“you think you’re on the other side of the dark but I’m holding onto ya I’ll bring ya back, I know I know, I can see what it’s like, I can see it ma, I can see you’re turning upside down and around a million million times and as fast as inside a dryer and falling and faster and faster and ice picks and scissors and snakes and every sick sound like throwin up and crushin eggs and mean laughin and everybody’s laughin and you’re fallin, I know, fallin fallin so fast so fast and you’re at the bottom you’re at the bottom now covered with mud and if you don’t breathe if you don’t breathe the light will be covered with mud”
Obviously enough, this is the quote that gives the title of this collection its name. There is something very resonant about that phrase—the other side of the dark—which is charged with meaning while at the same time also be incredibly vague. Tornado began life as a radio drama which the author then reconstructed into a stage play and the surplus of verbiage here can be partially explained by origins. Without access to their full instrument, actors in a radio drama are forced to rely upon words and so the very same story written for the radio as well as a more visually-oriented medium tends to be wordier.
Lucy, a ten-year-old white girl, is talking to her dead African Zulu nurse, Nellie, who has been shot in a protest march. Nellie is in an open coffin.
(takes a very deep breath and starts through the exhalation)
NELLIE
NELLIE
NELLIE
This is how Pink opens. What commences from this point is first another twenty-three repetitions of “NELLIE.” And only at that point does little Lucy actually dive deep in her monologue. From that point until the end is itself only about 950 words. Do the math and it becomes obviously that not only is Pink not a full play it is not even a One-Act play. It is described as a monologue, but as monologues go, it falls into the short end of the spectrum. Needless to say, the thing to understand about Thompson is that she is an experimental writer not overly concerned with packing theaters on Broadway by giving audiences what they want. Instead, she has carved out a career giving them what they don’t know they want.
“Did you ever start thinkin somethin, and it’s like ugly…? And ya can’t beat it out of your head? I wouldn’t be scared of it if it was sittin in front of me…but I can’t beat it ’cause it’s in my head.”
Alan’s got problems, all right. A much bigger problem than it might seem. You might say to yourself he would really be in much bigger trouble if the exact opposite was the case: if something ugly was in front of you it actually exists. But a thought? What’s to fear of thoughts? Abstract images non-existent in the corporeal world. Oh, if only that were the case. The playwright is a self-described Freudian and the other side of the dark is not light, but darker still. A darkness that must be experienced to fully be understood.
Alan’s problem is representative of the Freudian concept of repression which is basically all those ugly things we don’t want to see. The problem, of course, is that everything which the mind has quite thoughtfully repressed for us without even asking for our involvement is constantly trying to peck its way out the eggshell of subconscious so that we do think of those things that are like the two spectacularly unpleasant images which follow in this short monologue section of a full-length work. If you want to know the ugly things Alan can’t stop thinking about, by all means read the play. Just prepare to think about them yourself at some future point.
