Left: 'August Strindberg', by Gosta Adrian-Nilsson (1915)

We had earlier published John Ryskamp's poem "The Twenty-First Century", which was described as:

"[A] brilliant bolt from the blue. A pestilent persona, struck in the mint of French symbolism and surrealism, reflects Prufrock-like upon the arcade and arcadia of his poetic/historical existence."

We include here all 97 pages of his play The Curtain Rises on the Revolution in PDF form. We're also including the following notes which the author sent along with his play. They explain his philosopher's approach to the work, which illuminates this exercise on the nature of language in the theater:

What's the aesthetic? Strindberg on meth. I wanted to do a play which was not a literary, or armchair, play (you know, one just for reading). At the same time, I wanted to eliminate all the elephantine baggage of theatre: sets, characters, plot--everything traditional I could think of. In short, I wanted a new performable play, in which the question is: HOW to perform this? Not, CAN this be performed?

I wanted to do this as a challenge after poetry. As you know, writers have tried to cross disciplines and they largely have been unsuccessful: Joyce, not a good poet, James and Eliot, not good playwrights, Strindberg, not a good novelist, and so on.

You have NO idea how difficult this was and how long it took: well, until now! Above all, dialogue in any other form is not dialogue in drama. You can't simply pull dialogue out of a novel and put it on stage. Dialogue in drama is somewhere between a diagram and a score--very different. Try crossing this disciplinary boundary sometime--tres difficile!!

So, the revolution referred to is one in drama. It's somewhere between Buchner's Danton's Death and Gogol's Inspector General.

- John Ryskamp

Prose Poems… http://www.flashpointmag.com/ryspro1.htm