Stoplight Time

by

Trevor Allen

 

FlashPlays
Produced by
The Playwrights Foundation
Performed at
Brava Theater Center

San Francisco

12/6/15

 

A light above goes from green to yellow to red. An unkempt homeless man named “Tim” stands on a street median wearing a cardboard sign that simply reads “TIME?” He then takes out and turns over an hour-glass-shaped, two-minute egg timer and launches into this rapid fire speech directed at stopped traffic on the street going from seat to seat as if speaking to drivers waiting for the light to turn green.

 

TIM

Time at a stoplight seems to slow down… so that there’s enough to time tell the tale of never endings and ever more wanderings into the next day’s horizon with a step at a time through this city of Saint Francis. The timelessness of it all is like breathlessness in action but what happens to a man of action when he comes here to the well of the soulless? The time is ripe, so when the lie is right to say so is to see so but does it have it to be so- What in this town still pleases me? These are the times and the lines in my mind that ripen as the grapes do on vines entwined choking with growth and I see these faces behind glass just pass and those techs over there who must know better. I just can’t find it anywhere and I watch as they seek it with knives and they seek it all their lives on and on into the graves that in time we all fall down into but who has what it takes to be and see and what we all need when it comes down to it there must be time enough. The growth of what is and is not real in what we will all call the “The City” in the fog at the days end in the sunset at the end of the western world and the beginning of the run of the mill down the hill side we see the landslide in motion in this stop motion erosion from the ocean and the tides rise in the time lapse photography of the days and nights flashing by at a frame per day as the years fade away slowly into the mists of timelessness and the ones that we all know now will be lost in the ways of this world’s wonder and the days that are here will be gone and give way to the days that we will all remember that we once were in the throws of a New World order that was not such a good deal for those in the way and the time was ripe for the few to stand above the rest and the delusions of grandeur grew in proportion with the amount of time spent staring at small screens but their time slips away too, under the door and through the streets and over the dunes into the sea and is lost forever in the waves and beneath the blue of the deepest darkest days beneath the sky. (PAUSE) So, can you spare some change? No? Time just sighs and scratches its head as it passes through this day to another that looks just like it. But the picture has changed just slightly. Twenty four times and the room is redrawn in the greatest detail. But each is separate and unique. No two are exactly alike. Just like me. The reality strip is seemingly seamless even here in the Mission near its seamy underbelly under cover of darkness and moonlit by the big candle in the sky. To see the log unwind the rays of the sun into the fireplace and up the flue is nothing new but the hipster’s world above it all has nothing softer to offer. The glass is almost empty now that the sand has run out of the bottom- or is it the top knocked upside down like the worst day that we all live now in these so called modern times. I see red lights and the arrows all pointing the same way but I see the people act as if there was more than one direction to the down escalator but the elevator is climbing like the pressure to succeed in the ways of the tech world disorder in the way of all us vets and patriots on the day when the votes get tallied and then the retaliations occur. So, now I say what it occurs to me to say as it often does in these times of trouble and strife and this ever-changing town in which we live in. That there is just enough… time to change... those red lights to green.  

 

The stoplight above goes green. He puts his egg timer away and waits for the next red light.

END