George Hunka graduated from Bard College in 1983 with a BA in Languages and Literature. His writings on theatre have appeared in a number of general and specialized publications, including The New York Times, Yale Theater, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art and Contemporary Theatre Review. In 2008 he founded his own theatre company, theatre minima, which produced his play In Public, and in fall 2010 he will direct the premiere of his play What She Knew for the company. He lives and works in New York City.

What She Knew received a workshop production at the International Culture Lab’s Avant-Yarde project on 14 February 2010. It was directed by the author and Nick Fracaro, and performed by Gabriele Schafer.

For production permission please contact the author at:
geh@panix.com

White cyclorama, without entrance or exit. Spectrum of grays.
A woman, 45. Costume gray, skirt and top, of suede and leather. Gray high-heeled pumps.

1

Unconscionable the smell
When a girl I was taken unaware
by my mother and father to the temple
What a stench was there
sweet incense to put me in the mind of God
and all that incense smelled of decay
the rot of aging flesh
of bearded men in black robes
desperation
all the colorful vestments of the church
could not distract me from that smell
of age and years
the bodies buried under the church floor
beneath my feet
the stone did not serve
to hide the decaying bodies
Unconscionable
Ignorance
of
Ends
And since then the sweet smell
puts me in mind of death
not God
or perhaps there is no difference
I was too young a girl
to recognize such
sordid equivalences
and when we knelt
mother and father and I
side by side
they let go my hands and left me
in dark solitude
wrapped in that sweet smell
a ray of sunlight
stabbed through the stained glass window
upon my young breast
Unconscionable unconscionable
My earliest memory of the decay around me
beneath my feet
I relive it
with every waking
These Theban mornings I wake at four
when the fires that light the pestilential city at night
have died to a smoldering dim yellow
and the smoke above this cursed city
has cleared enough to reveal
the galaxies above me shimmering in the
black night
and the cries of the citizens have only briefly dimmed
to a low moan
I wake to his arrival
hearing his limping step down the corridor
step pause step
pause step
pause
My husband disguised as a beggar
reconnoiters through the alleys
unable to sleep himself
disguised in dirty rags he sees and pities
his kingdom’s children
I can see them
I close my eyes and see them
and have no pity, feel no pity
unmoved
The plague eats the flesh of the citizens
far beyond pain now they are numb
can scarcely recognize the skin slipping from their bones
The cattle bloated, dead in the fields
stomachs burst, meat fit for nothing
but dogs and crows
In the street my husband turns to a
nearby doorway
In the dim light of the smoldering dim yellow he sees
a man taking a woman standing in the threshold
sores suppurating on his back the man
impales her, she is ecstatic, upon his hard cock
he nearly splits her
she joyously surrendered to her pleasure
My husband hears the man’s heavy breath
the woman’s cry as she comes
to no purpose
Theban women give birth only to stillborns
in this plague
Still they embrace desperately, entwined
her legs around his thighs
her stiletto heels scraping against his skin
his sharp brief cry of pain and pleasure
commingles with her coming
Step pause step
pause
step
As my husband passes my bedroom door
he mumbles, he moralizes
“This is my kingdom” he complains
“There are my people
THEY
FUCK
LIKE RABBITS
SHAMELESS”
And he does not pause but trods on limping to his own bedroom
far from mine
I glance through the window to the four o’clock sky
and my hands grasp my metal bedstand
and I pretend to feel my own wrists
held tightly in his
NO
Unconscionable
to hold and restrain me
I wait silent until his tread has faded to silence
then rise
then like a ghost noiselessly I step onto
the veranda of the palace to look up
and see far in the east
a charcoal gray that promises
yet another day
not so unlike the last
the same sun to rise
to erase the stars in his dull
yellow
white of the stars, each a secret
obliterated in the coming morning
I look up at the dark sky through the branches
overhanging the veranda
the sky an impossible jigsaw puzzle
irregular shards of black between the leaves
as the firmament lightens
once again
this as every morning
And I dress
wrapping skins around me to bear some of the bestiality of the night
through my day
leather and suede
tight against my skin
animal no animal
my clothes the only reminder
of the night from which I emerge
as the Theban sun beats upon my face
and the city’s cries rise to their daytime shrill
in the midst of its disease
my husband’s disease
I begin to break a sweat
molding the animal’s skin
my second skin
to my breasts, my belly, my thighs
my children waken
except for my eldest son
who sleeps fitfully
unaware of what I know
how I have driven him to it
NO
drawn him, drawn him to me, my bed and my arms
every day dawns to the same curse
over and over
how I have rehearsed this
said the same words, taken the same steps
made the same sacrifice
to that wounding consciousness
Inescapable
Unconscionable
He will end blind yet seeing
I will end dead yet desiring
this pestilence to infest all our children
and yet always morning
again and again
Unconscionable morning

2

My parentage is lost to you
lost to me, dim memory
of the generations before me
there are photographs of a man and a woman
black-and-white photographs
I am told they were my parents
but their names I cannot remember
and they have not come down to you either
you see me
but you know me
I am in your sons and daughters
no different at three
than your own three-year-old children
swinging on a swing set
no different at thirteen
my first fuck at a party in a dark room
no different than your own thirteen-year-old
children
I smile out at you now
as your own children may smile at you over breakfast
perhaps they suspect what I suspect
granted to me in a dream
the night before
BUT YOU MUST HAVE YOUR
STORY
I was a lithe and attractive girl
no Helens, Helens are few
my violated virtue would not launch ships and soldiers
in Troy, a land too far away
and death far from home
but I had my share of admirers
and one day quite innocently caught the eye of
a king, white-haired and aging
but not without strength
as I felt when he lifted my hand to his lips
for a chaste kiss, his kisses always chaste
My brother was a practical man
and always with his eye on the
main chance
suggested to my parents an arrangement
of which my parents could only approve
as Laius was a powerful yet kindly man
and his visage did not
repel me utterly
And at first he was an enthusiastic lover
as befits a former soldier
with only peacetime responsibilities
And years went on
And I saw my parents less and less
When my father was dying
he called for Creon, not for me
and slipped from the earth reflected
in a man’s eyes
But my mother
she summoned me to her deathbed
the same bed in which
I was conceived and born
Arriving at her bedside
I found the shell of a woman
once said to be my mother
WHAT CAN BE SAID
WHEN YOU ARE THE WITNESS
TO A DYING FLESH
SAID TO HAVE LOVED YOU
SAID TO HAVE
GIVEN YOU LIFE?
I held her hand as something in my head
but not my heart
told me to, so that the expectations
of the witnesses were fulfilled
and her hand clammy and cold
and already dead
was repulsive
a damp simulacrum of a hand
I looked upon her face
lips slightly apart, scarcely breathing
eyes closed and sunk deep into her head already
eyes turned inward to stare at the inside
of her own skull
Upon this bed upon this deathbed
upon it years before she had cried with the
ecstatic pain of my own birth
but now I was silent
aware of my position
and let her slip silently away
That night I came unto my husband
and sensing my despair
he took me within his aged arms
thrust his hard cock into me
his balls ringed with whitening hair
and that night
our desire squared the circle
pleasure completing
in a fetus
that I felt growing within my belly
that very night
With time, as seconds ticked off
minutes hours days passed
I began to forget the faces of my parents
thinking, perhaps they were phantoms
except for me they’d left no trace
In my womb which had been warm already
a child began to stir
his blood and mine commingling
as I felt his unborn consciousness
pulse through my brain, blood, heart
with this awareness came profound
nausea
came a profound
glowing
and as I felt him growing larger
I knew it would be a terrible birth
delivering a son, and it was
and with that birth I felt afraid
that too soon
someone would hold my hand, cold and wet
my eyes would turn only inward
I too would fade to the condition of a
phantom
in the hard red earth

3

Mutilation
I say it and I listen as I speak it
Mutilation
A good word, a fine word really
It sounds like what it is
The word in the air pierces the silence
as a scalpel pierces the body
Incisive
So the doctor cuts
episiotomally
upon a thing I give suck
The father was quite proud
after I had been emptied
A woman seeks augurs for her child
but not only in the eyes of an infant
also in other eyes
eyes of gods, but blind
the blind see darkness
as we who see imagine it
but what is night to a being
who has never seen the day?
My son’s eyes dark with the death
into which I’d led him
unwillingly
Many deaths from one life
UNLESS
Mutilation
Even happiness, the happiness of a mother
breasts large with milk
is rent
with the visit of a priest, always a priest
What is that monster who hides himself
in the vestments of the church?
What gaping maw of hunger
saliva dripping from rimless lips
does the cassock secrete?
The only news that priests ever bear
is news of death
This boy of yours means death to his father
this boy as a man will find and fill
his mother’s cunt again
Then my only moment of clear thought:
I want this torture, this pleasure
Piercing unparalleled
I want this surrender
to the sea
Picture this:
a boy walks upon the beach
unending green ocean alongside him
to a gray-orange horizon
he grows and his stride is longer
leaving behind those who gave him birth
Their tread becomes heavier, slower
as his becomes lighter, stronger, faster
A parent watches a child disappear into the horizon
as her own body sinks with age into the sand
The taste of foul sand upon her lips
with her last breath
stink of rotting carcasses
as she begins to rot herself
PIERCING UNPARALLELED
I WANT THIS SURRENDER
TO THE SEA
But I confess my weakness to you now
To visit the death of my son
at my own hands
My husband unaware
I saw blood’s urgency in the innocence of my child at play
and resolved to cut it short
mutilate
in the service of some idiotic god
Phoebus Apollo
who rises each morning to light this world
and mutilate the desire of black night
So I mutilated my own flesh
A thick sharp needle of onyx
black as night
I drew it sharp through the ankle of an infant
first one leg then the other
a rough thick leather lace I drew
through the piercings
to bind them tight and bleeding
crippling movement
blood to melt into the dirt
I tied my son Oedipus in a burlap sack
and told my servant to dispose of him
thus hobbled
in the wilds of a strange mountainside
and to speak no more of it
YOU MUST HAVE A STORY
AND THERE IS YOURS
DON’T GAPE IN AMAZEMENT
WE HAVE ALL KNOWN THIS
FOR CENTURIES
What hatred of life I demonstrated
in that second when the needle pierced
his flesh
Listen
Listen to this silence
It is the same silence I heard
when my son’s muffled cries died away in the distance
and assured, I thought,
my husband’s natural death
and my own sexless future
Listen
Each morning since then
Each rise of the sun
replays this moment, as all moments
before and since
my children’s scream echoing in my closed skull
And just this morning
shaving my legs to make me desirable to my husband
my razor nicked my ankle
and thick red blood slowly oozed
from my foot
and trickled and dissolved into the bathwater
that drained
to the sewers

4

Hours burned to undesired night again
Days to months and years
I had saved Thebes and so the world
years to decades
each paper morning, thousands of them
pierced by the scream that echoed in my skull
I dulled the screams by taking up with my husband
the reins of civic management
and daily trivia deafened the patterns of suffering
for which I bore responsibility
IT WAS A GOOD AND
USEFUL LIE
THIS QUOTIDIAN FUNCTIONALITY
THIS USE
THIS PURPOSE, THIS MEANING
I attended all the charity events to which I was invited
and dressed in bright colors
and shook hands
and wore sensible shoes
At this time we installed electric lighting here in the palace
Isn’t it lovely? Doesn’t it shine?
No dark corners left unlit
eternal day here in my bedchamber
unending morning
Only behind a locked door, alone
did I invite the night
stretched alone and naked upon my bed
even at this ripe old age of 45
I touched the cold black steel of the bedstand with my fingertips
my ankle grazed the steel railings at the foot of the bed
and felt this cold hard steel curl around my wrists and ankles
alone and spread-eagled my pleasure pulsed
but only in the night
and only alone
my days I filled quite effectively
with common pleasantries
Thebes remained quite happily
at peace
My husband maintained this peace in diplomatic travel
oh so diplomatic my husband
white-haired and seeming wise
a stolid gentleman
and his final departure through the gates of Thebes
to yet another summit
leaving civic administration to my own
most diplomatic brother Creon
and myself
was unremarkable and so
unremarked
In his absence free from the confines and suggestions of my status
I fell into deeper nights
each moment more free with distance
and more desirous thoughts
Only in these nights were the screams of my child
turned to cries musical
and something there was of my body’s
celebration
Thus was marked for me the onset of
the first of the city’s plagues
The sickness began among the poor and the weak
children first, then the old
and one day there rained fire from the sky
and the pestilence spread
and the priests as they will
counseled fear and
sacrifice
to some miserable beast
with some inscrutable riddle
in the solution of which
we were told
we would have eternal healing and peace
And then as now
in the midst of a pustulating desperation
desire and pain erupted
from the ground of human flesh
In the midst of days we can’t discern darkness
and so must invite it
So the city suffered the rain of death
sacrifices unavailing
and my brother too stupid to solve this riddle
We awaited the return of my husband until
he too was only a memory, a rumor of history
that we couldn’t quite believe
It was only proper that as the queen I hid behind
closed doors
among perfumes and darkness
though the cries, the cries then, too
leeched through the palace stone
to reach my ears
which I had already trained to count screams
as part of the white noise
of my waking
In the sheets I writhed
glowing in the dark, the linen
my skin reflecting pale moonlight glowing
limbs outstretched on a rack
imagined pleasures pulsing
in the protected center of a
tortured Thebes
My own torture entirely my own
dim memory of a flesh I’d carried in my belly
a life that would tear itself out in time
In the soundproofed cavern of my dark bedroom
cry of conception vied with cry of birthing
all ecstasy
And in the certainty that Thebes was doomed
I gave myself up to the abyss
as I believed I recognized
in the cries from the alleys
a similar ecstasy
of surrender unto a night that swallowed us
no sunrise possible

5

I am never asked
ALL MYTH A SIMPLIFICATION
A HOLLYWOOD FILM
BROAD STROKES AND THICK LINES
TRUTH IN THE DARK THICK SYLLABLES IN THE AIR
what I knew
I had seen it all in the nightmares that haunted
my spent body
like another’s ghost residing in my own skin
When one day the stink began to rise from the city
we knew that the puzzle had been solved
that idiotic riddle clear to all
but the dullest clod
He walks on four legs in the morning
two at noon
three in the evening
a three-letter word
begins with the letter M
And he arrived at the gates to claim the city
I knew him
I could smell his sweat beneath the stench that lifted
stand to greet him on the palace steps
seeming imperious
but trembling upon my heels
smelling his sweat I grew damp between my legs
moistened cunt as he drew into my view
half my age
but desire collapses years, collapses time
like the folds of an accordion
the pleats of a curtain drawn to moonlight
the fall of a dress upon the floor
that holds in its leather, in its satin
the essence of the body of its wearer
as completion draws all the world
into fortuitous
union
I KNEW HIM
as he neared, limping
the ankles of his legs swollen with
thick hard scars
skin once pierced at my hand
Striding into town a cripple already
step pause step
pause
step
looking upon the city, the violence of his birth
unseeing, blind already
and when he reached the foot of the palace steps
I stood shaking, recognizing
in full knowledge
and I saw him too
after he’d been blinded by the blind will that drove needles
into the sockets of his eyes
the same blind will that tore apart
the belly of his lover
in its black glistening force
glistening with blood
I saw him stagger blind into the universe
NO NOT
YET
No for now white light
that poured over his hair and broad shoulders
very smart and very clever
but without recognizing the woman before him
He is given the city as his possession
no he takes it
simultaneously it possesses him
lost in the ocean of healing bodies
that surrounds, that drowns him
Each footstep an imprint in the sand
that draws him to the center of the palace
his dark truth
My brother offers me up
He is given the queen as his possession
no he takes her
simultaneously she possesses him
lost in the ocean of flesh, of wounded body
in which he drowns
all thought of husbands forgotten
my husband’s blood on my son’s hand
as I took his warm hand into my cool embrace
upon my flesh
That night I led him to our bedchamber
doused the fires that portended artificial day
led him into night
Stood astride him as he sat
let my robes fall
His face against my breasts
kissing them as once he’d drawn his mother’s milk
from their ripe full
And trembling lowered my wet cunt
impaled myself on his hard cock
took him full
as he drew my wrists tight in his grasp
behind me, inescapable
no wife, mother
no husband, son
but surrendered to him in perilous darkness
for an unending fall
no other, selves joined
DID I KNOW
DID I SEE
FEELING THE GRIP OF HIS HANDS AROUND MY WRISTS
ONCE A BABY’S HANDS
UPON THE FACE OF
THIS WOMAN
And only then did we stain the white bedsheets
glowing with white
with a blood that seeped from the scratches
my fingernails had left
upon the skin of his shoulders
My stiletto heels scraping against the skin
of his pale calves
His weight, his grip
anchored me spread-eagled beneath him
and in his hot come
in our energetic jointure
a new life conceived in me

6

In my belly I assembled him
BUT
his own seed in me germinated
budded and blossomed
entwined its threads around
and between my own
until flesh hardened and you
IF I MAY FOR A MOMENT
RECALL HIS FATHER
Laius was as mechanical
as his military machines
my belly, womb mechanical too
fetus reaching out
to pinch my bloody uterus
and to cling there
like grim death
Oedipus took on his head
arms, all his limbs
attached them to his own shoulders
his legs to his own hips
and unceremoniously emerged from my cunt
like a car at the end of an
assembly line
BUT
his own seed
drawn into me by desire
absorbing his come to my own
and as I felt
the fetus of our child rooting
into my skin
he slept
I laid my head on his sleeping chest
the palm of his hand lay broad and gentle and heavy
over my shoulderblade
and I felt life stir
in my belly
and when they were born
Ismene Antigone
Theseus Polyneices
they eased, flesh not metal
through my stretched cunt
and lay upon my belly restful after trauma
like my hand on his shoulder
after we came, hot and wet and
GERMINATING
Over the years I watched our children grow
took them to a dusty playground
where they ran and played among
metal and plastic spiders
my legs crossed, one over the other
leather-clad legs brushing
I saw them smile and laugh
stumble and fall
bloody cuts and bruises that I would clean
I licked my thumb and drew my wet spit
over their wounds
HOW QUICKLY SKIN HEALS
SO EARLY IN ITS DYING
and as I watched my four children play
I saw the face of my child, my son, my husband
and could feel his soft boy’s skin
on my own girl’s face
cool
and then I knew
I would exterminate a city
for a tender caress
of my children’s bodies
of my husband’s warm hand
heavy upon my shoulder
all these generations
stretched out over time’s length
to snap back
and entwine all
in a flash of joy
GERMINATING

7

Facing the death of his city in the sweet-smelling rot
of the plague
my husband sought his true origins
and told me
this was his obligation to others
What others? I said
What others?
These who disgust you so in their dying?
When I then asked him to come to bed he
turned away
he turned his eyes from me
to look into his own skull
and find there the
aboriginal glimmer
of the glint of his father’s own
eye
This he would find:
some yawning chasm
some abyss
that his own birth would have split
into the earth
with his first cry
when his eyes first opened to see
Thebes under Apollo’s light
Birth a fracture
birth a tortured emergence
from his mother’s desire
and when he discovered this
he handed me a steel knife
shining gray
and said: foul, foul
Foul in your knowledge of my birth
you took me into your cunt again
In your recognition of me at the door of the palace
how could you not have
slaughtered the butcher of your husband
For the sake of Thebes
of this city-state
You must make recompense
for your recognition
Flesh unto flesh once split
cannot join again
without plague
I WOULD DESTROY A CITY
FOR A TENDER CARESS
or destroy
my self
in its absence
My husband left me in our bedroom
and as the blinding yellow light from the window
in the fetid stink of the incense
that masked the stink of the city’s flesh
I draw the point of the grey blade
to my crotch
my belly
and thrust it upward
I felt its tip pierce my belly
pierce the womb inside me
the warmth there that had nurtured him
and the rest of my children
drew it up
thrust it deep
the blood flooded over my hand
drown my thighs, my calves
in some bitter parody of his birth
I slit my uterus
and my stomach
and felt the tender wet organs
fall from my wound
to the dusty floor
in my last moments
I tenderly fingered
my dying skin
hot and wet with the blood
that flowed through his veins too
the veins of
all my
children

8

My sons, you know,
they vied for this city too
long after my first death
An end came to that plague
only to be followed by another, and another
To have given birth to such idiots
my daughter Antigone the worst
I can only hope she remembered to fingerfuck herself
in that dark cave
What is the destruction of desire
next to that of moral pride?
But still
even as my husband continues to wander blind through the world
alone
even as plagues are reborn over and over
in disease, in war
But still
I love
and what am I to love?
A heated memory of a decaying bloody corpse
safely behind you
BUT EACH OF YOU
WALK UPON THE DIRT OF MY GRAVE EACH DAY
WHEN YOU DENY
MY DESIRE
AND YOURS
Am I dead?
When Apollo’s light shines on me each morning
and each night when I die before you and befoul your memory
when my self-slaughter is completely unmasked
for your witnessing
Am I dead?
but I live tonight
instead
in each of your children
in each of your eyes
in your faces
until you return to the street, and the city, and your homes
in your unconscionable ignorance
of ends
Unconscionable
the smell
When a girl I was taken unaware
by my mother and father to the temple
What a stench was there
sweet incense to put me in the mind of God

END OF PLAY