Arcadia Cover

The Last Thing I'll Ever Write (Part One)
Adam Lauver

You feel The Spiral unfurling within you. You're moving carefully, carelessly (take your pick), past a window or a tree or a person, and in the back of your head suddenly you hear the voice of the Spiral wheeze:

"Onward and upward and outward, this is growth, this is evolution. You are in this city and I am here too, with you and without you. I'm here to connect you with the outside, with what's been trying to get in, trying to get you on and up and out. Take my hand and you can be as elastic and as flexible as me. I'll stretch your insides thinner and thinner until finally you'll be able to expand, extend, expend yourself onward and upward and outward, and you'll escape this city, you'll escape that window and that tree and that person, every person that you feel such love/hate/indifference for (take your pick) and you'll grow thinner and paler and ever more transparent, but you'll be taller and longer and your eyes will be clearer and your imaginary embrace will encompass not only this city but all cities, all worlds, and your compassion will exceed even that of God's by virtue of your complete, utter, perfect inability to act on it, to spend it, to waste it on anyone at all. You'll finally be able to keep your love to yourself, untouched, untapped, pure and deep and preserved by your own inevitable valueless hate. And together we'll continue to unfurl, carefully, carelessly (take your pick), until we cover so much space that regardless of what we look like to others we'll know that we've discovered something we can finally un-call Truth."

And you say:

"Fuck off Spiral, I have shit to do."

A full-length debut on communication, intimacy, and despair as told through poetry, dreamscapes, and scenes from an existential sitcom, Adam Lauver's The Last Thing I'll Ever Write (Part One) will lovingly reach down your throat and pull out a series of vaguely Jurassic noises you can't quite identify as a laugh or a sob.

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Comedy, Tragedy, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Cast: 6A

Preview

Goodreads // Cover Design by Rayne Klar

PRAISE FOR THE LAST THING I'LL EVER WRITE (PART ONE):
Adam Lauver's The Last Thing I'll Ever Write (Part One) is like Prometheus Unbound rewritten by Samuel Beckett—a fever dream about a desperate search for meaning and connection in a world defined by violence and solitude. Alternating between satirical realism and mystic abstraction, between bawdy humor and lyrical solemnity, Lauver playfully experiments with competing apocalypses in this five-act closet drama.
Carrie Shanafelt
Professor of Humanities
This play invites us to fall into a dream logic bordering on Lynchian esotericism. Cutting between moments and scenes, characters are undefined, then defined, then obliterated. Religion cannot help a believer cope with the heaviness of depression, yet human intimacy and connection feel equally absurd in moments of hopelessness. Desperate to communicate, The Last Thing I'll Ever Write (Part One) is an urgent existential plea in the face of contemporary despair.
Joshua Young
author of Psalms for the Wreckage
Viscerally bare and hauntingly vulnerable, The Last Thing I'll Ever Write (Part One) is every inch a liminal space you'll want to spend the rest of your life wrestling with, and every bit an embodiment of why we admire the nostalgia within ourselves. As much as it is wise, it is young. As much as it is yearning, it is at peace. Adam Lauver's voice is one so inviting and so honest, you won't want anyone else to confront and caress oblivion.
Ayla Sullivan
playwright & Denver Youth Poet Laureate
A play & a dream journal, whimsical & insightful, filled with social horrors & delights, The Last Thing I'll Ever Write (Part One) is a wild ride of dialectics, all clamoring to speak. Concepts, archetypes, forces of nature, gods, and shapes work through gestures of intentionality & order, unified by the need to tell of—to make some sense of—our disarray. Adam Lauver buries insight in the fertile dirt of silliness, from which sprouts joy & wonder.
Mathias Svalina
author of Wastoid & the Dream Delivery Service