Playwright Portrait, David Ives, Excerpt from Variations on the Death of Trotsky

The Playwright David Ives, 2008

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Variations on the Death of Trotsky

TROTSKY (with a mountain climber's axe in his head, planted there by his gardener): So even an assassin can make the flowers grow. The gardener was false, and yet the garden that he tended was real. How was I to know he was my killer when I passed him every day? How was I to know that the man tending the nasturtiums would keep me from seeing what the weather would be like tomorrow...? Sometime, for everyone, there's a room that you go into, and it's the room that you never leave. Or else you got out of a room and it's the last room that you'll ever leave. (He looks around.) This is my last room. This desk, these books, that calendar... Maybe I'll go look at the nasturtiums... (Trotsky dies. The garden outside the louvered window begins to glow.) - From "Variations on the Death of Trotsky"