GRAMMAR OF UNDOING ~ The Carpenter's Apology
A Play in Three Acts with Temporal Bleeding
By B Otto Will and Brrd Roots
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CHARACTERS
ANGELICA WALL - 30s-60s, ages backward and forward. A carpenter who builds in reverse, teaching wood to remember being trees.
THE NARRATOR - Any age. Angelica's neighbor, documenting the undocumentation.
JOY DECK - 20s-40s. Refugee from next Thursday. Brings coffee that brews backward.
CAPITAL MONK - Ageless. A pangolin made of compressed prayers, each scale a divine rejection.
AMOS KAZBRO - 30s-50s. The Temporarily Deceased. Lives under the overpass between existence and void.
THE GRIEF-MOTH - Angelica's father transformed. Size of a door, wings of compressed sighs.
THE TERMITE QUEEN - "The Architect of Undoing." Glows with decomposition's light.
STORM DAVID - Angelica's ex-husband who chases yesterday's weather.
THE THREE CHILDREN - One child experienced thrice: PAST-CHILD, PRESENT-CHILD, FUTURE-CHILD.
THE COUNCIL - Municipal officials who exist too firmly.
THE CHORUS OF THE UNBUILT - Furniture that was never made, trees never planted, houses never constructed.
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SETTING
The stage is Angelica's workshop/garage, but time moves differently in each corner:
CENTER: The workbench where present tense struggles to exist
STAGE LEFT: Yesterday's workspace, tools moving backward
STAGE RIGHT: Tomorrow's workspace, furniture dissolving into lumber
UPSTAGE: The Grief-Moth's cocoon cathedral
DOWNSTAGE: The temporal bleed where audience and performance meet
Note: Time is a suggestion. Past and future scenes occur simultaneously. Characters age and de-age within single conversations.
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ACT ONE: THE GRAMMAR LESSON
Scene 1: Morning's Undoing
(7 AM. Silence where sawing should be. THE NARRATOR enters the garage to find ANGELICA holding the glowing TERMITE QUEEN.)
NARRATOR: The silence has weight. Like water pressing against glass.
ANGELICA: (To the Termite Queen) Show them how cherry wood remembers its blossoms.
(The wood begins dissolving, sawdust spiraling upward into the shape of a tree.)
TERMITE QUEEN: (Voice like wood settling) Every nail hole is a wound that wants to heal backward.
ANGELICA: This is the first grammar rule: All creation is violence. All destruction is mercy.
NARRATOR: How long have you been—
ANGELICA: Unbuilding? Since my father became that.
(Points to the GRIEF-MOTH hanging upside down, wings trembling with inherited sorrow.)
GRIEF-MOTH: (Wing-whispers) Cardiac metamorphosis. The heart too large for the chest. Had to grow wings or explode.
ANGELICA: He's teaching me through absence. Every empty space is a lesson.
(JOY DECK enters backward through tomorrow's door, carrying Turkish coffee in a copper pot.)
JOY: (Pouring coffee that turns into beans, then soil) I brought yesterday's tomorrow's coffee. Still warm from never being brewed.
ANGELICA: Joy Deck, refugee from next Thursday, meet my neighbor who thinks time moves forward.
NARRATOR: Time does move forward.
JOY: Prove it.
(She ages five years, then returns to her original age, then becomes a child, then returns.)
JOY: See? Time is negotiable. Like grammar. Like suffering.
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Scene 2: The Council's Gravity
(The garage transforms. COUNCIL MEMBERS enter, their bodies too solid, creating dents in spacetime.)
COUNCIL MEMBER 1: Ms. Wall, you're in violation of existing.
ANGELICA: (Her skin becoming translucent, organs visible) Watch my disappointment.
(Her liver turns gray, her appendix swells with hope.)
COUNCIL MEMBER 2: The parking garage will be built where memories live.
ANGELICA: Memories are citizens. They vote. They pay taxes in nostalgia.
COUNCIL MEMBER 1: Memories aren't real.
ANGELICA: (Building a chair from wood that doesn't exist) Neither is money. Neither is authority. But here we are, pretending.
(The chair screams the name of its unmade forest.)
ANGELICA: This chair is made from the oak your parking garage will prevent from growing. Can you hear it screaming its unbirth?
COUNCIL: (Covering ears) Make it stop!
ANGELICA: I'm running for council. The unborn are my constituency.
COUNCIL MEMBER 2: The unborn can't vote.
JOY: (From tomorrow) They did. She got eleven votes. Her unborn mother voted through séance. Her tomorrow-self voted through time-loop.
ANGELICA: I lost by winning. The garage will be built but immediately sink, pulled down by the weight of deleted gardens.
(The COUNCIL exits, but their weight remains, bending the stage.)
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Scene 3: Highway 49's Question
(Lights shift. ANGELICA on the ground. A CELESTIAL DEER made of starlight dying backward through her.)
ANGELICA: (To the deer) Shh, shh. (Singing in Russian) Zaika maya, you're un-dying beautifully.
NARRATOR: The ambulance is coming from yesterday.
ANGELICA: Tell them to bring bandages that remove wounds instead of covering them.
(CAPITAL MONK enters—a pangolin whose scales are rejected prayers.)
CAPITAL MONK: I'll trade you three ribs for the ability to see endings.
ANGELICA: Will it hurt?
CAPITAL MONK: Everything hurts. But backward hurting feels like healing if you don't think about it too hard.
(ANGELICA hands over three ribs. Her skeleton becomes visible, each bone inscribed with its future fracture date.)
ANGELICA: (Reading her bones) Tuesday. Thursday. Next September. Christmas 2034.
CAPITAL MONK: Now you know when, but not how. That's mercy.
(The CELESTIAL DEER completes its un-dying, leaps backward through the windshield, which un-shatters.)
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Scene 4: The Under-Overpass
(The space beneath tomorrow's bridge. AMOS KAZBRO sits in temporal suspension.)
AMOS: I'm temporarily deceased. Permanent death is so... permanent.
ANGELICA: Your house—
AMOS: Destroyed by a hurricane that hasn't happened yet. Insurance doesn't cover precognitive damage.
ANGELICA: (Offering food that's already been digested) Rescue cuisine in reverse. Nutrients extracted from waste.
AMOS: Tastes like tomorrow's hunger.
ANGELICA: (Studying decay specimens) Look—this fruit is growing intelligent mold. It's whispering stock tips.
INTELLIGENT MOLD: Buy nothing. Sell everything. Invest in absence.
AMOS: Everything falls apart into better things.
ANGELICA: That's the second grammar rule: Decomposition is composition in the honest direction.
(The GRIEF-MOTH descends, weaving cocoons from their conversation.)
GRIEF-MOTH: Small griefs need homes too. The grief of burnt toast. Of missed calls. Of sentences that end mid—
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ACT TWO: THE SYNTAX OF SUFFERING
Scene 1: Reverse Wedding
(STORM DAVID enters, maps of yesterday's weather floating around him.)
STORM DAVID: I'm leaving on Tuesday.
ANGELICA: Today is Tuesday.
STORM DAVID: Not the Tuesday that happened. The Tuesday that happens on Wednesday.
(THE THREE CHILDREN enter—same child at different ages.)
PAST-CHILD: (Age 16, aging backward) Mom, why was I born knowing how to die?
PRESENT-CHILD: (Age 8, stable) She's unbuilding us into possibility.
FUTURE-CHILD: (Infant with adult eyes) We're one person experienced thrice. A temporal trinity of her mistake.
STORM DAVID: I can't compete with your infinite capacity to care about nothing.
ANGELICA: Nothing needs care most of all. Something can take care of itself.
(She signs divorce papers. The marriage certificate unburns itself.)
STORM DAVID: (Exiting into yesterday) I'll remember you tomorrow.
ANGELICA: I'm forgetting you retroactively.
(She holds wood that remembers being furniture in houses not yet built.)
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Scene 2: The Adjacent Lovers
(Three lovers appear in parallel dimensions, visible but unreachable.)
PHOTOGRAPHER LOVER: (From next year) We'll meet soon. We've already broken up.
BAKER LOVER: (From last year) Our relationship was perfect because it never started.
SOCIAL WORKER LOVER: (From parallel timeline) In my dimension, we're friends. It means something different there.
ANGELICA: I'm built for adjacency. Love requires distance to breathe.
(She builds a coffin from pre-incarnated wood.)
ANGELICA: This tree remembered being human. Named Angela. Died in 1842. Became an oak. Now becoming furniture for the pre-dead.
NARRATOR: Who's it for?
ANGELICA: Everyone. Eventually. Retroactively.
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Scene 3: The Disease of Kindness
(ANGELICA's hands begin releasing tools before impact.)
ANGELICA: My hands are becoming too kind to cause damage.
JOY: That's the final evolution. When you can't even hurt wood anymore.
(ANGELICA's bones turn transparent, fill with light.)
ANGELICA: I'm becoming a constellation visible only from inside.
CAPITAL MONK: (Scales rattling with rejected prayers) God's accepting your apology.
ANGELICA: I haven't apologized.
CAPITAL MONK: Your existence is an apology. Every breath says sorry for taking air.
(She builds a chair from everyone who ever loved her.)
ANGELICA: Sit in this.
NARRATOR: (Sitting) It feels like... everyone.
ANGELICA: That's the third grammar rule: We're all furniture for each other's rest.
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Scene 4: The Medusa Cathedral
(The garage transforms into bioluminescent cathedral. Tentacles of light hang where tools were.)
CHORUS OF THE UNBUILT: (Singing)
We are the chairs never sat in
Tables never eaten upon
Houses never sheltering
Trees never cut
Lumber never sawn
We exist in the space between intention and prevention
ANGELICA: (To JOY) You need a chair for your unbody.
JOY: To not-sit in while not-being.
(ANGELICA builds a chair from absence itself—visible only as the space around it.)
ANGELICA: This is my altruistic deletion. Removing something so nothing can exist.
AMOS: (From under the overpass) Teach us to unbuild properly.
ANGELICA: First, hold the hammer backward. Feel its weight wanting to return to ore. Let it pull nails instead of driving them. Each removal is a small resurrection.
(Everyone practices unbuilding. The stage gradually empties of objects.)
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ACT THREE: THE APOLOGY COMPLETE
Scene 1: Tomorrow's Disasters
(ANGELICA stands in three different disasters simultaneously.)
ANGELICA: (In future flood) The water hasn't risen yet but I'm teaching people to breathe underwater.
ANGELICA: (In potential fire) The flames might exist if wind patterns align. I'm building furniture from future char.
ANGELICA: (In hypothetical tornado) It's still deciding whether to form. I'm negotiating with its pre-rotation.
FUTURE WIDOW: After my house will burn, you taught me to make a table from char that doesn't exist.
ANGELICA: Every meal will taste like possibility.
(All three disasters collapse into one moment of pure potential.)
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Scene 2: The Children's Inheritance
(THE THREE CHILDREN stand around ANGELICA as she builds a cradle backward.)
PAST-CHILD: (Now infant) Teach us to remember forward.
PRESENT-CHILD: (Now elderly) She already has. We just haven't learned it yet.
FUTURE-CHILD: (Now middle-aged) We're one child in temporal triplicate. Her grief made manifest.
ANGELICA: (Aging rapidly, then reversing) You'll run the workshop in three timelines.
THE THREE CHILDREN: (In unison)
We'll unteach carpentry
Unbuild furniture
Undocument everything
Until only punctuation remains
ANGELICA: That's my gift to you. The ability to apologize for existing by helping others un-exist.
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Scene 3: The Final Grammar
(ANGELICA lies on the workbench. Heart expanding into multiple dimensions.)
ANGELICA: The fourth rule: Everything built must be unbuilt, but the unbuilding takes forever.
NARRATOR: You're dying.
ANGELICA: I'm translating. Into a language only furniture understands.
(Her hand presses into soft pine, leaving an imprint that exists in all times.)
JOY: (From Thursday) The handprint is tomorrow's yesterday's now.
CAPITAL MONK: (Scales falling like rain) Every prayer I carried is answered by her dissolution.
AMOS: (Fully deceased now) She's showing us how to die productively.
(The GRIEF-MOTH lands on her chest.)
GRIEF-MOTH: Daughter, you've become the space between heartbeats. Where I live now.
ANGELICA: Dad? You're teaching through absence still?
GRIEF-MOTH: Absence is the only honest lesson.
(ANGELICA becomes light particles, dispersing through the theater.)
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Scene 4: The Continuing End
(The workshop exists in all times simultaneously. THE NARRATOR alone but surrounded by absence.)
NARRATOR: I kept the chair that collapsed. It's the only solid thing because it admits its brokenness.
(Sound of tomorrow's saw cutting yesterday's wood.)
NARRATOR: She's still here. Building backward through time. Creating absences where suffering can't exist.
CHORUS OF THE UNBUILT:
She removes things so perfectly
We mistake it for creation
Like God making light
By deleting darkness
JOY: (Entering from next Thursday) The workshop's still here. Tomorrow. Yesterday. Never.
CAPITAL MONK: Want to learn the grammar?
NARRATOR: Of undoing?
AMOS: Of apologizing for being by becoming not.
(THE THREE CHILDREN enter, each carrying tools that work in reverse.)
THE THREE CHILDREN:
First rule: Creation is violence
Second: Decomposition is honest composition
Third: We're furniture for each other
Fourth: Everything built must be unbuilt
Fifth: The unbuilding takes forever
Sixth: Forever is negotiable
Seventh:
(They stop mid-sentence. The lights fade except for the glowing TERMITE QUEEN.)
TERMITE QUEEN: The seventh rule can't be spoken. Only carved into wood that remembers being human.
(Blackout. Sound of sawing in reverse. Sound of trees being uncut. Sound of forests being unsilenced. Sound of the earth apologizing for providing materials.)
END
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PRODUCTION NOTES
Time
- Past, present, and future scenes occur simultaneously
- Characters age fluidly within scenes
- Use lighting to show temporal zones
- Sound design should include forward and backward effects layered
The Creatures
- Grief-Moth: Aerial rigging or large puppet, wings that breathe
- Termite Queen: Glowing puppet/projection hybrid
- Capital Monk: Actor in pangolin suit where scales can fall and regrow
- Celestial Deer: Projection that can move through actors
Transformations
- Angelica's translucent skin: UV-reactive makeup and strategic lighting
- Visible organs: Projection mapping on costume
- Aging/de-aging: Multiple actors or projection effects
- Dissolution: Particle effects, haze, scattered light
The Workshop
- Tools on invisible wire to move backward
- Sawdust that falls upward (reversed fans)
- Wood pieces that assemble into trees (projection)
- Furniture that appears/disappears (trap doors, fly system)
Sound Design
- Every tool sound should have a reversed version
- Ambient sounds of "unbuilding"—nails singing as they're removed
- The Chorus of the Unbuilt needs ethereal, barely-there voices
- Coffee brewing backward, water becoming beans
Critical Note
This play requires audiences to abandon linear time. Consider lobby installations that prepare them: clocks running backward, programs printed in reverse order, ushers aging backward as patrons enter.
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"Grammar of Undoing" premiered at [Theater] on [Date]. Runtime: 2 hours 45 minutes with one intermission that occurs before the play starts. Several audience members reported remembering things that hadn't happened yet. This is intentional.
The production includes a pre-show where the furniture unmakes itself, and a post-show where the entire set returns to trees. Audiences are encouraged to stay for both.
