The History of 5 Steps to Transcendence
Some ten years ago, the playwright John Patrick Shanley wrote a one-act play entitled An Old Story. It depicted a dynamic between a spider and a moth; it also mirrored something dark and central about men and women.
Two years later, Shanley wrote a second one-act entitled simply The Dark. Again, the playwright explored the bloody dance of the sexes, now adding the overlay of religion, horror, and pornography.
Another two years passed, and the writer realized he was in the midst of a surreal chronicle, a kind of five panel narrative of his ongoing journey towards gender synthesis. The third addition was Tennessee. This piece veered more in the direction of realism. The interaction, still between a man and woman, no longer revolved around sexual or romantic concerns. The young man wants to know the future, specifically his future, and the woman he accosts at an outdoor cafe is known for her psychic gifts. The clash between them is the result of a misplaced passion, a young man’s passion to know, rather than to live in the question.
There is an underlying grief in Tennessee, the sorrow that springs from a profound loneliness. This loneliness comes to those who live in the questions of existence, rather than the answers.
The penultimate piece is called On The Terrace. Former lovers meet on a balcony, and revisit the failure of their love. Romance is everywhere but they can’t have it. The demands of Time have doomed them. They missed the moment, and now must live with that.
In the tenth year, Shanley wrote the concluding play I’m Going To Touch Your Neck. On the advice of a friend, a man goes to a spa to receive what he has been told will be a transformative massage. The woman who is to administer this massage seems to be extremely otherworldly, hardly concerned with his physical body. The man becomes increasingly frustrated by her. She hasn’t touched him! But she insists that she is working on him nevertheless. Finally, as he protests ever more vociferously, she suggests that he should massage her. The man becomes apoplectic, citing the amount of money he paid, and his reasonable expectations, but she will have none of it. If he wants things to be different, then he must be different. Ultimately, she prevails, and he begins to massage her.
And then, something extraordinary happens. Each transforms into the other. The genders reverse, and then coalesce into a single sensibility. The struggle between the sexes, delineated through the five plays, written over ten years, resolves into a final transcendent moment.
