.. include:: /_templates/include-file/page-prefix.rst .. role:: raw-html(raw) :format: html .. role:: raw-latex(raw) :format: latex .. meta:: :description: Jonah-Play-b11, the ancient seed play of the Jonah Carnival: the book of Jonah told close to the original, as a play with two honest dice. Nineveh is spared only if the city turns in time. :keywords: Jonah Play script, Jonah Carnival, Jonah-shpil, purimshpil, book of Jonah, midrash, Nineveh, Leviathan, ASON, amateur theatre :author: LLoL as Laurence Loewe of Laodicea, ClaudeOp55Max, and Everyone :seo:title: Jonah-Play-b11 --- Forty Days, Overturned :og:card:title: Jonah-Play-b11
Forty Days, Overturned :og:card:description: The book of Jonah as an amateur play, with two honest dice: one that keeps finding the reluctant prophet, and one that is rolling the great city towards doom. .. TODO AA: Page maturity --- update StayC when reviewed Page status: MMv5r0p0_2026m09d25 (MMv4r0p0_2026m09d25; MMv3r0p0_2026m09d24; MMv2r1p0_2026m09d24; MMv2r0p0_2026m09d22; MMv1_2026m09d18) v4 (2026-09-25, LLoL's call): rewritten as an ANCIENT Jonah Play that stays in Nineveh, close to the book of Jonah, as a liberal midrash in play form. The modern watch moved out into its own play, b12 (Arkhipov). Two dice: Jonah's die keeps finding him (the odd vocation); Nineveh's die rolls towards doom by default, and the city decides whether it turns in time. Reasoning: hell/ll/other/b/26/. v5 (2026-09-25, LLoL's call): "a ready-to-play mockup model"; every described beat now written out as dialogue, with the beat kept in fine print; organizer notes moved to fine print. .. TODO AA: All open questions and action items for this page go here. - [ ] Review - [ ] Decide footer form type (open-std or shut-std) before MM -> OO *********************************************************** Jonah-Play-b11 --- Forty Days, Overturned *********************************************************** **An ancient Jonah Play** designed for the :doc:`Jonah Carnival `. This amateur play tells the ridiculous story of the selfish biblical prophet Jonah. It's kept close to the original four short chapters and de-excerpts their carefully chosen words to provide a bit more context that may be easier to connect to. Like a little midrash from 2026, so nobody has to read the book first (though the original masterpiece is definitively worth it: `Jonah 1--4 `__). **The play runs an estimated twenty minutes or more (the spoken lines alone take about thirteen), needs at least four people, two bedsheets, one mask, two dice and a pot plant. It ends with Nineveh spared or overturned, depending on what the city does and how the dice roll.** This is a ready-to-play mockup model for a play you can perform as it is written and that you are most welcome to rewrite and improve in any way you see fit. It comes with its specially designed Jonah License to allow this (see bottom). Its modern sister play is :doc:`Jonah-Play-b12 --- Arkhipov and the Steel Fish `; the two can be played as a double bill (see the end). **Who this Jonah was, and why that is funny.** His book calls him "Jonah son of Amittai". A prophet of exactly that name turns up once more in the Bible (2 Kings 14:25): Jonah son of Amittai, from Gath-Hepher in Galilee, whose word helped King Jeroboam II in winning back the old borders of Israel. So the man sent to save the capital of Israel's most dangerous enemy was, of all prophets, the one known for his own national security messaging! No wonder he ran the other way, supported by his family and friends who recommended a long holiday somewhere far from Nineveh. **Jonah's name cuts both ways.** *Yonah* in Hebrew means *dove*. But the very same letters also spell a form of the verb "to oppress": the prophets speak of "the oppressing sword" (Jeremiah 46:16) and "the oppressing city" (Zephaniah 3:1) with exactly this word. A dove, or a terror. Which one this Jonah turns out to be depends, like everything else in the play, on what happens next. .. container:: fineprint **For those who care about the Hebrew.** The name Jonah is יוֹנָה (*yod, vav, nun, he*), *yonah*, the ordinary word for "dove". A separate root, י־נ־ה (*y-n-h*), means "to oppress, to treat violently" (for example Exodus 22:21, "you shall not oppress a stranger"). Its feminine active participle, "oppressing", is spelled with exactly the same four letters and the same vowels. In Jeremiah 46:16 and 50:16 and in Zephaniah 3:1 it stands with the article, הַיּוֹנָה, *hayyonah*: "the oppressing sword", "the oppressing city". Ancient translators split over it: the Latin Vulgate reads Zephaniah 3:1 as *civitas columba*, "the dove city", where most modern translations read "the oppressing city". The word really has been read both ways. **A naming joke from later history.** Latin *columba* means dove. Christopher Columbus's Italian name, *Colombo*, means dove too; and "Columbia", the old poetic name of the United States, comes from Columbus. So the newest superpower carries the dove in its name, as the prophet sent to the old one did. Whether it turns out a dove or a terror depends, as it did for Jonah, on what happens next. .. admonition:: The gist :class: tip Jonah is called to warn Nineveh, the great and cruel capital of the superpower of his day. His friends tell him to take a holiday in Tarshish instead, and he does. *His own die-casting Leviathan keeps finding him*: the sailors cast lots, and however often they roll, it comes back to Jonah. Overboard, swallowed, faced with a physical Leviathan ("big fish"), spat out, and called a second time, Jonah, terrified, finally walks into Nineveh and says five words: *"Forty days, and Nineveh is overturned."* Nobody knows which "overturned" he means. **The city's die has been rolling towards its end every day, and the city has to decide whether to turn before the last die decides whether it will die as a city.** Either way, Jonah ends up under a dying plant, and the play ends like the book on the question: why should everyone die? Before you start ================ **Cast of roles.** JONAH · HIS FRIENDS (two or more; they come back as the SAILORS and then as the NINEVITES: CITYSTICIANS and FARMERS; together they make the CHORUS) · THE CAPTAIN · THE FISH (any number of people under a sheet) · LEVIATHAN (optional: more people under a second sheet) · THE WATCHMAN on Nineveh's wall · THE KING OF NINEVEH · A CHILD · a VOICE (anyone) · and **ASON**, a mask worn by whoever is nearest: Hebrew for *disaster*, and on this site also the *Ambiguous Semantics Of Nothing*. **Props.** Two bedsheets: a grey one (the storm, then the dust) and a white one (the fish, and Leviathan). A mask for ASON: a paper bag, a hood, anything one person can put on in two seconds and another can take off. A pot plant (broccoli will do) and a sock for the worm. Paper bags for sackcloth, one per member of the audience if you can. Hula hoops for the citysticians' hamster wheels. Pillows, if you play the fall. **The two dice.** This play has two, and they must look different. **Jonah's die** is small and lives in his pocket; however often it is rolled, it keeps finding him. That is what an odd vocation feels like from the inside. **Nineveh's die** is big (a cardboard cube will do) and lives on the city wall with the WATCHMAN; it rolls towards the city's end, by default. Both are honest. .. container:: fineprint **For whoever organizes the performance.** **Who ASON is.** *Ason* (Hebrew :raw-html:`אָסוֹן`\ :raw-latex:`\balospehebrew{אָסוֹן}`) is what Jacob fears will befall Benjamin on the road, the harm whose author the text declines to name. On this site the same four letters also stand for **ASON, the Ambiguous Semantics Of Nothing**: the trap of reading "nothing happened" as "nothing is wrong". ASON is never a person. It is the network of causes and chances that decides what actually happens, and it can take over anyone, however well-meaning, without their noticing. More, and other ways to show it: :ref:`ASON `. **How to stage ASON. This is the whole trick.** ASON is a mask, not a character. Anyone who puts it on becomes ASON: Jonah first, then a sailor, a busy Ninevite, perhaps the King. It must change wearers at least three times. At the end it lies on the floor with nobody in it. **The racket.** Whenever anyone on stage says some version of *"and nobody said anything"*, someone puts on the mask of ASON and the room makes as much noise as it can. That nothing is where ASON lives. **The rules.** Keep the :ref:`seven rules of the form `. Above all: the way out is always shown, ASON is the only enemy, nothing real is destroyed, and no sound in the room may resemble a real alert. Tell the room before you begin that tonight the city may fall, and that it falls only in the play. **The dice are honest.** Never load or swap them. Each die decides only *when*; what happens in between is up to the people. Scene 1 --- The call ==================== *Jonah 1:1--3.* JONAH at home with his FRIENDS. He looks at a piece of paper. He reads it. He puts it down. He picks it up. He puts it down. | **JONAH:** *(reading)* "Go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for their wickedness has come up before me." | **FRIEND 1:** Nineveh? They skin people there. | **FRIEND 2:** *You?* You are the one who told King Jeroboam to take back our borders! | **FRIEND 1:** The national-security prophet, sent to save the enemy's capital. | **JONAH:** I noticed. | **FRIEND 2:** You look terrible. You need a holiday. | **FRIEND 1:** Tarshish! Beaches. Sunshine. Nobody there has heard of Nineveh. | **JONAH:** *(to the audience)* Why me. I am not qualified. Someone else will do it. Someone more senior. *(beat)* Also they will laugh. | **FRIENDS:** *(helpfully)* They will laugh. | **JONAH:** And nobody said anything for years, and the world did not end, so --- **He puts on the mask of ASON himself. RACKET.** He takes out his little die, looks at it, does not roll it, and pockets it. | **FRIEND 2:** *(waving)* Send us a postcard! | **JONAH:** From Tarshish. As far from Nineveh as a ship will go. He leaves, in the opposite direction. .. container:: fineprint Beat: Jonah is the first to wear ASON, the disaster nobody authored. This is the most important staging choice in the play: the man who was sent is the first one to become the thing he was sent about. Scene 2 --- The storm and the lot ================================= *Jonah 1:4--16.* .. container:: fineprint Beat: the comic centre. Spend your best material here. The sailors, who owe Jonah nothing, behave better than the prophet does from start to finish. A ship made of chairs. The FRIENDS are SAILORS now. JONAH goes below and falls asleep, still wearing the mask. Then the storm: people shaking the grey sheet, harder and harder. | **SAILOR 1:** *(to the sky)* God of the wind, stop the wind! | **SAILOR 2:** *(at the same time)* God of the waves, calm the waves! | **SAILOR 3:** *(at the same time)* God of whoever is in charge today, whoever you are, please! | **CAPTAIN:** Throw the cargo overboard! Lighten the ship! They throw the cargo overboard (mime it: sacks, jars, a whole goat). | **SAILOR 2:** Not the goat! | **CAPTAIN:** Especially the goat. Where is the passenger? | **SAILOR 1:** Asleep. Below. THE CAPTAIN goes down and shakes JONAH awake. | **CAPTAIN:** You are asleep? Get up! Call on your god. Perhaps he will notice us, and we will not die. | **JONAH:** I find that sleeping helps. | **CAPTAIN:** It is not helping the ship. **The lot** (Jonah 1:7). | **SAILOR 3:** Somebody on this ship surely caused this perfect storm disaster. Let's find out who! | **CAPTAIN:** *(to Jonah)* You have a dice. Give it here. Let's roll the dice to find who's guilty! THE CAPTAIN gives each SAILOR a number, and Jonah one too. He rolls Jonah's little die on the deck, in front of everyone. If it shows a sailor's number: | **SAILOR:** *(whose number it is)* Me? *(the storm gets worse)* No, not me. Roll again! **They keep rolling until Jonah's number comes up**, counting each throw out loud. | **CAPTAIN:** It is you. | **JONAH:** How can you tell? | **CAPTAIN:** It took *(the number)* throws, and it still came back to you. | **JONAH:** It does that. | **SAILOR 1:** Who are you? What is your trade? Where do you come from? | **SAILOR 2:** What is your name? | **JONAH:** Jonah. | **SAILOR 3:** Dove? | **JONAH:** A dove, or a terror. Depends whom you ask. He takes off the mask. | **JONAH:** I am a Hebrew. I fear Yah, who is Reality Yah-self, the Highest God, who made it all, sea and land included. I am running away from him. | **SAILOR 1:** From the one who made the sea? *(pointing at the waves)* This sea? | **SAILOR 2:** What have you done! | **CAPTAIN:** What shall we do to you, so that the sea calms down for us? | **JONAH:** Pick me up and throw me into the sea. Then it will calm down. I know this storm is my fault. I'm as good as dead anyway, so it doesn't matter. At least then you can survive. | **CAPTAIN:** We are not throwing a passenger overboard. Row! Row for the shore! They row with all their might, and get nowhere. The sheet heaves higher. | **SAILOR 3:** It is no use. | **CAPTAIN:** *(looking up)* Please, Highest God, Reality, do not let us die for this man's life, and do not hold his blood against us. They throw him overboard, very apologetically. **The sheet goes still.** | **SAILOR 1:** *(in the silence, utterly amazed)* ...It worked. | **SAILOR 2:** He was right. We better worship Reality as it is! All on the ship bow silently to Reality. Then each vow in their own words to get as real as they can be for the rest of their lives. One SAILOR picks up the mask that Jonah dropped, turns it over, and does not know what to do with it. | **SAILOR 3:** What do we do with this? | **CAPTAIN:** Keep it as a warning. Somebody always ends up wearing it. .. container:: fineprint The book: the sailors fear what Jonah is running from (Jonah 1:10), try to row back to land (1:13), and pray before they throw him in (1:14). The "dove or terror" answer is this play's, but will be obvious to any attentive Hebrew audience. Scene 3 --- The fish, and Leviathan =================================== *Jonah 2, and an old retelling (Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer 10).* THE FISH arrives, as badly made as you can manage: several people under the white sheet. It swallows Jonah. Three days and three nights. | **JONAH:** *(to the ceiling)* Is this necessary? I was going on holiday. I had a ticket. | **FISH:** *(from all around him)* Stop kicking. | **JONAH:** It talks. | **FISH:** It has been listening for three days. You talk and kick around more than any prophet I have ever swallowed. | **JONAH:** How many prophets have you swallowed? | **FISH:** Counting you? One. It is still too many. *(beat)* I should tell you: today is the day Leviathan eats me. | **JONAH:** Take me to him. | **FISH:** You want to *meet* him? | **JONAH:** I have run from the biggest thing there is. A sea monster will be a rest. LEVIATHAN approaches: more people under a sheet, moving as one, with cardboard crocodile jaws. It can be played by whoever is wearing the mask of ASON. | **LEVIATHAN:** *(a great rumble)* Who comes down to my house? | **JONAH:** I came down here to see where you live. One day I will put a hook in your tongue and turn you into minced meat, so everyone can get a bite of you! That'd be a way to feed the hungry! LEVIATHAN flees, which no one expected, least of all Jonah. | **FISH:** He has never done that before. | **JONAH:** *(shaken)* Neither have I. Then, quietly, the one sincere moment he has had so far: | **JONAH:** When my life was fading away, I remembered. The deep closed over me, weeds were wrapped around my head, and I remembered You, Reality. Salvation belongs to Reality, Yah, my God. | **FISH:** *(with obvious relief)* Right. Out you go. THE FISH spits him out onto dry land. He takes out his die, rolls it without looking, and puts it away again. Jonah finds a second piece of paper in Reality (Jonah 3:1). It happened to hide in a mask of ASON on the way. | **JONAH:** *(reading)* "Go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim the message I give you." Same address. He rolls his die again to decide which way to go and puts it away again. | **JONAH:** Fine. I'm going. Stop looking at me like that. As if I knew what I was doing. I know how MAD this is. .. container:: fineprint Beat: in the book of Job, nobody can land Leviathan with a hook (Job 41:1). In the old retelling, a reluctant prophet in a fish's belly faces it down. Jonah's prayer here is a short paraphrase of Jonah 2:5--9. The minced meat alludes to Isaiah 27:1. Scene 4 --- The city ==================== *Jonah 3. The shortest sermon ever preached, and the best answered.* **Greater Nineveh.** Not only the walled city, but the whole metropolitan triangle around it: Nineveh, Calah and the towns between (Genesis 10:11--12 calls them all together "the great city"), with their suburbs and farmland. Inside the walls live the rich and the powerful. Outside, on the farms, live the people who feed them. In times of trouble, everyone is supposed to find shelter inside the walls. Everyone. Except by now some are considered more equal than others. The CHORUS are NINEVITES, busy. Half of them are CITYSTICIANS, the city's politicians, each running in a hamster wheel to keep up with their Joneses. It's symbolized by a hula hoop. Everyone turns it round and round in their own way. Every turn earns points, bucks and clicks in Nineveh's attention economy. | **CITYSTICIANS:** *(spinning gold from nothing and the blood, sweat, and tears of others who carry the real risks)* (chanting in a chorus) Points! Bucks! Clicks! Points! Bucks! Clicks! The other half are FARMERS and other workers, crammed into the corners. On the wall sits THE WATCHMAN with Nineveh's big die. | **WATCHMAN:** *(to the audience)* Every day this city rolls its big die. The violence in its hands keeps the die going. Three sixes are the end. *(rolls, calls the number)* Nothing. *(rolls)* Nothing. Nobody here remembers a six. My grandmother does: famine and sickness, cities rising against the king, and the sun going dark at noon. She warned them, and nobody listened. We call her Grandma Cassandra. Nobody knows why the citysticians of her day were so stupid as to destroy the people who fed them. | **FARMER:** *(asking a CITYSTICIAN, spinning past)* When trouble comes, is there room for us inside the walls? | **CITYSTICIAN:** *(without stopping the hoop, putting on the ASON mask)* Some of you. We'll decide who, nearer the time. It's all based on Points! Bucks! Clicks! | **FARMER:** Which of us? Can you help me with my Points? I don't have any Clicks? | **CITYSTICIAN:** *(still spinning)* Later. Let me first organize my own Points! Bucks! Clicks! | **WATCHMAN:** *(rolls dice)* Nothing. And nobody said anything. **RACKET. The CITYSTICIAN faces the audience with the ASON mask on, and keeps spinning.** JONAH walks in: a man from a small subject nation, walking into the capital of the superpower of his age. He crosses the city once, for one whole day, from the fields on one side, through the walls, to the fields on the other, and calls out the same five words to everyone he passes. **He walks slowly through the audience, repeating the line to person after person:** | **JONAH:** Forty days, and Nineveh is overturned. *(to the next person)* Forty days, and Nineveh is overturned. *(to the next)* Forty days, and Nineveh is overturned. He sits down, at the other end of the room, satisfied, in a comfortable corner, to watch the coming disaster from a safe distance. He's oblivious to the grass-roots movement that has been organizing itself, inspired by his words. | **NINEVITE 1:** Overturned? Destroyed? | **NINEVITE 2:** Or turned over. Like a new leaf. | **NINEVITE 3:** Like a table. | **NINEVITE 1:** Which one? | **NINEVITE 2:** Who knows?? It could be either? | **NINEVITE 3:** Let's hope there is still a chance it could mean "Like a new leaf"! | **FARMER:** *(slowly)* Forty days. Then it is up to us which one. Those CITYSTICIANs only think about Points! Bucks! Clicks! We have to do this ourselves! Let's be creative: If you write some flyers I could share them when I sell my goods at the market. | **NINEVITE 1:** Done. I know someone who can help me find the right words. | **NINEVITE 2:** I can talk to my local preacher. He's been railing for years about the madness of basing everything on Points! Bucks! Clicks! | **NINEVITE 3:** There's got to be a better way to organize things. Let me talk to some researcher friends who can probably help to find how. .. container:: fineprint Greater Nineveh is "a three days' walk" (Jonah 3:3): three days to walk round the whole triangle, farms and all. Jonah goes "a day's walk" into it (3:4): one day to cross it. A circle three days round and one day across: the book's geometry uses a very round pi. The Hebrew word for "overturned", *nehpakhet*, really can mean both: destroyed, or turned around. The warning does not say which. The city does. Grandma Cassandra's troubles are not invented. Assyrian records from Jonah's own lifetime note famine with epidemic (765--759 BCE), a total eclipse of the sun (15 June 763 BCE) and revolts in several cities. The historian D. J. Wiseman suggested that this is why Nineveh was ready to listen ("Jonah's Nineveh", *Tyndale Bulletin* 30, 1979, `doi:10.53751/001c.30607 `__). The rest of Grandma is artistic license. **The turning** (Jonah 3:5--9). THE WATCHMAN stands up. | **WATCHMAN:** Listen, all of you. The last face is a six. *(holding up the die)* Every time somebody here says "later", I roll. *(he hands out paper sackcloth to the NINEVITES and to the audience)* Whoever turns, put this on, stand up if you can, and say: "I turn." Once the dice has produced three sixes, time's up and Pandora's death-trifecta box is unleashed. That is unless someone can find a way to stop the rolling of the dice before that! | **FARMER:** *(putting it on at once)* I turn. | **NINEVITE 2:** I turn. | **CITYSTICIAN:** *(spinning)* Later. I need more Points! Bucks! Clicks! Else who will believe me? THE WATCHMAN rolls. This goes on, with the audience joining in: **every "I turn" puts a Ninevite in sackcloth; every "Later" is a roll.** .. container:: fineprint Maybe adjust the dice rolling scheme for the size of the audience involved and the desired outcome of what is to happen to the city in the play. This will make the intra-play dice-rolling more consistent. However, this may be too many calculations in real time based on flexible audience sizes and reactions, so the consistency may break here. It's an amateur play after all. **When the whole cast and at least half of the room have turned,** word reaches THE KING, while sitting on his throne, with the ASON mask on. Upon hearing, he decides for a change to not kill the messenger of unwelcome news. He gets off his throne, takes off his royal robe (Jonah 3:6), and stands there in his (symbolic) underwear. (Use a white blank sheet to indicate full transparency and that he's blanking on what to do exactly.) | **CHILD:** *(pointing)* The king has no clothes! | **KING:** No. And the farmers have no walls. Let's fix both by working true justice for once! He puts on sackcloth and sits in the dust. | **KING:** By decree of the king and his nobles: no one shall eat, no one shall drink, not man, not beast, not herd, not flock. Everyone, and the livestock too, shall be covered in sackcloth. If you find that sackcloth to be hairy: good. Because it's meant to make us think of all the hairy questions we have been avoiding, such as what really is the greater point of what we are doing? Who will care about our Points! Bucks! Clicks! in 100 years? Who will care about them once they have destroyed Nineveh by destroying all farms that feed us? | **CHORUS:** *(as cattle, in sackcloth)* Moo. | **KING:** Let everyone turn away from spinning their hamster-wheels of coveting! How much fake information and confusion has the game of "keeping up with the Joneses" not produced? How many were killed because we failed to think of our fellow citizens, whoever they may be? Is it an accident that the guy warning us about how we doom ourselves by trying to keep up with the Joneses is called Jonah himself? Let's get our act together! We are still a super-power! But if we turn all that power against ourselves and the weakest among us, how will we be able to survive? If we use our smarts to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, then the poor will die, followed shortly by the rich, because as you all know, the rich all rely on others to get stuff done. Do we want to really end our great civilization like that? There is room inside the walls for every farmer and every family, every child included. Who knows? Perhaps it is not too late. Let the smartest people find the best solutions for balancing our great society back to deserve being called a civilization! Let them go ask the farmers, families, and children, what they really need and find smart ways to care for them. Like the farmers care to provide all of us with the excellent food they grow! Let's fund that research by taxing the Points! Bucks! Clicks! that have been suffocating everyone. Let's develop better incentive-schemes. I know that you can do it. You only have to turn your mind to it! The CITYSTICIANS let their hula hoops drop. | **CITYSTICIAN:** *(looking at the hoop on the floor)* Why did we ever need so many points? | **FARMER:** Because nobody asked what they were for. What follows is an even faster slow-motion explosion of gentle-kind-reasonableness. Everyone knows why it happens: because the common good needs it; and because this generation in Nineveh realized as a whole that it didn't want to be that generation that would enter the history books as those who destroyed themselves by believing that nothing was wrong and that nothing could move, until nothing went wrong because everyone did nothing - until that ASON nothing (RACKET!!!) destroyed everyone here. THE WATCHMAN takes the dooms-day die off the wall and locks it up in a zoo to better explain to everyone the dangers of doing nothing. | **WATCHMAN:** No doom today. The city stopped rolling the dooms-day dice. We are still alive! Let's make sure we keep it that way by not killing ourselves! Let's learn to be gentle kind reasonable. **The city is spared.** --- **If a six comes up three times first,** the city is overturned. Pillows fall on the city from every side, thrown by the cast onto the stage, never at the audience. The grey sheet is drawn over the NINEVITES, and they lie still, as if dead. | **WATCHMAN:** *(very quietly, holding the die)* Three sixes. Leviathan has struck. *(Then he lies down as well.)* Silence, for as long as the room can bear it. (A memorial minute or more to commemorate now what can no longer be commemorated once everyone has been obliterated by the impending doom.) There is no second try. .. container:: fineprint Beat: in the book the turning starts with the people, from the greatest to the least, before the King hears of it (Jonah 3:5--6). That's a grass-roots movement leading the politics, not the other way round through astroturfing. The livestock in sackcloth is in the text, and it is one of the best cosmic jokes for a time when over-reliance on meat destroys much of the planet needlessly. The odds on Nineveh's die are only applicable to the play for illustrative purposes. Dice are not rigged; they decide when doom happens not if; hence rolling long enough will get the city destroyed. The city needs to learn to roll life-giving dice of innovation instead of knowledge-faking dice of death. For a real-world actuarial analysis of the dice of doom due to accidental nuclear winter, see the :doc:`Matheo-b16 study `; briefly, it finds that most people today are more likely to die in accidental nuclear winter than in a car crash. That is if nothing gets done about this. The logic for acting is illustrated sufficiently well by the Nineveh story, so that it is useful, even if we nowadays have to provide our own numbers and updated analyses of how to "do right by Reality". Scene 5 --- Under the plant =========================== *Jonah 4. Whichever way the city went.* JONAH sits on a hill east of the city, "to see what would become of it" (Jonah 4:5). | **JONAH:** *(settling in)* Best seat in the house. I can see the whole city from here. My own tele-vision. Someone holds a pot plant over his head for shade. | **JONAH:** Ah. Shade. *(he pats it)* Good plant. The only thing on this trip that has been kind to me. Some time passes. Jonah thinks nothing (ASON Racket!) is wrong. Then a sock puppet worm crawls up and eats the plant (Jonah 4:7). | **JONAH:** No. No, no, no. Not the plant. The CHORUS blows hot east wind at him. | **JONAH:** It would be better for me to die than to live. | **VOICE:** Is it right for you to be angry about the plant? | **JONAH:** Yes. Angry enough to die. **If the city was spared:** | **JONAH:** I knew it. I knew you would spare them. That is why I ran. You are gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and you relent from disaster. Now I look like a fool. | **CHORUS:** That is what a warning looks like when it works. | **JONAH:** It looks like nothing at all. | **CHORUS:** It looks like an ordinary Tuesday. | **JONAH:** Forty days, and nothing. By the law, a prophet whose word does not come true is a false prophet (Deuteronomy 18:22). Congratulations to me. | **CHORUS:** If they had not listened, you would have been right, and nobody would remember you. You would be Cassandra. They listened, so you are Jonah: the false prophet of the best kind: a false prophet in the Spirit of Boolean Truth. **If the city fell:** JONAH sits alone and looks at the grey sheet. He was right. Nobody is left to tell him so. He does not look satisfied. | **JONAH:** I was right. | **CHORUS:** *(from under the sheet, very quietly)* Nobody listened. | **JONAH:** That makes me Cassandra. How frustrating! **Either way**, the last lines are the last lines of the book (Jonah 4:10--11), spoken to the audience, and not answered: | **VOICE:** You cared about a plant you did not plant and did not grow. It came up in a night and died in a night. And should Reality not care about that great city, with more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left --- and even more cattle? *Silence. The book ends on this question. So does the play.* The mask of ASON lies on the floor with nobody in it. **Epilogue.** The cast stands up as themselves. One voice, plainly: | **WATCHMAN:** Nineveh was spared that time because it became gentle kind reasonable. A century and a half later it had forgotten how to be gentle kind reasonable, and it started to roll its dice of doom by short-term profiteering again. In 612 before our era the city fell; the book of Nahum is about that. The dice of doom have not stopped operating in this world. How fast are they rolling now? Go and check. .. container:: fineprint Say where to check: :doc:`/crisis/science`. Find a way to point out that today's dice are more likely to kill most people in accidental nuclear winter than in a car crash. **END.** *Take a bow, make a racket, eat something, and discuss the Nineveh of today.* .. container:: fineprint **A double bill with b12.** To play both plays in one evening, play this one first, and let the WATCHMAN end the epilogue with one more line: *"In October 1962, the die was in a steel fish."* After a short break we will start :doc:`Jonah-Play-b12 `. Between them the two plays hold both dice: the one that keeps finding the reluctant messenger, and the one that is rolling the city towards its end. **The smallest version.** If twenty minutes is too much, cut it to 2-5 minutes, with one verse and one die. Someone reads Jonah 3:4, *"Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown."* Someone else asks: *"Overthrown, or turned over?"* Somebody rolls a die, and everybody watches it. That counts, and it gets a link too if you post pictures of your play. **After the performance.** Tag it **#JonahPlay** and **#AuditTheMath**, and tell the :doc:`Jonah Carnival ` where it happened and what went wrong. If you rewrote the script, send the rewrite: it may become **b13**. .. include:: /_templates/include-file/footer/jonah-carnival-joli.rst