

Solomon sits today perched above the college, wrapped in angel-wings which look similar to the average snowflake, immune from the cold and the elements of other kinds, finally left alone with his thinking, absolutely shielded from his thoughts: a stance or seated-position he often approached in life.

While we stand here sending him up thoughts from our remembrances and trying to say A) how he died, and B) how he lived. And we must remember that we speak our thoughts under his presence and from memory.

It is said for example that he died of piles, of an incurable itch, and that he never longed for evil or good, and questioned neither: that he lived only normatively.

Others have claimed a resemblance to St. Edmund, our holy blissful martyr, and view his death as being conspired by a heathen army.

Both hypotheses will be discussed at length as we unwind our story, and eventually we will be dealing very closely with the allusion of the latter, questioning the symbolism inherent in it.

He had a wife or the wife had him, was the way he liked to say it as a joke to irritate his wife, he’d say, I have a wife or the wife has me.

The wife wears robes of silk with great wide sleeves, a necklace of gold coins, ancient and collector’s items, and a belt of the same sort, though with a chain that dangles to her hips. Her hair is stringy and like straw now, though her face has remained cold, and unmarked, or weathered.

So in summary, we need to recall that it is the subtlety of his nature which we wish to explore, and it is this essential paradox that defines his nature: he had a wife, he is a professor, and he is dead.

CAIN: “Cain!” the bitch I was copulating with screamed at me, seeming for a moment to be a wife or at least a well-conditioned and very-married lover. She had already initiated a long chase covering the countryside and lasting many restless days, restless because of my chasing and coaxing, her timidity, her coaxing. Yet now when to any casual third-person the hunt would have appeared completed, she, this instinctive bitch, wants the primal chase to keep going, and she screams, “Cain!” from her bowels, loud enough to loosen and deafen the strongest and manliest of canine. “Cain, Cain, Cain!” I keep hearing as if I were holding up my ear to some forbidden key-hole.

Yet I had hunted her as one might hunt for one’s own self. I stalked like a ram after his ewe across a snowed quadrangle, chased not as one might chase a specific white whale, but as one would chase after whales in general, any whale, white or whatnot, with no specific qualifications, simply questing for a satisfaction. And before I chased, I plotted this, my Italian intrigue, veiling it with shadowy mystery:

She had a lover, a warm and much-in-love suitor, whom with lies and whispered hints I convinced was being made a fool of. My laughter done him in: carried his naïve wits to madness, killed his soul with jealousy and pride, twisted every word he spoke around his own black thoughts and called him “fool.” The poor beast rolled over and died in the ice and snow yesterday.

And with this monster tongue that had maddened her fair lover, I charmed the pants off her, and ended my hunt which had covered seven days through desolate country and primal jungles of coldness and sterility and whiteness everywhere blinding my view.

Here my primordial rites for woman stopped with smooth strokes of my tongue battering her heart, and here she lay limp provoking me into my act.

But as all good things must come and pass, she has a mother who had well trained her in the faith of the cult of the womanhead, and she bucked at my provoked and sensual dance, and “Cain” she now bitches incessantly, “Cain, let’s stop,” she whimpers, drawing me back to my eyes and thoughts and out of her sponge, my goal, and telos. And in this position with her bitching, I saw my hairy and naked hide as that of a young lover, still questioning the moral worth of awakening the passions, or as a husband, already used to such bitchery from the wife, already deaf to her meek little-girl cries.

“But Cain, dear,” she bitches, and I watch the angles of our bodies running parallel or perpendicular to the rigid edges of snow and pavement and stone buildings, and I watch the others in the quadrangle waving their arms, moving along, breaking the bleakness of the forms.

A student named David and his love stand near, walk by, and he says as in a dream, “I want to say how I want this to stop.” She buttons up his open coat as if he were her puppy.

Across the first field of whiteness, a professor named Solomon falls head-first into the snow and doesn’t get up. Do I hear a shot from a gun? Do I see a stranger with a curved knife? I cannot recall. But the professor is dead now.

DAVID: I am eternally wandering, like an ancient god pushing a rock up a hill, but without even a rock to judge a moment’s progress, a minute’s passing by, and to be my friend. I have been chased into drifting through a wilderness of frozen figures, cold forms. I am the hunted, the game that has been lost and left for dead in the forest.

I pass an ancient arched building which was built by Solomon. It is made from stone and mortar. The mortar, once heated, has since frozen and stuck to the rock like glue, fixed forever, impenetrable. And I think about her, where we walked and later laid still, silent.

She and her new lover. I go mad. Strike a match in this iced flesh. Burn and rage in the heat of the evil flaming in mind.

But I crawl deeper and deeper into layer after layer of blankness, ready to fall over dead stiff, and melt the ice with suffocation.

My right arm is colder than my left. I think I have been swinging my left arm too much. And my buttocks are still flushed, I imagine, they will be the last of me to whiten and harden crisp.

She and her lover. Her flesh begotten by a mother who too lived for a lover, who has justly left her for another lover.

By these I am hunted, and by these I am forgotten. My wandering increases, not of pace or wandering, only the distance traveled.

I watch now a dog, named Cain, who has the face of a mystic, copulate with his bitch in the quadrangle. He stares up at me. A curious kind of stare, as if I were part of his love-making. I watch with her his sudden scientific jerks, and he watches me with her as she buttons my coat as we talk.

Solomon, the professor, has just died at the other end of the quadrangle. His death-pangs go almost unnoticed as he soon accepts his new frozen form. He has a bad case of piles and was forever falling into the snow, soothing his incurable itch.

SOLOMON: I fell to the earth, dead, right here. I watch the spot from the ruins of an old stone building I built, wearing my angel-wings. Where I fall the ground still shakes. My laugh is the wind’s howl that one hears and feels against his cheek. And my speech is that which engenders the vegetation.

I can watch a young woman with her lover whose name is David, and a young bitch whose lover is called Cain: each pair in various stages of the love-making process. The girl is buttoning David’s sloppy coat, appearing as one silhouetted against the earth; Cain ties his hand at fornication and appears to be succeeding or winning the hand: they, the two dogs, form a cameo against the same ground.

Solomon falls into the snow, becoming dead. His head leads the way with the forehead leading the head; his knees buckle but do not hit the land before his head does. He has fallen before into the snow, but never with such velocity.

His wingless fall recalls to mind the story of the holy martyr, St. Edmund, who refused to submit to a heathen army and who was beheaded in the cause. As has been mentioned, Solomon’s death may have been conspired by a heathen army, dressed in various colorful vestments, carrying spears, and blowing animal horns, as if signaling the end of summer and growth, dancing like satyrs in the woods. And killing Solomon as they would kill the vegetation, beckoning the end of fertilization, and bringing in the cold winter.

The professor’s wife did not watch his death, because she had up and left him. She was later found swooning after a new love, a young buck, engendered with virility, appearing as a potent leaf, a sex-charged twig and told of her husband’s passing.

At that time she recalled almost wistfully that she had told him such would happen, because of, she said, the coming cold and his old age, though he never remembered her saying such a thing. Instead, forever, she will be his spring-maid, milk buckets over her shoulder, rubbing his back after a thoughty day.

CAIN: “Cain.” Once again, I hear her moan, and more than just once again, but non-stop, I over-hear her bitching, “Cain, Cain, let’s stop.” She prays as if still under mother’s influence and manners and as hot fog rolls or spurts out the side of my mouth. “Cain” once more I unmistakably hear, as if now my name had become some magic formula or spell to ward off creatures, and the young-but-in-love such as me.

DAVID: Noiseless sounds of Solomon’s fall echo over the quadrangle: a tree falling alone in the woods, I say or just now recall this similarity. I say, being sucked dry of my hot blood and fervor, being pierced at my side, ready to lie down across iced paths, ready to be trampled upon, to relieve my weighty burden, I say, “once and for all,” anxious to be snapped and cracked, or at least purged of my evil inside and made clean.

SOLOMON: I do not believe that the holy teacher died of piles, though certainly his dying cooled the heels of the incurable itch. Instead, this white-haired teacher of men succumbed and/or gave up this life because of a broken heart.

DAVID: While she talked of her new lover as if he were a robed prophet, I hid my flesh from her sight, frightened I tightened and contracted this body as a monk might bow in front of his holy shrine. But then as a pilgrim I left her, ventured not toward an end or goal, but away from one. Carried my neglected belongings on my back, walked with broken stick in hand: using the staff to calm my shivering. Soon I buried all lust in the snow.

CAIN: I finished with her, and sent the bitch away.

SOLOMON: From above in my light-as-an-angel suit, I have watched my wife, in her red felt dress and sly turns of her head waiting alone in her arbor which had died for the winter. She waits in her ready-to-swoon position for her young buck who has now left her, who has scampered to another, one even younger than himself.

CAIN: I called an end to the hunt, blew the last notes on the horn, so I could be alone with crossed legs to meditate in the white snow. My hair is to be bristled by the elements.

DAVID: I imagine that she explained to me that the new prophet-lover has just left the bed of the professor’s wife, maybe the one who has died, and to her, the wife, he had appeared potent and vibrant.

SOLOMON: So her lover has run away, flitted away into the woods, I imagine, and into the arms and hands of one younger still than he.

I watch him running toward her; his two dogs chasing after him.

CAIN: Meditating now, I can see my little bitch running alongside her mother into the frozen woods where trees bend with gentle curves under the even weight of layered white and large-flaked snow.

DAVID: I imagine she has left me to wait a while for him. She will wait in the forest, where the limbs like arms seem to grab for her.

SOLOMON: He makes almost no sound as he runs through patches of sunlight which are made possible by the openings in the trees. However, the barkings of the two dogs prepare for his coming.

CAIN: She and her mother reach the spot in the woods where a lady stands.

SOLOMON: Following the dogs, the lover reaches the girl.

DAVID: And she must kiss him as she had kissed me. I hope so.

CAIN: Yes, she does, and the bitch jumps up on her leg. The other pushes her off, and pats her on the fanny.

SOLOMON: She blissfully holds his right hand in her left hand.

DAVID: Therefore, the two must be facing together.

CAIN: The bitch sits quietly watching the two kiss. She thinks of me.

DAVID: And she of me while they kiss.

SOLOMON: And the color of their flesh adds a helpful pink tone like that of early spring to the whiteness of the picture.

(Blackout)

(c) R. Nelson 2026

The Theatre Department did not yet exist at Hamilton when Richard Nelson ’72 was a student, so he made his own stage, experimenting through at least 14 plays over four years. After graduating, Nelson received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study playwriting in Manchester, England. Once settled back in the States, he and a few Hamilton friends approached a Philadelphia public radio station about delivering plays over the airwaves. A few years later, Nelson’s plays were being performed in both major theaters and smaller venues across the country, which led to a long-term partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Co. in Warwickshire, England. Also a librettist, Nelson wrote the book for the 2000 Broadway musical James Joyce’s The Dead, for which he won a Tony Award, as well as the book for the 1988 Broadway production of Chess. In recent years, he has directed productions in Kyiv, Ukraine, translated major Russian-language plays into English, and overseen the Rhinebeck Panorama, a 12-play cycle with a 13th installment coming this November. “A play is many, many things,” Nelson says, echoing Shakespeare. “Write what you want to write, not what you feel you should write.