GEORGIA GARDNER GRAY

The eponymously titled play NDE (Near Death Experience) opens with the near death of a wounded soldier in an unspecified future World War. He finds himself in an out-of-body experience, travelling through scenes of his brief life. Puncturing the rhapsodic, the highfalutin themes commingle with the petty microaggressions of everyday modern life.

On the Threadbare Carpet, Worn constantly thinner
By perpetual Leaping
This Carpet that is lost in infinite space
Stuck on like a bandage as if the suburban sky had wounded the earth.
Around this pestle pounding the carpet
This pistil fertilized by the pollen of its own dust
Producing in turn the specious fruit of displeasure
The unconscious gaping faces
Their thin surfaces glossy with boredom’s specious half-smile.

Angel!: If there were a place that we didn’t know of, and there
On some unsayable carpet, lovers displayed
What they could never bring to mastery here–the bold
Exploits of their high-flying hearts,
Their towers of pleasure
Their Ladders
That Have long since been standing where there was no ground, leaning
Just on each other, trembling, – and could master all this,
Before the surrounding spectators, the innumerable Soundless dead:
Would these, then throw down their final, forever
Saved-up
Forever hidden, unknown to us, eternally valid
Coins of happiness before the at last
Genuinely smiling pair on the
Gratified carpet?

—Extract from The Fifth Elegy, The Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke