John Monteleone

REVIEW - Nov. 7, 2023
“PRISONERS IN PARADISE has rich character dynamics and great use of humor and subtext. The tension is never derailed, and the character arcs are interesting and profound, especially for a piece with such great comedic balance.”
Catherine Randazzo
Associate Artist/Literary Manager
Florida Studio Theatre
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Professional reading in NYC at The Currican Theater.
Professional reading in NYC on Theater Row.
Professional reading in NYC at Theater 22.
Professional reading at Dowling College Performing Arts Center with professional Actors.
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4 Characters
3 Men. 1 Woman
Simple Set
116 pages

Abandoned by those they entrusted to raise and guide them, abused by those they loved, ignored by their leaders, and living in a fragmented, disparate culture run by madmen, this tormented family seeks justice, truth and unity.

Punk, a burnt out, intelligent, one-time family man, now divorced, and Johnny, his brother via adoption, have had a very hard life. Johnny’s parents adopted Punk as a baby. The two kidnap a Billionaire Governor’s son, Chris, who is a Harvard Graduate and a Priest, in an attempt to start a new life with the ransom money they think they will obtain. The only problem with Punk and Johnny’s kidnapping scheme is that the Governor won’t answer his phone!

Eve, Punks one-time lover and Johnny’s cousin, is a porn actress and drug addict who is now pregnant, and is seeking the American Dream. She returns home from a porn shoot and into this world of a kidnapping, to find her drugs for her daily fix, and to cope with her existence. She dreams of a home with Punk, who she loves, for her and her new baby, and Johnny living with them as part of her extended family.

What Johnny and Eve don’t know in Act One, is that Punk’s hidden motives for the kidnapping have nothing to do with money or escaping poverty, helping Eve off drugs, getting clean, and setting them up in a new life.

Punk needs to confront the Governor, who is his real father, who had his mother killed when Punk was an infant, leaving him to die in his own defecation. His mother wanted the Governor to help them survive financially, and instead, he had her killed to cover up his affair with her, protect his career, ensure re-election, and maintain his marriage.

Punk wants to reveal to Chris that he knows what happened, who he is, and pursue justice. He also wants Chris to own up to the fact that he did not turn his father in when he knew of the murder, and benefited from his father’s wealth while being a priest.

The play becomes not about kidnapping as a crime, but a kidnapping necessary to right a crime committed. But the real crime is how all of these characters have been abandoned, abused and ruined by those they depended on for guidance, love and support.

Prisoners in Paradise offers a comic motif in a dire and existential situation, with four interesting and dimensional characters, where each must deal with their existential reality, and their abusive pasts while trying to find balance and unity for their future together. The play examines social and personal responsibility to self and others, and the results of neglect, abandonment and abuse.

10 Page Writing Sample offered below.
You can download the full script off my site easily. Or email me and I'll send the PDF.
Also have many other plays on my new website, with reviews, short and longer synopsis, photos etc.

Full-Length Stage Play
2 Characters
1 Man. 1 Woman
Simple Set
143 pages

Peter and Belinda have been married for many years, their children are grown, and they are left together with a very high, large Pile of Baggage in the middle of their Living room.  A huge overbearing pile of memories that define their past together, while feeling trapped in a long relationship they believe is over, but cannot seem to escape from.  

Their trappings are motivated by their memories of a life which has defined their identities, and influenced profoundly complex contradictions within them individually and in their relationship together.  

Outside is a madhouse - everyone is fighting in the streets, in offices, in homes, innocent children have grown into thugs, lost souls, and violent hoodlums, and whenever either of them leaves they come back beat up, clothes torn off, arms and faces scratched, hair a mess sticking up, as if they fought for their lives to buy a loaf of bread.  While in their home, another battleground exists in the pursuit of breaking free from the order they have strived for to survive but that has made them feel trapped and helpless to change within the lager paradigm creating all of this existential chaos.

We witness the raw explorations of themselves and their relationship from highly comic and neurotic interactions, fears, misunderstandings, analytical confusions, sexual regrets and betrayals, and more, as their pasts collide with their present, and their future is nothing less than terrifying. Something far deeper exists as we witness evolving realizations and mysterious discoveries of the human heart, as they continually try to break open shallow concepts of contemporary relating, defined by labels and clichés that have been accepted, and that have entrapped them.

The Dove is a fragile, poetic image throughout the play, that exists in a poem Peter wrote for Belinda when they were young, that lead to them falling deeply in love.  A time in their past when they possessed innocence and openness, now juxtaposed against the exhaustion of a life of striving, disappointments, contending with brutal nature and mechanistic culture they exist within. 

3 Characters
2 Men
1 Woman
Woman can be a man or woman, but the Femme Fatale is actually a man, dressed as a woman. A great acting role for a very talented chameleon-capable actor.
Simple set
87 pages

Noir Comic-Tragic Existential Satire.
Based on a Twisted version of the Myth of Osiris.

When the heads out of whack, so is the body!

HEAD explores the dangerous masks we hold dearly; the delusions we create to find safety and identity, to survive in a madhouse of murderers, criminals, and ordinary people who lie through their teeth within our imbalanced cultural landscape.

Two 1940’s-type cops, in trench coats and Dick-Tracy hats, investigate a gruesome street murder, where the body has been chopped into 13 pieces, and planted throughout the city. They are found, except one part is missing – his head. They try to figure out where the head could be, but there are no clues. Enter a Femme Fatale, SEXFARCE, who seems to be a witness to the murder, but she diverts from their questions sucking them into her mysterious relationship to the victim, who has been ID’d by his prints as a Billionaire Famous Politician and Psychopath that has ruined countless lives for self-gain.

The characters explore the battleground between existential truth versus manufactured deceptions, order and disorder, the struggle for balance in an imbalanced culture, one at war with itself and dismembered then divided. The two cops realize that when the heads out of whack, so is the body. As their desperation to find the head grows, we realize they are searching for unity – completion, wholeness, and most of all a deeper understanding of their own often confusing sense of humanity in the quest for inner peace while living in a world filled with danger.

They find the head, hidden under a seat in the audience; it is a grotesque clown-like terrifying mess representing the mindset of our world, via the manifestations of our personal delusions, the state of the human condition, the corruption of the mind, and thus the heart – chaotic, terrified, grotesque, frightened, and spiritually bankrupt.

The division within the culture, within the self, within the world, needs to be whole and the hope is that once the crime is solved, we will find wholeness, harmony and peace.

But it’s not that simple.

How the victim was killed, who killed him, is both eye-opening, surprising, with mind-spinning revelations and spectacle that is both hilarious, frightening, revealing the struggles within the self and its relationship to the lager world, to ethical law, moral law, and the understanding we need to live TOGETHER, that our connections cannot be decapitated from the heart and soul of one another through greed, ignorance, and stupidity!

The revelations are terrifying, with a twist of hope somewhere in the mix of madness we call our world.

6 Characters
4 Men. 2 Women
Simple or Complex Set
Projection Screen Required
157 Pages

Two business men, Headhunter and Skinner, have a grip on acquiring ownership of earth stock, use it as a down payment on the galaxy, to win a deal with a visiting reptilian extraterrestrial, to pursue ownership of the universe, for the ultimate payoff of owning Godszillion and the Void.

Once those victimized are pushed too hard against the wall of indifference, taking too much from them, and resistance towards change grows, something breaks.

In Game, it all breaks.

It breaks beneath the feet of malignant greed, leaving them in the belly of the beast; a past of primordial slime, reptilian consciousness, brutality to survive, indifference, heartlessness, and horrific destruction.

Game, is a hard-hitting and funny sci-fi tragic-comedy adventure with lacerating, violent, rhythmic dialogue of winning, owning, killing and survival, juxtaposed against the poetry of wisdom, gentleness, and the inherent beauty of compassion and love. The play explores relentless, insatiable greed in the Contemporary Corporatocracy by two demented human Oligarchs, who are willing to do anything for power and wealth and its ultimate results on the world they control, and ultimately their own fates.

Until it all turns on them.

4 Characters
2 Men. 2 Women
Simple Set
Length: 92 pages

“THE LAMP” had professional staged readings at the 42nd Street Workshop and The Harold Clurman Theater on Theater Row in New York City.

A couple, Dudley and Fiona, were once hippies, seeking peace, love and freedom. But over 20 years, they slowly gave that up for material wealth. Now living in The Hamptons, they are trapped in the throes of that materialism and facing foreclosure. As their lives and possessions are confiscated, material item by material item, the primality of the outside world moves in, and the primitive influences beneath the surface of our civilization surfaces.

Today, Mr. Carnaro, the banker is coming to confiscate all of their belongings and evict them from their opulent home in the Hamptons, NY.

Bonnie-Boo, their daughter, returns home from college, a drug addict, confused and in chaos, wearing a ton of body piercings and tattoos, and is anything but the innocent child they seem to think she is. She’s lost and has no direction.

Mr. Carnaro was a once Idealistic Archaeological PhD student, who wears a little nose ring he bought from an primitive tribe on a Archaeological dig a long time ago, and gave up on knowledge for money. Carnaro is now a clean-cut, smooth-talking, hawkish banker who has come to confiscate all of their “things”, including their child, attempting to enlist her into his world of money to carry on the slaughter.

One item that Carnaro finds is a small old lamp. It has a shade on it with a texture unlike anything Mr. Carnaro has ever felt before – “soft as a baby’s skin”. Dudley tells him it’s an antique he picked up in a little German shop from World War II when his company hit the big time in the Fortune Five Hundred. Carnaro leaves the lamp for last to take home with him, glowing softly and sitting on a table up stage center throughout the remainder of the play.

Their social protections are confiscated. Fiona leaves for a walk while Dudley fears for her life as they no longer have gardeners to control the wilderness outside. Fiona is thrust in through a window badly beaten – something attacked her. Bonnie Boo is influenced by Carnaro’s education, and slowly transforms herself by using mud, tree leaves and branches, turning into primitive and bestial human. She is thrust into an uncontrolled ritual dance, stripped of her identity, trying to fight it but cannot. Dudley has become a threat to Carnaro’s future for Bonnie Boo, so Carnaro forces her to beat her Father unconscious with a large tree branch as she evolves into Carnaro’s partner, hungry for money and disconnected from her actions.

THE LAMP, is a comic and surreal examination of de-evolution from the mask of wealth and civility we like to believe we exist within, and delves into the primitive influences that permeates and fuels our mask of civilization – as well as the choices we must make to survive within it. Instead of cherishing and evolving human depth and intelligence, we participate in destruction of self, culture, nature and world, destroying priceless human life while worshiping the soft beauty of a material item and profit – even if a baby was murdered, and skinned alive, to obtain it.

9 Characters
6 Men. 3 Woman
Simple or Complex Set

Full Production by The Actors Workshop of LI, at Dowling College Performing Arts Center.

Farmland, is a surreal journey of a farm family dating back to the beginning, who have lost their farm to unpaid loans for equipment they bought to attempt to survive, and are now being evicted. The bankers and developers are in cahoots to force them off their land, unbeknownst to the family – who believed they wanted to help them prosper.

Freddy was going to be a Fighter and win the match of his life, so Sueanne (his new actress wife) and he could have a life of luxury and save the family from the sharks. But he lost the fight, as the odds were too high against him – it was him, against America and it knocked him out cold. His monologue about this is in the Excerpts below.

The play opens on the day the Banker, the IRS (a robot) and the Sheriff are coming to evict them. The clash of two worlds, takes us on a journey through the familial and cultural psyche as it loses a connection to its roots, each other, themselves and their identity, emerging with a new identity that fits into a disparate, fragmented, shattered culture.

20+ Characters – some actors can play multiples.
106 pages .
Foley sound effects (mic on the side of the stage, instruments, sound devices, etc.)
A few groupies and dancers.
Simple or complex set depending on budget – simple or complex platforms
Colorful Lighting is needed for color projections.
Large wall for projections of film clips, art, etc.

MOMMY, DADDY, SISSY, ROCK, MOTORHEAD, BEGGAR OR BAG LADY, NICE GIRL, (ALSO THE PROSTITUTE), YOUNG MAN, REVEREND MONEY, CASH, PAN, PIMP, COCHISE, COCHISE’S GRANDSON (REAL ESTATE BROKER), COLUMBUS, THE PRESIDENT, A POLICEMAN, A BOY, A GIRL, 3 OR MORE GROUPIES, 1 MALE AND 1 FEMALE DANCER.

THE LOONY-BIN is a kaleidoscope collage play spanning American History, exploring the contemporary human condition in an improvisational, story-theater open format. It utilizes rhythmic, rock and roll, poetry, prose and dialogue and is a more 2-dimensional, Brechtian style presentation, rather than a realistic exploration of psychological motivations. It’s visuals are where the power lives, and, the improvisational tone and staging, captivating and often humorous.

Juxtapositions onstage between the action, tableaus (posed paintings of each era stopped for moments) against real projections of contemporary human tragedy, history, and crime, is juxtaposed against the 2-dimensional satirical motif of over 20 characters – all seeking to escape or control the insanity American Genocide, Slavery and Abuse has created in contemporary life. What are our values? As the play progresses, both the stage tableau’s of the characters and the back wall projections create their own artistic expressions, like 3-dimensional, moving paintings, within the overall theme of the play.

A Foley stage makes sound effects as actors mime them onstage, while a few musicians reflect mood, or work with Rock, as he goes through his rebellious phase playing electric guitar. A fragmented platform set allows for the many worlds this play explores, colliding, reflecting, crashing into one another like living in a demented city while maintaining its unified whole.

The play follows Rock, Sissy, Mommy and Daddy, from Rock and Sissy’s teen years into old age. Their Transformations mirror the transformation of America – from violence, into chaos, from rebellion into complacency, as the system of Fascist Oppression in a Plutocracy run by Maniacal Oligarchs, Propagandize the Mass Audience into believing we are a free, great, open minded, fair, caring and compassionate “great” society while using them as working slaves. What really has changed?

The audience is spoken to directly, almost like a confession by various characters, or become the witness of the action like any normal audience with a 4th wall, existing in various points in the play.

Are we succeeding to transcend our heritage? Is a protest enough to pretend we’re evolving. The noise of the media, outcries of the abused, create national drama – but the actual inability to move forward, is crippled. Are these the seeds of change, or are we really just stuck within the same historical framework, with the only thing changing is the wall paper or pain job?

This collection offers all 9 of John's One-Act Plays. 

Many have been produced with both College-Level Students and Professionals in NYC.  As a Professor and Artist-in-Residence at a College for 15 years, John wrote and then worked many of the plays in this collection with his students, and saw the power they had on their development as young artists. He also workshopped and produce several of them as full productions and staged readings in New York City, on Theater Row, The William Redfield Theater and others. The plays are innovative and challenging in style, genre, character, as well as teaching students about the possibilities of playwriting, acting, directing, and theater in general. Of course they are perfect for professionals too for many of the same reasons. 

Check out the PRODUCTIONS section where many of the One Acts Plays in this collection have photos of student and professional productions. 

PRODUCTIONS that have been done from plays in this collection:

THE BOX 
Professionally Produced in NYC at The William Redfield Theater

HOMESICK
Professionally Produced in NYC at The William Redfield Theater

HE AND SHE
Professionally Produced in NYC at Theater 22.
Professionally Produced at Dowling College
Student Production - Dowling College
Student Production - Aquinas College

DROWNING STALLION
Student Production - Malaysia University

TOMORROW
Student Production - Dowling College

CHARADE
Student Production - Dowling College

5 Characters
4 Men. 1 Woman (can be a stagehand, no lines)
Simple Set
47 pages

Produced at The William Redfield Theatre, NYC (Professional Production.)
Produced at Dowling College Performing Arts Center (Student Production.)

Four-character play exposing the demands of the business world transforming innocence into corruption.

Rooster runs his coop, a place where they sell anything to anyone.

Boy, is a recent college graduate that wants anything but to be working for this creep, who was just like the boy once.

Web, is a hot-shot salesman who is hiding in the closet because he died humanly and feels safe with limitations surrounding him. His death was due to the numerous boxes he lives in, psychologically, emotionally and humanly.

Song, is an out of work singer-songwriter who now homeless, enters seeking money to get off the street.

Through this surreal comedy, Rooster trains Boy and Song to learn what it means to survive today in the business world, and culminates in Boy taking over the coop so Rooster can retire, while Song takes on the role of the Boy at the end of the play. Until an innocent young woman enters who wants to become part of the business world.

Boy’s transition into corruption from innocence, happens as Rooster trains him, and colors his face green as his is, dressing him in the same clothing he wears, until Boy is more ruthless and cut-throat than Rooster – which pleases Rooster.

4 Characters
2 Men. 2 Women
Simple Set
50 pages

Four characters explore the search for individuality amidst a family who embraces the social masks and unquestioned morality that validates their imprisonment, while systematically destroying them.

2 Characters
1 Man. 1 Woman
Simple Set
47 pages

This play explores the struggle for individuality while maintaining a relationship. The characters evolve through specific physicalizations revealing deeply emotional and psychological transitions of self and their relationship.

5 Characters
1 Woman. 4 men, although the stage manager could be a woman.
Simple Set
43 pages

Performed at the Dowling College Performing Arts Center as a student production.

The Director/Writer of this play is creating the play as the audience watches. What enfolds is the creation that seems to be originating in his head. But the characters often do not like how they’re being written and rebel, or think they’re rebelling, when that is actually what is being written. The characters attempt to define themselves, as the Director/Writer writes, but are not writing their lines – he is.

Or is he?

As the Director creates his play the characters go further into their thoughts, feelings, philosophies of life, art, theater and who they are as independent beings, called characters – until the Director/Writer has writer’s block.

His creations feel trapped in their lines that seem to be in a play within a play, where no one seems to know who is really writing it – are they writing it or is the writer writing it? The Stage Manager in the audience, in the dark, gives them their lines when they go off script. But the Characters don’t often like the lines being given to them, yet have no choice but to say them.

Even though the confusion is what is actually written in the script.

Were they written by the Writer/Director, or the Characters in his head, that speak as he listens and writes what they say on the page, or, maybe something else is going on – something else is actually creating the characters in his head, that he listens to and writes down, but takes credit for.

Except when the characters dislike what he’s writing. Or he dislikes what he’s writing.

Charade was an experiment in Meta-theater although I was going beyond that.

Being a writer, actor and director I became keenly aware of the fine line between what humanity is, and what character is. We study the creation of character, in acting – but that soon becomes clearly limited to what we’re really trying to understand.

The human being’s inner experience is or “can be” vast, connected to all that is – in some ethereal if not intellectual way.

Character is limiting down from that vast potentiality – labeling characteristics, past experiences and education that to become “the characters” they are – defining specific ways of thinking, responding, acting, hiding, lying etc. All limitations of limitations rather than possibilities of possibilities.

Within that conflict, when writing a play, one becomes aware of the characters seeming to know what to say and do beyond the writer’s control – be it parts of the writer’s subconscious, or, working through conscious conflicts and ideas, the characters and the writer are doing a dance. Or perhaps we are just channeling something from something somewhere.

As the Director attempts to shape the play about a play, being written by him, or perhaps the characters in his mind in the play, or, someone else – the actual playwright – ME who wrote all of them. But am I the creator because I have written the play, or just a conduit for something beyond myself.

These tiers and textures, levels and dimensions, permeate and create The Charade of our existence, as we grapple to better understand who or what is really in control, what we can potentially experience if we’re open to possibility, and how we hide from that by boxing in our characterizations – and tell one another who we are.

Charade, is fun, and thought provoking, and can use physicalized theatrical staging withing the fluent dialogue that dances between the Writer/Director and his creations.

3 Characters
2 Men. 1 Woman
Simple Set
18 pages

A study in loneliness and the slow deterioration of one’s passion. In the middle of a dark night, an old man confronts the ghosts of his dead wife and son, his sins against them, his own guilt, his fear of death, and his passion that is dying. We learn that the 2 characters involved in the play are really both dead, and are the ghosts that torment him on the last days of his life.

The language in this play is both stark and poetic, as the old man confronts his inner fears, demons, and aloneness . A projection of a white stallion, representing his life and passion, slowly galloping under the ocean waves, and disappearing, represents the dying of passion, and the ending of a life.

2 Men
Simple Set
52 pages

Two characters, a cop and a killer, deal with the loss of love and personal imprisonment on the eve of the killer’s execution. A hardened cop, Joe Eagle, and a convicted Killer, Joe Snake, a one-time drug-addict and petty criminal, face off on the night prior to Joe Snake’s execution.

The play is set in hard cement, a dark room, with large bars everywhere. It’s the belly of the male beast and explores MALE IMPRISONMENT, the Macho Psyche, and the barriers that hold that construct against the brutal pursuit of vulnerability.

Snake, killed the Cop’s daughter 6 years ago, because they were making love in a beautiful park, and he could not accept her beauty and love holding nothing but self-hatred within. As she pulled away, he grabbed her to give her his love, and broke her neck accidentally. But over a decade in jail, Snake introspects and becomes a deeply spiritual, whole and intellectual human being, while Eagle, due to the loss of his beautiful child, becomes hardened with hatred, vengeance, and retaliation.

The conditions of Snake’s life, prior to the murder, mirror the conditions of Joe Eagle, after the loss of his daughter. The pain created hardened their hearts, created a deep, terrifying desperation to overcome it, but were both limited by their hatred and male conditioning in our culture which demands one be strong, suppress vulnerability, and protect.

He’s brought Snake there to kill him with his bare hands, to purge the pain of his lost daughter from within through retaliation.

But what happens is a breaking of barriers we don’t expect, as the two men face off with their full humanity, and nothing to lose, in this hardened jungle of persecution, judgement and transcendence.

What happens when love is taken away – what’s left?

The barriers of our consciousness reflect hardened hatreds from years of genetic and social threat, murder, and fear. The male psyche, this machismo-mentality we’re taught to believe in, creates walls of indifference in both thinking, and feeling – shutting out, rather than opening up to any truth that does not condone the limited perspectives they’ve accepted.

Breaking down the barriers, is the center of all growth; the most difficult barriers to lift are those within ourselves.

How difficult is it to break free of your own identity, when your inner world is filled with these limitations?

As Snake says – “Please rephrase the violence.”

3 Characters
1 man. 2 Woman (1 of these women can be a man instead)
Simple Set
18 pages

Produced at Dowling College with student actors.

This “Jack and Jill” couple seeking the idyllic life, regret the moments they share together as they live them.

The language is based on the Jack and Jill English nursery rhyme but with contemporary American language.

As an old woman, (perhaps one of them one day) experiences her last DAY on earth, sitting upstage in a vertical box, also regretting her life, as the two main characters, Jack and Jill, sit at their desks never moving from them, stage left and right.

Throughout the play, they put on age make-up and age from their 20’s to old age before our eyes, juxtaposed against their dialogue of regret.

The brevity of the play, about 20 minutes, reflects the swiftness of our existence and the uselessness of regret as we witness a lifetime perish before us like a wisp of smoke, dissipating in thin air.

3 Characters
1 Man. 1 Woman. The child, or 3rd character, can be male or female
Simple Set
42 Pages

Produced at Dowling College with my adult acting students who I considered to be professional actors.

The play takes place in the mind of the child, now an adult, remembering the last days of his parents lives. The child remembers, and as he does, the parents come to life in chilling, sharp images that penetrate what it means to grow old, the interpersonal relationships we have to our parents, and the common human thread we share together.

Images, like a movie of one’s life shot in quick, transformational snapshots, reflect their parent/child/spouse relationships, the mystery and swiftness of life, and the ephemeral connections they shared together as the child struggles to come to terms with their deaths. Each moment, despite how long it lasted, is but a snapshot of time in the scheme of things and our lives. As if we’re caught in a swift, indifferent river of time. The Child attempts to find a center to these images, memories, joys and pains, as he / she too, grows old.

The last image sums up the experience; the child grasping for air, trying to hold onto the memories of them, like photographic snapshots that hold the memory and the experience, but not the flesh.

2 Characters
2 men or 2 women or 1 man and a woman
Simple Set
30 Pages

Two seemingly homeless men, Blab and Yak, are hobos with PhD’s who exist on the Mojave desert that is strewn with old junk.

Bored, they explore the “air”, and “ideas” that seem to exist within it, and the meaning of meaning, the meaning of existence, to pass the time. But they grow even more bored.

Finding junk laying about in the sand, they create a sculpture – a man, so they don’t feel as alone and productive. They contemplate creating a business to sell him, to overcome their boredom. As they contemplate the meaning of their lives, ponder and survive their human frailties and the absurdity of their universal and self-created condition. Their man-made sculpture of a robotic-type machine-man seems to overpower the landscape; their creation is bigger than they are, but completely useless to what they really need.

The man-made junk man, is a testament to the evolution of materialistic quests via the machine, masking the brutal indifference, the miracle and beauty of raw nature, and who we are as human beings within the conflict.