(BLACK.)
(Sudden FLASH like a neural network pulse. Red, pink, mauve, fuchsia: they intertwine violently.)
(Beat.)
(The bright contained lights of FIVE COMPUTERS rise on their users, who type in rapid bursts and long pauses.)
(LIGHTS UP. A medium-sized, modern, multi-purpose classroom at Deerfield Academy, a conservative boarding school in Massachusetts. The three walls have whiteboards: Stage Right, with remnant quotes by boring philosophers from the headmaster’s Art of Rhetoric class; Stage Left, with conjugations from the morning’s Introduction to Spanish class; Center, empty for these students, trying to write their first plays.)
(The five typing students sit at a table with dimensions suitable for twenty. All five laptops are stickered.)
(Beginning SR moving clockwise, there is: HEIDI, CHELSEA, MS. LA PUMA, ALY, and WILL. Male, white, here after not getting cast in the play, and after eight months of therapy and sixteen months of suicidal ideation, desperate to exit their despair, writing a strange play called “Them” in which characters are colors reporting on an art exhibit, the artist is an abusive parent, and the art itself magically and inexplicably follows and torments one depressed reporter, Yellow, around the city. WILL writes—)
(YELLOW stares at the audience, then stares straight down, into the abyss below them, below the stage. They lean slightly forward, their foot dangling over the edge like a worm in the beak of a bird, trying to escape, yearning for the outside but unable to reach it.)
(In its blunt over-lyricism, this stage-direction, from Yellow’s suicide-attempt climax, reflects the overall tone. WILL is recently out as nonbinary and, entirely convinced they are romantically unlovable, identifies as asexual and aromantic to justify this belief and to protect themself. These identities, along with their depression, underlie this play.)
(Sudden FLASH: lights like a neural network pulse. Red, pink, mauve, fuchsia; they intertwine violently.)
(We see their writing process through movement, moving back and forth between the front of the stage and the table.)
(Fifty pages into writing the script, WILL treats the front of the stage as a forty-foot ledge and considers jumping. They do not, because they knock over a cup and realize if they fall, they will not die.)
(Sixty pages in, WILL talks with MS. LA PUMA after workshop about their script. Tears brim. She notices, and does not comment, but her eyes soften and questions grow kinder. WILL is profoundly grateful to MS. LA PUMA in that moment, and remains so. She sees their soul and briefly cradles it, which WILL dearly craves but could never bring themself to ask for.)
(At house, in their mother’s rocking chair, WILL writes the final scene, in which Yellow sits on a chair set stage center and addresses the audience as if they were their therapist while two other colors climactically break up. WILL cries after each page.)
(It is only later—after the staged reading in which friends read all their characters, and after talking to their therapist about the whole situation—that WILL realizes they have written a psychodrama. That they have pulled apart their mind’s threads and made them dance on the page for study. That in lieu of speaking their pain, they needed to write them.)
(Sudden flash: lights like a neural network pulse. Blue, green, navy, teal: harmony begins.)
(HOUSE LIGHTS UP, but the show continues.)
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