A Ballet in Three Acts, story by Lucy Tisdale
(Carly—once you write the music, we'll add "score by Carly Jackson")
Act I, scene 1: The great hall
Carly-- Opening music should be sprightly but with an eerie edge befitting the magical atmosphere and also giving A Portent of Things To Come
Through a high window a full white moon is visible. The hall is lined with stately looking coffins. A grand buffet is laid on a long table, above which the arched ceiling is hung with red banners depicting various magical symbols, like ankh, magic eye, pentagram . . .
these should def. be REAL magical symbols, not just some fake-ass made-up bullshit
Two dozen superhot girls mill about the stage, eating, drinking, talking, laughing. They are dressed in form-fitting black unitards and capes of varying lengths and colors depending on their school rank.
Suddenly, the music stops. The toll of a clock is heard. The students freeze, some with wands raised in anticipation of trouble. At each stroke of the clock, a coffin opens, and the teachers emerge, one by one, and take their seats upon the dais at the top of the stage. The last to emerge, at the stroke of midnight, is the headmistress Patricia, who ascends the dais imperiously.
She waves her wand over the group of older girls in the longest capes. They dance, demonstrating to the new students some of the wonderful things they will learn in the coming year, such as: transforming people into animals, causing people to disappear, sucking blood, then causing the sucked-out people to disappear. At the end of the dance, the new girls pair off and begin to leave the stage. The spotlight picks out first Lucretia Thibodeaux and then Clarie Jacquesfils. They gaze at each other as if under a SPELL.
Act I, scene 2: Lucretia and Clarie's tower room
Lucretia and Clarie kneel facing each other on the bed. (There are also two coffins leaning against the wall for them to sleep in. The bed is for SEX.) The moonlight falls between them, illuminating their bare breasts. They talk—
Ok, from here on, if I say they talk, that means they pantomime, and the music has to fit the stuff they're acting out
—they talk to each other about their homes—Lucretia's cold succubus of a mother, Clarie's evil wizard grandfather, the unfairness of life and how thankful they are to have come to a place where they, as hot teenage lesbian vampire magicians, can finally be themselves.
They dance a joyous pas de deux, and as the first heart-breaking sunray slices into the room, they share a passionate tongue kiss, then climb into their coffins to rest.
Act II, scene 1: A graveyard
Energetic music. The new girls are doing gym in the graveyard. (They wear old-style sweatbands around their foreheads to show that they are getting hot and sweaty.) As they do sit-ups on the slab graves and use the tombstones for pushups, Marcella, a big, not-hot (how did she get into this school?) second-year BITCH, shimmies up a ten-foot-high obelisk and perches on the top, en pointe, en arabesque, even, before leaping off, landing right next to an admiring Clarie. Marcella flexes her muscles for Clarie, and they laugh together, while Lucretia looks on in a RAGE.
Finally, able to stand it no longer, Lucretia rushes at Marcella. They fight. Lucretia Thibodeaux reveals herself to be especially wild and hot-tempered, even among the already wild and hot-tempered population of hot teenage lesbian vampire magicians, and she is kicking some booTAY. Laissez your bons temps roulee, my friend, go ahead, Lucretia seems to be saying. I will find a way to fuck it up with some serious craziness.
There is a heated dance battle.
Music should have a back and forth quality because first Lucretia will show her stuff and then Marcella, and then Lucretia will do some more amazing moves, and then Marcella, etc., etc., the dancing just getting more and more awesome but then by the end they are doing actual hand-to-hand combat and the music has to be INTENSE.
Just as it seems Lucretia will choke Marcella to death, Clarie desperately waves her wand. Because she is inexperienced and doesn't know how to control her magic yet, Lucretia is only half transformed and now has a cat's head, paws, and tail but her own body. Though weirdly she is hotter than ever like this, Lucretia doesn't like it. In her distress, she leaps and bounds about the stage (lots of awkward pas de chats, naturally, as that is the step of the CAT) begging the other girls to return her to her regular form. But either they don't know how or they are afraid to anger Marcella, who is now putting her arm around Clairie like she fucking owns her or something, like somebody can own another person. Clarie looks sorrowfully back over her shoulder as she exits with Marcella, stage right.
Act II, scene 2: The dorm common room
Girls are lying around on the sofas in sweatpants, looking not so hot and eating pizzas and chocolate candies. Lucretia is with them, having been restored to her usual form by one of the teachers. Boxes of pads and tampons lie around to show that they are all on their period, which can happen sometimes when a bunch of women/girls live all together in one place—
Oh God! The PMS at this school, you cannot even—it would burn your brain to cinders to even imagine it.
—then they get up and all perform an ensemble dance, at first sluggish, then ramping up into dervishdom, to demonstrate the mad mood swings of people on PERIODS.
At the climax of the dance, stupid Marcella rushes in, panicked! Clarie is missing!!
Everybody freezes in horror.
Then they all start whispering and pointing their fingers at Lucretia, who looks like: What? Who, me? Oh. No. You. Didn't. Just. Point. A moi!
Act III, scene 1: Lucretia and Clarie's dorm room
Lucretia weeps alone on her bed. She is devastated that Clarie is missing and cannot believe that anybody would think she was behind it in any way. Clarie's magic cape is still hanging on a hook on the wall, and Lucretia takes it down and hugs it to her breast and floats about the room, her every pirouette and developpé an exquisite manifestation of her deep grief. Gradually, as her sadness begins to weigh upon her so heavily that she can no longer dance, she collapses against the bookshelf at the side of the room. It suddenly swings away from her. It is a secret bookcase door opening on a HIDDEN PASSAGE! Lucretia ties on Clarie's cape for courage.
BTW, I still have your hoodie you left at my house last time you slept over
Lucretia begins to climb the secret stair as the music crescendos ominously.
Act III, scene 2: Headmistress Patricia's chamber
Lucretia steps up into a stone-walled chamber. It is very very magical looking. Patricia sits writing in a large ledger at an ornately carved desk, looking sage in a wizard hat and sexy glasses. She has been expecting Lucretia, who sobs that she had nothing to do with Clarie's disappearance. I love her, she pleads, literally on her knees. Patricia closes her eyes and nods like she is telling herself, Patience, Patricia. Patience with these young and wayward and wild, and none more young and wayward and wild than brave young Thibodeux here.
I love her! Lucretia sobs again, slightly calmer, as she blows into the enormous black hanky Patricia has handed her.
Patricia sits back in her chair and tents her fingers and slits her eyes and shows the tips of her fangs in a weary way. She says, as Headmistress of Hot Lesbian Vampire Magic School, do you think I can't tell when two girls seriously dig each other?
Lucretia bows her head. She has been schooled and feels defeated, like maybe what she and Clarie shared was kind of—well, ordinary.
But it so wasn't, was it, Carly? Or isn't? Was or is?
Two vampires together is a doomed relationship, Patricia demonstrates in a sad dance of warning. Ultimately, it cannot work. What are you going to do, suck each other's blood, back and forth, forever?
Lucretia says, yes, exactly! Sit down, and I will show you. She dances a lovely solo, twirling Clarie's cape, embracing it, wrapping it around herself, showing what a beautiful synergy that would be, two young hot lesbian vampires loving each other, like an amazing Mobius strip of blood-sucking never-ending. We wouldn't even have names anymore. We'd be like the artist formerly known as, you know. We would the two of us together just be an infinity symbol.
—the music here should repeat but build, repeat but build, it should sound like a long slow night of loving, the dance will be very sensual but not just in a dirty humpy way because that's not all this relationship is about, it is a SOUL thing, I know you know what I mean—
Patricia admires her passion, but shakes her head. It can never be. Clarie's parents have transferred her to another school.
Lucretia clutches her chest as though she has had a stake driven through her heart. Why do you put all us hot lesbian vampires in here together if you don't want us to love each other? she shouts, sweeping her arm across one of Patricia's shelves and sending some magical stuff crashing to the floor, producing plumes of red and silver smoke.
Patricia shakes her head with bored regret. How many times has she had this same conversation? You are here to learn magic, my dear, not love.
The music becomes mournful, ethereal. Lucretia dances over to the window. She stares out, wondering where her love, her Clarie, has gone. She pictures a grim future of trolling coffeehouses and Alateen meetings for quick sex and easy blood. She sees that there is NO MAGIC without love. Ignoring Patricia's cries, she steps onto the window ledge and leaps into the void.
But, just as all seems lost, the wind lifts Clarie's enchanted cape, and Lucretia soars higher, fated to fly forever above the mist.
CURTAIN
© 2015 Julia Ridley Smith
