Stilnox: A Two-Act Drama Play

The name of the drama—STILNOX—is the name of a barbiturate and everything that happens in this play suggestively leads to the recommendation of medication.

It is springtime and there is a good feeling in the air, but everything good—they say—does not last for too long, therefore, the characters from this play make no exception whatsoever. The text, nevertheless, reveals an exception, offered by the society’s landscape with reference to the time and place where the action is developing: the cowards escape apparently, although they are compelled to put up with their own conscience forever, trapped in the cowardice they perceive as an acquittal, a sneak—out—the hamster wheel.

Therefore, the context is quite specific about the status of laws from Dependency by exhibiting the key elements of elaboration with regard to the characters’ social status, their psychological well-being, socio-economic factors and last but not least, the local and environmental communication acts. Only a handful of characters can enjoy having a name; the others are more and more sunken into anonymity because in a neo-colony the name that particularizes a person seems to fade away and be replaced by a number.

Love or hatred are not well defined, but one can feel them, just like phantoms, in the background.

Although not shown in flesh and bones, the ones who give out orders by pressing the launching buttons of this drama, are receivers of a variety of energies, all of them negative. These unseen but perceptible villains shape the fight between good and evil, making it perpetual and leading to a state of tiredness, on the brink of exhaustion. In this case, villains are incapable of issuing any fascination at all, staying in their own poisoning “sauce” from beginning to end.

The subtext has been endowed with discursive manifestations such as allusive language, tropes, and connotations. Some information is directly put forward, interfering with the main message of the drama, not necessarily due to the intention of not being linguistically expressed, not to be ascribed, because, eventually, all the contextual messages are or can be decrypted by the spectator. For instance, the well-known fact that smoking is prohibited is disregarded by almost all smoking characters. The never-ending smoke given out by the smokers in some scenes, disturb but also help Anchor—the main character—, because she sees her moral assassins as illusory apparitions, posing themselves into an imaginary land in which you can easily retain your composure, get away.

From the opening until the closing of the front curtain, the play is a roller coaster of hopes and feelings of all kind, on whose slope launch in a dangerous game both the legal concept of legally measured through truth or illegally measured through lies and honesty, dishonesty, tangled in the wish to fight or capitulate. The characters have an emotional ride to the “peak of the mountain”, ride followed by an unnatural descend, with bumps and speed, having no possibility of stopping with precision.

In fact, in this up and down commotion, the captive characters know that if they would really eject, this could more likely suppress their own existence. Even so, everything that happens to them in the dramatic moment, establishes their lives, compelling them to be or become powerful, agile beasts. In and for this train of ideas, was the text of replies and blocking made, this double division enhanced by framing, by the landscape that comes as an informational detail on the semantic and pragmatic assumptions.

The quantity, quality, relevance and the manner of discourse allow the spectator to receive as a gift his share of delight and awareness, together with free will.