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Issue Twenty-Four

Uncovering the Walkways by Vanessa Gebbie
Instructions on How to Build a Cloud by Daniel Hudon
Tiny Red Heart and Dog Daze by Tania Hershman
Three Theatrical Minutes:
An Unhappy Day at the End of March by Hubert Krejčí
Emulsifiers by Jiří Sedláček
The Minute Glass by Daniela Fischerová


 

An Unhappy Day at the End of March

by Hubert Krejčí

Characters:

Editor One (a woman)
Editor Two (a woman)
Cleaning Woman
Crowd

Setting: an editorial office

Stojcevski illustration

Editor One: (leaning from a window) I'm leaning out of the window of our editorial office, from where I can see a long line of playwrights standing impatiently in front of the building; the line disappears behind one side of the building, winds its way all the way around and then re-emerges from the other side.  A great number of playwrights are clutching manuscripts that represent their dramatic efforts, which they all want to place with our office.

Editor Two: (painting her nails)  We will be opening in six minutes.

Editor One: The cleaning lady is bringing up a basket full of manuscripts, which she apparently collected from the authors on the stairway. — Well then?

(The cleaning lady carries in a huge basket.)

The Cleaning Lady:  Nothing but signed letters, petitions, and appeals calling for the cancellation of theater as an obsolete, bothersome and boring genre.  Should I toss them out?

(Editor One and Editor Two gasp and then pass out.)

(After a leaden interval the curtains close.)

 

(translated by G.S. Evans)


Hubert Krejčí is a director, playwright, actor, translator, and writer. He was born in 1944 in Pardubice and educated in Brno. He has worked with a wide variety of theaters in The Czech Republic and abroad, and has been writing since the late 1960s — especially short, ironic plays such as Hry ze smetiště, Bramborové divadlo dra. Skarapantiho, and Divadelní hříčky. He lives in Prague.

G.S. Evans is the coeditor of The Cafe Irreal. A book of his fiction, Tajný (český) deník Fredericka Barona a jiné texty (Aequitas, Prague, 2007), was recently published in translation in The Czech Republic; his translations of the work of the Czech writer Arnošt Lustig have appeared in The Kenyon Review and New Orleans Review.


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story copyright by author 2007 all rights reserved
translation copyright 2007 by Greg Evans all rights reserved
illustration copyright 2007 by Dragan Stojčevski all rights reserved