The Toll.
I’m just now learning about Erin Myers, who I met and collaborated with throughout a script workshop process, in which I failed to produce a play worthy of her contributions and insights into it. And my heart breaks for those of you who have known and loved her better.
There will be a day when the cancer fails to kill anybody. It will be followed by another day when the cancer fails to kill anybody. It will be followed by a week, by a month, by a year, by a decade, by generations of life without fear of our cellular-level Shiva, destroyer of worlds, who used to plant sorrow in every flower bed it could find. This is not that day, not today, but that day will come, and our descendants will gather the last remaining specks of this raw, whimpering, toppled emperor of a disease, and they will with miniature chisel and mallet sculpt this material into a face of some kind, and the face made of the remnants of the cancer will be affixed upon a magnificent metal chime, placed within a tower at the top of a mountain, and the lines of humanity that will come, from leagues beyond leagues, to each one after another strike with great fury the face on the chime, to hear the majesty of the tone it produces echoing across the valley, into bones and into blood, until there is nothing left of it but whispers and rags. This is not that day, not today, but that day will come.
Creative Control 