Before They Were Night Vale: Stage Direction Poems

Welcome to "Before They Were Night Vale", our feature in which Night Vale creators Jeffrey and Joseph share writing from before their Welcome to Night Vale collaboration, along with commentary. Come explore their early writing, both good and bad.

When I first moved to New York, I quickly fell in with the downtown experimental theater scene. It was a great scene for learning how to write quickly, to try new ideas and techniques, and to abandon those ideas and techniques just as quickly if they weren't working. I feel like I basically got a degree in theater, just by spending all of my time hanging out with theater makers, most of whom were quite a bit older than me.

Around the same time, I started writing poetry more. I thought maybe I could be a poet. Most of the poems were not good. Or, they had their moments, but they were let down by the usual things that let down the work of a white cis-dude writer in his early 20s: they were self-important and often weirdly horny.

These poems below were written 11 years ago, when I was 24. They exist in a Word document on my computer just labeled "stage directions". These poems represent my attempt to combine the two types of writing I was interested in at the time. They are structured like the short plays that all of my new friends were constantly writing. But they were intentionally designed so that the stage directions would be impossible, or contradictory, or just nonsensical. I wanted to know what happened if you wrote plays that could never be performed.

The result is still a little self-important, but at least they weren't weirdly horny. Please imagine me at my desk at a prepaid debit card company, still a newcomer to New York, desperate to make something worth reading, and trying quite earnestly to create Good Art. 

-Joseph Fink

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stage direction poems

May 12, 2010

1

[The man exits.]

[A member of the audience rises and takes the mic.]

I guess.

I guess I’ll say something then.

so.

we seem to have gone off script.

the audience is engulfed with laughter.

[the audience is engulfed with laughter. A woman suffers a stroke.]

my tempo has been off lately.

I shower too fast, I eat too slow,

and my heart beats faster when I see things that include,

but are not limited to,

among other things,

you.

[the audience is engulfed in flames. the audience is engulfed in water. the audience is engulfed in darkness. the audience engulfs the stage. they begin to riot. they run screaming from the theater, except the stroke victim who is unable to move. the man enters. he stands, at center.]

2

[crosses to stage right]

my head has too much hair.

my voice has too much treble.

[crosses to stage left.]

my eyes contain too much you, in general, given the spectrum of the average day.

[crosses to stage right]

I own too many things. I want to own more things

I do not own you and I do not want to.

[crosses eyes]

That’s when I became convinced I would die in a plane crash

I wouldn’t of course. I’d die of cancer. Or not. Something else, maybe.

Choking on a slice of pizza. Run over by a car. Or in a plane crash. Who knows?

3

[The stage is empty.]

I would like to have made a window.

to have cut with tools a hole in wood,

and then fitted and installed glass.

instead I try to think of another word for “boring”,

or a gentle way to say “you are boring.”

if I had made a window,

with tools and glass and wood,

I could have waved goodbye to you from inside a house

and you would have been outside the house

and I would have never let you in in the first place.

[The stage is still empty]

I would have stained the window with fingerprints,

if I had made a window.

you could have studied how my palm looks through glass

on the other side, and only on the other side,

on my lawn of my house on the property of my patience,

a property that you are exiting, quickly, that you are quickly running out of.

[Empty, at center stage.]

[Empty exits.]