Prometheus Onstage

By Marvin Cho

Chapter 1: The Play

P. thought he felt an itch at the tip of his nose, but he did not have the time to remove his mask to scratch it. The director had already finished introducing the University Classical Drama Company and P. was to enter the stage in just a moment. He thus resorted to wriggling his cheeks about, trying to rub the coarse cardboard of the mask against his face. As the audience obliged the director’s request for an applause, the stout junior who played Hephaistos noticed P. 's mask floating up and down and tapped his arm with a prop hammer in hand. 

“No need to be so nervous. It’s just like last year,” said Hephaistos. P. had never considered him a friend, but the gesture was made so naturally that P. suspected that he had been mistaken, that they had in fact become good friends through their year in the company together. He suddenly regretted that he had only now discovered this new friendship. P. wanted very much to show his appreciation for his new friend, but having never talked to him in this way, he hesitated; after which he felt that the audience had held their applause for a moment too long. He opted instead for a quick smile and nod. 

The play began, for the most part, as rehearsed. P. sat down behind the wing curtain with his back facing the stage. Without a word, two actors—a gaunt, almost skeletal senior who played Power and a sophomore girl half his height who played Violence—grabbed his wrists from either side and marched out in unison into the light. The script instructed P. to slide like a rag across the stage, but he had learned through rehearsal that the pair were not strong enough to drag him along with an appropriately dominant air. He thus had to help them along with several scoots of his feet, while he kept his upper body limp to show that he was meant to be almost lifeless. Hephaistos followed behind with a well-practiced limp but stopped after only a few steps. When the audience saw them enter the stage, their claps swelled, perhaps because they understood that they were soon to be relieved from their duties. P. felt that this heightened applause made their struggle to center stage even more comical than he had imagined. The prop team had placed there a strange, somewhat pentagonal structure composed of artistically rugged plastic scaffolds. The top vertex of the pentagon extended irregularly upward, slightly leftward, a visual which the director emphasized should resemble “a spear challenging the heavens, but only timidly.” The draggers flung P. down before the structure. They must have been nervous, because this was done with slightly more aggression than P. was accustomed to; he had to extend his arm to break a fall onto his nose. This added greatly to his embarrassment. 

“Chthonos men es telouron hekomen pedon,” Power began, and through a grand speech condemned Hephaistos to the task of chaining P. to the scaffolding. As he did so, he strided over to Hephaistos, still hesitating on the left wing. 

From where he lay, with one eye facing the floor and the other directed obliquely downstage, P. could only make out the first row of the house. Directly in the middle sat a pair that looked to be a mother and a son; P. recognized them, from a prior encounter, as the director’s family. It was clear that the director had expected them to receive some attention that night and instructed his wife to prepare accordingly. The boy was dressed in a purple suit-jacket over a red cardigan and a neatly strung bow tie, while the mother wore sharply-ironed white garments and a straw hat that did not seem at all appropriate for the autumn weather. It occurred to P. that they resembled some kind of royal family at a spectacle arranged for no one other than themselves, in which they themselves were the intended objects. Several times during Power’s monologue, the boy turned to his mother as if to discern what had just been said, but the mother simply nodded and smiled knowingly; each time, the boy turned his attention back to the stage, apparently satisfied with his mother’s strange affirmations. 

“Kratos Bia te, sphon men entole Dios echei telos de kouden empodon eti,” Hephaistos responded, and explained his feelings of pity for P.’s fate. “Pollous odyrmous kai go-ous anopheleis phthegxe,” he concluded. The end of Hephaistos’ lament began a dialogue: Power rapidly launched a series of demands, to which Hephaistos defended with suppressed, barely audible mutters. Each give and take began with Power pulling at the arm of Hephaistos, who pretended to resist but gave up some ground every time; in this way, the pair inched toward P., still lying center stage. All the while Violence observed in silence from the opposite wing. 

P. had already grown quite bored at this point—which was natural, because the opening monologues were quite long and because P. for the most part had forgotten what they meant—and decided to be a little more adventurous with his survey of the audience. He lifted his face slightly and managed to extend his view of the house by several rows. Everyone in these seats seemed as they should seem, appropriately attentive and respectfully dressed so as to not rival the glamor of the royals. P. didn’t notice anyone interesting except for a trio of young men sitting not far behind the director’s family, who with one glance he concluded must be students: they had made the point to deviate from the crowd by dressing exclusively in University merchandise, as if to announce some superior connection to the company on stage. They listened neither with the omniscience of the mother nor the childlike confusion of the boy, nor even the polite attentiveness of the rest, but every now and then they seemed to catch a word or sentence that they understood somewhat; their eyes widened for a moment, then they looked down to scribble into notebooks resting on their laps.

“Perainetai de kou mata tourgon t0de,” said Hephaistos, finally bending down to help P. up to his feet. Trying as best he could to act like he was unable to stand or move without help, P. stood up to a foothold and moved his wrists into the two leather straps that had been integrated, a wingspan apart, onto the pentagonal scaffolding. He slouched forward at the designated angle, which the cast agreed expressed the perfect balance of resignation and resistance. At one rehearsal, P. had politely mentioned that this forward slant, when combined with the orthogonal angle between his arms and torso, applied an uncomfortable strain on his wrists and shoulders, but the director had remarked with a contemplative sigh that the imagery created by the pose was “just too striking and impressive” to give up. P. was to stay there for the rest of the play, and in obedience to the director’s command, “glare deliriously up at the heavens in spite.”

P. had wondered if there was, somewhere within the director’s passionate imaginations, a contradiction; but he was grateful in the moment, because they freed him from the awkwardness of standing still in the scene. He started rolling his head around, and though he tried to maintain a vacant look in his eyes, took in the auditorium now fully visible before him. 

He could not tell whether he was more surprised or relieved to discover that the house was barely half-occupied. Not in the sense that there were many unoccupied seats: P. in fact only saw a handful, and even these were covered by some or other article of clothing that signalled its reservation for an absentee. It was rather half-occupied in the sense that P. counted almost as many head-tops as faces. The frequency of these seemed to correlate with their distance from stage, such that the mezzanine seats were

almost entirely devoid of facial features. He would have thought them asleep if not for the fact that each of them, without fail, lifted their faces in apparent interest whenever he began to suspect. 

It was because of the universal yet unprovable facelessness of these attendees that P. was somewhat startled when he caught the gaze of a stranger in their midst. His eyes were dragged into it against his will; so imprisoned were they, that those paying attention might have wondered how his delirium had been so quickly replaced by a singular focus. P. could not make out the face of the girl to whom these eyes belonged, but simply by the confidence she maintained in this deadlock of gazes he knew that she was beautiful. He felt that she was observing him with a sort of motherly amusement, curious to see how long P. could hide his rapture with her, or to see if P. would risk doing something to impress her. P. managed after too long a moment to free his gaze, but it still wandered around her in a trance. 

There was not much action on the stage except that Hephaistos lingered around P. and the structure, occasionally pulling at imagined straps and striking at imagined nails with his hammer. Throughout the conversation, he had masterfully replaced the defiant tone in his voice with one of tired resignation and sarcasm; P. noted that Hephaistos was really outdoing himself that night and would certainly receive much praise from the director for his performance. When Power, with a sort of accentuated gravity, ordered him to “adamantinou nun sphenos authade gnathon sternon diapax passaleu erromenos,” Hephaistos froze and allowed a dramatic moment of silence. Having slowly turned his face upward to meet P.’s, he said, “Aiai, Prometheu, son hupersteno ponon!,” to which Power added from behind yet another impatient shout. Finally yielding, Hephaistos lifted a fist up to P.’s chest, and after two rhythmical wind-ups, swung down. The wind-ups allowed the back-stage crew and the actors not yet on stage to time a collective stomp. The moment called for P. to scream out in pain and let his head drop limply in defeat, which meant that he had no choice but to abandon the sight of the beautiful girl. It also meant that his time to speak was finally approaching, and that he should probably run over his lines one last time. 

Out of nowhere P. felt the itch return to his nose. With some amusement he entertained the idea that Hephaistos was right after all, that he was in fact nervous, and that this itch was his body’s way of symptomizing this nervousness; again he resorted to wriggling his cheek around, not without worry that someone in the audience would notice the wobble of his mask. 

“Horas theama dustheaton ommasin?” Hephaistos spat at Power.

It did not take P. much longer to realize that this itch was not an itch at all, but rather the hint of a smell. An odor, rather, because it was quite unpleasant. It was faint enough to be bearable, but strong enough that P. was certain its origin lay somewhere within the auditorium. He wondered how anything, or anyone, in such a well put-together crowd could ever produce so lowly an odor. To be sure, it was not completely repulsive, the same way that the stench of a corpse might not always drive people away but in fact draw them closer by force of curiosity. It was due to a similar pull that P. once again began surveying the audience, now neither in delirium nor under a spell, but with a strange eagerness to bring the source to light for all to behold; although P. was not entirely sure how he would do this while fulfilling his duties on stage. 

With a few more resentful exchanges with Power and a few more gestured touches on his work, Hephaistos exited. Power himself approached P. up close for the

first time, with a sly, slithering gait which he had perfected through several revisions with the director. He softly ran the back of his finger down the edge of P.’s mask and showed off an equally impressive cackle. 

“Entautha nun hubrisde kai theon gera sulon ephemeroisi prostithei,” he said, with a lift of his chin. It had been decided that P. would lock eyes with him at this point and begin growling like a dog, but he was so absorbed in this new investigation that he instead brushed off this challenge and continued to scan the audience for some break in the case. Power adapted as well as he could: he delayed his next sentences for a few seconds, deigning to allow his partner a chance to remember where he was. When this did not achieve the desired effect, Power snapped out his remaining lines. He abandoned the slyness he had worked so hard to develop and delivered his final monologue of the night with an honest frustration, as if he wanted nothing more in the moment than to express his scorn toward P., for making it seem like he himself had forgotten his lines, and for making him look like a worse actor than he really was. All of which was lost to the audience, who probably believed that Power’s sudden switch in demeanor was just as brilliant as any other moment in the play. 

So too was it lost to P., still busy with his search. Glancing over the house several times, he identified a handful of suspects: here an obtuse man whose heavy breath, one could suspect, carried visceral corruption and food; there a man with long hair and an even longer beard, on which a greasy polish signalled a lack of cleanliness. There were, in addition, several infants and toddlers being nursed within the crowd who could have easily made an innocent mistake befitting their age. But P. concluded that none of these could be the source: the odor somehow did not seem at all organic, or like it could be produced by a human body. He reserved, however, the suspicion that it could come from the crowd as a whole, like a strange olfactory kraken composed of an unfortunate combination of human stenches. 

Just as he was pondering this last theory, it occurred to him that the auditorium had grown completely silent, and moreover, that he was alone on stage. He took a few moments to realize that they were all waiting for him to do something; they may have been impressed at first with the unsettling momentary silence, but now it seemed like they were imploring P. to move on with their unfriendly eyes. P. tried hard to remember how long it had been since Power left the stage, and how long it had been since he was meant to begin his soliloquy, but he could not. The odor seemed to hide itself as a punishment for P.’s lapse; something in his stomach growled in anxiety at the sudden retreat. With great difficulty he gathered his breath. 

“O dios aither kai tachupteroi pnoai…potamon te pegai, pontion te…kumaton anerithmo…n gelasma, pammetor te ge…” P. managed to ramble. He was meant, as he said this, to glare at different corners of the auditorium, addressing the sky, the winds, the sea and earth; not unlike what he had just been doing, but now he was staring absentmindedly at the audience.

And in a moment it came back with all force, revealed itself: a horror, hidden guilelessly in the crowd, tragic, hateful, and yet…the kraken, its body discovered, dived at P.’s nostrils with all its ethereal mass. P.’s insides, in return, became massless and floated through his throat like a noble lion rising to face a far greater beast out of panic and courage. P. removed his mask to let it all out, revealing an expression that was spectacular, but nothing came except words. He asked, what is that thing, and that divine stench that flies at me, and who tortures me with it, gods, humans, or some conspiracy of both? And who are you, that comes to this fringe of the world to be spectators of my suffering? P. hated the son, the mother, the students, the girl, the fat man, the hairy man, he hated the director, hated Hephaistos, hated Power and Violence, for not smelling it, pointing it out, or for ignoring it out of some absurdly irrefutable decision that everything must be acted out to an end. He sobbed, begged them to stop, to sniff and be disgusted, to choke as he choked, not by words but by the fear in his eyes and the trembling of his being. 

For a second the audience seemed to hold its breath, as if considering whether they should oblige these prayers—breathe in the stench and bring this strange character some company in his misery. But it never happened. When other actors rushed onto the stage, the moment hanging collapsed and P. felt a drop in his gut. 

The play continued as rehearsed to the end, and P. was dragged along in a confusion. He never again allowed his eyes to wander beyond the threshold. By the time he was bowing for the curtain call, his mind elsewhere, the odor had again been reduced to an itch. He wanted to inhale, to grasp this otherworldly scent as it slipped away from him. More than anything he wanted another chance at pleading the crowd to feel with him. But he didn’t dare, not with the sting of an overlooked plea so fresh in his memory, and in the moment it seemed the most impossible thing in the world. 

The applause of the audience was an explosion, as much for their own patience as for the cast’s impressive commitment to memorizing lines in Greek. As P. turned around to exit into the wings, the crowd still cheering, Hephaistos again bumped him on the shoulder and gave him a knowing wink.