ACT ONE [SPOKEN WORD} PROLOGUE — JERUSALEM, THE LAST MORNING Darkness. A single warm light finds YOUNG MIRYAM — perhaps sixteen — in the temple courts. Gold light, a sense of height and holiness. Beside her, a YOUNGER SABA ELAN sits at a great harp, his hands moving. She is mid-song, wordless and lovely, a temple singer at the height of her gift, her father playing beneath her. For a moment we simply live in it: the world that is about to be lost. YOUNG MIRYAM. (breaking off, laughing) Again, Abba? The priests will say we practice too much. YOUNGER SABA ELAN. (not looking up from the strings) Let them say it. When you sing, the smoke goes up straighter. I've watched it. (he plays a flourish) Forty years I've played in this house. My father before me. One day it'll be your children singing while I'm too old to — A low rumble. The gold light flickers. He stops. Distant shouts. Something enormous breaks, far off, then closer. Red light begins to bleed across the stage. YOUNG MIRYAM. Abba — what is that? YOUNGER SABA ELAN. (rising slowly, his whole body changed) ...The walls. (grabbing her hand) Miryam. Whatever happens — whatever they do — you keep the songs. Do you hear me? They can take the city. They cannot take what you carry in here. (he presses her hand to her chest) Shadows of SOLDIERS climb the back wall. Smoke. He pulls her toward escape — too late. Hands seize them out of the dark. The great harp is knocked over. YOUNG MIRYAM screams for it as chains rattle, and the temple light dies. Out of the chaos, a single drumbeat. Another. A slow, heavy march. The COMPANY emerges — the EXILES — bound, trudging as one weary body across the stage. The drum is the rhythm of the march east.
