HISTORIAN

(While the HISTORIAN speaks, the member of the queue who will later play the part of Dr. Meiko Koyama is on stage, as a ghost-like presence, and performs the beginning of this Kata in slow motion. The HISTORIAN performs these same motions as he delivers his lines.)

In karate, the Kata Kanku-Dai, meaning Humility, begins with the hands joined just below the waist, in an inverted triangle pointing downward — from the sonshe, the center of energy, to the ground. From this position, slowly, they rise, one with the intake of breath — a gathering of force that moves slowly upward across the body until the triangle, now turned upward, forms an apex a foot above the eyes. Which look out, in darkness visible, awaiting the Sun, the red cauldron of dawn — the source of light and of the energy that gives us being. Dawn bursts and the triangle breaks as the sensei draws that energy inward in a wide sweep of the arms outward and down — gathering everything in a great sweep back into the center of self, the sonshe. Kata is a moving Zen — the highest form of meditation, of mind cleansing, in karate. It is also a fight to the Death.

(long pause, then continues)

Imagine a great sensei performing Kanku-Dai at precisely 8:14:32 a.m. in Hiroshima city on August 6, 1945 — opening his entire being to a light not of this world, brighter than a thousand stars. Could that perfect Master gather that energy within — if only for a millisecond — contract it to one's own point of greatest density — then explode outward in one great burst — toward you . . .

(Dr. Koyama repeats the first two movements of the Kata during this — directing some of the last movements toward TIBBETS, some toward the audience. Now, to himself, the HISTORIAN speaks the following — in the deepest state of meditation and choice — but also as a question and overture to the audience.)

You must become Orpheus — rent, lost, wandering in fragments of your own dismembered flesh.

(Music: Beethoven's Fidelio begins, the song of the prisoners as they return from the dungeon to the light of the Sun. This is then abruptly interrupted by the return of Penderecki's Threnody: For the Victims of Hiroshima once the Hibakusha have assembled and next scene begins. Here the Historian starts to move as if to become one with the Hibakusha sculpture but then realizes he cannot. He then does the next best thing — bows to them in formal style, as one does at the end of a Kata. All lights down except on Hibakusha tableau, but no movement yet.)

(BLACKOUT)

(END OF SCENE)

Scene 3

SETTING:  Same as previous scene.

AT RISE:  Dim lights come up slowly and hold until the first words of dialogue, at which time a blinding light floods the stage.

(Music: Penderecki's Threnody: For the Victims of Hiroshima should be played so as to coincide with the Hibakusha sculpture and butoh movements. As queue members give the six descriptive speeches that follow, they move from the fixed positions they have been holding and move center stage where each descends in turn to the ground, thus welded together to form a tortured sculpture that must suggest the Laöcoon in its nuclear metamorphosis. All motion by the members of the queue throughout the following scenes must be executed with gravity, slowness, and grace — as close as possible to the movement of Butoh dancers. Music: From here on, all music — with four brief exceptions — is Japanese, alternating between Kodo music (taiko drums) and Shakuhachi (Japanese flute). The six queue members again become VOICES in this act in a collective chorus, that of the Hibakusha. VOICES should be assigned at the director's discretion, though the desirability of some specific assignments are indicated at appropriate spots below. The intention in assigning parts and VOICES should be to map out an agon each actor must go through in experiencing Hiroshima — analogous to the series of transformations they have had to internalize to reach this point. Once they become the Hibakusha, this process becomes radicalized, of course, and insofar as the actors also represent "the audience," the effort to "signal through the flames" offers each actor a complex opportunity and challenge. One of the queue members, preferably the one who played TRUMAN in Act I, leaves the stage here to return later as DR. KOYAMA, a composite character based on books by several physicians who were in Hiroshima and who wrote reports of their experience. The HISTORIAN's participation in this act must be performed in terms of the through-line, which extends from his desire to become Orpheus and merge with the Hibakusha to the action he performs at the end of the play. In subsequent developments, the tangled mass the queue here forms stirs into "life," as the actors mime the various actions invoked in their following speeches. Figures emerge singly from the tangle of the mass, speak, and are re-assimilated into the oneness. The horror of Hiroshima must be that there is no appeal to individuation. In subsequent scenes they will move out from this collective body and act, in narrative blocks that have the logic of the dream, of a nightmare passage through this inferno, which also traces a chronology that moves from the pika-don to October and the Occupation. The HISTORIAN's speeches bring another presence to bear on these events: Through a pattern of allusions, images, and interventions, he strives to make the experience of the Hibakusha accessible to a Western audience as he internalizes it for his own "peculiar" end.)

VOICE 1
At approximately 1,850 feet, almost directly above the Shima Hospital, it burst — the pika-don: light become sound. A clap of thunder, brighter than a thousand stars. At that instant, the temperature is superstellar — 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit. At ground-zero the pressure a million times normal atmospheric.

(pause)

Vaporization was instantaneous for approximately 20,000 souls.

VOICE 2
Then the fire-ball — raging, rising in seconds to 20,000 feet with a blinding light . . .

VOICE 3
In its wake, the thermal pulse: Energy re-radiated in a wave of blinding light and intense heat moving out from the center. As it burns, the fireball rises, condensing water from the atmosphere into the mushroom cloud which, in its rising, fuses everything sucked up into it, creating that fine radioactive dust that will descend back to the earth within a day, blown by prevailing winds.

VOICE 4
One half-hour after the blast, everything swirls together into a fire storm that lasts six hours. Simultaneously, at 9:00 that morning, and lasting until late afternoon, large drops of black rain, full of radioactive waste, fall like ink spots on the survivors. Midday, and lasting for four hours, a violent whirlwind tears through the city uplifting the remaining trees and hurling them back like arrows to the ground.

VOICE 5
Those who survived found that where one second before the blast a city, alive, was readying itself for business, there was now everywhere shadows etched in stone, charred corpses heaped together, amid the howl of those trapped, buried alive, delivered to the flames that swept down upon them.

HISTORIAN ¹⁴

(From this point forward in Act II, boldfacing of the HISTORIAN'S dialogue indicates those moments when he has become part of the chorus of VOICES, speaking from a space that is both within and outside the actor.)

Those not permitted to die became walking ghosts, born into a new experience: death-in-life, the state of "suicides who failed" and now live on, condemned to walk in "death's dream kingdom."

(A voice from the queue raises head and speaks the following. BLACKOUT as she descends.)

VOICE 6
. . . when I looked up . . . it was like a huge bubble and inside it a great and angry eye staring at me.

(BLACKOUT)

(END OF SCENE)

ENDNOTES TO THE PLAY:

14. Most of the historian's lines in the Hiroshima scenes are built from a texture of allusions. Here to Lifton's Death in Life yoked to Eliot's The Hollow Men. The historian's effort, as in The Waste Land, is to make an entire culture — in traumatic memory — present to the Event.