But first I want to thank Patricia Spears
Jones for the beautiful, truly phenomenal reading
this evening.
And what an act to follow for us.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
And thank you to the University of Arizona
for hosting this year's Thinking Its Presence Conference:
The Ephemeral Archive, and especially to my dear friend
Prageeta Sharma for bringing all of you
here and really creating this amazing network of writers
and poets and artists and playwrights.
So thank you so much, and let's begin.
The Buffalo Play, a play by Ciara Griffin
and Kendra Mylnechuk Potter, Montana NYC Collaborative.
Cast of characters.
Woman, a woman played by Ciara; Buffalo, a Buffalo, a bison
cow played by Kendra Mylnechuk; Hank, a rancher played
by William Hubbard; and baby bison, a baby bison calf played
by Aja Sherrard; and I will play voices of various news
anchors heard off stage.
Prologue, in darkness.
And I have a memory.
It's not my own, but it's in my bones of the smell of sagebrush
warmed by the sun; the sweetness of horse manure
released in hot sun; the sound of grasshoppers
clicking as we rode through tall grass in the springtime;
and I remember a symphony of crickets.
I remember walking next to freed slaves and starvation.
And there is a memory of the rhythm
of a song I'm not allowed to sing,
speaking a language in hurried hushed whispers.
And I remember forgetting this language.
Act one, scene one.
Lights barely rise to reveal the silhouette of a bare jail cell.
Bunk bed, no window, a single blade of grass
grows up through a crack in the cement floor;
a woman sleeps in the lower bunk with her back to us.
Maybe we don't see her.
From outside of the theater we hear a wailing.
[WAILING]
The doors to the theater burst open.
A mother buffalo carries her dead calf
as if in offering through to the audience.
She lays the calf's body on the stage.
She puts her nose to the floor.
She quietly sniffs, snorts, nuzzles
and bellows at the dead baby as if in ritual.
[WAILING]
This wakes our sleeping inmate in an absolute fright.
They startle in their discovery of one another.
Woman leaps to the top bunk, Buffalo
goes to protect her child's body.
She spoons the dead baby.
The woman never takes her eyes off the buffalo.
The buffalo falls asleep holding the child.
Woman discovers a single piece of grass growing up
through the floor.
She plucks it and puts it as an offering where the calf is.
She crouches in the opposite corner of the room.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid,
stupid, stupid, stupid.
Lights out.
Act one, scene two, we hear media playing.
In other news, a woman from Brooklyn,
New York is facing federal charges
after loading a bison calf into her vehicle at Yellowstone
National Park.
When questioned by park officials,
the woman expressed concern for the calf's welfare
as the bison appeared cold.
Ha.
Daytime temperatures this may average around 50 degrees,
as Jim in the weather center pointed out.
Park officials are currently attempting
to reunite the calf with its herd
and are frankly stunned the woman was not
attacked by the cow.
Lights up.
More grass grows in the cell.
The buffalo stares at the woman from across the room
chewing her cud.
We walk into storms.
Straight in, if a blizzard is coming, a thunderstorm,
hailstorm, we walk straight into it head down, side by side,
we herd up.
We walk forward.
By walking through it we do not get stuck in it,
we get to the other side quicker.
My herd is not the most intelligent,
but we do know how to weather a storm and stay warm.
We very rarely freeze to death.
In fact, no one in my herd has ever
been frostbit, or my mother's herd or her mother's herd
before her.
I didn't know that.
I didn't know you walked straight
into storm with-- my god, that's so poetic.
Po-e-tac.
Poetic.
Poeatic.
Poetic.
Poeatic.
Poetic.
Quack.
Poe tac quack.
I cannot say it but I am it.
[LAUGHTER]
Holy shit you are.
Look, I'm sorry about your--
[SHIVERING]
OK.
Actually I don't even know how to apologize.
I am so, so--
I would never try to protect your child.
I would never go near your child.
I don't actually have a child.
It's for political reasons.
I'm an environmentalist, overpopulation.
How did she die, exactly?
I don't know really.
I dropped her off at the ranger station
and they brought me here and booked me.
I didn't know until you brought her here that she--
She didn't smell right.
--died.
She smelled of Industrial Revolution.
Industrial Revolution?
Did she have a name?
Do buffaloes have names?
Her name?
I knew her by scent.
I smelled her.
I am sorry.
I hope you know that.
I know, it was dumb.
I didn't mean to have all of this happen.
I've made a horrible mistake.
Well, what am I supposed to do now?
No, I am like genuinely asking.
Lights out.
Act one, scene three, media update.
A bison calf recently had to be euthanized at Yellowstone
National Park after a woman put it
in the back of her rental car.
Now, many are asking, why?
Park rangers tried to get the bison calf to return to a herd,
but it kept getting rejected, park officials said.
They added that the calf wouldn't eat
and kept returning to the roadway trying
to nurse on tailpipes.
Back to you, Roger.
Euthanize.
Euthanization.
Euthanasia.
Eu-thin-asia.
You will never--
This is not natural.
I know.
Woman reaches out to comfort.
Don't touch me!
Don't touch me.
What is wrong with you?
Don't you read the [BISON NOISE] signs?
Danger, bison are wild and dangerous.
Do not approach.
Danger, do not approach wildlife.
Many visitors have been gored by buffalo.
Think safely, act safely.
Or do you think that signs don't apply to you?
You're not supposed to touch.
I will [BISON NOISE] you.
I will gore you.
Buffalo sings to her dead calf.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(SINGING) Go to sleep, my little one.
The grass is green forever.
The path is clear.
No walls in sight.
You rest, my love, till morning light.
Your bones belong now to the sun.
Your spirit's free.
Your body's done.
So stay asleep, my little one.
Listen, I didn't know about the storms or the frostbite.
I just saw her shivering.
No one was around.
I thought she was abandoned.
Do you know that there were coyotes out there with her?
I saw her touch noses with one of them.
Been in nature before?
I'm part of the New York Ramblers Hiking Club.
And you're an herbivore?
Yeah.
Well, I mean I'm mostly vegetarian.
Sometimes at brunch every once in a while
I always have a bite of bacon and we always
eat at Peter Luger's on Christmas Eve.
So not strictly, but, like, mostly.
So you do not know.
Well, I'm fairly well educated.
Not Ivy League, but I do have a doctorate degree.
In nature?
No, in social justice.
[LAUGHTER]
Justice?
What is justice?
The administering of deserved punishment, or reward
based on a judgment.
What is judgment?
Well, it's when you decide if something is good or bad.
What is punishment and reward?
A reward is a gift for a good deed.
A punishment is inflicted pain or retribution for an offense.
It's like hurting someone physically
or limiting their freedoms for that deep--
We do not have judgment in nature.
There is not justice.
There is just is.
I would like justice for my child.
I would like to give you punishment for your bad deed.
She was not my first calf, and she will not be the last.
I will give birth most every year of my life until I die.
It is my way.
The coyote who followed her, my baby, he has hunger.
You should not attempt to interrupt someone's hunger.
It is as it is.
We should die natural deaths.
You inserted yourself into the circle
and now it starts turning in the same smooth way.
Her body was of no use to coyote after the tailpipes.
It is simple.
It may not be easy or clear to you, but the circle is simple.
Coyote does coyote things.
I do buffalo things.
What do you do besides just is?
Human things.
I do not know about human things, human hunger.
Well, it's complicated to explain.
Then don't.
What should I do if I can't explain myself?
Just stand still.
[LAUGHTER]
Like tadasana?
[LAUGHTER]
Mountain pose, well, it's yoga.
It's a pose that is just standing still.
I don't know about that.
I just know stand still.
The woman tries to be still.
She tries very hard as long as she can.
She settles into it.
Perhaps she rides some waves of emotions.
She rides stillness, finds a little peace.
This can take as long as it needs to, although it
should be at least 1.5 minutes.
Act one, scene four, media update.
This incident, along with the incident
of an entire family being gored after they tried
to ride an adult male bison, the incident
of a 16-year-old boy being dissolved alive
after he dove in headfirst to a geothermal hot pot,
as well as the incident of the couple who
fell over the railing into Yellowstone's Grand Canyon
while trying to take a selfie, plummeting 1,200
feet to their deaths, has made this season's visitors
the most mentally dull Yellowstone has ever
experienced in its 145 year history.
Back to you, Roger.
Lights half up.
Hank, a rancher.
A rancher, shitfaced, is thrown into the cell.
It is 2:17 AM.
Good evening, miss.
Excuse me.
I think that this is a female cell.
You're in the wrong cell.
You put him in the wrong cell.
You're not allowed to be in the same cell as me.
P-R-E-A is a law.
Ever heard of it?
There is only one cell in town.
I'm not going to bite, too hard.
[GIGGLING]
Nope.
Wouldn't hurt a fly.
Done enough damage for one night.
I'm going to pass out and then I'm repent for my sins.
[INAUDIBLE]
He face plants, passed out drunk.
Things bad, huh?
You know him?
Tried to shoot me once with a bow and arrow.
Terrible shot.
What?
Why would he do that?
I wandered out of the park.
Sometimes he gets lost in thought
and forgets to close the fence after he feeds.
There was a little clearing in the barbed wire.
I walked through, went to smell his cattle.
They smell almost like us, but different pheromones, maybe.
Alluring, really.
They smell like the organic state of paper wealth.
Putrid, sweet fermented corn silage
breakfast, and the fattened up dirt flowers off of Lucerne,
salty.
They smell of salt.
And if you can get close enough to lick them,
sometimes they taste salty too.
But Hank does not want me licking his cattle.
So he tried to shoot me, screaming
that I was an abortionist and to stay the hell away
from his cows.
I bellowed back at him.
[WAILING]
Abortionist.
Why would he call you an abortionist?
What is an abortionist?
Someone who performs an abortion.
They take the embryo out of the womb of the mother
so she doesn't have to be pregnant anymore,
and the embryo dies.
It doesn't become a fully grown baby or get born,
the doctor sucks it out of the womb.
This is why he wants me away from his cows?
He thinks I will suck their babies out of the womb?
Make their babies be born dead?
I guess.
Abortion is not what I do.
I do not perform abortions.
I would not think so.
Brucellosis comes mostly from elk, but we get blamed.
Brucellosis.
We carry it.
Sometimes it causes us to deliver our young
before their time.
Oh.
But I do not have it.
My children have all arrived when they were meant to.
Oh.
Do you know an abortionist?
I do.
In fact, I've met one.
Did you shoot an arrow at her?
No.
Women can choose if they want to have a baby or not.
Do you fight human bulls away if they come to mate?
Sometimes I guess, but sometimes we
mate when we don't want to conceive.
Sex is fun.
It's pleasurable if it's consensual.
Mating is called sex?
Yes.
We have a lot of words for it.
What else do you call mating?
Intercourse, fornicating, penetration, making love, sex,
fucking, boning, bumping nubbins, shagging, doing it,
having the sex, going all the way,
home base, rolling in the hay.
You roll in hay?
I would not have thought that was your way.
I've never literally rolled in hay.
Sex is really complicated.
It is clear for us.
There is the rut in the hot time and then all of the cows
are pregnant, then we deliver our calves and care for them.
We don't have a rut.
Hank russels around.
They stare at him.
Are we safe with him?
We are fine for now.
Sometimes his spirit goes out of his body and another enters,
but his true spirit always returns.
He will not hurt a fly.
That would require a dexterity he
lacks in his current condition.
[LAUGHTER]
Hank wakes.
Well, where'd I get--
oh.
Oh, shit.
Has there been any word on Frank?
You are drunk again.
You have not been drunk for a very long time.
Well, how late is it?
I don't know, maybe 8:00.
Hey.
Hi.
Nobody stopped by you, did they?
Did anyone say anything about Frank?
No.
Nobody's been by.
Excuse me.
Oh, dear Lord, I know we haven't spoken in a while,
but please take me to Frank.
Let him pull through even.
What are you in for?
I'd rather not talk about it.
Well, no need to be secretive.
It's you're telling me as soon as I asked, you're visiting,
and I can see that much.
Now, did you get caught with some reef around '89?
No.
I swear to Christ, some of you tourists kids get stoned
and drive 30 miles an hour like you're
from goddamn Madison County where
you can get into the park.
Damn nuisance.
What?
No, that's not it.
You're not one of those protesting, what
do you call it, water protector libtards, are you?
No.
I was not at Standing Rock.
Well, I had a few then.
One freeloading hippie kid was in here a few months back
for locking himself to a bulldozer.
Little dipshit.
Kid like that should be working, contributing.
Why the hell are you paying bills chained
to a piece of machinery?
My daddy would have beat me half to death
if I had pulled a stunt like that.
Do you want a lit?
No, thank you.
So where are you coming from?
Brooklyn, New York.
You're a long way from home.
Yes, a world away.
I was looking for an adventure.
Did you imagine that included a night in the clink?
Ha-ha-ha.
No.
New York, huh?
Well, did you hear about that idiot city slicker put a baby
bison in the back of their car?
Oh my goodness.
What's the world come to these days?
I haven't had such a good laugh in a long time.
It's not that funny.
God, it was cold.
I mean, how idiotic you got to be
to think a buffalo who was going to freeze to death in May?
[LAUGHTER]
Oh.
Pardon me, ma'am, but it is a strange world we live in.
Oh, that poor little bugger.
They're kind of cute when they're little guys.
They get to feeling good, run around, kicking,
chasing each other.
Cattle do it too.
Nothing cuter than those little ones in spring.
Now, you don't look like an outlaw.
I'm not.
I'm the asshole who put the calf in my car.
Well, I'll be.
Pardon me there.
For Christ's sake, I saw you on the news.
What the hell are you still doing here?
Well, the incident happened on Friday morning
and no one can see me in any courthouse for sentencing
until Monday.
So here I am.
I'm sorry, I'm on the news?
My face?
Yes, ma'am.
Local.
Saw the story on KTVQ yesterday.
This is a really good intention gone very bad.
Well, what did you think exactly was
going to happen when you put that baby
in the back of your SUV?
He puts his hand on top of her head.
He contracts it over and over again as if his hand
is eating her brain.
Hey.
You know what this is?
No.
It's a brain eater.
And you know what it's doing?
No.
Starving.
[LAUGHTER]
I didn't act out of some idiotic thoughtlessness, OK?
Oh.
Well, you clearly had a thought, but it was idiotic.
I was driving through the fucking parking lot that
is Yellowstone National Park.
It was literally bumper to bumper traffic
all the way from Norris to the Paint Pots.
I decided to skip Old Faithful so I could get ahead
of the crowds, and as I drove around the corner,
I saw this baby buffalo bedded down in the clover.
Look, I read the brochures.
I stayed a good distance away and I watched.
She was so fucking cute.
I mean, super young.
I've never seen a baby buffalo, but she
looked just like she was a day or even a few hours old.
She was orange.
I didn't know that they're orange when they're babies.
Yeah.
Baby bison enters.
She plays by herself.
She is precious.
Till fall most times.
Ma'am, they're big brown beasts.
Well, she was orange.
She could stand up, and I don't know, moo or bleat or whatever.
It was such a forlorn sound.
It was awful.
I felt like I knew exactly what she wanted
and because I understood--
[COUGHING]
--I had to watch her, and her mother came back for her.
Mothers don't just reject perfect babies.
I mean, human mothers maybe, but not in nature.
Well, you're wrong about that, miss.
I tried to google behaviors of baby and mother buffalo.
There is no Google in the goddamn forest.
Because wilderness.
But you put her in your trunk.
I didn't just, like, roll up and pop her in the trunk.
I watched her from my car for eight hours.
She didn't move from that spot, except to get up
and look around.
Over the following, baby bison gets up, walks in a pattern,
leaves, looks around, goes back to her spot, waits.
This becomes the waiting dance.
Woman watches as she speaks.
It was almost like she was working on some inner clock.
She would get up every 12 minutes and walk in this,
like, pattern around the clover bleeding,
then she'd lay down and rest.
After hours of this she got weaker,
her breathing was labored, and her walk got messier.
Sounds like a sick one.
She wasn't sick.
She was perfect.
Then the herd came by and she ran up
to every buffalo, every one.
She was looking for her momma.
Rejected by the herd.
Happens all the time.
It was, like, to get protected.
She had to make herself more vulnerable.
She was just wandering around, calling out.
It was the saddest thing.
Other buffalo were just kind of shoving her off,
and then this coyote started following her.
Well, sounds about right.
She even ran up like nose to nose with the coyote.
She was so desperate.
And the herd went away and she just
went back to her clover patch and just lay there.
She was so thirsty, she was panting.
A stream of milk flows from the buffalo's udder.
The woman notices.
But you put her in your car.
What choice did I have?
I couldn't just watch the thing be eaten by a coyote.
Did you come to Yellowstone for a live action Disney
movie, sweetheart?
What?
No.
But I just couldn't, OK?
So you put it--
Fuck!
Yes, I put it in the trunk.
I drove to the goddamn ranger station
and said I have a baby buffalo here and it's been abandoned
and it's shivering and it's quite weak,
and we need to find its mother.
The poor little bugger was rejected.
What did you think the ranger station
is going to do about it?
Fix it.
I thought the rangers could fix the situation.
Don't they have a responsibility to care for these animals?
Isn't it in their job description?
Keep the buffaloes alive?
And what about the fact that buffalo--
They're called bison, sweetheart,
and I don't need any lecture on--
Fine.
Bison are like going extinct.
What's their responsibility?
There is no buffalo orphanage.
It's not their job to interfere with nature.
Do you have any idea how to get a cow
to take a baby that's not her own?
How?
One, you got to find a cow within the herd whose calf has
recently died; two, you have to skin that dead baby
calf; three, you got to place its hide on the abandoned calf.
You got to trick the mother into thinking it's her baby.
That's deceitful.
It's nature.
We have no responsibility to nature, honey.
We are nature.
And we fucked it up.
Ha-ha.
You can't fuck up nature.
It's so much bigger than you.
You get to fuck nature up.
But about as soon as you can fuck up Mike Tyson,
it'll eventually swallow us.
Look at that piece of grass.
Look at it.
I see it.
The woman realizes this is the same blade of grass she plucked
to offer to the dead baby.
She is in disbelief.
Oh my god.
It just grows up from the cement.
It's always grown, slowly consuming,
everything we built, making cracks in the sidewalks,
busting up foundations.
Builds itself up, burns itself down,
so slow that if you're not sitting still and watching
real hard, you might not realize it's happening.
Oh, sure, you can throw a little Roundup on it,
but it'll sprout up again.
You can fuck up a lot of things in this life.
Trust me, I know firsthand, but this great big world
is not coming.
What about air pollution?
What about fracking creating fault lines where
there were none before, and people's drinking
water catching fire?
Nuclear war?
What about the nuclear fish in Japan?
What about the fucking Berkeley Pit I
just visited in Butte, and Monsanto
destroying biodiversity?
Well, I better make a phone call.
I need to see if Frank's going to pull through.
Sheriff!
We hear the cell unlock.
Hank walks out; woman goes to grass,
plucks it, three blades of hearty wheat grass
sprout and grow to full maturity as she watches.
Holy shit.
Did you just see that?
Who are you talking to?
What?
Wait, what?
Who are you talking to?
I'm talking to you.
Who are you talking to?
To whom do you speak?
I'm talking to you.
The grass just grew.
Grass grows.
That is what grass does.
You did not know?
I knew.
I know grass grows, but it just happened so fast.
Sometimes growth feels slow, other times it is fast.
Did you see it grow?
When you learn to stand still, you also learn to watch
and time becomes more.
More?
Yes.
More what?
More.
Oh.
She picks the grass.
They stand still.
The grass grows back with five blades of mature grass.
Wait.
Did the grass grow fast, or did I just stand still
for weeks or what?
How long does it take grass to grow?
I do not know about how long it takes
except that it takes time.
Hank re-enters, wiping tears from his eyes.
He doesn't make eye contact with the woman.
She studies him keenly.
Are you all right?
Me?
Yeah.
Well, no.
I just got a little wind in my eye.
That's what my grandma used to say when she cried.
I'm not crying.
Of course not.
But if you needed to, that would be all right.
Here.
Pulls out a wad of tissues, picks through them.
Sorry, that one's been used.
I had a lot of wind in my eyes when they brought me in.
When wind gets in my eyes I put my head to the Earth.
He takes one of the tissues.
He cries a lot.
The more he tries not to, the more he cries.
It might make her cry too.
After a few beats, he gets a hold of himself.
Thank you.
Look, just so we're straight, I'm not
self-pitying son of a bitch.
These are tears of joy.
Frank's going to be OK.
Just got off the phone with the vet.
What happened to him?
I accidentally shot my dog.
I thought he was a damn wolf chasing the cattle.
Turns out I left the gate open and several
steers wandering in the next pasture
and he was just rounding them up.
Well, Frank's the smartest goddamn dog I've ever had,
but I didn't have my glasses on and I shot at him.
He yelped.
I knew I made a mistake, but thought he'd bleed out
before I got him into town.
I just laid there in the pickup staring at me,
trying to stay alive.
He was panting hard at first and then started
taking short little shallow breaths.
I didn't think there was any way that pup would survive.
I shot him with a shotgun.
Little son of a bitch.
I got him to the vet.
I felt like my heart was going to fall out.
I looked into his sweet little face
and told him he was the best cow dog there ever was,
and if he did fight so hard, he could come back home with me
and he could gnaw on that deer leg
I've been saving in the deep freeze for him.
And then I went downtown.
I bought a bottle of 10 High and I drank the whole damn thing.
I didn't figure there was any point in living if I
killed my only true friend.
So I drank the whole damn bottle and got in my pickup
and was on my way to the river when I got pulled over.
I hadn't had a drop in 15 years.
Not since my wife left.
That sounds like a really bad country song.
Well, that sure does.
So you're not the only idiot around here,
but you're getting quite famous out there.
Excuse me?
Well, you better off in here talking all kinds of shit
out there.
Fox News have a field day.
You could be a movie of the week before all of this is over.
Fox News?
I'm on the local news?
No, national.
Mornings with Maria.
Jesus Christ.
What am I going to do?
Oh, what you got to do sweetheart, face the music.
You're famous.
I know fox.
Low to the ground, enjoys rabbits
and other small animals.
I have not known fox to eat humans.
No, this isn't that kind of fox.
There are others?
Well, this is a Fox who shares information with us.
Sort of, only they skew.
I have known Fox to be mysterious.
They do skew.
What did they say about me?
I didn't hear the whole clip.
I was on the horn with my vet, but I sure as hell shit
saw your picture.
What?
Which picture?
I don't know.
You had a shit eating grin and an ice cream cone.
Oh.
Jesus Christ, my old profile picture.
You're better off here for the weekend.
They're going to eat you alive.
That is not the fox I know.
Fox eats rabbit and vole, but it begins with the grass.
It begins with the grass as all things do and have forever.
It begins tall and strong and holds the sun,
holds water in its body.
We crunch.
Deer, pronghorn, antelope, insects, rodents, fox, owl,
bird and snake eat rodents.
Coyote eats rodents.
Eagle eats rodents.
Buzzard eats rodents.
Buzzard eats coyote.
Fungus eats buzzard.
Fox is near the top.
Fox is the top.
Only one who's not fake news.
Sound cue of Fox News.
Lights shift to studio lighting.
The buffalo turns to the audience.
She speaks into a microphone made of grass.
She and Hank re-enact the newscast.
Well, John, it's the story that has
PETA's feathers all ruffled, the Brooklyn woman
who's been deemed a calf napper.
New details on that baby bison taken from the park,
it has sparked so much outrage.
Park officials explain why they had
to euthanize it after a tourist put it in her SUV.
This footage shows the baby bison earlier that same day
struggling to cross the river and keep up with its mother.
And here is the baby bison trembling and sticking
close to a car.
As you can see, many people saw this baby bison
on that fateful afternoon.
It was really tragic and hard to see that little calf
in the road.
Sentiments the tourist clearly shared.
She was moved so much she chose to put the bison
calf in the back of her car, the results of which we now
know led to the bison being rejected from her herd
and ultimately being euthanized.
The calf napper has been identified
and images of her driver's license and school transcripts
have been leaked as you can see on your screen.
She is a 35-year-old New Yorker with a PhD in social justice
from the University of Chicago, and apparently
a penchant for artisanal ice cream.
She's being held in a small town jail
as criminal charges are pending for her federal offense.
Protesters are expected at her hearing
Monday, as many people have congregated
at the site where the baby bison was
taken from the bosom of the wilderness.
When I heard they killed that baby
I had to come mourn her properly.
It's just sad.
Some people are laughing, but, well, she was somebody's baby.
I hope the lady who did this loses something close to her
and that she's prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
At the end of the newscast, Buffalo
takes a bite out of her grass microphone.
She chews and chews.
We all eat the sun and the sun eats us.
Fox fakes its direction.
It's the fox way.
Oh, my motherfucking Goddamn Jesus Christ.
You've got to be fucking kidding me.
Well, guess you got your 15 minutes of fame, right?
Yeah.
You really chapped some hides.
Most hated woman in the west, huh?
Purt near.
My driver's license photo, that is cruel.
I hate that photo.
I have my mother's chin in that photo.
I hate my mother's chin.
I'd be proud to have my mother's chin.
I have my mother's hoofs.
They look at the buffalo.
She chews and blinks at them.
You are majestic.
Your mother must have been beautiful.
She is my mother.
She eats grass.
Her hooves are strong from walking.
I have my mother's hooves.
Is your mother still alive?
I believe she is.
Yes, my mother is too, I think, but I
was raised by my Aunt Lydia.
My dear mother has been gone a long time.
Was 1/2 raised by my dad until my grandmother caught him
filling my bottle with whiskey.
I remember my grandmother, she was killed by a bear.
Bear will eat anything alive; not fox.
Fox eats small animals.
Fox will eat me alive.
Maybe they should.
Is this your social justice?
I mean, maybe.
We all do stupid things.
You just did a really, really, really stupid thing.
She did not know.
She did not know what a bison was.
If she had known, she would not have put my baby in her SUV.
I know what a bison is.
It is OK.
No need to be ashamed.
You obviously did not have the knowledge.
I'm not stupid.
I know what a buffalo is.
It's the largest mammal on the North American continent.
We are?
Disbelief.
She tries to imagine being the largest.
It strikes her with awe.
Yes, you are.
There was once so many of you on the prairie
that if you looked at all you could see was bison and sky.
I remember this.
Inside the sinews there's a vague memory there,
but the memory belongs to the grass and the Earth
and all of our herd.
I remember, we were sea across the plains, important, honored.
As numbered as the grass as we move within the herd as a blade
moves within the prairie.
We move as one.
We think as one.
There's a memory of running from wolves, a memory of grass,
chewing of cold and heat, of running for running,
of lying in hot dust with all of the others; nothing
but us tails swish at flies; tails move back and forth,
back and forth.
The buffalo begins to pull sinews full of memories
out of herself.
This triggers the woman and Hank.
They also pull out their sinews.
It is if the memories are their literal makeup, their DNA,
their sinews and bones, long flags.
Visual scenes of their ancestral history
reveal themselves in these sinews.
As they begin to overlap the dialogue,
their memories become braided together
until the stage is covered with guts and muscle, and tendons
and bones, and image upon image of the ancient and recent
history of the west.
A memory of thunder, of drums, of hooves.
I have my mother's hooves.
I have my father's cheekbones.
My mother once told me I looked nothing like her;
that I was 100% my father.
Well, my father always said you got younger blood in you.
You got it from your mother's side.
That's where you get that curly hair, from those outlaw
relatives of yours.
I have my mother's hair.
It's true.
I have his cheekbones, the 1/16th Native American.
It's true.
My grandmother may have been a Cherokee Indian princess.
Of mounting, of the rut, of birth.
Mixed in his Yankee blood with damn Confederate blood,
but I emerged [INAUDIBLE].
Emerging wet, warm, licked clean by mother; unsteady legs.
The only thing that survives of this woman, my key to belonging
is her cheekbones.
My only exoticness comes from these cheekbones.
Whatever secrets she knew, her life experiences, her story
was vanished.
Her memory wiped clean.
I was good at killing things.
Even before I was born, a master killing animals.
I emerged with buckshot in my bones.
A memory of fires chasing us; of falling over
the edge of the Earth.
I remember Missouri, though I never been there;
robbing banks in Minnesota though I never
lived there either.
Heart palpitating so hard, and running.
Always running, running from the law.
All of us running.
A photo of her remains; of course, not smiling.
Why would you?
You had to hold very still back then.
The face would tire and the eyes dulled
to hold a smile for that long.
She looked so awkward, like two cheekbones
on top of a pioneer woman dress.
There's a memory wagon wheels of cold, hard winters
in a dream I can't remember.
I shot bison for moving [INAUDIBLE]..
Of locomotives with men and guns shooting at us as
they sped by a falling down.
I don't believe her name has ever been spoken in our family.
It was the name we forgot; the story we didn't pass on;
the memory we [? killed ?].
A memory of being chased from the prairie,
onto different land, penned up, dying;
the sea of us becoming a lake then a pond of us to a puddle;
bulging eyes of our bodies strewn across the plains;
grasses blowing against our wasted flesh,
waiting for death to take us so we
could once again join the way.
Baby Bison enters.
She gets tangled up in the sinews and historical memory
ribbons of the other three until she is stuck.
Momma?
Lights out.
Act two, scene one.
In the dark we hear media update.
The woman ultimately responsible for the death of a bison
calf at Yellowstone Park is scheduled
to be released for sentencing today.
Concern for the woman's safety is
mounting after receiving vicious threats over social media.
News organizations tweeting about the incident
have received comments like this.
Cruel comments overlap into a wild sound montage
that grows to a cacophony, then fades away to lights up.
The sinews are now hanging across the cell, unfurled
into flags or scenes of each of their ancestral lineage.
The cell is still the cell, though it has been almost
taken over by nature.
One leg of the bunk is now a tree.
Grass has sprouted up all over.
The floor is covered in dirt and one wall of the cell
has been replaced by a stream.
The light is different.
Baby Bison stands chewing.
Hank sleeps.
Woman washes in the stream.
For a moment we see her on stage simply bathing herself.
I never knew I had more pit hair under one arm than the other.
What's pit hair?
It's the fur that grows under your arm.
Why didn't you know?
Because I never let it grow out.
I shaved it.
I always cut the hair under my arms and on my legs.
Why?
Well, because that's how I feel sexy.
Because it's what most people do.
Hank has fur on his legs.
Yeah.
It's what women do.
Oh.
Why?
To attract men.
Oh.
Yeah.
I'm never doing it again.
What else do women do?
We put on makeup.
We color our face.
Why?
To look like we do right after we mate.
We wear shoes that make our backs sway of the movement.
We wear special clothes to make our udders look more full.
Full of what?
Of milk, I guess.
What else?
We use special ointments on our skin
to make it shine and look younger.
We use goop on our teeth to make them whiter.
We put deodorant on to cover up our smell
and then we put perfume on to smell like flowers.
Do you need bees to mate?
No.
During the rut, deer, the bucks and does both urinate
on their hind legs and move them together
to activate the tarsal gland.
It makes an unmistakable smell, deer sex.
Begins to drizzle inside the cell.
Over the following, Hank uses the memory sinews
to create a makeshift shelter.
We just think that we have to hide any portion of our body's
natural self.
Smell, look, age, feel in order to be able to attract a mate.
Wow, we are not deer.
What else?
We wait until we are sure before we speak in a group.
We apologize for our feelings, a lot.
We take pills to make sure we don't get pregnant
before we're ready.
When are you ready?
Well, we aren't ready when our bodies say we are.
I know that much.
We aren't ready then.
When are your bodies ready?
It varies.
I was 11.
I don't know when I'll be ready emotionally, if I'll ever
be ready.
I mean, I can't really do better than my plant and my cat,
and I didn't have a great role model as a mom.
So I don't know.
Why not?
She just made some pretty shit choices.
She shouldn't have been a mother.
What were her choices?
It was a combination of choice and circumstance I guess.
She didn't want to be who she was or where she was.
Who did she want to be?
She wanted to be someone else from someplace else.
She didn't know how to play or cook or just, like, be,
and then she left.
She just left.
Where did she go?
I don't know.
I came home from school one day and she was gone.
I was 12.
My aunt was there and she took me to her house
and I lived with her from then on.
Some years I got a postcard on my birthday
from places around the world.
12?
How long do you live with your mother?
Longer than 12.
18 for most people.
I would have lived with mine for three cold times
before I became full grown.
Oh.
My fur would turn brown first and I
would have begun to eat grass and grow big.
Where was your mom?
I don't know.
I was watching you and you looked for her.
How did you get separated?
I don't know.
Were you scared?
I don't know.
I was scared for you.
Why did you put me in that metal [? cow? ?]
Throughout the following, their movements
build to a dance in unison.
The baby bison dances her same dance in the clover,
waiting and looking, her own inner clock.
The woman moves with her own rhythm, her own waiting dance.
They both tremble as they wait and search
for their respective mothers.
I was afraid.
I know what it's like to be left and afraid,
and I didn't want that for you.
I was watching you and I remembered one time
when my mom left one night after she thought I was asleep.
She got all dressed up and I heard the front door close.
I got up to pee and I could still smell her hairspray
and perfume in the hall.
I searched the whole house calling her.
I was so scared.
Eventually I just lay down in the middle of the hallway
under her sweatshirt.
It smelled like her, like a mix of perfume, cigarettes
and sweat.
I loved her smell.
I was too scared to lay alone in my bed.
I felt less alone in the hall somehow,
like someone would discover me there.
I would wait until the grandfather clock
made a dong every 15 minutes.
I promised myself I'd wait 15 more minutes before I
could look for her again.
You were trembling and I thought the rangers could
help you find your mom, and I didn't want you to be hurt.
The woman's stomach grumbles.
[LAUGHTER]
Excuse me.
How embarrassing.
I haven't eaten in a while.
Her stomach grumbles again long and loud.
I felt like a fish in there, moving without walking.
A fish.
That's funny.
I just wanted you to live.
It was warm in there.
I thought maybe since it was warm, like my mother,
I was safe.
I know.
Me too.
I thought maybe I was in another mother somehow.
So when I came out of one I tried to drink from its udder.
I heard.
That's not an udder, it's a tailpipe.
Cars aren't alive.
What is it tailpipe?
I know about tails.
It's like a tail that lets gas out.
It didn't taste good.
That's because it's not food.
But then I stopped being a bison.
I know.
You were a bison and now you're not.
I thought I saw myself in you, that we were the same,
but we're not.
Well, we kind of are.
You're a magnificent creature and I'm
like a garbage person from a big city where
the most useful knowledge I have is, like,
not to take the L train on weekdays until 10 AM
if I can help it.
Being a human is weird.
Being a human in the city is super weird.
You know, all of these things that
are really useless in the grand scheme of things.
Well, except maybe navigation.
That seems important.
Snow pack is how we navigate.
It shows us the way.
This is the stupidest thing I've ever done
and everyone in America knows about it.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't even care because I'm here with you,
and you are beautiful.
You are like a child of poetry and so pure and so innocent,
and your mom didn't leave you to go out on a date or something.
She left because she was walking with her herd
and you lost your way.
It was the natural order of things and I fucked up nature.
Can't fuck up nature.
I fucking broke nature in some small but significant way.
A coyote didn't get to eat you because the grass wasn't, like,
being fed by the phosphorous in your bones;
and you inhaled a fucking tailpipe;
and then you kept doing it.
It was some sort of crack pipe.
So I basically ghettoized you, and I am so sorry.
I am so--
[SCREAMING IN ANGER]
Woman begins to move into a primal stance.
She stays away from the bison, but she finds in herself
a new level of connection to something.
She makes the sounds for as long as she needs to.
This should be a moment.
This is the moment she finds that she is part of nature.
Woman's stomach growls and grumbles
as if a great earthquake is taking
place inside of her intestines.
It is the deepest hunger she has ever felt.
She howls deep and guttural from the pain of hunger.
Buffalo, shocked by the abnormality of the woman,
shrinks to the ground and watches in awe.
Woman shrinks again and on pure instinct reaches inside Buffalo
and pulls out buffalo cream.
She devours it.
She eats more and more.
Buffalo never runs out.
The woman eats so wildly that the cream
covers her whole head.
Buffalo undulates with each handful of cream.
The woman takes from her body a fluid and sacrificial movement
that is beautiful.
It is not painful after the initial shock
of having your buffalo cream pulled out of you.
She consumes the buffalo in a joyful and messy dance where
ultimately she has been covered, hair slicked back,
white vernix like cream on her skin, blood and small clots
stuck to her face.
She looks like she's just been born.
I know what a buffalo is.
The rain has finally arrived.
It rains inside the cell.
Hank pulls more memory sinews down
onto the floor to complete this shelter.
Baby Bison enters, throws off her hide
and uses the opportunity to turn this into a slip and slide.
She slides on it.
I'm not a buffalo anymore.
I'm a light.
People sometimes get sad about dying because they won't
see the body be loved anymore.
We stopped being in a body, like we weren't a body before.
Before, I was a light, then I was a bison,
and then I went back to being a light.
A different light, but still the light and I
can become another body if I feel
like it and it makes sense.
Does a person become another person?
She can, or she can become a rat or a dog, a wild dog
with a family.
Can a dog become a person?
I become a dog every day.
I play wild dogs.
When you're a light you can become whatever you like.
Baby Bison runs and does the slip
and slide a few more times.
Each time she hits the end of the slide
she yells out a different animal or person's name
or whatever she feels like she has become.
Gorilla, chicken, amoeba, velociraptor, tiger.
Et cetera.
And runs back to the front of the slide as that animal.
She gets Buffalo to do it a few times.
Woman gets ready to join in before she's
stopped, hit with a wall of sound,
maybe hundreds of simultaneous news reports,
she realizes her life won't be the same.
A storm is brewing.
What is happening?
Hold on to your britches, kiddo.
Shit's about to hit the fan.
I've been watching it brew for a good bit now
and it's pretty near ready to land on you.
What is it?
I feel it in my bones.
Well, let's just say the storm's coming on strong now.
I'm still me, aren't I?
Yeah.
Still you, still here, and they found you.
The media shit storm.
The internet is going crazy, projections
all over the cell; first of individuals making
weird choices about how they interact with nature
and then about the woman.
The storm moves through the internet
into an elemental storm.
Reporters pounding on the door to the jail are thunder,
flashbulbs are lightning, helicopter whirring is wind.
Hands with microphones pop through the bars
of the cells come down out of the tree even beneath the bed.
But am I different?
Don't ask me.
I see things now.
Yeah.
I know what a bison is.
And you know how we weather a storm.
Hank readies himself.
He puts on old '80s ski goggles.
The buffalo puts baby bison's hide on the woman,
then lifts the baby bison's body.
They herd up.
Turn to face the storm, put their heads down,
and in perfect unison against rain, snow, wind, media, they
slowly and steadily exit the theater and play.
[APPLAUSE, CHEERING]
[APPLAUSE]
Can I just say one little thing?
No.
Say it.
Do it.
Kendra and I are not in academia.
We're theater majors and this experience for us,
the conversations that we were able to hear,
I think changed the way we will approach work.
And this is the second draft of the play and we
were very stuck on how do we flip archetype on its head
and how do we--
but yeah.
There's just a lot of tricky things
that we're trying to dive into, and being here
I think has really, really inspired us
on which conversations are important to be having and
how we have them.
So we would like to thank you all so much for letting us
be here.
This has been a seriously life changing experience.
Absolutely.
And because of the fact that we are works in progress
and the piece is very--
I mean, we were like up last night
cutting and moving and trying to find a way for it to feel good.
Second draft is early.
So any feedback that anyone has about things that were working,
that were not working, that were severely--
I mean, we heard some of the problems,
and we don't need to take up everybody's time.
We don't have to do this in a big public way necessarily,
but we really would welcome any feedback.
And thank you guys so much.
This has been great, and hard.
[APPLAUSE]