THE GEOMETRY OF HYSTERIA A Play in Triangulated Time
CHARACTERS:
DOROTHY - 30s, ink-stained fingers, eyes that see through surfaces to structures beneath DOROTHY is drawing but the pencil is also her voice is also a river cutting channels through paper to show what's underneath which is more knowing which is—
THE BODY - Dorothy's physical wisdom, speaks in frequencies and breath (interrupting because she is the interruption itself) —to WHERE? There is no where there is only the opening the door the sky the wind rising the—
HERR DOCTOR - Freud-figure, notebook always open, listening for what he expects to hear
THE CARTOGRAPHER - establishment geometer, terrified of her proofs enters but he cannot fully enter because he is always already observing always outside always rigid with his instruments his rulers his—)
AUNT EM - voice of Kansas, of staying small
THE SPHERE - breathing mathematics itself, the truth that expands
SETTING: A consultation room that keeps rotating. Drafting table covered with Dorothy's triangulated drawings - geodesic sketches, icosahedral projections, the sphere subdivided in ways that make the eye ache with recognition. The walls breathe with overlapping geometries. Nowhere that holds still. A room that breathes. Maps flowering on the walls like morning glories opening to impossible suns. The space undulates with light.
ACT ONE: THE CONSULTATION
[DOROTHY sits across from HERR DOCTOR. Between them: her drawings. He writes. She draws even while speaking. Her hands never stop moving.]
DOROTHY: They want me to tell it straight but there is no straight there is only the spiral and I have been inside it I have walked the yellow thread back to the heart of—
THE BODY: (interrupting because she is the interruption itself) —to WHERE? There is no where there is only the opening the door the sky the wind rising the—
DOROTHY: —tornado which was also an ecstasy of the earth herself breathing in and I said yes I said YES to the lifting YES to the breaking open YES to—
HERR DOCTOR: So you say you went to... Oz? And this experience, it troubles you still?
DOROTHY: It doesn't trouble me. It instructs me.
THE BODY: (standing behind her, hand on her shoulder) The tornado was a rotating system. Center point moving through space. I understood expansion before I had the language.
HERR DOCTOR: (writing) Dreams of flight, of being taken... very common in young women. A wish to escape the sexual—
DOROTHY: (not looking up from her drawing) I wasn't escaping. I was entering. Into the structure of the wind itself.
THE BODY: I felt it in my ribs. The mathematics of pressure differentials. The way the funnel tessellates the air.
HERR DOCTOR: You speak of mathematics, but you're not trained in—
DOROTHY: (suddenly fierce, looking up) I walked the yellow brick road. Do you know what a spiral is? Not in books - in your feet?
THE BODY: Every step a degree of rotation. Every curve bringing you simultaneously closer to center and further from origin.
DOROTHY: I tried to tell them when I came back. The road wasn't decoration. It was instruction. The sphere teaching me how to move across its surface.
HERR DOCTOR: (leaning forward) And these... drawings. You make them compulsively?
DOROTHY: I make them necessarily.
(She holds up a sheet - an icosahedron unfolded, twenty triangular faces laid flat, continents sketched across them with shocking accuracy.)
DOROTHY: The world is not flat. Your maps lie. They stretch Greenland, shrink Africa, pretend the ocean can be cut in half by an arbitrary line. But if you subdivide the sphere with triangles—
THE BODY: —instead of the colonial grid of squares—
DOROTHY: —you can lay it flat and preserve the truth. Twenty faces. Equal area projection. No privileged viewpoint.
HERR DOCTOR: But Fräulein Gale, professional cartographers have established—
DOROTHY: Professional cartographers are wrong.
THE BODY: (laughing) She's so polite when she says it. Inside she's screaming: THEY'RE LYING TO MAKE CONQUEST EASIER.
THE BODY: I ARRIVED WITH MY HOUSE
(She laughs. It sounds like bells, like water finding its course, like the moment before flight.)
DOROTHY: The first witch died under my dwelling do you understand I descended upon her with my domesticity
THE BODY: —and then I took her ruby, her inheritance, her foot-magic her—
HERR DOCTOR: This anger at male authority figures, this feeling that you alone see the truth—
DOROTHY: I don't feel it. I prove it.
(She begins drawing rapidly, speaking as her hands move.)
DOROTHY: The tetrahedron. Four points. Four faces. The minimum structure that can enclose space. It has insideness and outsideness. It can contain complexity. Every other polyhedron can be built from it or contains it.
THE BODY: In Oz, we were a tetrahedron walking. Me. Scarecrow. Tin Man. Lion. Four points. Stable. Self-supporting.
DOROTHY: The Wizard tried to give them what they already had. Brain. Heart. Courage. But the structure itself—the relationality—that's what held.
HERR DOCTOR: You identify with male figures in your dream. The straw man, the metal man—
DOROTHY: (interrupting) They weren't men. They were vertices. Points in a structural system.
THE BODY: And I wasn't Dorothy wanting to be them. I was the integrity of the whole form.
HERR DOCTOR: (writing faster) Rejection of feminine role, identification with mathematical abstraction as defense against—
DOROTHY: (slamming her hand on the table) It's not abstraction! It's the most concrete thing in the world!
(She stands, begins pacing, gesturing.)
THE BODY: Not feminine? Not soft? Not yielding?
DOROTHY: I'll show you yielding: the sphere receives from all directions simultaneously she is touched by infinity she is opened by her own expansion she is—
THE CARTOGRAPHER: (covering his ears but he cannot unhear) The tetrahedron the triangle these are rational forms these are—
THE BODY: (laughing like water) The triangle is the delta the river-mouth the place where THREE becomes ONE becomes EVERYTHING becomes—
DOROTHY: When you build with right angles, with squares, you're imposing an artificial grid. But triangles? Triangles are how nature actually distributes stress. Look at a spiderweb. Look at a honeycomb. Look at the pattern of cracks in dried mud.
THE BODY: Look at the branches of trees reaching for light.
DOROTHY: Omnitriangulation. That's what I'm calling it. Subdividing any surface with the maximum number of triangular faces. It creates the strongest structure with the least material.
THE BODY: Doing more with less.
DOROTHY: Ephemeralization.
HERR DOCTOR: These are... very sophisticated concepts. Where did you learn—
DOROTHY: I didn't learn them. I lived them.
THE BODY: The ruby slippers taught me.
HERR DOCTOR: The shoes from your... dream?
DOROTHY: They weren't solid. They were frequency. When I clicked them—
THE BODY: —three times, everyone says, but that's wrong, it was a rhythm, a pattern—
DOROTHY: —I felt it in my whole skeleton. Resonance. The structure of my body vibrating in harmony with a specific frequency signature.
THE BODY: That's how I knew they were real. My bones knew.
HERR DOCTOR: (putting down his pen) Fräulein Gale, I must tell you. This insistence on the reality of your delusion, this construction of elaborate mathematical frameworks to support it—
DOROTHY: (very quietly, very dangerous) Twenty years from now, someone will build what I'm drawing. They'll call them geodesic domes. They'll subdivide spheres with triangular faces and create the strongest, lightest structures humanity has ever made.
THE BODY: And they'll be a man.
DOROTHY: And no one will remember that a woman from Kansas tried to tell them first.
HERR DOCTOR: This paranoia, this feeling of persecution—
DOROTHY: It's not paranoia. It's pattern recognition.—the place where I diverge where I refuse your binary your this-or-that your home-or-away your—
THE BODY: There is no OR there is only AND and I am Dorothy AND the Body AND the map AND the territory AND the tetrahedron which breathes in FOUR directions—
DOROTHY: —like the four winds like the four seasons like the FOUR WITCHES—
THE BODY: —two gone two breathing two they called evil two they called good except there is no good there is no evil there is only POWER and those who hold it and those who take it and those who—
THE SPHERE: (breathing, expanding, contracting like tide, like lung) yesssssssss
ACT TWO: THE MILK THE INK THE SALT THE FLOOD
[The room is weeping now. Gently. The walls shimmer with moisture. Everything is secreting light. THE BODY is writing on the walls with fingertips with breath with—]
AUNT EM: (materializing, trembling) What are you DOING you're making marks you're—
THE BODY: I'M WRITING
DOROTHY: With my breath my salt my luminescence I'm writing the maps you refused to see I'm—
THE BODY: —I'm sweating geography I'm weeping topology I'm trembling in geodesic frequencies I'm—
AUNT EM: STOP THIS IS NOT HOW WE—
DOROTHY: How we WHAT? How we speak? How we know?
THE BODY: How we touch the dark and discover the mathematics within?
(Enter the DOCTOR the PROFESSOR the AUTHORITY - they are echoes they are the same voice repeated they are—)
DOCTOR: The womb is wandering again the womb is in her THROAT the womb is in her BRAIN the womb is—
THE BODY: —EVERYWHERE YES the center is EVERYWHERE and I am gravid with knowing I am full with maps that show the truth I am carrying—
[THE CARTOGRAPHER enters with rolled documents - standard Mercator projections, square-grid maps. He barely acknowledges Dorothy.]
THE CARTOGRAPHER: (to HERR DOCTOR) You asked me to review the young woman's... work.
DOROTHY: I'm right here. You can speak to me.
THE CARTOGRAPHER: (finally looking at her) Miss Gale, these drawings are... imaginative. But they violate every principle of established cartography.
THE BODY: Good.
THE CARTOGRAPHER: I beg your pardon?
DOROTHY: Your established cartography lies. The Mercator projection makes Greenland appear larger than Africa. It isn't. Not even close.
THE CARTOGRAPHER: That's a necessary distortion to preserve—
DOROTHY: —to preserve European visual dominance. To make the colonial powers appear larger than they are.
THE BODY: (moving closer to him) She's saying you bend space itself to serve empire.
THE CARTOGRAPHER: This is absurd. Maps must be practical. Sailors must be able to—
DOROTHY: (spreading out her icosahedral projection) Here. Twenty triangular faces. You can fold it into a three-dimensional form or lay it flat. The continents maintain their actual proportions.
THE BODY: No lies. No distortions. Just the sphere's truth.
THE CARTOGRAPHER: But the angles—navigators need straight lines—
DOROTHY: There ARE no straight lines on a sphere! That's the point!
(She's drawing again, furiously.)
DOROTHY: Great circles. Geodesics. The shortest path between any two points on a curved surface. That's what navigators actually follow, whether they admit it or not.
THE BODY: The yellow brick road was a geodesic. The shortest path to Oz.
HERR DOCTOR: (to THE CARTOGRAPHER) You see how she returns always to this fantasy? This Oz?
DOROTHY: It's not a return. It's a demonstration. I'm using the memory to illustrate the principle.
THE CARTOGRAPHER: (gathering his papers) I'm sorry, but this is too unorthodox. No institution would accept—
DOROTHY: I'm not asking for acceptance. I'm stating facts.
THE BODY: The sphere subdivides into triangles more efficiently than into squares.
DOROTHY: The tetrahedron is the minimal enclosure.
THE BODY: Triangulation distributes stress better than any other geometry.
DOROTHY: These aren't opinions. They're structural truths.
THE CARTOGRAPHER: (at the door) Perhaps if you were to study at a proper university, under guidance—
THE BODY: Under whose guidance? Yours?
DOROTHY: So you can teach me that what I know is impossible?
THE CARTOGRAPHER: So we can help you understand the limits—
DOROTHY: I've been to Oz. I know there are no limits. Only structures we haven't learned to see yet.
(He exits. Silence.)
HERR DOCTOR: You see how you push them away? This pattern of yours—
DOROTHY: What pattern?
HERR DOCTOR: Insisting on your private knowledge. Refusing to submit to established authority. Claiming special access to truth through this... dream state.
THE BODY: (very soft) What if it's not a dream state?
DOROTHY: What if it's an expanded state?
THE BODY: What if the tornado didn't make me hallucinate?
DOROTHY: What if it made me see?
HERR DOCTOR: See what, precisely?
DOROTHY: (standing, gathering her drawings) The structure underneath. The mathematics of reality.
THE BODY: The way the sphere breathes.
DOROTHY: The way expansion works from a center point outward.
THE BODY: The way my body is a geodesic structure - ribs like triangulated arches, skull like a dome, bones distributing weight through tensegrity—
DOROTHY: I didn't go crazy in Oz, Doctor. I went sane. I saw how things actually work. And when I came back, everyone wanted me to unsee it.
THE BODY: To say it was just a dream.
DOROTHY: To accept their flat maps and their square grids and their lies.
HERR DOCTOR: And you couldn't do that?
DOROTHY: Would you?
(Beat.)
DOROTHY: If you saw the truth—the actual structure of something—could you pretend you hadn't?
THE BODY: Could you let them call your vision sickness?
DOROTHY: Could you smile and be quiet and be a good girl and forget?
HERR DOCTOR: (quietly) That is precisely what we call hysteria, Fräulein Gale. The inability to forget.
DOROTHY: Then call me hysterical. Call me mad.
THE BODY: But keep your hands off my geometry.
ACT THREE: THE LAUGHTER THAT OPENS
[The room has blossomed into pure geometry. Triangles everywhere. Radiating light. THE BODY and DOROTHY are dancing are breathing are drawing are—The space has shifted. DOROTHY's drawings now cover every surface. The room itself has become geodesic—triangulated, breathing. AUNT EM appears, flickering.]
AUNT EM: Dorothy, honey. Come home. Stop this... thinking. You used to be such a sweet girl.
DOROTHY: I used to be small.
THE BODY: I used to fit inside your Kansas.
DOROTHY: But I've expanded.
THE BODY: From the center outward.
AUNT EM: This isn't natural. Women aren't meant to—
DOROTHY: Aren't meant to what? Understand mathematics? See structures? Know things?
THE BODY: My brain is the same organ as a man's. Same neurons. Same capacity for pattern recognition.
DOROTHY: Better, even. Because I haven't been trained to ignore what I see in favor of what I'm told to see.
AUNT EM: But you'll never marry. No man wants a wife who—
DOROTHY: Who what? Who can prove the sphere subdivides more efficiently with triangles?
THE BODY: (laughing) No, Aunt Em. They want wives who pretend not to know. Who perform stupidity like it's a virtue.
DOROTHY: I tried. For a while. After I came back. I said the words: "It was just a dream." "I'll never leave again."
THE BODY: But my hands kept drawing.
DOROTHY: My mind kept calculating.
THE BODY: My body kept remembering.
(THE SPHERE begins to glow, pulsing with each of Dorothy's heartbeats.)
THE SPHERE: Tell them about the dome.
DOROTHY: (to audience) In twenty years—maybe thirty—someone will build it. A structure that's almost all air. Just a framework of triangulated struts following geodesic paths across a sphere's surface.
THE BODY: Incredibly strong. Incredibly light.
DOROTHY: The most efficient enclosure ever designed.
THE BODY: And it will revolutionize architecture.
DOROTHY: And they will call the man who patents it a genius.
THE BODY: And no one will mention the girl from Kansas who drew it first.
THE SPHERE: Show them the transformation.
(DOROTHY unfolds her icosahedral map—twenty triangular faces, each showing part of Earth's surface without distortion.)
DOROTHY: This isn't a projection. That's the wrong word. Projection implies you're standing outside the sphere, casting its image onto a flat surface.
THE BODY: Fuller will call it a transformation.
DOROTHY: Because it's generated from the center point of the sphere itself.
THE BODY: From the inside out.
DOROTHY: Like a breath expanding.
THE BODY: Like a heart beating.
DOROTHY: Like consciousness radiating from its source.
HERR DOCTOR: (returning) You speak of this Fuller as if he exists. But he doesn't yet. You're inventing him to validate your—
DOROTHY: I'm not inventing him. I'm predicting him.
THE BODY: Because this is how it works. Women see. Men speak. Women know. Men claim.
DOROTHY: But this time I'm writing it down.
THE BODY: This time there's evidence.
DOROTHY: These drawings. These calculations. This moment—
THE BODY: —when she speaks her truth—
DOROTHY: —and refuses to be silent.
HERR DOCTOR: But who will believe you? A woman with no formal training, claiming to have learned advanced geometry from a dream—
DOROTHY: Not from a dream. From experience.
THE BODY: From walking the spiral.
DOROTHY: From being inside the tornado.
THE BODY: From clicking my heels and feeling the frequency.
DOROTHY: From killing witches and taking their power and learning.
(THE SPHERE expands dramatically. The icosahedral map floats in three-dimensional space around them.)
THE SPHERE: This is what they cannot bear: A woman who knows her own structure A woman who sees through their grids A woman who understands that The sphere is everywhere The center is anywhere And she is both
DOROTHY: I am the sphere observing itself.
THE BODY: I am the center expanding outward.
DOROTHY: I am the geodesic dome that hasn't been built yet but will be.
THE BODY: I am the map that tells the truth.
DOROTHY: I am the tetrahedron—insideness and outsideness—containing all complexity.
THE BODY: I am Dorothy Gale.
DOROTHY: And I know.
TOGETHER: And I will not unknow.
(AUNT EM, HERR DOCTOR, THE CARTOGRAPHER speak simultaneously—a chorus of containment.)
ALL: Too much / Too loud / Too certain / Too strange / Not feminine / Not modest / Not possible / Not real / Not sane / Not—
DOROTHY: (cutting through) NOT SILENT.
THE BODY: Never again silent.
(She begins to click—but it's not the ruby slippers now. It's her fingers on the drafting table. A rhythm. A code. A frequency.)
DOROTHY: Fuller will publish his geodesic dome in 1948.
Click.
DOROTHY: His Dymaxion map in 1954.
Click.
DOROTHY: He will speak of ephemeralization, of doing more with less, of nature's coordinate system.
Click.
THE BODY: And he will be called visionary.
Click.
DOROTHY: And I will be called hysterical.
Click.
THE BODY: But I was first.
Click.
DOROTHY: And this play is the proof.
Click.
THE SPHERE: And the proof is in the body.
Click.
THE BODY: And the body is geometric.
Click.
DOROTHY: And the geometry is true.
Click.
TOGETHER: And the truth expands.
(The clicking becomes continuous—a frequency that builds and builds. The icosahedral map spins faster. The triangle tessellations on the walls pulse with light.)
DOROTHY: (final words, to the audience) They will ask you: Did you dream this?
THE BODY: And you will answer: I lived this.
DOROTHY: They will ask: Are you certain?
THE BODY: And you will answer: I have proof.
DOROTHY: They will ask: Who do you think you are?
THE BODY & DOROTHY: And you will answer: I am the geometer of my own expansion. I am the cartographer of my own truth. I am the sphere, breathing. I am the center, everywhere. I am Dorothy. And I know.
(BLACKOUT. But in the darkness—the sound of her pencil on paper. Still drawing. Still calculating. Still knowing.)
THE SPHERE: (whisper) Hysteria is just geometry trying to speak through a throat they tried to grid
DOROTHY: —REFUSE TO FORGET THAT I LIVED AND LEARNED AND RETURNED—
(The icosahedral map UNFOLDS in space around them. It is also a flower opening. It is also a breath expanding. It is also—in multiple voices - Glinda, the Witch, Aunt Em, Dorothy herself) Twenty faces Twenty openings Twenty ways to enter Twenty ways to breathe All equidistant from the center The center which is Everywhere The center which is Now
Click. Click. Click.
END
(But it spirals. It expands. It resonates in every woman who knows something she's not supposed to know, who sees something she's not supposed to see, who is something she's not supposed to be.)
PRODUCTION NOTES:
The set should be an actual geodesic structure—incomplete, under construction, breathing. Dorothy's drawings should be projected, animated, living mathematics.
When she speaks of the tetrahedron, four lights should define its vertices in space.
When she unfolds the icosahedral map, it should be physically present—a real object that transforms from three dimensions to two.
The clicking should be felt in the theater seats. Subwoofers. Resonance. The audience's bodies become part of the frequency.
And somewhere, visible but unremarked upon: actual mathematical proofs. Real geodesic calculations. Evidence that everything she says is true.
The audience should leave knowing: she was right. She was first. And they called it hysteria.
Because they always do.
When women know.
Author's notes: This play should be performed in a space that literally rotates, or with projections that make the walls appear to shift. The actress playing Dorothy and The Body should be the same person, but costumed/lit so we can see the split consciousness. The men's voices should eventually become indistinguishable from each other - a chorus of containment. And somewhere in the theater, hidden, there should be the actual sound of geodesic structures under tension - that peculiar singing that taut cables make. The audience should leave unsettled, feeling like the ground beneath them isn't as stable as they thought.
Dorothy's map is more than cartography - it's philosophy. It shows that there's no privileged viewpoint, no "up" or "down." Kansas isn't the center. Neither is it anywhere else. Every point on the sphere is equidistant from the center, and the center is everywhere.
Dorothy's geometric insights become a framework for understanding distributed consciousness - her imagination seems impossible from her humble beginnings. Just as her icosahedral map shows the earth without privileging any viewpoint, my writing in the Electric Puncture aims to let people experience consequences from multiple nodes simultaneously.
She's not building structures that contain (like the Wizard's palace) - she's designing frameworks that distribute. Strength through networked relationships rather than central authority, distributed energy is a strong theme on the author's life.
She came back from Oz knowing that mass is optional. That you can create shelter, create worlds, create new ways of being that float on tensegrity rather than crushing down with colonial weight.