PARTS UNKNOWN

a play in three acts written with a predictive text emulator

source: all available transcripts of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown

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Methodology:

1. Get all transcripts of the show Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown from cnn.com.

2. Divide transcripts by character and give them to computer program that uses word sequences in a source text to suggest likely words to continue a sentence, like the predictive text function on a smartphone. The program offers a list of top options and the writer picks one of these.

3. Write Bourdain lines using collection of all lines transcript attributes to BOURDAIN; write Unidentified Male lines using collection of all lines attributed to UNIDENTIFIED MALE; write Unidentified Female lines using collection of all lines attributed to UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE.

4. Arrange lines into play.

5. Write stage directions without machine assistance. Add punctuation.

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Act 1

Daytime. A modest kitchen in a distant land. American television personality ANTHONY BOURDAIN hunches over a small, bare table opposite an UNIDENTIFIED MALE and an UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE. Behind them, a cracked window gives onto a vast desert. Bourdain moves his hands animatedly, addressing his hosts with utter confidence.

Bourdain: It’s delicious to be a poet of life. I guess what I’m telling you is, I am famous for my great joys and I would like to eat a big thing of the pig. A big bowl of rice might be worth dying for.

Unidentified Female: We have one food here and it’s very bad for sure. We can get a lot of it for you if you like.

Bourdain: For me, it’s the booze that looks awesome, I mean I would like to eat some of that straight Chinese flavor packed with tuna lime leaf and steamed cabbage and then it’s time for delicious, delicious blood salsa. Looking forward to getting it done old school, oh yeah, thats pretty cool, anyway, I am starving.

Unidentified Male: I guess you could have a dinner of beer and ginger ale and then you could go back to your life.

Bourdain: Is there anything else I may suck on? No problem for me if there’s nothing but I hope that you can maybe get some kind of fish or, like, chicken necks that would really be good for me to explore with my head.

Unidentified Male: I mean, I can get you a very small shell with tuna fish in it. Is that good?

Bourdain: Is this the first time you ever tempted a nice man who’d looked at the greasy ass crack of the gods?

Unidentified Male retrieves a tuna-filled shell from the kitchen counter and offers it to Bourdain. He eats the tuna, then continues to lick the shell.

Bourdain: It’s beautiful! So delicious and completely natural! I love this part. What is this part?

Unidentified Female: That is the beach.

Bourdain: This is really really amazing, spot on. (pause) I notice that I grew to be like a million acres. Is that correct?

Unidentified Female: That is not possible.

Unidentified Male: I think it’s easy enough to do. Everything is connected to the universe and that’s what’s happening.

Bourdain: This is the most important question: what would Jesus do with a big freaking lobster?

Unidentified Male: I think that the American businessmen will invest in jail and for us this will be a mess, of course. I don’t understand why things happen but I don’t care.

Bourdain: This neighborhood is many acres of property which has been waiting for me to eat it.

Unidentified Male: You like to be a mess of different things, yes yes yes. You like to taste its rice a lot during the civil war.

Unidentified Female: I know what happens to you when you lose your hope. I love my addiction to the music instruments of pain.

Bourdain stands and starts pacing, as if seized by an idea.

Bourdain: I am famous for sure, but what do you think I love to do with my chin?

Unidentified Male (humoring him): I would probably go with, you get hundreds of thousands of chefs to make sure it’s always here for you.

Bourdain: I want to kill everybody who listens to me as I stumble around this world.

Unidentified Female (indignant): You know, you are highly educated but you cannot have my house.

Bourdain (lecturing): There are many many things that I probably should not like to do that I just can’t help but be doing. For instance, I love to get robbed in my backyard. That is not an amazing place to get robbed and I love to do that right in my backyard. I think it’s awesome because it’s clearly a sick thing to do and I do it again and again for over seven hours.

Unidentified Female (baleful):  I think the most thoughtful thing you can do right now is really to say stuff like, “The food is a private part of my heart and I think it is the document of my god.“

Bourdain (undeterred): What do you think is the most ferocious thing I have eaten in my mouth?

Unidentified Male:  I don’t care about truth man I would never talk about that .

Bourdain moves for the door.

Bourdain: I don’t even remember what it was. I can’t think of it in my mind of a crab. I need to see how you eat. I want to know what you are. I really want to eat a big glass of the best hummus in Okinawa!

Bourdain exits stage left, out into the wasteland.

Unidentified Female: I am sure I don’t understand how this is possible.

Unidentified Male: I think I can actually become addicted to the unknown.

Blackout.

Act 2

The kitchen, later that night. Unidentified Male and Unidentified Female talk at a near-whisper.

Unidentified Female:  I would like to start a little society.

Unidentified Male: It would be like a nice park you can dance in. I can see it.

Unidentified Female: They could do the thing I love. The music thing I don’t know how to do.

Unidentified Male: That should be in the middle of the town. Ok, nice.

Unidentified Female: And then we can open a little beach right in the craters for my kids and everything.

Unidentified Male: A little hotel.

Unidentified Female: But for everyone.

Unidentified Female glances at the door.

Unidentified Female: I hope I can think more than what I live.

Unidentified Male: Yes but that is very expensive. That is very very surrealistic. You would never never see the bread of money and we will be a mess.

Unidentified Female: I have to get out of here. I have more power. I have you.

Bourdain, drunk, staggers in from left.

Unidentified Male (to Unidentified Female): And I have money for people like him.

Bourdain: Are you talking about Ronald McDonald?

Unidentified Male: Yes, yes baby I was…

Bourdain: So what happens if I want to eat up a big freaking octopus? What do you think of food and water?

Unidentified Female (scathing): I think they are people who have families.

Bourdain ignores her and starts ransacking the kitchen, flinging cabinets open. All of them are empty.

Bourdain:  I like to eat…traditional foods and then next week…what I guess I want to do is have a…tattoo…of food.

He rubs his belly as he considers this possibility.

Unidentified Female (sarcastic): You like to have good, really really nice food. Yes, I think that is it, Bourdain, yes. That is where you are extreme.

Bourdain: This neighborhood has long been waiting for me to eat it. This beautiful mountain of food is a sacrifice to make me happy.

Bourdain finds a bottle of gin and begins to down it by mouthfuls.

Unidentified Male: Yes, I would recommend it. Seems to be right.

Bourdain (making a show of open-mindedness): This is not just about what I want but it is about what you want! Do you want a car bomb? Do you want a motorcycle of the gods? I can afford 100 percent of the things you love. I can afford the world and its freaking strong emotions. I don’t even know what happens if I don’t get a lot of money…

Bourdain continues gesturing at Unidentified Male silently as Unidentified Female steps out of the world and addresses the audience.

Unidentified Female: I was always afraid of people who live down there in the ocean, for when they have a problem they go right to the beach and they say stuff like “impossible, how can you get arrested” in Portuguese. I think the most thoughtful Sicilians are disgusted by the animal of the beach, the thing that we would likely stuff in a cave.

Bourdain (still rambling to Unidentified Male): …like I said, it ain’t always a party where I am. I love to make little social problems in my mouth and in my mind…

Unidentified Female: I don’t have a fear of violence but I have a fear of politics. I have a fear of these beach super people who have hundreds of politics.

Bourdain (teasing): …I can smell the frightened chicken. It was a very famous chicken. I mean, it seems like it would be a very famous chicken….

Unidentified Female: We are extremists but I think that we are highly against the Arab Spring.

Bourdain: …the world is big too, deep fried little tomato salad with Indian-style people, usually alongside some huge fried squid. I guess thats the best thing about Ethiopia….

Unidentified Female: I love a little bit of politics on a day like this but I cannot pass through life in a vicious nap and I don’t want to find my house waiting for me to be eradicated by the animal thing in my head.  I just like to have my doctor drug and then I can be determined to be okay. I found out that i was lacking a lot of sauces in my head and that is the thing: I don’t understand how to unwrap my life.

Bourdain: This is probably the best thing I have ever sat down in, a sauce called turbo derg. I really really—oh yes I mean I’m thinking really good about this kind of silky, deeply satisfying beans. It’s really intensely delicious. I want to eat it hot. I want to put it in the brain!

Unidentified Male joins her at the front of the stage.

Unidentified Male: You know, I used to spend all day every day here in the middle of the country, simply chewing a small shell. I had several amazing tumbles. One, of course—and this is typical for me—so it was the beginning of hip-hop and I was literally only a couple of years old. I was considered an egg of the earth and this was also the bronx so, you know, it was definitely not the city of nature, but you would have people dying in front of wood houses where concrete guys from France do things like getting arrested and the water thing, just like, oh man, God, crazy taxi you know? And I’m going “Here is a cool place for us to leave.”

Bourdain (very drunk):…I am definitely wrong about the basic truths of things like French dynamite and French laundry—apparently they don’t even know what I mean…

Unidentified Male: And I told my father “I love ketchup but I don’t think I love this city,” and he says “Listen, you are blessed to have a nice fresh seafood in your life scenario and I hope you know I love you.”

Bourdain: …What a coincidence for you, I am actually the literal world of gastronomy in a bag. Like a calzone of people who live with each other.

Unidentified Male snaps back into reality and speaks right into the face of Bourdain, who has grown powerfully drunk.

Unidentified Male: The world is a small corner of a little box of which you are a coward.

Unidentified Male exits to bedroom, right.

Unidentified Female (still to audience): I was born here and, just like the food, I was alive. Then there was a bad part of the day, and I had my addiction to the music instruments and then I had a major nap of my heart.

Bourdain (to no one in particular): A good thing for me that I don’t understand anything.

Bourdain falls asleep on the table. Unidentified Female continues to stare out at the audience. Blackout.

Act 3

The kitchen, the next morning. Bourdain is asleep on the table. Unidentified Female addresses the audience as she closes cabinets and puts things back in order.

Unidentified Female: That stuff we talk about—the smells of the pesticides and the hormones in the early days of money—that is so nostalgic to me. That is really the thing that i love watching in the hospital of my heart. Is crying more Spanish than human blood? I think it is very different than human blood and I think it is really nice to do with a mom.

Bourdain (rubbing his aching head): I was here last night…

Bourdain gets up and begins to pace the room, trying to remember.

Bourdain: I was here last night…I think I remember going right here and somehow getting a bunch of deep-fried little salty goat innards for my own dark heart. I was just scarfing it all in, trying to kill myself by hand and, well, I was still alive so I thought this was supposed to happen and I said “Oh, my God, whatever you want my face to do, that is pretty much what I want it to do,” and then I could hear some kind of music producer right in my mouth and his name was The Epicenter and he says “Thanks for nothing” like a degenerate wino and I said “not a problem” like a celestial thing of beauty.

Unidentified Female: Bourdain, you are perfect against the dictatorship of the moon and the hormones.

Bourdain: The world I spent a little bit of life in is a place where you can feel the ground shake under your bed. I was here last night in the middle of the day. I was thinking about running uphill faster than all those years. I was going to die and then everybody else, they gave up and just dumped the whole bag of dead things into the sea.

A long pause. Eventually, Unidentified Male enters from right. His mood has become serene.

Unidentified Male: You know, we don’t have anything to eat. Like, really, we have not a bus of food. I think it’s almost un-American not to have some kind of food.

Bourdain: I feel all guilty now. This time I finally have a situation in my head. I live like a degenerate thing. I mean, I love it and I need it to go on forever.

Unidentified Male: You are a great cultural thing but we don’t need a big fireball of the world. I guess I am a really lucky man thats all.

Bourdain: You are alive and lucky as hell. Your job is like wrestling, in fact it’s pretty much the same idea. You think about what you need to do and then you do that.

Unidentified Female: I think it’s very different than that. My kids are very very bad to me. I am sure they will be the impossible thing of pain.

Bourdain:  I am told that every great meal is paid for by people I don’t even see.

Unidentified Female: We have to fight you to be made impossible.

Unidentified Male: We are going mad with it all. Come here. We will be resolved. Maybe we will be resolved.

All three embrace.

Unidentified Female: My kids have been around a lot of people who live down in the craters. They don’t learn to fight—they just hang out down there and nothing more. I don’t understand how they are going to live. In Jamaica, they have four months and they just call one of these the beginning. Time is the same for everyone.

Unidentified Male: I think my wife is what we call a big bag of heroin that I love. I think she is my favorite soup.

Bourdain: This place is pretty much lost without a bone marrow–rich literary tradition. I know how to eat a lot of meat, like beef and raisins and the skin of a stranger. I have to ask, what is the real deal behind dark clouds?

Unidentified Female: My son is a public nap of pain. He is a guest of the craters, a little girl of martial art and chicken soup. My god, my baby is another one of my addiction drug opioids…

A pause as she cannot go on.

Bourdain: I don’t know what to call your son, but I am starving.

Blackout.