I Hate Running (or, Death on Stage) — A One-Act Play

The psychedelic era that crystalized in the mid-sixties, when hallucinogenic drugs became broadly accessible, was a period of radical artistic innovation. And yet, in the popular imagination, “psychedelia” conjures little more than Day-Glo mandalas, contorted mushrooms, and “images of young white people dancing lethargically to the Grateful Dead,” as critic Emily Lordi points out in an essay on the underrecognized Black creative leaders of the first psychedelic movement. This is a field broadly centered on the expansion of the mind; meanwhile, the cartoonish version of psychedelic culture we’ve accustomed ourselves to is a cramped corridor. 

Elastic is a new print magazine of psychedelic art and literature interested in taking the walls down. Or, rather, Elastic is interested in demonstrating that the walls were never really there. A first issue on the theme of dying, launched earlier this year and supported by Harvard and UC Berkeley, brings together a truly diverse body of contemporary art and writing and at the same time pays tribute to an overlooked psychedelic archive. Alongside the fifty luminous contributors filling Elastic No. 1’s 176 pages is Korean American writer, artist, and musician Johanna Hedva, who wrote a one-act play for the magazine. Celebrating Elastic’s launch, Something Curated publishes Hedva’s play, I Hate Running (or, Death on Stage), as an online exclusive, with photographs by Benoît Paillé.

NOTE

The character falls down a lot—whenever a “/” appears in the text.

When a “!” appears, they get back up.

The stage is bare, bright, an eerie light. A scrim curtain hangs in front, so what the audience sees is blurred. Scrims are common in theater—well, certain kinds of theater—and yet it’s not often noted that the scrim also blurs what the actor sees when they look into their audience. The blur is subtle. Vaseline wiped across a lens. An eye rubbed with a fist and bleary for a few seconds. The world becomes vague, untrustworthy. One must use certain kinds of knowledges to make sense of it. When I say “certain kinds of knowledges,” I don’t know exactly what I mean, but it makes an intuitive sense, no? When I say “certain kinds of theater,” I’m talking about a combination of beauty, money, death, and love dressed in a costume that makes those things seem deadly, holy, rough, and immediate. Hanging parallel to the floor of the stage is a mattress, suspended by each corner with black chains. The mattress hovers about six feet above HEDVA’s head—out of reach even when they stretch their arms toward it, which they do often.

HEDVA:

My problem is / I’m too awake.

(They look around.)

Where are my wings?! …

(They keep looking but the looking is not desperate. We can see them try to be grateful. What they see around them is nothing.)

… Damn, it’s really giving Godot. But where is my Vladimir / Where is my Estragon?!

…

There is blood / I am blood! I am poor / I am rich! I cum / I cum! I cum / I came, I will cum forever. I search all of time and there is only you. And you! And you / And you! And you / My mother, again, and again! Her / him! him / him! It / All of it.

(Behind HEDVA, two attendants dressed in white begin pushing a large black grand piano across the stage, from one side to the other. They go very, very slowly. The piano is heavy. When they reach the edge of the stage, they reverse direction, and push the piano back the way they came. The piano leaves a trail of black feathers behind it. When the piano moves back along its path, the feathers respond, twitching, floating, fluffing up, sticking. HEDVA never looks at them, makes no notice. This continues until the end. They speak the following as the piano is moved.)

One of my favorite parts of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is in Book Two. Phaëthon has traveled to meet his father. He wants to confirm where he comes from. His father says, “I can understand that you need some indisputable proof that my own blood runs in your veins. So here you have it: my fatherly fears and misgivings prove me to be your father.”

…

His father is the sun god, Helios, by the way / That a father would be confirmed a father because of his fears!

…

“Look, boy, look at my face. How I wish your eyes were able to pierce deep down to my heart and catch a glimpse of your father’s anxiety.”

…

What would the sun be afraid of /

…

In the Ovid, he’s afraid of what his son wants. The sun says to his son, Please don’t ask me for what you’re about to ask me for! Choose anything else. Because I won’t be able to say no to you / …

(They roll over onto their back, lying on the ground. They’re facing the mattress hanging above them. If it weren’t for the distance between them and the mattress, they’d be lying on it, something soft. We see them realize this. They reach pathetically, for only a moment, before letting their arms fall back to themself in their uselessness.)

… I first read Book Two of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the bath. The pages crumpled in my wet hands. My lover was cooking dinner and puttering around the house. It was an ordinary evening. We were falling in love. That night, we fucked for the third time in as many hours. In those months, I only cried about five times a week, rather than five times a day. Being in love seemed so lucky, so rare. But I was often in love. I was often heartbroken.

…

I’d like to maybe get better—even be good at it this time?!

…

In terms of fate, when it comes to the right choice / versus the wrong choice! Is there a difference? I mean / The choice that you make is the choice that you made. How could it be wrong?!

(The song “Piggy” by Nine Inch Nails starts to play. Hedva looks up. They can’t see where the sound is coming from and for a moment this confuses them, but then the song takes over. They close their eyes and start to move, slowly at first. They sing along. They harmonize. They become excited. They heat. They touch their clit. Holds their own tits and throat. They scream. They become furious. The refrain “Nothing can stop me now / ’cause I don’t care anymore” repeats itself. Fifty years pass.)

If this is the beginning / then I want to know who my enemy is

…

But! If this is the end /

…

then I want to know

…

how I can possibly say thank you enough.

(Lights out.)

REFERENCES

“Deadly, holy, rough, and immediate” are the four essential forms of theater proposed by Peter Brook in his book The Empty Space. He writes: “Sometimes these four theaters really exist, standing side by side…. Sometimes they are hundreds of miles apart, the Holy in Warsaw and the Rough in Prague, and sometimes they are metaphoric…. Sometimes within one single moment, the four of them…intertwine.” Most relevantly to this play, Brook says that the “Deadly Theater” “means bad theater,” which makes me laugh. Vladimir and Estragon are the two primary characters in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. They constitute a sort of perfect, archetypal pair of wise fools who suffer hilariously, absurdly, while waiting for God. I think Beckett is wondering if they suffer this way because they are waiting for God. But then I think, what else is there to do with God but wait for him? When I quote Ovid’s Metamorphosis, I am using the Penguin Classics edition, translated by David Raeburn, which is not my favorite translation but the newest copy I own. I am using it because I don’t have my favorite translation, by Charles Martin, in the copy with all of my notes and underlines that I bought in 2005. In 2024 my eleven-year marriage ended and I left Berlin to return to Los Angeles, my hometown, where all the Johannas and Hedvas that I’m named after are buried. I just signed a lease on a house that I have no idea how I will afford, and none of my furniture has arrived yet. My mattress is on the floor in an empty house and the seven thousand books of my library are on a slow boat from Germany. It will take three to five months for them to get here. The Nine Inch Nails song “Piggy” is from the 1994 album The Downward Spiral, which I’ve listened to more than any other record in this lifetime. The piano-pushing is a twist on a visual motif from Maria, the 2024 biopic of Maria Callas, which I thought was very bad. (Perhaps I disliked it so because, tragically, I am in the cult of Maria Callas.) Some of the gestures in this play live in my mind as, if not invented by Romeo Castellucci and Rebecca Horn, best tended by them. Since Horn died a few months ago, around the time a version of my own life ended, I’ve wanted to be surrounded by piles of black feathers. I buy them obsessively and put them around my new house. I’ve also bought a glass table and two see-through chairs. They are called “ghost chairs.” The feathers sit in a heap on the table and look like they’re floating. A friend came over and blessed the house with an incantation. She noticed the glass and ghost chairs. “Nothing can be hidden in this house,” she said, and then she sprinkled salt at all my thresholds and wished me abundance.



Feature image: Benoît Paillé. Courtesy Elastic