Proscenium Journal Issue Five Fall 2016

Proscenium

Issue Five º Fall 2016

Stoker

by C.S. Whitcomb

Burning Cities

by Simon Fill

Pulse

by Ken Jaworowski

An Interview with Sarah Ruhl

An Interview with Christopher Shinn

An Interview with Yussef El Guindi Fall 2015 Proscenium 1

Pericles Wet Ellen Margolis

TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue Five º 2016

The Plays 06 Interview with Sarah Ruhl

Editor-In-Chief Steven Rathje Managing Editor William Rathje

12 Stoker C.S. Whitcomb

57 Burning Cities Simon Fill

David Kinder

54 Interview with Christopher Shinn

Post-Show Discussion in Proscenium Live 2016

106 Interview with Yussef El Guindi

David Kinder

112 Pulse Ken Jaworowski Pericles Wet in Proscenium Live 2016

Prosceniumjournal.com Contact us at info@prosceniumjournal.com www.facebook.com/prosceniumjournal Follow us on Twitter @ProsceniumPlays Cover Photos by David Kinder 2 Proscenium Fall 2014 2015

Dear Reader,

Proscenium osceni

Welcome to the fifth issue of Proscenium Journal! In this issue you will find two exciting new plays chosen from another competitive round of hundreds of submissions, Burning Cities by Simon Fill and Pulse by Ken Jaworowski, in addition to C.S. Whitcomb’s new play Stoker, which left audiences spellbound at the second annual Proscenium Live Festival of New Works.

Additionally, as part of Proscenium’s continued initiative to interview exciting contemporary playwrights, you will find interviews with some of the most talented playwrights working today: Sarah Ruhl, Yussef El Guindi, and Christopher Shinn.

You will also find highlights from the second annual Proscenium Live Festival of New Works, which Proscenium produced in partnership with Portland Shakespeare Project and supported by a grant from the Donald A. Strauss foundation. We produced staged readings six new plays over the course of four evenings at Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland, OR, by playwrights Amy Freed, C.S. Whitcomb, Ellen Margolis, Simon Fill, and Wei He. We also produced the full version of Ellen Margolis’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Pericles, Pericles Wet, commissioned by Proscenium and Portland Shakespeare Project. Over 600 audience members attended this year’s festival, meaning that over 1000 people attended Proscenium Live over the past two years.

Thank you for reading Proscenium Journal and for supporting playwrights. We hope you enjoy this issue.

Sincerely, Steve Rathje Editor-in-Chief Proscenium Journal prosceniumjournal.com

Fall 2014 Proscenium 3

Boxing the Sun Aurin Squire

Proscenium

Live

This summer, Proscenium Journal and Portland Shakespeare Project hosted the second annual Proscenium Live Festival of New Works, supported by a generous grant awarded to Proscenium by the Donald A. Strauss Foundation. Bringing in about 600 audience members, Proscenium Live featured free staged readings of six new plays by playwrights Amy Freed, C.S. Whitcomb, Ellen Margolis, Simon Fill, and Wei He, including a commissioned adaptation of Shakespeare’s Pericles

by Ellen Margolis, “Pericles Wet.” Post-show discussions with the playwrights, directors, and actors were held after every performance.

4 Proscenium Spring 2015

Photos by David Kinder Spring 2015 Proscenium  5

My Birthday Party Wei He

6 Proscenium Fall 2015

A Conversation with Sarah Ruhl Your dialogue often reads like poetry, filled with poetic line breaks and metaphors. How did you develop your unique writing style?

I started out as a poet, became a playwright, and kept going. I think playwriting contains all other genres, including poetry, the essay (or argument), story, song…And it’s one thing that draws me to the form again and again—the way it folds all the other genres in.

Your subject matter is bold, wild, and eclectic, blending fantasy and realism.

What draws you to the subjects you write about?

It’s a little mysterious. Sometimes an image, sometimes an idea, sometimes a feeling I can’t seem to excise.

While your plays explore heavy topics, they are also very comedic, with a whimsical sense of humor that explores the absurdity of life. What role does comedy play in your works?

I can’t separate comedy and tragedy. I think they are as mutually dependent as the muscle and the bone in terms of getting a leg or a play to move.

Your latest play, “Scenes From Court Life, or the Whipping Boy and His Prince,” will premiere on September 30th at Yale Repertory Theatre. Can you tell us about the process of writing this play?

It was a wonderfully insane process. It was based on the joint stock model that Caryl Churchill used for plays like Cloud Nine.

Mark Wing-Davey, the director, used that model with Caryl in England and now he uses it at NYU. He invites writers to write plays for specific ensembles, and the actors help do the research. In this case, I asked the group to research American political dynasties, sibling rivalry, and whipping boys.

Your plays explore several ideas from earlier times. You have said your plays are “pre-Freudian,” and they explore ideas like melancholia and the humours (“A Melancholy Play”), Victorian hysteria (“In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play)”), or Greek Mythology (“Eurydice”). What draws you to these themes?

I think looking back can help us frame our own historical moment, can help us see what is staring us in the face.

Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright Paula Vogel was your playwriting teacher when you attended Brown, and you have continued to have a relationship with Vogel long after your time at Brown.

How have teachers like Vogel influenced you?

Paula quite simply made me a playwright.

You are a teacher of playwriting and theatre and Yale. How has your teaching influenced your writing?

Teaching has made me, I hope, more for-

Fall 2015 Proscenium Photo Courtesy the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation7

An Interview with Sarah Ruhl

giving. I don’t know if that quality has made its way into my writing. I think teaching also makes one more objective in the sense that Chekhov speaks about. Chekhov said he began to write more objectively after he did his medical training. I think teaching is similar. I think the word objective can be misconstrued—what I mean is a quality of observation that is more sympathetic and less solipsistic.

What inspires you?

People who are both humble and brazen.

Kindness. Rain. My family.

What kind of theatre excites you?

Theater that surprises me. The most surprising play I’ve seen in the last couple of years was An Octoroon by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. Theater that moves me—like Julia Cho’s Aubergine, or Lisa Kron’s Fun Home. And Hamilton surprises me and moves me on a cellular level.

What advice do you have for playwrights starting out?

Read more, walk more, love more.

Would you like to share any projects you are working on now, besides “Scenes From Court Life, or the Whipping Boy and His Prince?”

I’m also working on a musical with Elvis Costello and a new play called How to Transcend a Happy Marriage.

8 Proscenium Fall 2016

Fall 2015 Proscenium  9

Stoker C.S. Whitcomb

Stoker by C.S. Whitcomb Author’s Note: I was born theatre crazy. I loved plays before I’d ever seen one. I was making plays with my cousins summers and Sundays and doing plays at school from third grade on.

I had seen Henry Irving’s statue in London and had heard about Ellen Terry for decades, but I didn’t realize that Bram Stoker was Irving’s assistant theatre manager until my friend, actor Don Stewart Burns told me about a year ago. My instant reaction was, “There’s a play there.” I write plays full time for the last ten years, so I know a good idea for a play doesn’t come along all that often. I am always grateful and excited when it happens.

C. S. Whitcomb has had thirty full-length scripts produced for primetime national television. She has been nominated for the Emmy, W.G.A., Humanitas, Oregon Book Award, Drammy and Edgar Allan Poe Awards. Her works include Buffalo Girls (miniseries, starring Anjelica Huston, nominated for 11 Emmys.) I Know My First Name is Stephen (for which she was Emmy nominated.) Mark Twain and Me starring Jason Robards (Emmy, Best Children’s Program.) Whitcomb has created roles for Martin Sheen, Ellen Burstyn, Kevin Spacey, Liev Schreiber, Linda Lavin, Sam Elliott, Brendan Fraser, and Gena Rowlands.

Her 16 plays include Lear’s Follies, The Seven Wonders of Ballyknock and Holidazed (the latter with Marc Acito.) Her website is cynthiawhitcomb.com 10 Proscenium Spring 2016

In April I emailed Michael Mendelson, the co-founder of Portland Shakespeare Project, some pictures of Irving, Terry and Stoker and told him I was planning to write a play about them. He said he was intrigued and would like to read the play when it was written.

Every April I take a group of 20 or so writers on a Trans-Atlantic cruise where I teach in the mornings, we write all afternoon, and then after dinner, we read aloud in the evenings. This past spring those 22 writers got to hear the play “Stoker” on the installment plan over those 3 weeks as I wrote it. The draft I brought home at the end of the trip was 82 pages. I expanded it to 100 pages over the next weeks and of course, sent it off to Michael Mendelson. In collaboration with Steve Rathje and Karen Rathje, they invited me to have the play read at the 2016 Proscenium Live New Play Festival in August.

Since I know local actors, I had written all

the roles with specific actors in mind. I heard their voices. Saw their performances in my imagination. Of the five roles, I got four of the actors I had hoped for. And four out of five of the actors were Equity. And all five were fantastic. Perfect.

Stoker is copyright © 2016 by C.S. Whitcomb. All inquiries regarding rights shall be sent to the info@prosceniumjournal.com and will be forwarded to the playwright or their agent. Performances of Stoker are subject to royalty, and are fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America and all countries covered by the International Copyright Union. All rights, including professional and amateur productions, staged readings, television, motion picture, radio, translations, photocopies, and all other reproductions of this play are strictly reserved.

I have had quite a few of my plays read for audiences, but this one was the strongest positive reaction I’ve had for a first read. People were engaged by the true story. I hope that many of them went home and Googled these people. It was an exhilarating night. I have made a few small changes, but this is almost entirely the same play that was read at Artists’ Repertory Theatre on August 18, 2016.

I had a play produced Off Broadway when I was young. It closed in one night and I was devastated by that. I went back to California and spent the next years writing television and raising children. In 2007 I switched back to writing plays full time.

Some of the skills from screenwriting translate to the stage. How to write a scene actors can dig into. How to write dialogue. Develop character and story, structure and subplots for example. But some things are completely different. A film shows a story unfolding. In a play, the challenge is keeping the secrets as long as possible before the underlying truths are revealed to the audience.

I taught myself how to write plays primarily by going to plays and reading plays. I started with one a day in 2007. I am not quite keeping up that pace now, but I am nearly to 1,500 plays. I recommend this method. It’s possible to learn to write good plays without fully understanding how that’s done. You can do it intuitively. I do. I hope you enjoy Stoker. I loved creating it.

Spring 2016 Proscenium 11

Stoker C.S. Whitcomb

Stoker

By C.S. Whitcomb CAST BRAM STOKER, 40s, Manager of the Lyceum Theatre and a writer ELLEN TERRY, 40s, most famous leading lady of the day HENRY IRVING, 50s, legendary actor/manager WALTER COLLINSON, 70s, Henry Irving’s long time dresser WALT WHITMAN, American Poet, 70s SETTING In and around the Lyceum Theatre, London 1890s Walt Whitman’s home in New England ACT ONE Scene One At Rise: Lights up on the theatrical offices of the Lyceum Theatre circa 1890s. A big Victorian jumble of desk, file cabinets, a full-length mirror with a heavy gilt frame. Bolts of luxurious fabric leaning in a corner. A life-sized statue of a Nubian boy holding a massive ostrich and peacock feather fan, waiting dusty for some long gone Cleopatra. A basket with a crimson velvet cushion for a small dog that seems to be sleeping there. A massive freestanding lamp chandelier.

An emperor’s throne. A large painting in the Pre-Raphaelite style of Henry Irving as Hamlet and Ellen Terry as Ophelia.

BRAM STOKER, 30s, rushes in and deposits an arm full of papers and miscellany on the desk.

And plops down on the leather desk chair, searching in the mess for an ink bottle and pen.

He begins to write quickly. After a few words ELLEN TERRY bursts in. She is about the same age as Bram, tall for a woman. Striking and in a breathless state. He barely looks up from his paper.

ELLEN: Is he...?

BRAM: Momentarily.

ELLEN: I thought I was late.

BRAM: You are, as always. He’s later. Or his train is anyway.

ELLEN: That’s a first. I wonder if the engineer realizes who he’s got onboard. (she fondles the dog in the basket) Hello, Fussie darling. Are you still alive? You good girl.

BRAM: If it runs much later the engineer will be handed his hat.

ELLEN: With his head still in it.

BRAM: If he’s lucky.

ELLEN: What are you doing here? Why aren’t you at the station?

12 Proscenium Fall 2016

The cast of Dracula’s Father in Proscenium Live 2016. Photo by David Kinder.

BRAM: He wired from Southampton a whole new guest list for the Beefsteaks Dinner. I have to get these out or no one will get them in time. Walter’s gone to meet him.

ELLEN: A new list? The old one was the best in London. The Prince of Wales, of course. Who else?

BRAM: Everyone. Over a hundred others. I don’t have time to read it to you now.

ELLEN: Any princesses? If there is at least one princess, I can come.

BRAM: Two. Sweden and Belgium.

ELLEN: Good! I want to sit by Oscar. He’s the funniest.

BRAM: Do you think you can manage sitting between Wilde and Shaw?

ELLEN: Jolly fun! I’ll have them at each other’s throats.

BRAM: Never mind. I’m putting you with the ladies.

ELLEN: No, you can’t. It isn’t done.

BRAM: The politicians then.

ELLEN: Worse! Why the sudden changes?

BRAM: Henry has been inspired apparently.

ELLEN: By what? Italy?

BRAM: God no. Venice.

ELLEN: Wonderful. The Merchant of. What now? Importing a few canals and installing them onstage?

BRAM: Probably. In the meantime, the food must be Italian complete with pastas and ices and Fall 2016 Proscenium 13

Stoker C.S. Whitcomb

ancient cheese made from god knows what kind of Roman beast. Goats maybe. It’s all in Italian. Francois nearly had a stroke when I gave him the menu.

WALTER, an elderly dresser from Cockney origins, rushes in out of breath.

WALTER: Where... (gasp, gasp) ...is he?

ELLEN: Walter!

BRAM: What are you doing here?

WALTER: What am I doing here? I live here!

BRAM: You’re supposed to meet his train.

WALTER: He wasn’t on the train. He must have taken a hansom cab.

ELLEN: Oh God, Henry’s going to kill someone.

BRAM: He’s on the next one! Go back! The six-fifteen from Southhampton!

WALTER: What?

ELLEN: I only hope it isn’t me.

BRAM: Go! Walter! Go! WALTER: (gasping) I’m too old for this.

Walter staggers out again.

Ellen starts poking among the papers.

ELLEN: Let me see the list.

BRAM: No! I need it for the invitations.

She takes a sheet of paper from his stack.

ELLEN: You keep working on page one. I’ll just look this over. Why do we call them the Beefsteak Dinners? We don’t always serve beef.

BRAM: The name precedes us by almost a hundred years. When we found the huge banquet hall under the stage gone to dust and decay we revived it. Had it cleaned up and well, decked out.

ELLEN: Gorgeously, by the way. Thanks to you. All those polished mahogany panels and chandeliers and paintings.

BRAM: We don’t do anything by halves, do we? The fireplace has a roasting spit that can hold a fatted calf. I guess thus its name.

Ellen starts reading the page in her hand. Bram dips his pen and scrawls quickly on heavy cream envelopes. Ellen grins at what she is reading. Then reads aloud in her lovely stage voice.

ELLEN: “...into a gold-buttoned waistcoat of snowy twill...”

BRAM’s head snaps up.

BRAM: What?

ELLEN: “Even in her fourteenth year Miss Stephen Norman gave promise of striking beauty.

BRAM: Give that here!

ELLEN: “The glorious mass of red hair, suited well with the voluptuous curves of the full crimson lips.”

BRAM: I’m not joking!

ELLEN: “The purple-black eyes, raven eyebrows and eyelashes and the fine curve of the nostrils spoke of Eastern blood of the far-back wife of the Crusader.”

14 Proscenium Fall 2016

BRAM: God! ELLEN: What is it?

BRAM: Nothing.

ELLEN: This nothing is in your handwriting, Mr. Stoker.

BRAM: The Lyceum doesn’t own me body and soul. I am allowed my own life.

ELLEN: Your own creative life.

BRAM: And why not?

ELLEN: I would have guessed poetry.

BRAM: I’m no poet.

ELLEN: Unlike your muse, Mr. Whitman.

BRAM: Yes, all right? I am not Walt Whitman.

ELLEN: So what is it? A story? A novella perhaps.

BRAM: I’m not telling you.

ELLEN: Oh Lord! It’s a novel. We have a novelist secreted among us.

BRAM: Can you leave it alone?

ELLEN: I don’t think so.

BRAM: Can it be something you tease me with in private? No one else has to know.

ELLEN: Hmm. I’m thinking. What can you do for me?

BRAM: What do you mean? I already do everything for you.

ELLEN: I guess that’s true. I’ll just save it up then, in case of emergency.

BRAM: Fine. But just between us.

ELLEN: Our little secret? We shall see.

BRAM: Thank you.

ELLEN: Do you have a nom de plume?

BRAM: No. ELLEN: No? HENRY IRVING, a renowned actor/manager, the most famous in England in fact, makes his entrance. He is tall, thin, rather severe looking, but extremely theatrical, wearing black traveling clothes and a stovepipe hat looking like someone who has escaped from a Dickensian novel.

HENRY: Bene! Buon giorno!

Ellen whirls to see him and flies into his arms kissing him on both cheeks.

ELLEN: Darling Henry! We’ve been waiting for hours! You look splendid. Utterly rejuvenated. Ten years younger, isn’t he Bram?

BRAM: At least.

Henry sees the dog in the basket and goes to it, bending over to embrace and cuddle the small creature.

HENRY: Fussie! Papa’s home. How’s my girl? Oh you naughty creature, look how fat you are! (looking up) What have you been feeding her?

ELLEN: Whatever she asks for.

BRAM: Sausages.

ELLEN: Sweeties.

HENRY: Ah well, Papa’s home now.

Fall 2016 Proscenium 15

Stoker C.S. Whitcomb

(to the dog) Did you miss me? Yes you did. Of course you did.

Walter staggers in carrying one suitcase and dragging a steamer trunk.

WALTER: He hallooed me from a hansom. I had to chase it down the avenue. Blasted horse wouldn’t stop.

Walter drops the bags and collapses on the trunk panting and wheezing terribly.

WALTER: (doing Henry) Halloooo there, Walter! What was I supposed to do?

HENRY: Where is the other trunk?

WALTER: I’m getting it.

HENRY: Hurry before the local scallywags run off with it.

WALTER: Run off? They’d need a crane and an elephant to lift the bloody thing.

Walter staggers off again. Henry surveys his domain, glad to be home.

HENRY: You got the list.

BRAM: Oh yes. Nearly done. And Francois has the menu.

HENRY: Wait until you see what I’ve brought from Venezia.

BRAM: A gondola?

HENRY: Don’t think I didn’t try. The damn things are thirty-seven feet long.

BRAM: And the stage is only eighty feet wide.

HENRY opens the large trunk and starts pulling out exotic fabric and a velvet jacket and cap, almost Turkish in style.

ELLEN: For me?

HENRY: Patience, my darling, Henry throws off his coat and puts on the velvet jacket, then the cap, and turns to them in full Shylock.

HENRY: “Where is my pound of flesh?” (looking at his coat) I had this made by Eastern Mediterranean Levantines.

BRAM: Levantines?

HENRY: Maybe it was Byzantines. Anyway isn’t it stunning? Very Constantinople.

ELLEN: Gorgeous.

HENRY: It will be a sensation. Everyone has always played Shylock as a savage beast of a villain. But I have seen the light. Shylock was no common thug. He was wealthy. Brilliant.

Educated and refined. A man of style and substance. My Shylock will be a revelation.

ELLEN: Marvelous, darling. Simply and utterly marvelous. And what have you brought me?

HENRY: The best in the whole world for my leading lady. Voila!

He hands her a box which she opens then gasps and almost drops it.

ELLEN: Beetles? You brought me a box of insects? Henry!

HENRY: I am having them made into a cape of green iridescent beetles’ wings from Egypt. As Cleopatra might have worn.

ELLEN: (holding the box at arm’s length) But I’m not playing Cleopatra, darling. Portia is more of a boyish student of law type, surely?

HENRY: Ah, possibly. You may be right.

ELLEN: A bit much.

16 Proscenium Fall 2016

BRAM: And how long will it take to sew all those beetles wings onto a cape? We open Merchant in a fortnight plus three.

HENRY: Ah, time time time.

ELLEN: Maybe I could wear it for Lady M. HENRY: You’re a genius.

ELLEN: As are you, my Shylock.

HENRY: And the scenery and lighting will all be new and Venezian. The light there. It is other worldly. All shimmering reflected light from the water in a sort of pinkish gold that makes everything and everyone beautiful. Celestial.

A loud THUD from offstage.

WALTER (O.S.): I’m all right. No worries. Just need a little something.

The butt end of another trunk slowly pushes a few inches through the door and then it stops.

Sound of another thud as Walter collapses behind it.

HENRY: Walter?

WALTER: I’m all right.

HENRY: Bram? Have you a little something for Walter? To revive him.

BRAM finds a bottle of brandy, pours a glass and holds it over the trunk in the doorway.

Walter’s hand appears from the floor behind the trunk and takes the drink, disappearing from sight.

WALTER (O.S.): Much obliged, I’m sure.

HENRY: We’re going to need ten at least. Or twelve.

BRAM: Ten or twelve what?

HENRY: Pieces.

BRAM: Of? HENRY: Orchestra.

BRAM: For the Merchant?

HENRY: For the Beefsteaks.

BRAM: I’ve already hired the usual string quartet.

HENRY: So you’ll need six more. Or eight.

BRAM: Are you serious? The costs are already mad what with the extended guest list and the prosecco, which is what exactly?

HENRY: It’s sort of an Italian champagne. Delicious.

BRAM: And it costs as much as French?

HENRY: Maybe a bit more.

BRAM: Henry...

HENRY: Devil the cost. This Merchant is going to make my star ascend unto the apex of the heavens. They will still be talking about it in a hundred years’ time. And it will do the same for Ellen. She will be more brilliant than any Portia ever played.

ELLEN: Thank you, darling. I recognize my cue when I hear it. Good night, sweet princes.

Ellen blows them kisses and with an extra kiss tossed toward Fussie’s basket, she makes her exit.

BRAM: You don’t need a ten-piece orchestra for that.

HENRY: Of course not. The orchestra is for Caruso.

Fall 2016 Proscenium 17

Stoker C.S. Whitcomb

BRAM: You’re bringing in Enrico Caruso? From Milano?

HENRY: He’s in London. I met him on the boat back. Oh and we’ll need an invitation sent over to him immediately.

BRAM: Where is he staying?

HENRY: I don’t know. Have a boy run round to the opera house in Covent Garden.

BRAM: And does he want to perform at a dinner party? These opera singers can be difficult.

HENRY: Do I have to do your entire job for you? As soon as he hears the orchestra he will sing.

He can’t help himself. We practically heard the whole of Pagliacci on board the ship.

BRAM: And they had a ten piece orchestra? In the dining room?

Henry takes off the Shylock coat and drapes it over the trunk.

HENRY: Of course.

BRAM: We’re not paying Caruso, are we? Except with a first class supper?

HENRY: We dine! We do not sup.

BRAM: Of course we do. And Enrico?

HENRY: We’re paying him with a six-course dinner. And our presence.

BRAM: If by some catastrophic mishap we can’t get him? Can I resort to the quartet?

HENRY: Get him. This is the Merchant of Venice. We must have Caruso. Tell the orchestra to brush up on Santa Lucia and O Sole Mio. BRAM: Right.

HENRY: I have the vision. You make it happen. Walter? Are you still among the living?

WALTER(O.S.) I’m all right, guvnor.

HENRY: Good. Time to unpack. (to Bram) Oh and I want a gondola made in time for dress.

BRAM: I thought you decided against it.

HENRY: Against bringing one back. Not against having one. It can be a small one. Ten or twelve feet.

BRAM: To float on?

HENRY: Wheels, dear boy. It will float on wheels.

BRAM: Thank god for that anyway.

Henry picks up the little dog and carries it out.

HENRY: (to the dog) Come with Papa, little Fussie. (as he exits) The quality of mercy is not strained. Not strained? Strained. Glad I don’t have to sell that.

And Henry is gone.

BRAM: You say, “Jump.” I say, “Off which cliff?”

BLACKOUT. SCENE TWO Lights come up on Ellen Terry wearing her coat, hat and carrying a handbag. She speaks to the audience as if she is in a book shop.

ELLEN: I would like a novel by Bram Stoker, please. I don’t know the title. (slight pause, grin) 18 Proscenium Fall 2016

Ah, good. I will take them both.

LIGHTS OUT. SCENE THREE

The Lyceum Office again.

Bram writes a letter intently and with feeling. He speaks the words as he writes them.

BRAM: My dear Mr. Whitman, I hope you will not consider this letter from an utter stranger a liberty. Indeed, I hardly feel a stranger to you. A friend told me that you like new acquaintances or I should rather say friends.

Four years ago I wrote out the enclosed draft of a letter which I intended to send to you. It has lain in my desk since then. It is as truly what I wanted to say as that light is light.

The four years which have elapsed have made me love your work fourfold. You know what hostile criticism your work sometimes evokes here, so I wage a perpetual war on your behalf. I am glad to say I have made your work known to many who were scoffers at first. No one can deny the greatness of “Leaves of Grass.” And my own favorite, “I Sing the Body Electric.”

As Bram continues to write, WALT WHITMAN appears in an isolated spot downstage. He recites a section of his own poem that Bram refers to. Whitman’s white hair and whiskers are wild around his electrified eyes. He speaks to the audience as if he is orating to an auditorium in his famed New England accent.

WHITMAN: “The expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face, It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists, It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress does not hide him, The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth, To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more, You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder...

As the light fades on Whitman and he moves back offstage and out of sight, Bram continues his letter once again.

BRAM: The years which have passed have not been uneventful to me, and I have felt and thought and suffered much in them, but from your work I have had much pleasure and consolation. Your open, earnest speech has not been thrown away on me. It has deeply impressed my life. I write this openly because I feel that with you one must be open. (re-dips his pen in the ink bottle) I hope that we may sometime meet and I shall be able to say what I cannot write. I am sorry that you are not strong. Many of us are hoping to see you over here. If you like getting letters, I shall be happy to send you news of how thought goes among men in London. With truest wishes for your health and happiness, Your friend, Bram Stoker.

As Bram finishes his letter, Walter comes in worrying. Bram finds a large brown envelope with Henry’s name on it and holds it out to Walter.

BRAM: Oh good, Walter. Can you take this play script to Mr. Irving at his house?

WALTER: I can’t do that, Mr. Stoker, sir.

BRAM: And why not? You’ve done it a hundred times before. Is something wrong with your Fall 2016 Proscenium 19

Stoker C.S. Whitcomb

feet?

WALTER: No, sir. Not the feet.

BRAM: And so?

WALTER: The problem is with Mr. Irving’s house.

BRAM: What do you mean? Has something happened to his house?

WALTER: Not per se. No. Not to the house itself.

BRAM: Then? What’s the stumbling block?

WALTER: It’s Mr. Irving. He ain’t at his house no more.

BRAM: What nonsense are you babbling about? How can Mr. Irving not be at his house “no more?”

WALTER: On account of he don’t live there no more. I fetched his clothes from there weeks ago.

BRAM: Just tell me. What happened?

WALTER: It ain’t my story to tell.

BRAM: At once, or you’ll be out of here in spite of your decades of service.

WALTER: You can’t discharge me as I don’t work for you. I am Mr. Irving’s personal man and have been since before you were born probably.

BRAM: I take care of Mr. Irving’s theatre, his house, finances, family, mortgage, bills, taxes, coachmen, cooks, servants and grocers. His stagehands, costumes, wigs, greasepaint, props, lights and scenery. Without me, he wouldn’t have a brass ha’penny to pay you with.

WALTER: It wouldn’t matter if he never paid me. I’d still be his man.

BRAM: Loyalty is to be commended, Walter, but I need to know what the problem is or I can’t possibly fix it.

WALTER: You can’t possibly fix this one.

BRAM: Why not? What the hell is it?

WALTER: (lowers his voice) It’s her.

BRAM: Which “her”?

WALTER: (still whispering) The missus.

BRAM: I’m sorry, Walter. I never knew you were married.

Walter bursts out with a braying laugh.

WALTER: Lord luv ya, of course I ain’t married. How could I be married and me never home one night in the year?

BRAM: So the Missus is...

WALTER: Mrs. Irving. Yes sir. She is a...I hate to admit it, but I’m not sure what the word is for her.

BRAM: Harridan? Harpy? Shrew?

WALTER: Of that ilk, yessir.

BRAM: Are you telling me that Henry left Florence?

WALTER: You could call it that.

BRAM: Did something happen?

WALTER: It was the first night of Pickwick. Mr. Irving’s Jingle was the toast of the town. Everyone loved it. I should say almost everyone. Then they went to the dinner party in their honor. Well you were there. She said something.

20 Proscenium Fall 2016

From left, Michael Mendelson and Amanda Soden Dracula’s Father in Proscenium Live 2016.

Photo by David Kinder.

BRAM: Oh. Yes. WALTER: Do you remember her exact words?

Bram does, but it is painful to repeat them.

BRAM: She said she feared that her husband might be boring the company.

WALTER: Boring? Mr. Irving boring? She’s mad. Has to be. He’s not the Prime Minister!

Boring. Bloody woman.

BRAM: Yes. And then?

WALTER: Then in the carriage on the way home, I was up top, but they don’t have little voices them two, do they?

BRAM: No. WALTER: An elegant carriage with matching chestnut horses overtook us on the Avenue, in Knightsbridge, and Mr. Irving, being in high spirits, said that one day they would own a fine carriage and pair like that one. She said to him, “Are you planning to go on making a fool of yourself like this your whole life?”

This is so hard for Walter to repeat that he chokes up a bit on the last few words.

BRAM: Good lord.

WALTER: His voice icy cold, Mr. Irving asked the driver to stop. At that moment they were at Hyde Park corner. He stepped out of the carriage and walked to the Batemans’ house at KensFall 2016 Proscenium 21

Stoker C.S. Whitcomb

ington Gore and hasn’t returned home since. He says he will never speak to her again and I must say, I believe him.

BRAM: This time, so do I. Walter takes the large brown envelope.

WALTER: I’ll put it in his dressing room. The Lyceum is his home now.

BRAM: Walter, what about his children? His little boy, Harry? And the baby?

WALTER: That’s the shame of it, for sure and all. That’s the shame.

Walter goes out, wringing his cap. Bram sits lost in thought for a few moments.

Then Bram remembers something and searches through the letters on the desk, finding the one he wants and reading it over.

BRAM: The great bloody bitch!

Sound of a whine from the little dog in the wicker dog bed.

BRAM: Sorry, Fussie. Nothing personal.

Irving enters in a foul mood.

HENRY: Blast and bloody hell.

BRAM: What now?

HENRY: The Times. Has Ellen seen it?

BRAM: I doubt she’s up yet, but there’s no chance she won’t see it.

HENRY: They are idiots. She is one of the great talents of all time and they treat her like their own adored little pet. They don’t own her. They can’t even understand how far above them all she is.

BRAM: Do you want me to take Henry Labouchere off the list?

HENRY: No, no. That would be suicide. Just be sure to keep him far away from her.

BRAM: How bad is it?

Henry pulls out the folded newspaper from his coat pocket, unfolds it and reads.

HENRY: “Henry Irving has persuaded himself that Lady Macbeth is in reality, the sweetest, most affectionate creature that ever drew breath. She roars as gently as any sucking dove.”

BRAM: Good God. HENRY: Imbecile.

BRAM: Utterly. And what about you? And the production?

HENRY: Better. He calls it: (reading) “...a magnificent show. Such a Macbeth has never been seen before.”

BRAM: That explains the ticket sales.

HENRY: They’re strong then?

BRAM: Strong enough for today.

HENRY: Good then. Let’s just hope this doesn’t throw off her performance.

BRAM: And the green beetles-wing cloak was a smash hit. As Wilde was leaving the theatre, he declaimed loudly for all to hear, “Obviously Lady M does her shopping in Byzantium.”

HENRY: That mantle is the most beautiful costume any actress has ever had the privilege to wear. I knew it would be.

BRAM: John Singer Sargent wants to do a full-length portrait of her in it.

HENRY: That will help. A little. Try to spring that news just as the wave of outrage breaks over 22 Proscenium Fall 2016

The Times.

BRAM: I will try.

HENRY: You have that knack.

BRAM: Henry, I got a letter from Florence. She wants her usual box for Saturday. Do you want her here? In the box in full view from the stage?

HENRY: I don’t think I can avoid it. If I don’t comply to her demands, her ranting will be heard from Piccadilly to Portsmouth. Then my family will be smeared all over the Times. No. I refuse to let her viciousness do any more damage to the Lyceum than I can help. She would love to see it all come crashing down in ruins. It would prove her right.

BRAM: Maybe she should have played Lady M. HENRY: Quite probably. Between you and me, I wouldn’t mind seeing my little boy’s curls at the rail.

BRAM: I’ll take care of it.

HENRY: Do you know what she wrote in her diary the night of my first Romeo? I couldn’t resist sneaking a look. I should have resisted. She wrote, “First night of R and J at Lyceum. Jolly failure. Irving awfully funny.”

BRAM: How could she have fooled us all for so long?

HENRY: She didn’t fool me long.

BRAM: When did you realize?

HENRY: The morning after the wedding.

BRAM: She couldn’t even sustain the pretense for a few days of honeymoon? I’m sorry, Henry.

She seemed, well, if not sweet, at least pretty and quiet.

HENRY: That’s how the Devil fools us all. The pretty face. Dainty ankles. The tilting neck of the swan, and then the trap crashes around us and we are locked in a hell of our own making.

BRAM: Is it the Egyptians who say the guardians at the Gates of Paradise are Fear and Desire?

Are they two sphinxes?

HENRY: I don’t have to worry about Desire any more. That has been thankfully murdered in cold blood. And Fear? Well the older I get, I am more and more feared than fearful. By the way, the last fear to cling to us is not fear of death.

BRAM: No. It is fear for our children.

HENRY: Yes. Exactly right. You know more than I realize most of the time, Stoker.

BRAM: I’m a father as well.

HENRY: Of course. I should remember that. How is my little namesake? Wee Henry Stoker.

BRAM: He looks well. I mostly see him when he’s sleeping, of course. And they all look angelically beautiful then.

HENRY: Yes. It’s how I remember mine best, but I don’t see them at all any more.

BRAM: I’m sorry. You know I hardly remember my father from childhood. Except behind a newspaper or a cloud of pipe smoke.

HENRY: Well, life in the theatre is not the best life for knowing one’s children. We are awake all night and asleep by day, like owls or bats.

BRAM: Bats...yes. I guess we are nocturnal creatures.

HENRY: Well spoken. Too bad you’re not a writer any more.

BRAM: A writer?

Fall 2016 Proscenium 23

Stoker C.S. Whitcomb

Bram whips around to look at Henry, trying to figure out if he knows. Henry is too good an actor to let on.

HENRY: You wrote some of my best reviews as a young fellow back in Dublin.

BRAM: Right. Well deserved.

HENRY: Ah, well. Happy days. Nearly forgot, I came up here to tell you I’ve had an inspiration for the Beefsteaks dinner on the hundredth night of “Merchant.” I want three hundred guests, particularly those who knew me in the old touring days. Magnums of Heidsieck ‘74.

BRAM: Heidsieck? What’s wrong with the old Tokay?

HENRY: You know I don’t drink...wine. And I want privately printed commemorative copies of the play bound in velum with gilt-lettering as gifts for each of the guests.

BRAM: Gilt and velum?

HENRY: Three hundred copies.

BRAM: But that’s going to cost...

HENRY: No matter at what cost, Stoker. No matter the cost.

BRAM: No matter to you. It is a great deal of matter to me.

HENRY: I don’t speak about filthy lucre. We do things elegantly here. Lavishly.

BRAM: Expensively.

HENRY: Enough! You are always trying to shrink me down to the size of an ordinary man. If I let you have your way I’d be bounded by the space of a nutshell. Or rather a pine box. One they bury you in.

BRAM: I’m not trying to bury you, but you’re going to bury us all with your extravagance. You don’t need twenty-year- old imported champagne to be Henry Irving.

HENRY: Yes! I! Do! BRAM: Fine then. We’ll go on. Until the day we lose the Lyceum.

HENRY: So be it!

BRAM: Just remember, our fate was made here today. By you.

HENRY: Our fate has always been made by me! Our destiny is mine to create or destroy.

BRAM: (bows to him)Your humble servant.

HENRY: Yes! Mine!

Henry storms out. Bram is so frustrated he lets out a burst of sound and then folds onto the chair, looking at the bills and receipts.

Ellen pokes her head in. She is in her dressing gown having been drawn by their shouting.

ELLEN: Are you all right?

BRAM: No. ELLEN: That was one of the worst. Or the loudest anyway. It sounded like he was about to hand you your hat.

Bram actually laughs at this.

BRAM: He can’t afford to hand me anything. The hats may not even be paid off.

ELLEN: As bad as that?

BRAM: If I’d wanted to play screaming melodrama, I would’ve become an actor myself. He’s a monster. The son of the devil.

ELLEN: Yes, of course, darling. But he’s our monster. And they do sell the most tickets.

BRAM: I’m not sure it’s worth it.

24 Proscenium Fall 2016

ELLEN: Yes you are. You know what your trouble is?

BRAM: Does this seem like the best time for a delightful lecture on what’s wrong with Mr. Stoker?

She smiles, unperturbed by any of it. She flits around the office fooling around a bit, trying to lighten things up. She puts on his coat which is huge on her.

ELLEN: It’s freezing in here.

BRAM: It’ll warm up in a minute, now that the arctic blast has removed himself.

ELLEN: Your trouble is that you see him as a father.

BRAM: I don’t.

ELLEN: Unfortunately, you do. You are a wonderful son to him. And he is a terrible bully of a father to you.

BRAM: He doesn’t see himself as my father. He sees himself as the master and me as his servant.

ELLEN: You mustn’t take it personally. He sees the whole world as his servants. It doesn’t make it true. It’s just his particular form of delusion. And I guess it’s what he needs in order to turn himself into all these devils and madmen and monsters.

BRAM: You don’t need any of that and you’re as good as he is.

ELLEN: Thank you, dear boy. But I’m a woman. We don’t need to pound our chests and roar down the jungle so much. I love my work, but if I were in charge of this place we would have gone spinning down the drain years ago. We’d all be dancing on street corners for copper coins by now. It’s a proven fact. So we each do our jobs. And try not to kill each other.

BRAM: What do you mean, a proven fact? How have you proved that?

ELLEN: I retired from the theatre when I was a girl, left my husband and ran off to the country with my one true love. Had a lovely house with fields and woods and a couple of adorable babies and a nanny named Boo. My companion went up to work in London during the week and left me money for housekeeping and things and I spent it more on things and less on housekeeping. Blokes kept showing up to repossess the furniture. It was quite Bohemian. I loved the Japanese style. Wearing kimonos. Sitting on the floor. We may have lost a house or two.

BRAM: Is that why things didn’t work out? Between you and Godwin?

ELLEN: Possibly. But it may have been the other architect he fell in love with. A lady architect.

I didn’t know there were such things as lady architects. He married her. And eventually I returned to the theatre. To work. What do you think of the name Craig?

BRAM: For what?

ELLEN: The children. Edward Gordon Craig. Edith Craig. I like the sound of it.

BRAM: Are you talking about Teddy and Edie? Your children are half grown. They don’t have names?

ELLEN: Not last names. I was waiting to think of a good one. I like Craig. Sounds strong.

She is now sporting his derby as well and is winding his wool scarf around her neck.

BRAM: Would you mind not wearing my clothes? It’s hard enough to maintain a marriage without coming home smelling of an actress’s perfume.

She admires the effect in the full-length mirror.

ELLEN: Sorry. I need them. They’re warm. And life can be so cold.

She sags onto a trunk.

Fall 2016 Proscenium 25

Stoker C.S. Whitcomb

BRAM: You’ve seen The Times, then.

ELLEN: How does a sucking dove roar I wonder. Come to that, what is a sucking dove? Do you think he meant to say suckling duck?

BRAM: It’s from Midsummer. Bottom in Pyramus and Thisbe.

ELLEN: I know what it’s from. I played Peasblossom and Moth in Midsummers since I fell out of the cradle onto the blooming boards. I can probably still recite the play in its entirety from “Now, fair Hippolyta,” clear through to “Give me your hands if we be friends...”

BRAM: “And Robin shall restore amends.” Of course you did and you can. I’m sorry.

ELLEN: It’s as if they think I just flit through any role without a single thought in my empty little head. I worked hard on those choices. She’s not an animal. She loved her husband. What she did, she did for love of him. That is a legitimate choice. Love can make a woman into a monster as easily as ordinary, banal, boring evil can.

BRAM: He’s an idiot. You were brilliant. The audience loved you and John Singer Sargent wants to paint you in the beetles’ wing cloak.

ELLEN: Does he? Well, all right. Those little bugs won’t last forever. Sargent may as well immortalize them so they won’t have sacrificed their tiny lives in vain.

BRAM: Well said. And I will remember how well you behaved in the face of the beastly Times review.

ELLEN: Thank you. Goddamn Labouchere! What does that even mean anyway?

BRAM: I think it’s French for Big Mouth.

ELLEN: I won’t change a word in the reading of it. I am convinced my choices are right.

BRAM: Good for you.

ELLEN: If you can’t stand by your own work, what good are you?

BRAM: Will you be all right?

ELLEN: Of course. Buoyancy is just one of my myriad of talents. I’m famous for it.

BRAM: Wait, The Star was quite a bit better. Did you see it?

ELLEN: After The Times, I stopped reading.

Bram finds another paper in the mess of papers on his desk. It is already folded to the review and he reads a paragraph aloud to her.

BRAM: “The great fact about Miss Terry’s Lady Macbeth is its sex. It is redolent, pungent with the odeur de femme. Look how she rushes into her husband’s arms, clinging, kissing, coaxing, and even her taunts, when his resolution begins to wane, are sugared with a loving smile.”

ELLEN: Sex. There are worse things to be praised for, certainly.

BRAM: And one more. “Ellen Terry moves through the world of the theatre like embodied sunshine.”

ELLEN: Really? Who wrote that?

BRAM: I did. Well, I will write it down for you.

ELLEN: Thank you.

BRAM: It’s true. And I am writing it down for you this moment.

He sits and takes up his pen, writing his note to her.

He hands her the page with her one line review written on it. She takes it and looks it over with a smile.

ELLEN: How delightful. You are a lovely writer ... of many adorable things.

26 Proscenium Fall 2016

BRAM: What do you mean by that?

ELLEN: I went round to the book shop and asked if they had anything by a “Bram Stoker” and guess what?

BRAM: Ah. Surprise, surprise.

ELLEN: How could you keep something like that a secret from us? We’re your family.

BRAM: I deserve one little corner of my life to myself, don’t I? ELLEN: A little corner?

BRAM: My books haven’t created enough of a stir to be particularly noticed by anyone. If you hadn’t been snooping in my papers, it would still be a pretty neat little secret.

ELLEN: I think they are charming. And spiritually uplifting. You are quite the romantic. I had no idea.

BRAM: Right.

ELLEN: And what does your little wife think of her husband, the author?

BRAM: Is there even the slightest chance we could leave my wife out of it?

ELLEN: I don’t think so. Is she proud of you?

BRAM: I wouldn’t know.

ELLEN: Don’t tell me your little Florrie is as bad as Henry’s.

BRAM: No, mine actually is pretty and quiet. She has her own interests.

ELLEN: Really. What might those be?

BRAM: I don’t like to talk about my wife.

ELLEN: I have noticed that.

BRAM: Ellen.

ELLEN: Bram?

BRAM: She is interested in spiritualism. I have my hands full here. More than full, obviously.

ELLEN: Spiritualism. You mean ghosts? Crystal balls? Tapping and table tipping? Sounds colorful. And cozy.

BRAM: Are we finished?

ELLEN: One last tiny bit of business. These gilt and vellum copies of the play, will they include our names?

BRAM: Have we ever left an actor’s name off anything?

ELLEN: Good. You know it’s your fault that Henry’s a monster.

BRAM: How is that my fault?

ELLEN: You ... make Henry possible.

BRAM: Impossible.

ELLEN: And however mad he drives you, he gives your life some sort of purpose.

BRAM: Such as it is.

ELLEN: Exactly. And together we create magnificent things.

She now takes off his scarf and wraps it around his neck. She hangs his coat back on the rack.

ELLEN: Bram, darling, you should take a walk. Get some air. Smell a rose.

BRAM: You have a matinee, Miss Terry.

She puts his derby on his head.

ELLEN: Bon soir, Monsieur Stoke-aire.

And she waltzes off.

Fall 2016 Proscenium 27

Stoker C.S. Whitcomb

Bram allows himself a moment to read a letter from his pocket. As he reads he gets happier and even touched by this. It is from: SCENE FOUR Lights rise on WALT WHITMAN alone in a spot, dressed in his black suit, as before, replying to Bram’s letter. He speaks it as Bram reads it.

WHITMAN: My dear young man, Your letters have been most welcome to me, as Person and as an Author Ð I don’t know which most. You did well to write me unconventionally, so fresh, so manly, and so affectionately. I too hope, though it is not probable, that we shall one day meet each other. Meantime I send you my friendship and thanks. My physique is entirely shattered, doubtless permanently, from paralysis and other ailments. But I am up and dressed and get out every day a little. Live here quite lonesome but hearty and good spirits. Write to me again. Walt Whitman.

BLACKOUT SCENE FIVE Lights up in a small area downstage where a corner of the apron becomes Henry’s dressing room. Mirror, dressing table, a small gilt chair with red velvet seat. Irving applies his makeup for Shylock. Dark brows, eyeliner, mustaches. Walter enters carrying the freshly pressed shirt and doublet. He dresses Henry for Shylock.

HENRY: Tell me, Walter, which do you think was my greatest role? You’ve seen them all.

WALTER: I couldn’t say, sir.

HENRY: Of course you could. Which?

WALTER: If pressed, sir, I would have to say the Scottish tragedy. Definitely your greatest performance.

HENRY: Really? I liked that one myself. But most people would say it was my Hamlet.

WALTER: Hamlet?

HENRY: You don’t agree?

WALTER: No, sir. Definitely Mackers. You sweat through two shirts in Hamlet and five in the Scots.

Henry laughs out loud.

HENRY: Why not? Theatre criticism measured in laundry tags.

WALTER: Do you know what Miss Terry said about your last scenes as the Scots king?

HENRY: No. WALTER: She said, “he’s like a great, famished wolf.”

Henry smiles at this, his chest swelling with pride.

HENRY: I wonder if I can get that carved on my tombstone?

BLACKOUT. SCENE SIX Bram sits alone at his desk writing a letter.

BRAM: Dear Mr. Whitman, Thank you for answering my last letter. It meant a lot to me that you wrote and that you seemed 28 Proscenium Fall 2016

to understand me better than people who have known me all my life. I don’t quite know how to thank someone for that. I read one of your poems aloud to myself each night before retiring.

They are a comfort and an inspiration to me. Certainly no one in England is writing with your kind of vitality. Maybe Yeats in Ireland might compare, but only faintly. I hope that you may be able to come to London again. I would like to introduce you to the Literary Academy and of course you would be the guest of honor at the Lyceum Theatre Beefsteak Dinners. They are the toast of many princes and kings and famous men. The Prince of Wales is a regular at our table.

As are Oscar Wilde and Conan Doyle. I look forward to seeing you either here, or when we next tour America. I hope you are well and in good spirits.

Your devoted friend, Bram Stoker Bram looks it over. Blows on it to dry the ink. Carefully folds it and puts it into an envelope and then tucks it inside his breast coat pocket.

BLACKOUT. SCENE SEVEN Lights rise on the set for “Merchant.” Painted backdrop in the Pre-Raphaelite style of a fantastic Venice. The lighting is trembling and pulsing from reflecting off the waters of the canals onto the ancient pink and terra cotta walls. A mist hangs on the ground. In the distance a small gondola seems to float along and out of sight.

Moments later a larger gondola rolls silently onto the stage and up to a landing place. And the dark-caped figure sitting in it, stands and steps out onto the stone walkway unfurling the cape and rising to his full height. It is, of course, Irving as Shylock. He wears a scholar’s cap and carries several large, leather-bound books. At his waist a heavy purse filled with coins. It is an “elegant, dignified, infinitely cunning portrait.”

HENRY(AS SHYLOCK): Three thousand ducats; ‘tis a good round sum, And for three months. Let me see the rate.

Signior Antonio, many a time and oft In the Rialto you have rated me About my moneys and my usances.

Still have I borne it with a patient shrug.

For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.

You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog, And spit upon my Jewish gabardine, And all for use of that which is mine own.

Well, then, it now appears you need my help.

Go to then. You come to me and say, “Shylock, we would have moneys” you say so; You that did void your rheum upon my beard And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur Over your threshold: moneys is your suit What should I say to you? Should I not say, “Hath a dog money? Is it possible Fall 2016 Proscenium 29

Stoker C.S. Whitcomb

A cur can lend a thousand ducats?” Or Shall I bend low and in a bondsman’s key With bated breath and whispering humbleness, Say this, “Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last; You spurn’d me such a day; another time You call’d me dog; and for these courtesies I’ll lend you this much moneys?

I would be friends with you and have your love, Forget the shames that you have stain’d me with, This kindness will I show.

Go with me to a notary, seal me there Your single bond; and, in a merry sport, If you repay me not on such a day In such a place, such sum or sums as are Express’d in the condition, let the forfeit Be nominated for an equal pound Of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken In what part of your body pleaseth me.

As he speaks the lights behind him grow brighter and the flicker of reflected light becomes more erratic, shifting from water to fire. And the gentle lapping of the water against the stone banks of the canals is overtaken by the sound of distant shouting and crackling flames. Somewhere in London a huge warehouse is being consumed in fire.

SCENE EIGHT Lights come up on the Lyceum office. Faint light of dawn through the window. Bram enters, in his shirtsleeves, covered in soot and ash. He carries his coat, which may even be smoking a bit, and drops it on the floor. He is so soot-faced above his beard, he could play Othello. He sinks into his chair at the desk and drops his head into his hands. He is a beaten man. Utterly broken at this moment.

Henry enters and stands in the doorway his face ivory white. Bloodless. Pale as death. He is swathed in a long black cape. When he takes a step toward Bram, it swings open and his white alabaster hands are revealed against his completely dark clothing. They shine, clinging to each other, the hands of a marble statue.

HENRY: (his voice a ravaged whisper) Stoker...

Bram raises his head and sees Henry standing there and his first instinctive response is fear.

Henry looks like a ghost, newly dead, appearing before him.

Bram can’t speak. He just shakes his head.

HENRY: How bad?

BRAM: Incalculable.

HENRY: Everything? Gone?

BRAM: The warehouse was filled with scenery. Canvas and oil paint with a foot between them.

The flames took to it like paper. It cracked like bombshells going off.

HENRY: But we were insured?

30 Proscenium Fall 2016

BRAM: Yes, of course, but... I’ve been doing the calculations in my head.

HENRY: Why? BRAM: In actual fact, we are hopelessly under insured.

HENRY: But you took care of all that. Surely...

BRAM: When we commissioned the Burne-Jones backdrop for Midsummer, he was barely out of art school. We paid him in sausages and songs and a few hundred pounds. Just one of his scenes is worth fifty thousand pounds now, maybe twice that. All those backdrops were original oil paintings fifty feet wide by thirty feet high by people who are now the pre-eminent artists of our time. The loss is incalculable. The insurance estimates were based on what we spent. We lost all the scenery furniture and props for over forty productions. It’s a tragedy. Like the library at Alexandria. We will never see its like again.

HENRY: We will recover from this. Stoker? We will.

BRAM: We may not. This might bankrupt us.

HENRY: We’ve been in trouble before.

BRAM: Not on this scale.

HENRY: We will find a way. Even if we have to go back and tour America. We can always make ten or twelve thousand profit playing the colonies.

BRAM: Yes, but only because there are no beefsteak dinners there.

HENRY: So? BRAM: It will take months to arrange and how do we survive in the meantime?

HENRY: How much is left in the coffers?

BRAM: After three hundred gold and velum bound copies of Merchant? The twenty-five cases of Heidsieck ‘74, the ten piece orchestra and a six course dinner for three hundred? We can hold on for two weeks, maybe three. We still have to pay to clean up after the fire.

HENRY: Are we always this close to the bone?

BRAM: Most of the time, yes.

HENRY: And yet you always keep us afloat. Remarkable. You are quite resourceful at finding ways to meet my most outrageous demands.

BRAM: Because your outrageous ideas and wild dinner parties are what we are selling. It’s what brings in the princes and politicians and painters and even, bless them, the public. Do they pay their hard earned coin to see ordinary men?

HENRY: They do not.

BRAM: No. So you go right on being Henry Irving and I will go on trying to talk your expenses down and we will get through this until our small time is up. What is it? “The poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage?”

HENRY: “And then is heard no more. A tale told by an idiot. Full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.”

BRAM: You were good in that.

HENRY: That’s what Walter tells me. But I’m good in everything. People like us, you, me, Ellen, even Walter, we survive because we thrive in the artificial light. The midnight suppers and theatrical fireworks. We are children of the night.

BRAM: I like that.

HENRY: It’s yours. Put it into my eulogy.

Fall 2016 Proscenium 31

Stoker C.S. Whitcomb

BRAM: I’ve never seen anything like it. That fire, flames a hundred feet high boiling against the night sky, with you standing there like a demonic conductor orchestrating the holocaust.

HENRY: I have never felt more powerless.

BRAM: Still. Too bad we couldn’t have sold tickets to the fire. With you standing before it with your cape, flapping from the blast, silhouetted against the conflagration of hell itself, berating God! That was as theatrical as it can possibly get.

HENRY: That’s it! That’s what we’ll do!

BRAM: Henry, we have nothing left to burn but the theatre itself.

HENRY: Mephistopheles!

BRAM: Mephistopheles?

HENRY: We won’t need scenery. We will have the darkness and the flames. We will paint the black velours into cliffs and craters with flames shooting up into the blackness of the night.

BRAM: You’ll play Faust?

HENRY: Good heavens, man. Are you blind? I will play Satan. Lucifer. The greatest villain in history. They will run screaming from the theatre when I cast my red glowing eyes upon them.

And point to each one with my finger of death.

Henry raises his arm and points out into the audience and the lights change right here to a flaming hell and he is the devil himself.

Lights out on Henry who, by turning upstage in his black cape, has vanished into the dark.

Bram shakes his head, turns to his desk, wildly scrabbling through it in search of a pen. When he finds it, he dips it in ink and begins to scratch furiously on paper. He reads as he writes.

BRAM: As our carriage raced through the darkness, a dog began to howl somewhere down the road, a long agonized wailing, as if from fear. The sound was taken up by another dog, and then another, till, borne on the wind, a wild howling began through the gloom of the night.

As he reads the sounds he describes can be heard, faintly at first then louder. The horse’s hooves, wind and dogs howling.

BRAM: The horses began to strain and rear. Then far off in the distance, from the mountains began a louder and sharper howling, that of wolves. The horses plunged madly.

He writes on as fast as he can, dipping his pen and scratching away with great speed and energy. The lights shift and the howling wind and wolves die down. As Bram continues, Henry Irving slowly turns and lights come up on him, now somehow fully made up as Count Dracula.

BRAM: The great door swung back. Within, stood a tall old man, with a long white mustache, clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of color about him anywhere. He motioned me in with a courtly gesture.

HENRY: Welcome to my house. Enter freely and of your own free will.

BRAM: He stood like a statue fixed in stone. The instant, however, I stepped over the threshold, he moved forward, and holding out his hand grasped mine with a strength which made me wince. It seemed cold as ice, more like the hand of a dead than living man.

HENRY: I am Dracula and I bid you welcome, Mr. Harker, to my house. Come in, the night air is chill and you must need to eat and rest.

BRAM: His face was a strong aquiline, and the mouth was cruel looking with peculiarly sharp white teeth. He thin with an extraordinary pallor.

Henry comes alive as once again, the sound of wolves howling far away down in the valley ris32 Proscenium Fall 2016

es. When he smiles, Henry has the sharp pointed canine teeth of the vampire.

HENRY: Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make.

He laughs as the wolves howl away. Bram stares at the vision of Dracula as jagged lightning flashes and as the thunder crashes -BLACKOUT. END OF ACT ONE. ACT TWO SCENE ONE Lights up on Walt Whitman’s study in his home in Camden, New Jersey. Whitman sits in a rocking chair. When Bram enters, large for the small room, Whitman looks up and grins at him, struggling to his feet.

WHITMAN: Bram Stoker. Abraham, is it?

BRAM: Yes, Mr. Whitman. Don’t get up.

WHITMAN: This is America. You can call me Walt. And I can still make it up out of this old rocking chair. We should celebrate that while we can.

Walt stands a bit unsteady. Bram offers to shake his hand, but Whitman embraces him warmly like a father to a long lost son. Bram is almost overwhelmed with emotion at this greeting.

Few, if any men, have ever embraced him in his life.

BRAM: I can’t tell you how happy I am to finally meet you.

WHITMAN: I’m glad your company decided to tour America. That was a bit of good luck that allowed us to meet each other in person.

BRAM: Not quite luck. I pushed for this American tour partly so that I would be able to finally meet you. And because we needed to make some money after a bit of a catastrophe.

WHITMAN: I read about the fire.

BRAM: Yes. You look exactly as I imagined from your photograph.

WHITMAN: And I would have known you anyway by your clear and accurate description of yourself in your letter. You said, “I am six feet two inches high and twelve stone weight naked and used to be forty-two inches round the chest. I am ugly but strong and determined.” I’d say you described yourself exactly, except for the ugly part. You are far from ugly, young man.

You are like a breath of good, healthy, Irish sea air.

BRAM: I only included my physical description, because I surmised from your works that you would be interested to know the personal appearance of your correspondents. You are, I know, a keen physiognomist.

Whitman settles back into his rocker. Bram takes the footstool facing him, to be close, and so as not to miss a single word from the master.

WHITMAN: Right, you are. I guess I am. I have always felt that a man should flood himself with his immediate age as with vast oceanic tides.

BRAM: I couldn’t agree more.

WHITMAN: When I was your age, I was simmering, simmering, simmering. It was discovering Emerson that brought me to a full boil.

BRAM: I read what Emerson wrote about you when he first read you. “I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty.”

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WHITMAN: Wonderful. I’d forgotten that. I somehow seem to remember the bad things more vividly. The Boston Intelligencer wrote: “There is neither wit nor method in his disjointed babbling, and it seems to us he must be some escaped lunatic, raving in pitiable delirium.”

BRAM: A wise man once told me that critics write about the only real magic on earth as if it were sleight of hand.

WHITMAN: I like that.

BRAM: And Thoreau. Alcott wrote: “Whitman and Thoreau eyed each other like two beasts, each wondering what the other would do, whether to snap or run.”

Whitman closes his eyes and begins to recite one of his poems aloud. He does it, as always, with almost physical pleasure.

WHITMAN: “I knew a man, a common farmer, the father of five sons, And in them the fathers of sons, and in them the fathers of sons.

This man was of wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person, The shape of his head, the pale yellow and white of his hair and beard, the immeasurable meaning of his black eyes, the richness and breadth of his manners, These I used to go and visit him to see, he was wise also, He was six feet tall, he was over eighty years old, his sons were massive, clean, bearded, tanfaced, handsome, They and his daughters loved him, all who saw him loved him, They did not love him by allowance, they loved him with personal love, When he went with his five sons and many grand-sons to hunt or fish, you would pick him out as the most beautiful and vigorous of the gang, You would wish long and long to be with him, you would wish to sit by him in the boat that you and he might touch each other.”

Bram responds by reciting the next section of the poem.

BRAM: “I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough, To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough, To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough, To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?

I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea.”

Whitman laughs with delight at this.

WHITMAN: It heartens me to hear my words in another’s voice and accent. These poems should be universal.

BRAM: They are.

WHITMAN: To those who can get hold of them.

BRAM: I wanted to talk to you about this very thing. About the possibility of editing some of your poems. As you know, not a single edition of Leaves of Grass has been permitted to be printed in Britain, due to our censorship laws under Queen Victoria.

WHITMAN: Oh yes, I know all about that.

BRAM: And it occurred to me that if you were to cut around a hundred lines, your book could be in every home in America and in England as well. I’ve been talking to our mutual friend Talcott Williams of the Philadelphia Press. He believes we could easily accomplish this. Wouldn’t 34 Proscenium Fall 2016

it be worth the sacrifice of a hundred lines so that everyone could read your work?

WHITMAN: It would not be any sacrifice. So far as I am concerned they might cut a thousand.

It is not that -- it is quite another matter. When I wrote as I did I thought I was doing right and right makes for good. I think so still. I think that all that God made is for good Ñ- that the work of His hands is clean in all ways if used as He intended. If I was wrong I have done harm.Ê And for that I deserve to be punished by being forgotten. It has been and cannot not-be.Ê No, I shall never cut a line so long as I live.

BRAM: I understand. I must say I am disappointed, but I admire you for it.

Lights fade out on Whitman, then on Bram. To full blackout.

SCENE TWO Bram comes into his office with an armful of mail. He drops it on his desk and takes off his overcoat hanging it on the hatrack.

Ellen comes in and flops down in his desk chair before he can sit in it. Her arms hang limply by her sides. She doesn’t even take off her hat or coat.

ELLEN: Ma, please, I’m desperate for a cup of tea.

BRAM: You haven’t called me “Ma” in ages.

ELLEN: I need a mother today. Can you make me a cuppa?

He shakes the kettle. It’s full enough.

BRAM: What happened to Katie?

ELLEN: Not here yet. And I’m desperate.

BRAM: Don’t tell me you’re one of those leading ladies who can’t even make her own cup of tea.

ELLEN: You know I am not. I need it extra strong. With lots of milk. And three sugars. Better make it four.

BRAM: (lighting the fire under the kettle) So? What’s the problem?

ELLEN: I’m having a little trouble. With my arms.

BRAM: What’s happened to your arms?

ELLEN: Sargent. Not totally his fault. It may have been my idea to pose holding the crown above my head. And the beetles-wing cloak is heavy as well.

BRAM: You forgot what it was like?

ELLEN: I must have done. Lord, hours and hours and now ... (looks down at her lifeless hands in her lap) ...totally useless.

BRAM: And how are you going to play Lady M without arms?

ELLEN: Sucking doves don’t have arms, do they? This may be more of a dolphin performance.

The Scottish Tragedy as performed by the Loch Ness porpoise The kettle whistles and Bram pours the hot water into an old chipped teapot with a spoonful of loose tea.

BRAM: I hope the painting was worth it.

ELLEN: Haven’t seen it. But when it’s finished he’s promised to unveil it at a Beafsteaks.

BRAM: I’m sure it will be stunning.

ELLEN: It had better be after I’ve given my right arm. And my left.

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Bram pours milk into a cup and adds four teaspoons of sugar.

BRAM: Are you sure? About the sugar?

ELLEN: Stir it for me.

He stirs the cup and sets it before her.

BRAM: All right?

She looks at the cup and tries to lift her arms. The one that comes up halfway seems to get the shakes. It drops back into her lap.

ELLEN: Ma? If you laugh...

BRAM: You’ll what? Butt me with your bonnet?

He does laugh.

ELLEN: It’s not funny.

BRAM: From here it is, rather.

But he takes pity on her and lifts the cup of tea, so she can sip it.

ELLEN: Thank God. Irish Breakfast work your restorative powers.

BRAM: Not too sweet?

He gives her another sip.

ELLEN: Heaven.

BRAM: Better than English Breakfast tea?

ELLEN: You know you’ve done a pretty good job losing your brogue. Come to think of it, how did it ever happen? You and Henry are so utterly opposite. How did you manage to become partners?

BRAM: A long story.

ELLEN: Tell me. Him from here. You from over there. A young Irish lad among the leprechauns and penny whistles. How did you end up here as one of us? You’re not born into it like me. Or stage struck like everyone else.

BRAM: I guess I was a bit stage struck. Though not for acting.

ELLEN: Talk to me. I still can’t get The Times notice out of my head. If I don’t I’m afraid I’m going to go out onstage and actually “roar as gently as any limp, dead, plucked sucking dove.”

So tell me. You were a child of twelve and Mummy took you to see Henry in a touring production of what, Richard? The Corsican Brothers? Much Ado? BRAM: It was Two Roses, I was sixteen and my mother was nowhere in sight, thank you very much. I took myself. Three times.

ELLEN: And? How was he?

BRAM: Indelible. He played Digby Grant. And then, because the newspaper did nearly nothing on it, I went to the editor and offered to do some theatre criticism for them.

ELLEN: Really? At sixteen? You cheeky boy!

BRAM: I guess I was, but I was also large for my age by then. He probably assumed I was older and I didn’t enlighten him otherwise.

ELLEN: I’m sure you were born big for your age. What were you at birth, fourteen pounds? A record for Dublin County? Did they nickname you One Stone Stoker?

BRAM: No, I was a measly little sickly child. Carried everywhere. I didn’t walk until I was seven. Before then my feet never touched earth.

ELLEN: Astonishing. Look at you now. You really never walked until you were seven?

36 Proscenium Fall 2016

He gives her another drink of tea.

BRAM: I’m one of the few who remembers his first shaky, newborn-calf steps.

ELLEN: What was wrong with you?

BRAM: I don’t think anyone knew for sure. Some sort of rheumatic fever maybe. I wasn’t expected to live. As a baby, they tell me I was often at the point of death. They had a little plot reserved for me in the churchyard. Just in case.

ELLEN: How macabre. And by sixteen a professional writer.

BRAM: Not exactly professional. The editor of the Dublin Mail said he could not pay me for such a thing as reviewing plays. I said no payment was needed or expected and voila I had a job of sorts.

She now has enough strength to lift the cup and take a shaky sip herself.

ELLEN: Marvelous thing, tea.

BRAM: Well done, you.

ELLEN: So you wrote about Henry.

BRAM: In his next production, The Rivals.

ELLEN: And? How did you describe his performance?

BRAM: I don’t remember now.

ELLEN: God, you’re a terrible liar. Lucky you never went on the stage.

BRAM: I leave all that to you.

ELLEN: You wrote, “Mr. Henry IrvingÉ” Do I need to fill in the blank myself?

He closes his eyes and recites from memory.

BRAM: “What I saw, to my amazement and delight, was a patrician figure as real as the persons of one’s dreams, and endowed with the same poetic grace. A young soldier, handsome, distinguished, self-dependent, compact of grace and slumberous energy.”

ELLEN: I knew it! I suspected some such. Henry read it, invited you to dinner and the rest is history.

BRAM: A few years later, after occasional dinners whenever he played Ireland. And yes. As you say.

She manages to finish her cup. Sound of the Stage Door slamming off.

ELLEN: That will be Katie. I hope she played with dolls as a child, since she’ll be dressing a big limp ragdoll tonight. Thanks for the tea, Ma. BRAM: Good show tonight, little Nellie.

Ellen gets to her feet, kisses him on the cheek and exits. Bram takes Ellen’s empty cup (it may be his only one) and pours tea for himself from the pot, adding milk.

He sits at the desk flipping through the mail and is stopped by one thin parcel the size of a manuscript. Stamps on it from America. He sits, afraid, and opens it carefully. When he sees what is inside he is overcome with sadness.

Henry comes in quietly and Bram turns away to hide his tears. Henry says nothing. He knows.

He puts a hand on Bram’s shoulder.

HENRY: I’m sorry.

BRAM: It’s not...entirely unexpected.

HENRY: He was an old man.

BRAM: And frail. For a long time. He wrote to me, “My physique is entirely shattered.”

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HENRY: Still. A great loss. To the world.

Bram nods, unable to speak. He slowly stands and goes out. Henry allows him his dignity.

Henry feels the full weight of Bram’s grief, then exits the other way.

BLACKOUT. SCENE THREE Lights come up on Ellen in Bram’s office. It is morning. She sits at his desk, and has been reading his pages. He comes in, in his shirtsleeves a bit rumpled, having recently woken up and gone for a wash. He is drying his hands and face on a towel.

BRAM: What are you doing up before noon?

ELLEN: I had to come see him off to Buckingham Palace didn’t I? It’s once in a lifetime.

Couldn’t sleep through that.

BRAM: Get your little nose out of my papers, will you?

ELLEN: It’s Henry, isn’t it? Your Count Dracula. Though I don’t think he will ever realize it.

He doesn’t think of himself as an old man and of course never will.

BRAM: No, no. It’s fiction. A made-up character.

ELLEN: So is Henry, don’t fool yourself.

BRAM: And the Count’s not even human. He’s a phantasm.

ELLEN: Exactly. One we know only too well.

BRAM: Nell...

ELLEN: I know.

BRAM: This can go no further.

ELLEN: No worries. It can be our own private little secret.

Henry comes in, wearing formal dress. A silk sash diagonally across his shirt front.

HENRY: Well? Do I look ready to meet Her Royal Highness er Roathe Queen?

ELLEN: You look beautiful. Stunning. Walter should be proud to have dressed such a noble figure.

HENRY: Proud? He wept like an Irish mother.

ELLEN: You are the first actor ever in history to be knighted. I’m so proud of you. Finally the government has done something absolutely right.

HENRY: Thank you, my dear. You will be next. I am sure of it. The first Lady of the English stage.

ELLEN: Of course. I’ll be right behind you.

Walter pops in, nervously.

WALTER: You carriage is waiting, m’lud.

HENRY: I guess I’ll be sirred and m’lorded from now on, will I? Jolly good. I don’t think I’ve ever played a knight.

BRAM: Just a lot of old kings and princes.

Henry does a slow turn in front of his friends.

HENRY: No wrinkles or loose threads?

WALTER: Don’t be daft. I done that already.

ELLEN: Perfection.

Henry makes a sweeping low bow.

38 Proscenium Fall 2016

HENRY: And my bow? Is it too much?

BRAM: Yes. You don’t want to make Prince Albert look like a stick in the mud.

ELLEN: Don’t listen to him. Do it just so.

HENRY: Good-bye, dear peasants. I only hope you know me when next we meet.

Henry kisses Ellen’s hand, salutes Bram and is gone in a grand sweeping exit, Walter following like a train-carrier.

After he’s gone, Ellen sinks onto Bram’s chair as he closes the door behind the others.

ELLEN: Is it a coincidence do you think that they happened on the same day? Or did they plan it this way to divert attention from the other.

BRAM: From what other?

ELLEN: You know what other.

He lets down the pretense of good humor and a grimness settles over them both.

BRAM: I know.

ELLEN: Poor Oscar.

BRAM: They passed sentence this morning then? It’s happened?

ELLEN: How could you not know this? Newsboys are shouting it on every street corner. “Oscar Wilde Guilty!” Did you spend the night here?

BRAM: I may have fallen asleep on Cleopatra’s fainting couch.

ELLEN: Why on earth would you do that?

BRAM: It’s more comfortable than my desk chair.

ELLEN: Trouble on the home front?

BRAM: That would be easier, believe me.

ELLEN: You’re not worried about Henry, surely. Not really. He’s always like this. You know him better than anyone.

BRAM: No, no. Henry’s fine. Henry’s Henry.

ELLEN: Well it can’t possibly be me. I’ve been an absolute angel all year.

BRAM: Yes, you have and I appreciate that.

ELLEN: You can tell me all. I’ve proven myself pure genius at keeping your secrets.

BRAM: It’s not my secret. I’ve been bailing single-handedly like a deranged madman trying to keep this monumental warship from sinking. And I’m failing.

ELLEN: Are we? Sinking?

BRAM: At an alarming rate. As your friend Lewis Carroll says, I have to make myself do two impossible things before breakfast every day just to keep us all from drowning.

ELLEN: Poor Bram.

BRAM: Poor you. Poor Henry. Poor Walter, if it comes right down to it.

ELLEN: No, I’ll get another theatre. Henry will be hired somewhere as a leading player and Walter will go with him. But if we lose the Lyceum everyone will blame you. You won’t be able to get another theatre to manage.

BRAM: I’ll be all right.

ELLEN: How will you be?

BRAM: I’ll get a little cottage for me and the missus somewhere in the country and write books.

ELLEN: Can you possibly live on that?

BRAM: If it’s a very little, tiny, wee cottage. We can grow carrots and potatoes in the tiny wee Fall 2016 Proscenium 39

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little garden in back and manage to survive into our dotage I expect. Maybe I’ll write Henry’s biography.

ELLEN: You could do, surely. No one knows him better than you. But haven’t you given him enough of your life?

BRAM: Nearly. What did he get? Oscar’s sentence?

ELLEN: Two years hard labor.

BRAM: Two years? Oscar won’t survive that.

ELLEN: He might. There’s something tenacious in Oscar. Maybe he’s too bitter to let it kill him. I hope he is. He always seemed to float above the fray, until now.

BRAM: I knew him in Dublin. When we were both starting out. He was five years younger. He courted Florrie before she married me.

ELLEN: Really? I didn’t know that.

BRAM: He was quite peeved that she chose me. It took him a couple of years to forgive me. I never did understand why she did it.

ELLEN: Why she chose you? It seems obvious to me.

BRAM: What was obvious was that Oscar was going to go far. Even in his youth he had more wit and style than anyone else.

ELLEN: Maybe she didn’t want to compete with him. Or maybe she knew even then.

BRAM: No. She didn’t.

ELLEN: Don’t be too sure.

BRAM: I am sure. She didn’t know there was any such thing.

ELLEN: As Oscar and his type.

BRAM: Yes. ELLEN: I guess she didn’t. But it’s you I’m worried about.

BRAM: Me? ELLEN: Yes. You. Are you careful, Bram? Are you safe?

He is shocked and takes a moment to consider her. This is not something he has ever talked about to a living soul. But he realizes that she knows, without a doubt. And that he is safe with her.

BRAM: I am not the leading player, even in my own life. I am not one for taking dramatic actions of any kind really. So you needn’t worry about me.

ELLEN: I’m glad if that’s true. But you are certainly the leading player in your own life. It’s just a secret life that you lead.

BRAM: It may not always be so secret. I should have considered a nom de plume more seriously. I don’t know what Henry’s going to say when he finds out about the books. Or book really.

The one.

ELLEN: Don’t worry about it. He’ll huff and he’ll puff but he won’t blow your house down.

It’s his house as well.

BRAM: I would never presume to steal any of his limelight.

ELLEN: No one could ever accuse you of that.

BRAM: I now see that if he finds out about the book from a stranger or on the street, well it would be a bit like finding out your wife had a lover. From the newsboy.

ELLEN: Oh my God. You are onto something there. It could be more than bad. Mount Vesuvi40 Proscenium Fall 2016

us has nothing on Henry.

BRAM: So it needs to be broken to him gently. And lightly. Off handedly. In a way that makes it clear it’s not important. Just an amusing tidbit. Like gossip.

ELLEN: It can’t be Walter.

BRAM: No, no. That would be equivalent to the newsboy. If his dresser knew his theatre manager was an author before Henry did? Not good.

ELLEN: It has to be you or me.

BRAM: Exactly. But if it came from me, it would be like a confession. To a priest. Of a mortal sin or some such. Which would give himÉ ELLEN: Terrible power over you for a long, long time.

BRAM: Oh God. Exactly.

ELLEN: So it has to be me.

BRAM: You of the ever so charming, light and delicate touch.

ELLEN: I may need a bit of rehearsal. I wish I had a script. You’re a writer. How can I ease into this?

BRAM: As an amusing anecdote? Something inconsequential and laughable?

ELLEN: I can do that.

BRAM: I am absolutely certain of it. If anyone can.

ELLEN: I’ll try to catch him while he’s still intoxicated from the knighting ceremony.

BRAM: Do they still touch people on the shoulders with a broadsword?

ELLEN: I certainly hope so. Or Sir Henry will be terribly disappointed. His bow is nothing compared to his dropping to one knee and turning his eyes heavenward in the manner of a humble saint touched by God. BRAM: I can imagine it. Vividly. (small pause) How did you know? About me?

ELLEN: Women always know if they are paying attention. The way you look at me. The way you look at Henry. And the way you don’t look at me.

BRAM: What do you mean? I look at you.

ELLEN: You look at my face, my makeup, my costume, as if you were about to paint me. My first husband was like that.

BRAM: But he did paint you. He was a brilliant painter, George Watts. Still is.

ELLEN: I suppose. Only of others now. I was sixteen. He was forty-seven and a famous artist.

George Frederic Watts. Pre-eminent. I thought posing for him would be so romantic. Artistic.

But it was a painful bloody bore.

BRAM: You didn’t love him?

ELLEN: Good God no.

BRAM: Was it what your parents wanted?

ELLEN: No, no, no. They didn’t even come to the wedding. None of the family did.

BRAM: Then why on earth did you marry him?

ELLEN: He asked. And I thought it would shock everyone. An act of adolescent rebellion. The bride wore brown. Literally. Watts was fond of brown. But the shock wore off and I was stuck.

BRAM: How did you get yourself out of it?

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ELLEN: I fell in love with Godwin. It was of the heart at first. The body came later. He took a fever and I sat up with him, mopping his brow with a cold compress. Dozing in a chair at his bedside. Very Florence Nightingale. He slept through the whole thing. The next morning when I reappeared chez Watts, it was too scandalous. I was not believed of course. No one ever asked Godwin. And in two shakes, I was a free woman again. Or a girl really. I was still well under twenty.

BRAM: So your nobler instincts won the day.

ELLEN: Yes, thankfully. Because all Watts ever wanted me for was to paint me. He immortalized me as Alice, Juliet, and Titania.

BRAM: What’s wrong with that?

She assumes the famous pose of “Alice” in Watts painting.

ELLEN: What’s wrong with that is that when he looked at me it was all face and hands, braid and brocade. Never seeing that underneath the facade, was a living, breathing woman with breasts and belly and thighs.

He is nearly flabbergasted by this.

BRAM: Oh. ELLEN: That’s the way you look at me. Only you are fond of me.

BRAM: I’m sorry. I mean I am. Fond of you.

ELLEN: I’ve made you blush.

BRAM: I’m sorry if you think it’s wrong. The other thing.

ELLEN: Don’t be silly. You are who you are. In the theatre over the years, I’ve met all sorts of men, or both sorts really. They are usually one of two things. Wolves in hiding, or lambs hiding in fear. You are the latter, of course. (she stands behind his chair and puts her arms around his neck affectionately.)

Bram the lamb.

BRAM: It’s just you, isn’t it? You don’t think people know?

ELLEN: God no. Especially not a big, bearded bloke like you. No one would ever suspect.

BRAM: Thank God for that.

ELLEN: I hope there has been some love in your life. I would wish that for you. One great love.

There should be one in each life I think.

BRAM: I have had one, in my life. But more of a spiritual love. He is from another age. And he lived on another continent.

ELLEN: Is he still alive I hope. Mr. Whitman?

BRAM: No. ELLEN: I’m sorry. But you did meet him? In the flesh.

BRAM: Yes. ELLEN: Was it a disappointment? Or all you had hoped it would be?

BRAM: I found all that I had ever dreamed of, or wished for in him: large-minded, broadviewed, tolerant to the last degree, incarnate sympathy, understanding with an insight that seemed more than human.

ELLEN: He was that spiritual father to you, wasn’t he?

BRAM: Yes. He was. When he died, he left me the original notes from the lecture he gave about Lincoln at the Chestnut Street Opera House on April 15, 1886.

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ELLEN: Because you are also an Abraham.

BRAM: It was something that I admired. Greatly.

ELLEN: And he wrote that beautiful poem about Lincoln.

“O Captain, my captain Our fearful trip is done.

The ship has weathered every rack, The prize we sought is won;” BRAM: But O heart! heart! heart!

O the bleeding drops of red, Where on the deck my captain lies Fallen...

The last words “cold and dead” are left unspoken, but felt by them both.

ELLEN: It’s like he immortalized them both in one poem. Lincoln and himself.

BRAM: Yes. I didn’t know you read poetry.

ELLEN: Shakespeare’s nearly all poetry.

BRAM: I guess I meant modern poetry.

ELLEN: I read Whitman because you love him.

BRAM: Now you can see why.

ELLEN: Yes. He will be remembered for hundreds of years.

BRAM: I’m sure of it.

ELLEN: (smiles) I just had a funny thought.

BRAM: I could use one of those. What?

ELLEN: It’s possible that in a hundred years, between Henry, me and you, yours might be the only name that people remember.

BRAM: Queens don’t knight people for writing vampire tales.

ELLEN: Not yet. I’ve got to go prepare for my big scene. “Breaking the news to Sir Henry.”

BRAM: If it’s at all possible, you might find some way to give him the credit.

ELLEN: Give Henry credit? For your writing career. Years and books of it. That he knew nothing about?

BRAM: Yes. ELLEN: Good idea.

She flies out. Bram sinks onto his chair, exhausted.

SCENE FOUR Henry’s dressing room. He is made up as MacBeth with windblown red hair and makeup that makes him look mad before the curtain has gone up. Walter makes adjustments to the kilt, sporran and plaid, the latter which drapes from his shoulder to the floor. Ellen enters, nearly giddy with pretend high spirits.

ELLEN: Milord? How was it? Tell me every glorious, tiny detail.

HENRY: The palace was a glistening jewel in an Ethiope’s ear.

ELLEN: And the Queen? Was she terribly plump?

HENRY: Or course she was.

ELLEN: And could she lift that heavy sword without beheading you accidentally?

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HENRY: She’s had a few decades of practice.

ELLEN: But never on an actor. And one who has played centuries’ worth of kings from several continents. Did they give you a little cushion to kneel on? Show me!

HENRY: They have a little stool called the “knighting stool” that you kneel on, but this will do.

Henry acts like it’s a chore, but inwardly he’s delighted at the chance to re-enact his moment for an audience of two. Walter quickly grabs a cushion from the dressing room chair and places it before Henry, who kneels on it with great flair.

HENRY: Some sort of herald announced my name. “John Henry Irving.”

ELLEN: John? How did they know that? I didn’t.

HENRY: Don’t interrupt. One of the Queen’s ministers handed her the sword.

ELLEN: Oh please. Let me play mother.

Walter hands Ellen a stage sword from MacBeth’s sheath and she stands to her full regal height.

ELLEN: I now dub thee...wait, wait, too tall and thin.

She makes herself shorter and chubbier somehow.

ELLEN: Better. I now dub thee...

HENRY: No. The monarch doesn’t speak.

ELLEN: No? No lines at all?

HENRY: No. She just touched my right shoulder, then the left.

Ellen does so. Then Henry rises to his feet.

ELLEN: She doesn’t even say “Arise, Sir Henry?”

HENRY: No. ELLEN: Even Guenevere was a better part.

HENRY: Which is only one reason they don’t write plays about the current monarch. Then she pinned the order of knighthood on my shoulder.

Walter hands the large gleaming brooch to Ellen who gasps.

ELLEN: Gorgeous!

Henry practically glows with pleasure as Ellen pins it to his Scottish plaid. Then she bows to him.

ELLEN: Sir Henry.

HENRY: Arise. Queen’s should rarely bow to anyone.

ELLEN: (rising)Oh Henry, I just found out the most delightful thing.

HENRY: You know I don’t stoop to common gossip.

Henry puts the finishing touches on his makeup. Walter takes off the Knighthood pin and puts it carefully into its velvet presentation box.

ELLEN: Of course not, but this is quite uncommon and it’s about Bram.

HENRY: How could there possibly be any gossip about him? He’s the least colorful person we know.

ELLEN: It turns out he has a secret life.

HENRY: Bram Stoker? Impossible. What is it, lovers? Bastards? Someone must be playing you for a fool.

ELLEN: No, no. It’s perfectly true and too, too delicious. His secret life is as a writer.

HENRY: What do you mean? What does he write about?

ELLEN: All sorts of things.

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HENRY: Me? ELLEN: Of course not you.

HENRY: He writes plays?

ELLEN: That would have made a lot of sense, but no. In his non-existent spare time, he writes novels.

HENRY: How the hell does he find time to write novels?

ELLEN: I don’t know. On ships and trains? When we’re on tour?

HENRY: I’ll have to give him more work to do, obviously, if he has so much time to waste. Has he published these “novels?” Under his own name? I’ll be a laughingstock.

ELLEN: They’re published and people love them. And it’s all because of you, Henry. You’ve created a popular novelist. He only started writing reviews of your work in the Dublin paper because he thought they weren’t doing you justice.

HENRY: Too true. They were far worse than brutal. They were dismissive. Fifty words. More a notice than a review until young Stoker inked up his quill.

ELLEN: You’ll be the only theatre manager in the world whose assistant manager is a published novelist. Isn’t that marvelous? You’ll be the talk of the town.

HENRY: You mean I’ll be laughed at all over town.

ELLEN: No, no. They’re good. People like them, especially the new one. It’s a gothic horror story, like the penny dreadfuls, full of blood and monsters. Terrifying.

HENRY: Stoker? Terrifying? Now, that is not possible.

ELLEN: I know! But true. Just being near you inspires everyone. They can’t help it.

HENRY: And no one bothers to tell me one word about it!

ELLEN: (kisses his cheek) Henry, darling, you’re the most remarkable man in London.

And she breezes out before he can blow up. He is left sputtering to Walter, then he calms down and tweeks his false eyebrows and hair a bit.

HENRY: Great Caesar’s petticoats! (makes sure she’s gone) How was that, Walter?

WALTER: Brilliant. Most convincing.

HENRY: You’re the only one who knows my secret.

WALTER: That you’re not a monster? Your secret is safe with me, Sir. HENRY: I trust you to take it to your grave.

WALTER: I will, Sir. But may I just say, I believe Henry Irving is your greatest performance.

BLACKOUT. SCENE FIVE Bram’s office. He is working away at his desk when Ellen blows in, out of breath.

ELLEN: Done. Not one of my greatest performances. No text. No glory. But good enough, hopefully.

BRAM: He hit the ceiling?

ELLEN: I rushed off before it had fully sunk in. But I expect it to be a wild and furious Scot murdering everyone for the crown tonight.

BRAM: I’ll have to slip in and watch.

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ELLEN: Just stay out of sight for awhile. Maybe sign a copy and have Walter slip the book to him. I suppose it’s too late for a printed dedication.

BRAM: Right.

ELLEN: I said it went well. What’s wrong?

BRAM: I just got a note from my publisher. It turns out that I have to have my book read out loud to get copyright protection. With an audience. The laws protect playwrights but not novelists it turns out.

ELLEN: But that’s marvelous. What fun. We’ll all help you read it out loud. And we’ll get our usual audience to come. Who shall I be? Mina or Lucy?

BRAM: You are Ellen Terry. You don’t want to waste your talent doing this.

ELLEN: Of course I do, darling. You don’t think I’d miss this, do you? So? Mina or Lucy?

BRAM: It depends on whether you want to live or die twice?

ELLEN: Perfect. Two death scenes. I’ll have them weeping rivers down the aisles.

BRAM: I’m afraid they may be cheering for the second one when you’re a monster.

ELLEN: Screaming then. Henry always gets to make them scream and faint. No one’s ever screamed or fainted at one of my big moments. And Henry. We know what he’ll play of course.

BRAM: He’d never do it.

ELLEN: Of course he will.

BRAM: Read a novel aloud for no money to a non-paying audience? One written by his assistant theatre manager? Are we talking about Henry Irving?

ELLEN: Leave that to me, darling. All I have to do is plant a little bug in a toady’s ear. And I know the most darling little cockney toady.

BRAM: You realize that the book is three hundred and sixty-two pages long? It will take hours to read aloud.

ELLEN: We’ll have three intervals. You’ll arrange to sell beer and oranges. It won’t be a total loss.

BRAM: Three hundred and sixty-two pages?

ELLEN: Five intervals, then. Do you remember our Hamlet? It went on for yonks and yonks.

Even the curtain calls went on for yonks and yonks.

BRAM: For Hamlet they averaged thirty-six minutes.

ELLEN: Darling! You time the curtain calls? You never told me.

BRAM: I didn’t want you milking them.

ELLEN: Milking them? How do you think they got to be thirty-six minutes?

BRAM: All right. I’ll put on my begging cap and round up the supporting cast.

ELLEN: Put Teddy and Edie in it.

BRAM: Your children?

ELLEN: Yes. BRAM: But, they’re, well, children.

ELLEN: Not so’s you’d notice. Teddy’s nearly as tall as me. And splendid little readers, both of them. They run lines with Mummy all the time. Oh, make Teddy a henchman or a policeman.

Someone simply massive and hulking. He’ll love that.

BRAM: All right. If you can figure out how to get Henry, I’ll do the rest.

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ELLEN: Consider it done.

BLACKOUT. SCENE FIVE Walter mends Henry’s costume with a needle and thread, as Henry applies his stage makeup at the mirrored table.

WALTER: I read it meself. Nearly fainted with fright. They’re going to have an audience in.

Read it aloud to ‘em. The whole book for the copying thing.

HENRY: Ridiculous.

WALTER: The reading?

HENRY: The laws.

WALTER: Oh, yes sir. Most of ‘em are, sir. Better not to know ‘em. I meself have nothing to do with the law.

HENRY: Who’s playing him then?

WALTER: Him, sir?

HENRY: The monster? The vampire?

WALTER: Oh, they haven’t found anyone yet sir. They thought about William T. HENRY: With his blonde Byronic flowing locks? Ridiculous.

WALTER: I know sir.

HENRY: He’s as dim as a ha’penny candle flickering in the windy graveyard. At midnight.

With no moon.

WALTER: Yes, sir. He is pretty dim, sir, if I do say so meself.

HENRY: When we were rehearsing Hamlet, he kept stumbling over a line. Couldn’t get it right.

I stopped and asked him what the line meant. He guffawed and said, “Oh, you know, guvnor.”

He had memorized it by rote. Didn’t understand a single word of the entire Shakespeare canon.

WALTER: No, sir. But he does have lovely hair. You rarely see a full grown man with hair that color. Cornsilk. You see it on little boys, yes. Common as dirt on little boys, but grown men, no. I thought it must be a wig, but I once give it a good tug and no sir, it ain’t no wig. It’s his own yellow gold hair sure as I’m standing here.

HENRY: But the Count. Dracula. Who are they getting?

WALTER: They don’t got nobody. If Keane was alive, or Edwin Booth was in town. He’d be good. Probably.

HENRY: Edwin Booth?

WALTER: He did a lovely Iago to your Othello, sir.

HENRY: No, I did a lovely Iago to his Othello.

WALTER: That too, sir.

HENRY: Both of our Othello’s were sadly lacking. And even with Irving and Booth you can’t have a good Othello without, you know.

WALTER: An Othello, sir?

HENRY: So who’s playing it?

WALTER: No one’s playing it. It’s only a reading.

HENRY: Who’s reading the vampire?

WALTER: Well, it’s a grand part, but not a really big part. And it’s a long book. Three hundred Fall 2016 Proscenium 47

Stoker C.S. Whitcomb

and sixty-two pages.

HENRY: And Dracula’s only in sixty-four of them.

WALTER: Oh, I didn’t know you’d read it, sir.

HENRY: I flipped through it.

WALTER: Up to the minute, they can’t find anyone to play the Count. I guess they’ll have to get Mr. Stoker to read it. Or Ellen’s little boy Teddy. I know he would love to.

HENRY: Teddy?

WALTER: Or I’d be willing if they are in an absolute briny pickle. I can read in case you didn’t know this about me.

HENRY: Good God, what is the world coming to? Walter Babbitt reading Count Dracula?

Walter bites off the thread as he finishes sewing.

WALTER: Collinson, sir.

HENRY: What are you babbling about?

WALTER: It’s Walter Collinson, sir.

HENRY: Great jumping jackrabbits! Have you all lost your minds?

WALTER: Then you’ll do it yourself, sir?

HENRY: Don’t I always have to do everything myself?

WALTER: Almost, sir. Almost everything.

HENRY: We’ll just need one small change. No white mustaches.

He’s immortal, not an old man. Even an actor such as myself can only do so much.

WALTER: Cut the white mustaches. I’ll let him know.

SCENE SIX As the stage is being cleared with a couple of wooden lecterns for readers, Bram catches Henry’s attention.

BRAM: I appreciate your help with this, Henry.

HENRY: I know who you based the Count on.

BRAM: Dracula? You do?

HENRY: Of course. Anyone who knows you would see it at once. This tall thin figure? The blazing eyes. I know. You can’t put anything over on me.

BRAM: I’m sorry.

HENRY: It’s Whitman.

BRAM: Oh, yes. Of course. I’d hoped no one would get that.

HENRY: It’s useless to try and fool me.

BRAM: I see that now.

Henry takes his position in a chair upstage facing away from the audience.

The actual audience serves as the reading audience. Apparently this has been going on quite some time already. Bram reads from the book. Ellen waits, poised, emoting the brides of Dracula as they are described. Henry sits with his back to the audience as if he is terribly bored having to wait ages for his turn.

BRAM: (reading) “The other was fair with great masses of golden hair and eyes like pale sapphires. All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the 48 Proscenium Fall 2016

same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. They whispered together and then they all laughed such a silvery laugh, but hard as though the sound never could have come through the softness of human lips. It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of water glasses. The fair girl shook her head coquettishly and the other two urged her on.

ELLEN: Go on. You’re first and we shall follow.

BRAM: The other added ELLEN: He is young and strong. There are kisses for us all.

Bram tries to continue reading in a normal respectable voice. Ellen acts the vampire with sexy relish, acting out the movements, even to the near biting of Bram’s throat. He tries to go on as if nothing is happening.

BRAM: I lay quiet in an agony of delightful anticipation. The fair girl advanced and bent over me till I could feel the movement of her breath upon me. Sweet it was, honey-sweet, but with a bitter offensiveness as one smells in blood. The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness, which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck, she actually licked her lips like an animal, the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower went her head as the lips went below my mouth to fasten on my throat. She paused and I could feel the hot breath on my neck. The soft shivering touch of the lips on my throat, and two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited, waited with beating heart.

Henry whirls around, all stage presence, intensity, as Dracula. Ellen is not aware of him yet.

BRAM: But at that instant, another sensation swept through me as quick as lightning. I was conscious of the presence of the Count. And of his being in a storm of fury.

As Bram describes the next actions, Ellen and Henry act them out.

BRAM: As my eyes opened I saw him grasp the slender neck of the woman and with giant’s power draw it back, the blue eyes transformed with fury, the white teeth champing with rage.

The Count! Never did I imagine such. His eyes were blazing as if the flames of hellfire blazed behind them. His face was deathly pale. He hurled the woman from him, and motioned to the others, beating them back.

HENRY: How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I have forbidden it? Back I tell you! This man belongs to me! Beware how you meddle with him or you’ll have to deal with me.

ELLEN: You yourself never loved. You never love!

BRAM: On this the other women joined, and such mirthless, soulless laughter rang through the room that it almost made me faint. It seemed like the pleasure of fiends.

HENRY: Yes, I too can love. Now I promise you that when I am done with him you shall kiss him at your will. Now go! Go! I must awaken him, for there is work to be done.

With a flash of lightning and a clap of thunder, BLACKOUT. SCENE SEVEN Henry and Walter dressing him for a performance of MacBeth.

HENRY: I always thought it was Babbitt.

WALTER: I know, sir.

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HENRY: And you’ve let me go on saying it wrong for nearly thirty years.

WALTER: When you first hired me, you said I looked like a nervous rabbit. I said something about it being a bad habit and you thought I said “Babbit.” And that it was funny my name rhymed with rabbit.

HENRY: Which it doesn’t.

WALTER: No, sir. Not really.

HENRY: Not remotely.

WALTER: No, sir.

HENRY: And yet, you’ve let me go on for thirty years?

WALTER: I correct you from time to time, sir.

HENRY: No you don’t. You never correct me about anything.

WALTER: I suppose that’s true, sir.

HENRY: Thirty years, Walter?

WALTER: You said it was funny. And one thing you taught me is “never change something that’s funny. Comedy trumps all.”

HENRY: So it does, Walter. Comedy trumps all.

WALTER: True today as it was then.

HENRY: Thank you, Mr. Collinson.

WALTER: My pleasure, sir.

Bram steps into the dressing room and Henry and Walter look up shocked to see him there. He never steps into Henry’s dressing room. No one speaks for a moment. Henry looks closely at Bram.

HENRY: It’s finished?

BRAM: Yes. HENRY: When?

BRAM: This is the last performance followed by the final Beefsteak Dinner. The receivers take possession tomorrow morning.

It takes Henry only a moment to recover from the shock. He is already on to the next scene.

HENRY: All right. Let’s make it one to remember.

Bram nods.

BRAM: I’m sorry.

HENRY: Don’t be daft. Do you think this is the first theatre I’ve been drummed out of? It’s part of the life, my boy. Part of the life. Storms come and go and yet we go on. Whether in glorious golden temples like this one, royal palaces, roman amphitheatres or on rickety donkey-cart stages dragged around the countryside. We go on.

BRAM: Yes. HENRY: Better grab a seat. You’ll want to be out front for this one.

BRAM: Wouldn’t miss it.

HENRY: Go on. Can’t you see we’re trying to get dressed here.

Bram nods sadly and slips out. Walter is blinking back tears trying to put a brave, happy face on this.

WALTER: You can call me Babbitt any times you’s a mind to, Sir Henry.

HENRY: Thank you, Walter. I’m sure it will come to that. Wherever we play hereafter.

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(full Scots now) “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps at this petty pace from day to day until the last syllable of recorded time!”

Lights fade, then come up again upon the same, Henry’s Dressing Room, after the curtain calls.

SCENE EIGHT ELLEN AND HENRY tired after the last performance. She is in her dressing gown, hair long and hanging down in a long tail. He sits exhausted in his dressing room chair before his large mirror. Now Henry takes off his makeup.

ELLEN: I saw your boy, wee Harry tonight. His little face peering down at us.

HENRY: Yes. ELLEN: He lit up the box. How old is he now? Six already?

HENRY: Just.

ELLEN: Did he have a party?

HENRY: He must have done.

ELLEN: Ah. But you sent something.

HENRY: A Punch and Judy theatre.

ELLEN: I hope his Punch smashes the head off the Judy.

Henry laughs.

HENRY: Thank you.

ELLEN: And one other gift?

HENRY: What do you mean?

ELLEN: Fussie’s basket has been empty since Friday. Has something happened to her?

HENRY: She’s getting old. She nearly fell through the stage trap the other day. I thought she’d be safer with Harry.

ELLEN: I thought Florence loathed the little darling.

HENRY: That’s absurd. How could anyone possibly loathe dear little Fussie?

ELLEN: I will miss her, but it will make me happy every time I think of her in her new home.

Gnawing Florence’s satin slippers.

HENRY: Nothing lasts forever.

ELLEN: You can’t have loved Florence, can you, Henry? Ever?

HENRY: No. ELLEN: But you loved someone. Once.

HENRY: Yes. ELLEN: Tell me. I need a love story tonight.

HENRY: We were both very young. Her name was Nellie Moore. She played Nancy to my Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist.

ELLEN: I’ll bet your Bill Sykes was frightening.

HENRY: Terrifying. Ladies in the stalls screamed and fainted when I snarled at them.

ELLEN: What happened?

HENRY: She missed a performance. I went round to her house. They said she was ill. Scarlet fever. I came back three days later clutching a nosegay of violets and there was a black wreath on the door. When it opened they told me she had died.

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ELLEN: Oh, Henry.

HENRY: I was barely twenty. She was less.

ELLEN: And never again?

HENRY: I don’t think something like that happens more than once in a life’s time. Twice might actually kill us.

ELLEN: Oh. I see it now. For the first time, I understand your Hamlet. It was her you were thinking of when you held my Ophelia to your breast and then thrust me violently away from you. Those tears were for her.

HENRY: Yes. ELLEN: You were shattering.

HENRY: No. I was shattered.

ELLEN: I had one. A shattering of my own. When I was not quite so young.

HENRY: I know. And I hope I didn’t break your heart.

ELLEN: It’s all right, darling. Time heals all things.

HENRY: Good.

ELLEN: Did you know I was called me Nellie as well. Everyone called me Nellie as a girl.

HENRY: I know.

Walter enters with Irving’s evening dinner coat, velvet in purple and gold. He wordlessly helps Irving into it. Ellen stands and takes off her robe. Underneath she wears a splendid gown of gold and bronze. Walter tenderly moves her braid from front to down her back and makes sure it is hanging straight.

The two of them abandon their fatigue and before our eyes transform into royalty. King and Queen.

Walter places a delicate coronet of gold on Ellen’s head. Then a second, more substantial crown on Henry’s.

Henry proffers his arm. Ellen rests her hand on his. They turn upstage and exit into the light as the unseen crowd bursts into a muted ovation.

SCENE NINE When they have disappeared into the light, Bram appears downstage, like an unwitting narrator or chorus feeling some need for closure.

BRAM: There is a tradition in the theatre of curtain speeches on closing nights, though this is the first I’ve given myself.

Ellen Terry was the second actress to be knighted. The first was an American which caused a great uproar from the public. Henry Irving went on to play for a few more years. In October 1905, at the age of sixty-seven, after a performance, Henry collapsed in the lobby of his hotel, and died a few moments later in the arms of his loyal dresser, Walter. Throughout Britain flags flew at half staff. At the Lyceum the pillars were wrapped in black crepe. Every London hansom cab driver tied a black ribbon around his whip. Henry Irving is buried in Westminster Abbey at the feet of Shakespeare.

Looking back over a century some things telescope into focus and some lengthen like shadows, distorting what was. But these things happened. These people lived once. And stitched a golden temple from the slenderest gossamer spider’s web and green iridescent beetles’ wings. It was 52 Proscenium Fall 2016

magic, but temporal. Ephemeral. No less glorious for its briefness. Like the ancient Incan temples of gold, the Lyceum still stands and Henry Irving’s statue near it. Even though everyone who ever saw them in their splendor is gone now. The Beefsteak Club has fallen once again into a dusty, rusting underground cavern awaiting some future archeologist to discover it and wonder what sort of luminous creatures once blazed here before the lights went out.

BLACKOUT. END OF PLAY

Fall 2016 Proscenium  53

Defacing Michael Jackson Aurin Squire

54 Proscenium Fall 2015

Photo by Maria Baranova

A Conversation with Playwright Christopher Shinn Christopher Shinn’s plays include Where Do We Live (2005 Obie Award for Playwriting), Dying City (2008 Pulitzer Prize Finalist), An Opening in Time (Harford Stage), Teddy Ferrara (Goodman Theatre), Picked (Vineyard Theatre), Now or Later (Royal Court Theatre), and more. His plays have been produced by the Royal Court Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, Roundabout Theatre, South Coast Rep, Lincoln Center Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, and more. He is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in playwriting and teaches playwriting at the New School of Drama.

Can you tell us a bit about your background and why you started writing plays?

I’m interested in reality -- in what actually happens -- and in understanding reality, analyzing it. To do that you need to have lots of ways of looking at it. My plays reflect my general interests, and are informed (but not determined) by the disciplines I’ve studied to try to get a deeper understanding of why things happen as they do.

You teach playwriting at the New School of Drama. How does your work as professor influence your work as a playwright?

A great thing about being a teacher is that you are forced to articulate what you believe. In doing so you learn the flaws and limitations in your thinking, spurring you to further thought.

Also, it is wonderful to be around younger people who have grown up in a somewhat different world. They also challenge me to refine my thinking. But the best thing about being a teacher is how good it feels to help people grow.

My mother grew up deprived of culture, and so exposed me to culture from an early age. I loved acting and writing and when I was old enough to understand that the two disciplines in a way come together in playwriting, I started writing plays.

You are a fan a psychoanalysis, and many of your plays are deep explorations of the Your first professionally produced play, human psyche. What draws you to psychoFour, premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, analysis, and how does this interest show and many of your plays have premiered in up in your works?

London before being produced in the United States. What is different about having Psychoanalysis is the attempt to understand a play produced in the United States and what is going on at the level of psychic reality. having one produced in London?

What creates our dreams and why? What do our fantasies mean? How do these deeper layers of The biggest difference is the audience. Audi- our minds inform our actions in everyday life? ences in London are younger and the energy in Psychic reality is in some ways still culturally the auditorium is much more alive. taboo, yet it is present in almost all great drama from the Greeks onwards. We persist in refusYour plays deal with issues of class, pow- ing to come to terms with who we truly are, but er, sexuality, war, and human psychology, at the same time there is a deep desire to know. among other things. What draws you to the Art and psychoanalysis at their best offer us the subjects you write about? possibility of knowledge, and confrontation too Fall 2016 Proscenium 55

Burning Cities Simon Fill

with our inability to fully know ourselves, and the dangers and temptations of believing we can.

What inspires you?

I’m inspired by getting to know people, hearing about how they think and feel, learning about their histories and desires. And I’m inspired by great minds who are traveling to unexplored territory in an attempt to further fill out our understanding of reality. Essentially I am inspired by intimacy -- sharing, openness, and risk.

What kind of theatre excites you?

I like theatre that communicates something absolutely unique and honest, and isn’t trying to control or manipulate. Theatre that is unrepressed, generous, and clear.

What advice do you have for playwrights starting out?

To be a playwright, one should write plays, read great literature, study deep thinkers from before our current era, go to psychotherapy, and most importantly, cultivate the skills required for genuine intimacy.

What projects are you working on now?

I have various projects at different stages of completion and hope there will be some firm news by the end of the year about at least some of them!

56 Proscenium Fall 2016

Burning Cities

THE GROYSER by By James Brown Simon Fill Fall 2015 Proscenium  57

Burning Cities Simon Fill

A Conversation With the Playwright Simon Fill’s “Night Visits” won the Heideman Award from Actors Theatre of Louisville, where the play premiered in the Wintermezzo Festival.

“Night Visits” received its New York premiere at HERE Arts Center, produced by Circle East Theatre Company. Simon was originally a member of the Playwrights Project, a small group of young playwrights nurtured by Circle Repertory Theatre. His plays have been produced in New York City, regionally, and internationally.

“The Gift” was recently published by Vintage Books in the anthology Plays For Two. He was an A.S.K. American exchange playwright at the Royal Court Theatre, and his full-length play Post Punk Life received a month-long developmental production by Lincoln Center Theatre Directors Lab. Simon was awarded a playwriting residency and fellowship by Yaddo, where he began his full-length play Burning Cities. Burning Cities won an international competition, the BETC Generations Award, and Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company (BETC) workshopped the play at the Denver Center. Burning Cities was just named a Panndora’s Box winner and will receive a staged reading at the Tenth Anniversary Panndora’s Box Festival of New Works, produced by Panndora Theatre Company at the Garage Theatre in Long Beach, CA.

What was your inspiration for the play?

I began writing Burning Cities during a residency at Yaddo, and it took a little while for me to realize what inspired the play: grappling in my own life with what defines a meaningful family, how we create one, what risks are inherent in that, and how we cope with the deepest kind of loss and find a way to go on.

An audience member at the Generations Award staged reading of the play by Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company pressed me to go further back in my inspiration. I recalled how I’d been a volunteer bringing around a book cart to patients at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Book cart volunteers were really there to give patients someone to talk with. One day a young woman with cancer came to my cart and was effusive about the joy and excitement of reading Dick Francis mysteries. She couldn’t get enough of them. I still remember her face as she spoke. She was incredibly present. Perhaps that memory influenced the character of Elise.

What do you want the audience to come away with?

The feeling they’ve seen something honest, unsentimental, and authentic. Something that shows the world as it is, or at it could be. Of Simon has an MFA in Theatre from Sarah Law- course this doesn’t necessarily tie a play to rerence, and taught playwriting Off-Broadway alism. for years at the Women’s Project Theater, then at The New American Theatre School and the I want a play to entertain, too, to make peoBoulder International Fringe Festival. He is a ple laugh, to move them. And there’s a deeper new member of the PlayGround Writers Pool, idea explored in each play. In Burning Cities a playwright member of Circle East Theatre it’s family: the faith required to create one, how Company, and a member of the Dramatists family isn’t necessarily biological but a deeper Guild. bond, the courage needed to nurture this bond 58 Proscenium Fall 2016

through good times and bad. The character of Elise, her honesty and hope, how she changes the lives of the disparate adults who adopt her, her notion of family, what she sees moment to moment—I want the audience to come away with that.

“Visitations,” which not long ago had an illuminating reading with terrific actors. Experienced actors can be so giving, and are essential to the development process of my plays.

And I recently finished a one-act, “One Good Day,” begun after a recent move to the Bay What projects are you working on now?

Area. Again, a couple of terrific actors in a reading—and my spouse, who is encouraging My agent Susan Schulman and I are beginning yet unstintingly honest—helped me see what to market Burning Cities, which won the BETC needed revision.

Generations Award, was workshopped by Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company (BETC) at the What playwrights inspire you?

Denver Center, with a staged reading in Chautauqua, and is ready for its world premiere. The Those who take risks, show artistic and emoworkshop with BETC was enormously helpful tional courage, playwrights who push the in developing the play. I cannot praise enough art form forward, like Caryl Churchill, Tony Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company (including Kushner, Martin Crimp, Sarah Ruhl, Will Eno. the director Stephen Weitz and the dramaturg Among earlier playwrights, Williams, Beckett, Heather Beasley) and the actors Luke Sorge, O’Neill, Chekhov. The list could go on and on.

Damon Guerrasio, Heather Nicolson Hughes, and Kate Poling. Their public staged reading of Why did you start writing plays?

Burning Cities received a tremendous, wonderful audience response—it couldn’t have been I began writing as a poet, while an undergradbetter. I sat in the last row studying the reac- uate at Cornell University, studying with wontions of the large audience at every moment of derful poets there, who taught me a great deal. the staged reading, and afterwards I did a half Then I wrote a novel. When I went to Sarah hour audience talkback along with director Ste- Lawrence for graduate school in fiction writphen Weitz, who is also the Producing Ensem- ing, I was required to take two electives and ble Director of BETC. I’ll always be grateful to chose playwriting and theatre directing. Those BETC. It was a privilege to see the play come electives changed my life. I realized I had the to life. ability to write dialogue, as well as, from being a poet, heightened language. I could hear charBurning Cities was just named a Panndora’s acters speaking as I wrote, and I came to underBox winner and will be given a staged reading stand my storytelling has a dramatic sensibility.

by Panndora Productions Theatre Company in I switched in my second semester to a Master of the Panndora’s Box 10th Annual New Works Fine Arts in Theatre, with an emphasis in PlayFestival. The play will open the festival at 8 PM writing and Directing. on Friday, November 4, at the Garage Theatre in Long Beach, California. I’m excited about that.

What kind of theatre excites you?

I’m writing the third draft of another full-length, Theatre that is honest, unsentimental, and Fall 2016 Proscenium 59

Burning Cities Simon Fill

A Reading of “Burning Cities” at the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company breaks new ground. All great plays do this, and a part of it is the playwright’s original voice.

A directing teacher from graduate school, Paul Austin, told me any groundbreaking play will get mixed reviews initially. This is true for plays as different at The Glass Menagerie, Waiting for Godot, and Plenty.

Arthur Miller and Milan Stitt, among others.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

In Eugene O’Neill’s time his plays were national bestsellers. I believe good plays deserve to be widely read as well as produced. Thank you, What advice do you have for playwrights Proscenium Journal, for continuing this tradistarting out? tion.

Write, write, write. Be honest in your writing.

Knock out any sentimentality from it. Sentimentality runs both ways: dishonestly happy or dishonestly bleak. Listen to how different people talk. Read and reread Kenneth Thorpe Rowe’s book, Write That Play, and devour Aristotle’s Poetics. Break or bend dramatic principles only for good reason, and after you know how to use them. Kenneth Thorpe Rowe taught 60 Proscenium Fall 2016

Burning Cities is copyright © 2015 by Simon Fill. All inquiries regarding rights shall be sent to the info@prosceniumjournal.com and will be forwarded to the playwright or their agent. Performances of Burning Cities are subject to royalty, and are fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America and all countries covered by the International Copyright Union. All rights, including professional and amateur productions, staged readings, television, motion picture, radio, translations, photocopies, and all other reproductions of this play are strictly reserved.

Burning Cities Simon Fill

CHARACTERS JOE, mid-thirties to mid-forties, owner of a philosophy bookstore, over-educated and underpaid, a downtown New York boy, likable.

TIA, mid-thirties to mid-forties, a nurse, not quite as over-educated, a big heart she tries to hide but cannot, somewhat edgy.

RON, mid-thirties to mid-forties, a successful literary agent, Joe’s best friend, whip-smart.

ELISE, seventeen, loyal, a writer, a young literary artist.

Please feel free to cast these roles with diverse actors. Diversity only supports the meaning of the play.

TIME AND SETTING The present. Multiple locations in New York City, each of which can be suggested simply with a few key scenic/set pieces.

ACT ONE SCENE 1 Darkness. A glowing, mystical light comes up on ELISE, a girl of seventeen, holding a music box. She lifts the lid and stares insifide. A melody wafts out: beautiful, wistful, haunting. It lingers. A light comes up on RON, an engaging man in his mid-forties. Hip, downtown look. He watches from a distance. Slowly the music fades out, as Elise stares into the box.

RON: (to audience) She lifts the lid of the music box, listens, looks inside. What does she see?

To keep looking like that? She showed us once, small figures, people, far from each other, tall buildings around them. As the spring unwound the people moved closer. But I think she saw something else, too.

It’s easy to forget how young she was. When you think of what she did. And what happened later.

Don’t get me wrong. She was a teenager. She could have the social graces of a New York cabbie. Who you forgot to tip. She once told me her favorite word was “fuck,” not in the literal meaning, but because it was so versatile. I asked her to explain, and she said, “The fucking fucker’s fucked.”

She could be empathetic, too. Once, she asked, “Is it hard being a literary agent?” I replied, “It’s hard being a human.” She nodded, like what I’d said was really smart, though it was actually kind of stupid. It takes a lot of effort to be as unoriginal as I sometimes am.

“Elise.” That was her name, she insisted we use it. None of this “Ellie” shit. “I gave up being a girly girl when I got sick,” she said. I told her many a gay man had said the same thing.

When we first adopted her, she wouldn’t talk to me. She’d speak somewhat to Joe. But most of all to Tia, because they’d known each other such a long time. When you’re as sick as Elise was, Fall 2015 2016 Proscenium 61

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that counts even more. Then one day, she invited me into her room. She told me, “I feel safe with you.” I replied, “Because I’m gay?” She said, “No, ‘cause I’m smarter than you.” (beat) I wish I could tell you it all ended well, I wish I could tell you that.

But I suppose I need to start when Joe...met Tia. SCENE 2 A bookstore. JOE, mid-thirties, adjusts books on a shelf. He wears worn red high-tops. He looks out the front window. Sound of rain. He shakes his head. Returns to the books. The door opens and we hear the chime attached to it, to indicate a customer is entering. The chime has a magical, powerful beauty, which lingers. TIA wanders in, soaking. Mid-thirties. She wears Doc Martens.

TIA: ...Whoa...That is...That is...

JOE: Wet? She is some distance away. He finds a towel behind the counter and tosses it to her.

TIA: Thank you.

She dries herself briskly.

JOE: Nasty out there.

TIA: It’s raining, too.

Beat. He smiles.

TIA: (indicates store)What is this?

JOE: I often wonder that myself. A philosophy bookstore. “For every question you have, we’ll give you ten more.”

TIA: I love philosophy!

JOE: You do?

TIA: (checks her watch) You about to close? It’s almost seven.

JOE: We got a few minutes.

She peruses a shelf, checks a book.

JOE: Oh...you don’t want that, too depressing.

She moves, finds another book.

JOE: Oh, not that one, way too long.

She moves again, finds another book.

JOE: I’d stay away from that. Boring!

TIA: I’ve got a question.

JOE: Shoot.

TIA: You sure you work here?

JOE: I tied up the real owner in back. I own another bookstore. (points to a book) Try that one.

TIA: (reads the title)“The Meaning of Meaning”?

JOE: A page-turner. (off her look) This is why I do most of my sales online...You really like philosophy?

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TIA: I minored in it.

JOE: What’d you major in?

TIA: I’m a nurse.

JOE: Huh. My mom was a nurse.

Pause.

TIA: A guy died on our operating table today. He was getting his appendix removed, and his heart stopped for no reason. We brought him back, but it was scary.

JOE: I broke up a fight in the store before you came in. Between a punk and a Wall Street guy. I had to throw them both out.

TIA: Who won?

JOE: I think I did.

TIA: I was a punk. And I dated a Wall Street guy. What a coincidence. Those guys are like my inner conflict.

JOE: Huh. Why’d you stop being a punk?

TIA: Who trusts a nurse with a Mohawk?

Joe looks out the front window. The light dims.

JOE: It’s raining harder. You can’t see across the street.

TIA: We could be the only people in the world right now.

JOE: Wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

Tia turns to look at Joe. For the first time, they really take each other in. Their attraction mesmerizes them. A moment. The lights transform and tighten into a beautiful, mystical glow, over the two of them.

TIA: Hi. JOE: (dazed) Me, too. (beat) ...Yeah, I...

TIA: What? What?

JOE: (shy, embarrassed) Maybe I should go.

TIA: This is your bookstore.

JOE: Right! Thanks. (beat, lightly) I’m pondering our lives together.

They smile. Beat.

TIA: People...things...they’ll tear us...everyone we love...apart...

JOE: You’re even more of an optimist than I am. (beat) I won’t let that happen. I won’t.

They stare at each other, still mesmerized. A moment. The lights return to normal, and Joe and Tia come out of their daze, though the attraction continues.

TIA: Oh! I gotta meet someone for dinner.

JOE: Date?

TIA: A friend, seventeen-year-old girl. From the hospital.

JOE: Patient?

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TIA: How many patient teenagers do you know?

He checks out the window. The light brightens.

JOE: It’s getting better.

TIA: It’s no longer a deluge.

JOE: (cheerfully) Just a downpour. I’m Joe. TIA: Tia. JOE: You don’t have to buy that book.

TIA: If I don’t like it, can I get a refund?

They look at each other.

JOE: Only if you come back to the store.

They keep looking at each other. Lights fade.

SCENE 3

Ron. RON: You know when you get in someone’s car the first time? You don’t know them that well.

You tuck in your seat belt a little tighter. You look at their hands, which suddenly seem odd, too large, or too dry, you think “those hands are about to hold my life,” and you wish you had a bottle of moisturizer. You’re just getting to know someone. To care about them. This might be the person, but you’ve both gotta survive this car trip.

The key goes in the ignition. You take a silent breath. They pull out from the parking space, or garage, and you think if you grip the seat hard enough, push down hard enough, you can keep the car on the road. Then you remember that the seat you’re in, the passenger seat, is sometimes called the “death” seat.

But before you have time to take that in, you’re moving, shifting in and out of traffic, easily, you sense those hands have done this every day, for years, and your breath comes back, the blood returns to your arms, your shoulders release, your face gets warm, and all of a sudden your whole body goes, “Ahhh.”

Or maybe it doesn’t.

SCENE 4 Joe and Tia stand at a bar, nursing cocktails. Post punk music plays. It fades out.

JOE: That sushi was good.

TIA: It tasted just like fish.

JOE: So, this Wall Street guy, Daniel?

TIA: He wasn’t mean. I think he wanted me to grow up. But his idea of growing up was owning lots of things. At first I was impressed by how much money he made. I mean, I’m a nurse, I don’t exactly own a yacht. But after a while it seemed to be all he talked about.

JOE: My older brothers are investment bankers. They wanted me to join them. But I said before I joined them, I had to figure out if I actually existed. That led to a philosophy degree, which led to another philosophy degree, which led to another philosophy degree. (cheerfully) And I still can’t prove I’m here, though I’m now qualified to teach other people that they’re not.

TIA: How come you broke up with Carol?

64 Proscenium Fall 2016

JOE: She wanted to move to the suburbs and have kids. I wanted to stay in the city and have a dog.

TIA: Did you get a dog?

JOE: No. I don’t think one person should own a dog. The poor dog starts to feel responsible for you, and gets resentful. Besides, I eat mostly pasta, which dogs don’t like.

TIA: When I was a freshman in nursing school, I had a Chihuahua. It loved linguini with clam sauce.

JOE: What was its name?

TIA: Kierkegaard.

JOE: You’re as weird as I am.

TIA: Thanks. I think.

Pause.

TIA: Why is this bar empty?

JOE: They knew I was coming.

TIA: No, really.

JOE: They knew I was coming. When I was in grad school, this bar was the “in” place. I worked here as a bouncer.

TIA: A bouncer?

JOE: Someone’s gotta do it.

TIA: You like fights?

JOE: No, I hate fights. That’s why I was a bouncer, to break them up.

TIA: A philosopher and a bouncer. So those two guys brawling by your bookshelves had no idea what they were getting into. Is there a test to become a bouncer?

JOE: Uh-huh. If Prada is having a sale, they give you a list of fifteen items. If you can get out of the store with all fifteen and no bruises, anyone will hire you.

TIA: You’re not big.

JOE: I’m fast. It’s more important.

TIA: (beat) What did you think when you first met me?

JOE: You make it sound so long ago. I thought this person needs a towel. Badly.

TIA: No, really.

JOE: I thought: She makes me feel as though I’m here.

TIA: Thanks, that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.

JOE: I doubt that.

He moves closer to her. She smiles.

TIA: This must be the emptiest bar in New York City.

JOE: Once, when I was working here, I took a break at the bar. The front wall exploded and a car burst through it. Everyone was crowded around the bar, so no one got hurt. The car was a Caddy, and its ornament logo was still on the hood, hadn’t moved, wasn’t even scratched. My first thought was, “That’s American craftsmanship. You don’t see that enough anymore. What a privilege.” I think I was in shock.

TIA: Now I understand why this bar is empty.

JOE: It was weird, kind of a high point and a low point. It took a month to rebuild, and after that this place was no longer “in.” People came here to have a quiet talk.

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TIA: Except when a car would explode through the wall.

JOE: Yeah, that kind of lessened the intimate feeling.

Pause. He takes her hand. She looks nervous.

TIA: (quickly) At work this morning, I’m talking to a patient, pre-op, I’m looking around the room, and I’m like thinking, “Whoa. Haven’t I been here before?” I didn’t mean for work, ‘course I’d been in that room like a trillion times, I meant in some like profound, permanent, like I’d done this over and over in some deep immovable sense, and here I was again, I knew exactly what to say, ‘cause this was who I am, like I was a spectator at some freaky rehearsal for my inner life. I’ve got a fear of being shallow, that’s why I did a philosophy minor, though what could be more shallow than a philosophy minor, right? so any time I have a thought that’s remotely under the surface, I’m like, “Whoa, girl! You’ve done your bit for the moment. Now you can have a latte.”

JOE: Wow. What you just said. I felt like I was in a blender at high speed.

TIA: It’s like that woman you dated, Carol? In real life people do move to the suburbs. It’s frightening. I’ve lost my two best friends to the suburbs, and they’re not happier, in fact they seem worse. (beat) I mean, are we all just confused and pretending?

She shivers.

JOE: Philosophers don’t answer questions. We build glass cages around them and say we’re safe. When we’re not. My thesis advisor, whenever one of her students was about to get a doctorate, would give them her recipe for vegetarian chili. Then she’d say, “That’s more useful than anything we’ve done in the last four years.” The head of the department told her to stop doing that, ‘cause it was too depressing. So instead she gave students her recipe for fondue.

He looks at her. They kiss. Their kiss has an intensity that surprises them.

JOE: I’ve gotta go.

He exits. She looks after him. Silence.

SCENE 5 Later that night. Ron’s living room. Joe paces. Ron is trying to soothe him. Ron is the same age as Joe, mid-thirties.

JOE: I can’t believe this!

RON: Will you chill. It was only a date.

JOE: Right. Right!

Joe paces faster, even more distraught.

RON: I’m continually impressed with my ability to calm people.

JOE: What is wrong with me? How could I have done that to her? She was...great. Great!

Joe stops.

RON: Um? The answer to the first question might be the answer to the second?

JOE: Dude, get with it, if this was a hockey game I’d be in sudden death overtime.

RON: When I was a kid that term used to scare the crap out of me. It reminded me we were all gonna die.

JOE: What a fun kid you must have been.

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RON: My favorite writer was Dostoyevsky.

Joe tries to think of a smart response, but can’t. He is too flustered over what just went wrong with Tia. Beat. He takes a tiny cocktail umbrella from his pocket.

JOE: See this? I saved it. As a memento. Of our first date. I put it away at the start of the evening. What a loser I am.

He throws the tiny cocktail umbrella to the floor and stamps on it. Loudly. For far too long.

Then he stubs his toe.

JOE: Ow...the fuck.

Ron looks at him.

JOE: What.

RON: You are completely insane.

Joe puts his hand over his eyes.

JOE: Tell me something I don’t know.

Joe looks at Ron. JOE: You’re my oldest and closest friend.

RON: I’m beginning to regret that.

JOE: What is wrong with me?!

RON: Sometimes children think if they ask a question over and over, the answer will magically appear. That isn’t actually true.

JOE: I should stay away from her. Right? It’s safer that way. Right?!

Ron stares at the floor. Beat.

RON: Unless you’re a cocktail umbrella.

JOE: Why do I have such a fear of intimacy?

RON: ...We’re gone over this...

JOE: (stricken) How could I treat her so badly?

RON: Hey. C’mon. She might be laughing about it with her friends. As we speak.

JOE: ...You think?

RON: Of course. It was only a date. A date. Odd things happen on dates. People bring lots of baggage.

JOE: Some of us have more than we can carry.

RON: Who doesn’t? Who doesn’t!

JOE: Right. I’ll just treat this as something that didn’t work out. A weird...quirk. No big deal.

RON: (a reassuring smile) There you go.

Silence. Joe is miserable. He groans. Ron looks at him.

RON: ...Um...What’s her name?

JOE: Tia. RON: Short for...Tiajuana?

JOE: No, not short for anything. (chuckles) We spoke about how she went through a time in high school when she told everyone her full name was Venetia, to be more “fascinating.” We laughed about that, I mean, what’s a more boring name than Joe! But I told her she didn’t need a name change to be “fascinating,” I could’ve talked with her forever.

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Ron takes this in. He looks uncomfortable.

RON: Maybe you should...get in touch with her again?

JOE: What, so she can make fun of me?

RON: No, that’s my exclusive territory. (pause) It was only a thought.

JOE: ...You mean it?

RON: I’ve never seen you so...This one seems different...

Pause.

JOE: (moved) I don’t deserve a friend like you.

RON: True. (beat) This is gonna come back to haunt me, I know it.

JOE: You are such an opaque depressive!

RON: A different kind of insult. I appreciate the variety. Thank you.

JOE: ...Thank you for talking.

Beat.

RON: (softly) Words. They’re just sounds we make when we don’t want to be alone.

SCENE 6 The next morning. A hospital corridor. Joe enters. He wears a black trench coat. From his shirt pocket he takes out a piece of paper and checks it, puzzled. Elise walks in, carrying her music box. She is seventeen, charismatic, but pale. Wears a light brown corduroy skirt. She notices Joe, hesitates. Then she approaches him.

ELISE: May I help you?

JOE: I doubt it.

ELISE: You sure? I’m a volunteer. I know my way around.

He notices the music box.

JOE: What is that?

ELISE: Oh, a music box. A patient wanted to see it. I didn’t realize what a drag it would be to carry it around. I must look like a doofus.

JOE: Maybe you can help me.

ELISE: ‘Cause I look like a doofus?

JOE: Yeah. I mean, no. What do you do as a volunteer?

ELISE: I bring around a book cart so patients can borrow a book. But that’s an excuse, it gives patients a chance to talk with me, if they need to talk to someone. You’d be surprised how many people come here alone. It’s okay if I see only one person a day, if that person gets to open up a lot.

JOE: Huh. Good for you.

ELISE: I’m lucky to do it. So how can I help you, Mr. Generation X cheesy trench coat looks like a flasher in mourning guy?

JOE: I’m trying to find someone who works in this place.

ELISE: I heard a doctor say that the other day.

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JOE: I’m not a doctor.

ELISE: The world breathes a sigh of relief.

JOE: Teenagers are sarcastic.

ELISE: (sarcastic) No we aren’t.

JOE: Does a nurse work here?

ELISE: This is a hospital, so it’s unlikely.

JOE: No, I meant. Does a nurse named Tia Anders work here?

Pause.

ELISE: You’re not the schmomo who cheesed off on a date with her last night?

Pause.

JOE: That would be me.

ELISE: You hurt my friend.

She puts down the music box and slaps him, hard.

JOE: OW...the fuck?

ELISE: That’s the first date she’s had in three years.

JOE: It’s the first I’ve had in four years.

ELISE: I’d cut down, if I was you.

JOE: I’ll take it into consideration.

ELISE: Why don’t you fight back?

JOE: I...don’t hit kids?

ELISE: People only use this hall coming from the elevator.

JOE: So if I yell for help, no one will hear me.

ELISE: I will, but I guess that doesn’t count.

Pause.

ELISE: You know what this means?

JOE: I’m more scared right now than I’ve ever been in my life?

ELISE: You can go, and no one will know you were here. I won’t tell Tia I saw you. When I came in this afternoon she was crying. I’d never seen that before. I asked what was wrong, I thought someone died, and she goes, “I must be the worst kisser in the world.” I go, “Excuse me?” Then she tells me she had the most beautiful kiss, with you, more about that later, and you’d suddenly decided you forgot to floss or something and you left. No goodbye. People who don’t say goodbye are like people who forget to change their socks. They stink, and you don’t know where it’s coming from. So now she thinks you’re wonderful and she’s starring in the sequel to some horror movie called, “The Spinster Nurse.” It’s way obvious you don’t understand the word “consequences,” but if you leave quietly, maybe you can get to a bookstore before it closes, and buy a dictionary, preferably one with a dork on the cover saying, “Hi. I’m for total morons who specialize in being tacky and stressful.”

Pause.

JOE: (stricken) She was crying?

ELISE: No, I just said that. What is your probltem? It’s like this is a long distance call but I’m standing right next to you.

JOE: I’m the black hole of relationships.

ELISE: You’re way easy on yourself.

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JOE: You cheer people up?

ELISE: They don’t pay me for it.

JOE: That’s a relief. You still haven’t told me if Tia works here.

ELISE: You’re right. I haven’t.

JOE: Could you please move?

She blocks him from going down the hall. Joe sighs.

JOE: This is dumb.

ELISE: That’s the pot calling the kettle black.

JOE: I’d like to talk with your parents.

ELISE: I don’t have any!

Tia enters from the same direction as Joe did. She wears a nurse’s uniform and carries a pink zebra-striped umbrella. She notices Elise first, since Joe has his back to her.

TIA: Hey cute thing.

ELISE: (points at Joe) It’s the sheep in wolf’s clothing.

Joe turns around. Beat.

ELISE: He was just leaving.

TIA: (without anger, a little sad) Some people are good at that.

Tia indicates for Elise to leave. Elise picks up her music box and does, though she looks concerned about Tia being alone with Joe. JOE: Is that your friend? She sticks up for you.

TIA: Elise is tougher than you and I will ever be.

Pause.

JOE: I messed up, I got scared, I’m sorry. I can change.

TIA: It was my fault. I laid too much on you for a first date. I don’t know who the genius was who insisted getting to know someone meant talking about your flaws. It’s like, “Hi, I’m totally neurotic and unstable. Now you can get close to me.”

JOE: I’ve got some good news and some bad news.

TIA: (doubtful) Okay.

JOE: I’m an insensitive jerk.

TIA: What’s the good news?

JOE: That is the good news.

Pause.

TIA: What’s the bad news?

He appears so nervous that she gives him an encouraging look.

JOE: ...You’re stuck with me?

Pause. She smiles.

SCENE 7

Ron. RON: A great poet once said truth and beauty are the same thing. Of course he was talking about pottery, so that kind of qualifies the statement.

I didn’t hear from Joe for four days. It was strangely liberating. It reminded me of when I’d 70 Proscenium Fall 2016

done a wilderness retreat in the Catskills led by a couple of angry folksingers, Jonathan and Tara, and we were ordered to leave behind our cell phones. We got lost at one point, and every time someone’d ask where we were, they’d say, (sings angrily) “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.” (speaking) It almost made me quit being a liberal.

The problem with having a best friend is you think you know them. But the odd thing was, I did know Joe. And when he called and told me he’d seen Tia at the hospital, I thought once more, “I’ve got a feeling about this one.” It wasn’t a good feeling, but it was still a feeling.

When the agency I work for made me head of non-fiction, I became their money maker. If that sounds impressive, it isn’t. I even created a piece of proprietary software that predicted a book’s profit margins over time. The program never failed, except for one kind of book. And no, it’s not self-help. Tell an American they have a flaw, and you’re disturbingly popular.

A memoir. Who knows how a life will sell?

SCENE 8 Four days later. Joe’s apartment. Evening. Joe and Tia sitting in bed. He wears a black teeshirt; she, a cozy men’s flannel shirt, faded black, too big for her.

JOE: So. You did have a normal childhood.

TIA: I know. It’s embarrassing. I’ll never be on a talk show.

JOE: You must miss your dad.

TIA: I hope he’s somewhere watching me.

JOE: Not right now, though.

TIA: That would be uncomfortable.

She indicates the shirt she’s wearing.

TIA: This was his.

JOE: That’s a relief. I thought it was from some old boyfriend.

He touches her shirt.

JOE: It’s soft.

TIA: He was a big softie.

Pause.

TIA: He was a contractor. Ivan. He had big hands, with calluses. When I was a kid I asked him, “Papa, why are your hands so hard?” He goes, “’Cause I spend every day trying to smooth down the rough edges of your life.” Not like my mom, Monica. I’m thirty-five and she still wants to control me. The warmest thing about her is she’s a divorce lawyer. When you’re the kind of lawyer even other lawyers look down on, you’re in trouble. I have dinner with her once a week, and I always worry she’s going to bill me for it. When Dad was alive he kind of protected me from her. Did you have a normal childhood?

Joe shakes his head. She takes his hand.

TIA: You don’t have to tell me about it right now.

JOE: That’s a relief.

TIA: This has been the best four days of my life.

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Pause. He touches her cheek.

JOE: ...Something I’ve been meaning to tell you.

TIA: My feet smell?

JOE: This is only the beginning.

Pause. They become uncomfortable.

TIA: Elise told me she likes you.

He rubs his cheek.

JOE: She has a painful way of showing it. The next time we talk, I’m gonna get a shot of novocaine beforehand.

TIA: She was left on the hospital steps as a baby, she has no parents, she’s been in six foster homes, she’s in remission from leukemia, and she doesn’t even know her real name. I know, it’s unbelievable. I’ve been friends with her four years, since she started volunteering.

JOE: That’s. It’s like if Dickens was a depressive.

TIA: She doesn’t feel sorry for herself. She’s a writer.

JOE: A writer who doesn’t feel sorry for herself? That’s not possible. She’s kinda young to be a writer.

TIA: In many ways she’s older than me or you.

JOE: That doesn’t mean much in my case.

TIA: I helped get her assigned to a new social worker, a good friend of mine, Claire, someone who understands her more.

JOE: You nurses are like behind-the-scenes political operatives.

TIA: I guess that’s a compliment.

JOE: She really doesn’t know her birth name?

Tia nods.

TIA: She was left at the hospital when she was a baby and already sick. No note.

JOE: Poor kid.

TIA: Don’t say that to her, she’ll bite your head off.

JOE: Poor murderous psycho kid.

TIA: That’s better.

Pause. They kiss.

TIA: Do you think we’re taking this too fast?

JOE: If we were hit by a truck tomorrow, would you think, “I was taking this too fast”?

TIA: No, I’d be unconscious.

JOE: You wouldn’t think that, right?

TIA: I’d be unconscious, I wouldn’t think anything.

JOE: Everyone’s a comedian in bed. (beat) I was teaching a class on personal identity to undergrads when I was a grad student, and I asked each of them to write down a question they could ask about their future selves ten years from now. Most people wrote stuff like, “Am I married?” or, “Am I rich?” One guy wrote, “Am I an asshole?” But nobody wrote, “Did I take it too fast?”

Pause.

TIA: ...I, I’ve been scared to tell you...I can’t have kids.

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Silence.

JOE: Does your doctor know?

She gives him a look. Beat. He gets out of bed and comes around to her side. He kneels.

JOE: Let’s not have kids...together.

She smiles.

TIA: I’m deeply moved by your lack of commitment. (beat) What I have, it’s called primary ovarian insufficiency, not enough eggs. When I told my mom, she said, “That’s okay. Kids are a big disappointment.”

JOE: Wow. That’s hurtful on so many levels, it’s kind of a masterpiece.

TIA: Some people know exactly the right thing to say.

JOE: Then there’s parents.

Tia looks sad. He takes her hand.

JOE: When I was a kid, and upset over something, my grandma would say, “You’re too young to be sad.” It made me feel being sad was the province of grown-ups. I imagined every grownup I saw walking around with some secret sadness.

TIA: Don’t work so hard to cheer me up.

JOE: When I look at you, I think...”I’ve come home.”

She smiles. He gets up, goes to the foot of the bed, and faces her.

JOE: We’ve agreed not to get pregnant together.

TIA: In my case that’s easy to agree to.

JOE: We’re never gonna have kids.

TIA: Sounds like a plan.

JOE: We’re committed to that.

TIA: We should be committed, that’s for sure.

JOE: How about adopting Elise?

Pause.

TIA: Isn’t that having a kid?

JOE: No, that’s having a teenager. Teenagers are like grown-ups with bad skin. (off her look) Okay, they’re kids. But they’re pre-packaged.

TIA: But you don’t know her.

JOE: I don’t know myself, but that’s who I spend every minute of my day with.

TIA: She’s seventeen.

JOE: Better late than never.

TIA: Come closer.

He does.

TIA: Closer.

He leans in. She grabs his ear.

JOE: Ow...the fuck?

TIA: I started this evening with little fears. Like are we taking this too fast. Little fears are normal. They’re even kind of reassuring. Whoa, Tia, you got little fears. You go, girl! But this.

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Beat. He indicates for her to let go of his ear. She does. He rubs it.

JOE: When you think we could all get hit by a truck tomorrow, which could very well happen, it’s all little fears.

TIA: That truck is dangerous.

He goes back to his side of the bed. She looks at him, smiles.

TIA: You really don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, do you. You’re completely winging this.

JOE: When you said you’re good friends with her social worker, and you looked so sad about not having kids, I...

TIA: ...This is so crazy.

JOE: ...I know it is.

They consider it carefully. Pause.

TIA: What if I said, “Okay”?

He touches her arm, smiles.

JOE: May I make a little suggestion?

TIA: (quickly, freaking out) To me, a little suggestion is mustard instead of mayo. To you, it’s moving to another country!

How would we do this?! Taking care of her, moving in, the adoption papers...do you know how much red tape this kind of thing involves?! We’re already raising two children!

Beat.

JOE: Who? TIA: OURSELVES! Beat.

JOE: Let’s ask my buddy, Ron, to help, to be a part of it.

Beat.

TIA: (stunned, subdued) I’m in awe. I didn’t think it was possible. You just made the whole thing even crazier.

SCENE 9

Ron. RON: Tia and Elise moved into Joe’s apartment a week later, through a special arrangement with Elise’s social worker, while they waited for a legal foster home transfer to come through, a step toward adopting her.

One Sunday afternoon Joe knocked on my door. We lived in the same building. He gave me his crooked smile, and I remembered when I’d come out to my parents, eight years earlier. Joe went with me to Rye, less than an hour from the city. You’d think proximity to tolerance would increase tolerance. You’d think that, and you’d be wrong. My dad is a tax accountant. He kept saying, “Maybe there’s some way you can deduct this.” It was fucking...weird. It took five hours, most of which was uncomfortable silences. Joe sat through all of it. We’d planned it for months, even decided having a straight friend there would help endorse it in their minds. “If I’m not gay and I feel good about this, maybe you can, too.” My life had become an infomercial.

Joe never wavered. He was there through it all. There was never a moment I couldn’t count on him. He didn’t just look good on paper.

74 Proscenium Fall 2016

My mom even asked if I was in love with anyone. (beat) I said I’m in love with myself, but it’s unrequited.

Anyway, Joe told me Elise was in her third remission from leukemia. That’s why no one had adopted her. Joe asked me if I would join this contrived family. As an equal, a “third parent.” He mentioned how Tia was concerned I might be offended by the gay uncle cliche, and she wanted me to know I’d be as much of a parent as she and Joe were. I knew this demanded a mature response, so I called him a pinhead.

He said he understood if I couldn’t do this. I said if I don’t do this, I’m an asshole. He said I was an asshole whether I did it or not. It was strangely comforting.

If men use insults to show affection to other men, I’ve been very loved in my life.

I told him I needed to think about it. Every day I heard voices in my head whispering, “Help!

Get me out of this! This is insane!” Suddenly I yelled, “Back up! Back up! Back up!” When I did, I realized I was alone in my room.

I thought of how many years I’d spent alone in that room.

So I said, “Yes.” I even meant it.

When you think your life is, um, one way, and it’s, um, suddenly something completely different, it doesn’t promote confidence.

SCENE 10 Ten days later. Joe’s apartment. Joe, Tia, Ron, and Elise sit at an old funky dining table that looks like it came from a thrift store. The music box is at one end of the table. Elise wears a thin brown cardigan and a burgundy turtleneck. Joe and Ron wear black tee-shirts. Dinner is almost over. Everyone holds a fondue fork. They’re uncomfortable, but making an effort.

TIA: That was tasty, thank you.

JOE: My thesis advisor’s recipe for cheese fondue. Funny, I haven’t made it in--seven years?-since I got my doctorate.

RON: Thanks, Dr. Joe. JOE: (sarcastic) A doctorate in philosophy. That’s really opened doors.

TIA: How come you don’t teach?

JOE: To teach, you have to publish, and to me, writing is like a slow dental extraction. So I started the bookstore. If someone’s writing a paper, they’re stressed, they call me, say what they’re writing about, and I suggest books that might help. I like to do that. It’s gratifying to hear the relief in someone’s voice.

He turns to Elise.

JOE: I heard you write. That’s...great.

Elise gives a tentative smile.

TIA: (to Ron) She writes essays. Autobiographical.

RON: Oh? Interesting. (off Joe’s look) I mean it. Maybe someday you’ll show them to me.

JOE: (to Elise) I’ll let you in on a secret. You look elegant tonight.

TIA: She does.

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RON: You’ve got style.

TIA: Doesn’t she?

JOE: I wish I dressed as well as you.

RON: Me too.

JOE: I’ve been watching what you wear. Not that I’m a clothing expert.

ELISE: My last foster parents, Marta and Richard, they didn’t like how I dressed. These clothes are what they made me choose. I hate them.

Silence.

JOE: The clothes or the foster parents?

Elise looks at him.

JOE: Both?

Elise nods.

TIA: Why didn’t you tell me?

ELISE: I didn’t want to worry you.

JOE: I’d call myself a moron, but I try to avoid euphemisms.

Joe gets inspired by a thought. He taps his fondue fork a couple of times on the table, hard.

JOE: What kinda clothes do you like?

ELISE: I don’t know. Punk stuff?

Joe exits with the fork.

RON: He’s gone off to impale himself on that fondue fork. I can already hear it on the local news. “Cheese fondue leads to suicide. Recipe at eleven.”

Joe enters, carrying a black punk jacket.

JOE: I thought I still had this.

Joe helps Elise take off her cardigan and put on the jacket.

ELISE: You were a punk?

JOE: Yep, just like Tia. Not Ron, though. Ron was post-punk before the punk movement even started.

RON: (delighted with himself) I wear black because I’m bleak.

JOE: And that’s you at your most hopeful.

Elise adjusts the jacket, looking pleased.

JOE: It’s yours.

ELISE: Really?

JOE: Uh-huh.

Joe returns to his seat.

TIA: (sarcastic, to Joe) You need to learn to be generous.

Elise mouths “thank you” to Joe, and he nods.

JOE: (to Tia, lightly) I don’t think I can commit to you.

TIA: Me neither.

JOE: I thought I could, but now I’m not so sure.

TIA: I feel exactly the same.

JOE: How can I commit? My haircut is a cry for help. Along with my cooking. And my choice 76 Proscenium Fall 2016

of vocation. (to Elise) You look good in that jacket.

RON: It suits you.

JOE: I got it when I was your age. I grew up on the Lower East Side. That jacket made me feel like I belonged. Not that I did.

TIA: Do you belong now?

JOE: We’ll see. (to Elise) That jacket is post-punk love with a dollop of attitude.

RON: You look like a famous writer.

JOE: That just means you’re joining the establishment. (off Elise’s look) Don’t worry about selling out. I’ve never sold out.

RON: Because you don’t have anything to sell.

ELISE: I saw Dr. Nagel today. It’s come back.

Silence.

ELISE: I sure know how to wreck a party. (beat) The leukemia was so bad the last time I had it, but I didn’t think it would come back. I see her tomorrow morning to talk about treatments. Like there’s a lotta treatments for someone who’s been sick four times.

JOE: Why didn’t anyone go with you to the appointment?

ELISE: ‘Cause you generally need to know about an appointment to go to it? It was only a checkup, I didn’t want to bother you guys. Now, if I could get you guys to take the blood tests for me, that I might say yes to. (pause) I feel like I’m showing you guys a bad report card.

JOE: We’re going to your appointment in the morning.

Joe looks at Tia and Ron, who nod.

ELISE: I’m the only kid I know with a spare parent. Is having a spare parent the same as having a spare tire? I suppose a parent wears out sooner.

The music box emits several notes.

ELISE: It only does that when I’m not being funny. (beat) The spring is old, sometimes it gives. That’s why I keep it out here. It wakes me up in my room at night.

Tia moves her chair next to Elise and holds her. Joe opens the lid of the music box. It plays a haunting tune. A subtle, mystical glow forms over it. They all listen until the tune stops. The glow of light disappears. They are moved. Pause.

RON: The thing about beautiful objects is they make me feel like I’m shallow. By comparison.

JOE: You are.

Joe looks inside the box.

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JOE: Figures of people, surrounded by tall buildings, looking at something, I can’t tell what. (to Elise) Do you know?

Elise shakes her head.

ELISE: That’s what I like about it, it’s kind of a mystery. A patient gave it to me on the ward when I was eight years old. Velma. We shared a room. She was ninety-two. Her grandfather made it for her when she was born. She told me it was mine, to do what I wanted with it, she didn’t need it anymore. (beat) It makes me feel...I don’t know...safe. Her husband’s name was Manny. He visited every day, and he treated her like she was a total hottie. This tiny old lady. I was gonna give it back to her when she got better, but she didn’t. (touches the box) I tried to give it to Manny, but he told me she’d said, about giving it to me, “From one hottie to another.” How could I give it back? I’d be saying I wasn’t a hottie.

Pause.

RON: I know what you’re talking about, I’m a hottie too.

ELISE: After she died, when Manny was cleaning out her side of the room, he said he was okay, ‘cause she was still there, he could feel her. But I wonder if later he...couldn’t.

Pause.

ELISE: Maybe this is a lame idea.

TIA: What?

ELISE: Maybe we shouldn’t do this.

TIA: What’re you saying?

ELISE: I’m gonna mess you guys up.

JOE: You’re gonna mess us up?

ELISE: I’ve already messed you guys up.

Ron unexpectedly stands. He points at Elise in a dramatic way.

RON: I RESENT THAT. WE WERE MESSED UP LONG BEFORE YOU GOT HERE. Silence. Elise giggles.

ELISE: You’re a freak.

Beat.

RON: Takes one to know one.

Joe pats Ron on the shoulder.

JOE: (to Elise) We’re gonna try to make this work, and you’re never going to a doctor’s appointment alone again.

ELISE: I can’t believe it. I’ve got a staff.

They all smile.

SCENE 11

Ron. RON: We went to the doctor’s appointment the next morning. Elise introduced the three of us as “parents in training.” That elicited an interesting reaction from her oncologist. Elise was right 78 Proscenium Fall 2016

about the number of treatment options: there was one, experimental, with side effects worse than the disease.

Afterward she and Joe went to every punk clothing store downtown. The punk version of the Silk Road. But she didn’t mess with her hair, she had way too much sense for that.

I tried my hardest to feel part of the family, but it wasn’t working. To get closer to Elise, I asked about her studies. She went to School of The Future, a public middle and high school that emphasized writing. Every year the school held a contest for best essay. Elise had won it five years in a row. Never happened before. Her last essay had been a plea to improve the conditions in school bathrooms. She began by pointing out the average person in a lifetime spends a year and a half in bathrooms.

It made me want to invest in toilet paper.

One afternoon I brought Elise to work. She was curious what an agent did. I work for the Litman Agency, and our offices had just been remodeled. They were in Times Square. She watched me for a while, then she said, “Wow. I never knew talking on the phone could be a job.”

It was like bring your daughter to work day, except she wasn’t my daughter, she was a stranger.

She seemed to know this, because she said, “Am I the only one who thinks our family is completely bizarre?” I didn’t say anything, so she knew my answer. Then she added, as she pulled on the jacket Joe had given her, “If you can’t beat ‘em, and you can’t join ‘em, at least you can look good.”

When I saw her face, it held the kind of hope only a seventeen-year-old can have.

SCENE 12 Ten days later. Evening. Joe’s apartment. Tia and Elise in the kitchen, slicing a bunch of celery for a large salad. Elise wears punk clothes, tastefully, which she will do from now on, and red high-tops, clearly new. The music box is near them on the counter.

ELISE: He did not do that.

TIA: He did.

ELISE: I don’t believe you.

TIA: He’s really like that. He’s kind when you least expect it.

ELISE: The other morning, after breakfast, when you and Ron left for work, he walked me to school. We got there early. Cherie and Devon were talking outside. Devon goes, “Hey, Elise. Is that your brother?”

TIA: Shut up.

ELISE: He looks younger than you think he does.

TIA: I hate men.

ELISE: Devon isn’t a man, he’s a boy.

TIA: I didn’t mean him.

ELISE: You are older than Joe. TIA: By one year.

ELISE: Hey, one of my friends asked if you were in a beauty contest.

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TIA: We are making this work, aren’t we?

ELISE: The celery?

TIA: Yeah, the celery, that’s what I’m talking about.

ELISE: We seem to be okay. For the moment.

TIA: I don’t know how this happened. A month ago I was just a nurse.

ELISE: You’re still a nurse. You’re just a nurse with an incredibly strange family. That’s barely holding together.

TIA: Thank you for the reassurance.

ELISE: I don’t lie. You know that.

Beat. Tia strokes Elise’s brow.

TIA: I do know that.

ELISE: Did you know celery has negative calories? It take more energy to eat a piece of celery than the celery has in it to begin with.

TIA: You just described most of my relationships.

Beat.

ELISE: I’m not gonna do this experimental treatment. The remission rate is too low, and I’d be sick in bed the whole time.

Silence.

TIA: We’ll keep talking about it.

ELISE: Why? The front doorknob rattles. This goes on a bit too long. The door opens, and Joe enters, gasping, carrying a large brown paper bag. He sets it on the counter.

JOE: I’m middle-aged and I live in a fourth floor walk-up.

TIA: You aren’t middle-aged. If you’re middle-aged, I’m middle-aged.

JOE: (singing, a la opera) If you’re middle-aged, I’m middle-aged, we’re all middle-aged-(points to Elise) --except you.

Tia and Elise look grim. Beat.

JOE: Huh. I knew my singing was bad, but I didn’t know it was disturbing.

TIA: This isn’t about your singing.

JOE: Is that supposed to be reassuring? ‘Cause it’s not hitting the mark.

TIA: We’ve got a problem.

JOE: Is it me?

ELISE: Not this time.

TIA: Elise won’t even discuss the treatment with us.

ELISE: I didn’t say that.

TIA: So your mind isn’t made up?

ELISE: No, it is, I’m not doing it.

JOE: We’re your parents.

ELISE: Yeah, for about an hour.

JOE: That means we have to be involved in the big decisions.

ELISE: You can’t even decide if you exist.

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JOE: That’s a low blow.

ELISE: Since when is telling the truth a low blow?

TIA: Let’s calm down.

ELISE: I’m calm. I’m way calm.

JOE: I just want to do the right thing here.

ELISE: I’ve already had three treatments. On my own. The third one, the last time I tried something “experimental”? It was the best. I had no balance, I was so weak I couldn’t move, and those were the fun side effects. I only did it ‘cause the remission rate was a lot higher than this one. But you can’t do that treatment twice. And even if you could, it was so great I’d still say no. So trusting me is the wrong thing?

TIA: We’re not saying that.

ELISE: No one seems to be saying anything right now. Except me.

JOE: I just want to be a good parent. Not that I know what that looks like.

ELISE: You know a lot more about it than I do. Tell me. What would your father have done?

After he advised you to enter the glamorous profession of philosophy.

JOE: That would have been one of his better recommendations. If he’d made it.

ELISE: At least you had a father.

Beat.

JOE: When I was ten, he hit me, often enough my mom and I had to leave home for a year and a half, until he stopped drinking.

Silence.

TIA: That’s why you didn’t have a normal childhood.

JOE: Sorry, I don’t like to talk about it.

TIA: I wish your dad hadn’t done that to you.

Beat.

JOE: Ever since he hit me, I’ve felt it was my...fault, I mean, who hits a ten year old?

TIA: How could it in any way be your fault?

JOE: He was between careers. The problem with being a professional tennis player is you can be ranked fifty-first in the world and no one knows who you are. He got so bitter he became a Neoconservative. Then when he retired from a knee injury, he hit the scotch, then he hit me, over and over, and I thought, a father doesn’t do this, there must be something wrong with me.

TIA: The only thing wrong was you had the misfortune to have him as a father.

JOE: I keep thinking I’m gonna mess up our family, I’ve got some kind of inherent flaw.

ELISE: No more than the rest of us. Hey, at least you’re not dying.

Silence.

ELISE: If you don’t talk about the elephant in the room, he stomps on you. You’re allowed to laugh. Death is funny. It’s like one second you’re here, the next, “poof.”

Elise starts to cry, but stops herself. Joe holds her. Tia joins them.

ELISE: I hate feeling sorry for myself.

JOE: If I was you, I’d be feeling much more sorry for myself.

Pause.

ELISE: (lightly)Thank you, that just made me feel a lot worse.

JOE: What is wrong with me?

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The three of them laugh. A tension is lifted. They quiet as they take in the moment.

JOE: (to Elise) Whatever you choose...we’ll be there.

He looks at Tia. Beat. She nods. Elise smiles.

ELISE: (gently sarcastic) You’re right. You don’t know how to be a good parent.

Pause. Ron enters through the front door, holding a manuscript.

RON: Doug Thorpe is going to make a lot of money. He hates liberals and he hates conservatives. He’s got the whole market covered. Sometimes I don’t know why I represent political columnists. I like the guy, but I’m not at all sure this is non-fiction. Don’t repeat that.

ELISE: You love what you do, don’t you.

RON: I love books. They saved me when I was a kid. When I was low I’d read Tony Kushner, and he made me feel I was special because I was highly intelligent and had a sense of style.

TIA: It’s true.

JOE: I don’t know if wearing black can be considered a sense of style.

RON: In a world where a missile can be called the Peacemaker, black can be considered a sense of style. How were your days?

ELISE: I got an A on my paper where I chose the topic, on how the sounds of Fitzgerald’s prose show the story.

RON: Yes! TIA: It was operation day. I was on my feet all day. We even took out a gall bladder.

RON: I love that term. “Gall” bladder. (relishes this) It’s a bladder with a sense of insolence.

JOE: I didn’t sell any books in the store.

RON: What else is new? Online?

JOE: A lot.

Ron points to the paper bag.

RON: Is that what I think it is?

JOE: Veggie fried brown rice and tofu with broccoli in garlic sauce, for four, from Shun Lee. I made a special trip uptown.

RON: Beyond gratifying. What a day. We’re definitely individuals.

ELISE: But we’re not, too. We’re a family. Beginning.

JOE: ...Maybe we are.

TIA: No maybe about it.

RON: Does being in a family make you fat?

JOE: Not if you eat Chinese.

RON: Fine. Let’s do it.

ELISE: Eat Chinese?

Pause.

RON: No. The other thing.

SCENE 13

Ron. RON: Just after that night, Elise asked me if I dated around. I said my last relationship had been 82 Proscenium Fall 2016

two years ago, and now I dated around sometimes. I told her about a recent date with a guy named Ian, a marketing executive, who’d suddenly grabbed my hand over coffee and asked if I felt the vibrations between us. I asked him if he’d left his cell phone on vibrate. That was the end of that date.

I even dated Joe a little when we first met, in our early twenties. Joe was experimenting a bit, wondering if he was gay. He wasn’t. Elise found the idea of Joe and I dating incredibly funny.

When I asked why, she said, “Imagine how you’d feel if you discovered your dad dated himself.”

It’s easy to run from what matters most. I was there, but still...apart. Elise was on summer vacation. One afternoon in the kitchen I saw her wash her hands. It was a simple motion, with a kind of jaunty elegance. She took pleasure in the water. I smiled, and she smiled back. I told her, “You’re clean.” She said, “Doesn’t hide my dirty mind.”

Later that day Joe told me she washed her hands every hour now, because her body was losing its ability to fight infection.

SCENE 14 Joe’s apartment, a month and a half later. Ron and Elise drying dishes in the kitchen. Elise is paler. She is in a playful mood.

RON: So when do I get to see your autobiographical essays?

ELISE: I put them in your bag.

RON: EXCELLENT. ELISE: Has anyone ever told you how strange you are?

Pause.

RON: Um. No. ELISE: You’re very strange. Very very strange. There’s strange, there’s stranger, there’s strangest, then there’s you.

RON: (smiling) I am, aren’t I. ELISE: I’m strange, too, maybe that’s why we get along.

RON: I knew there had to be a reason.

ELISE: I spent the whole day writing.

RON: Good for you, Ms. McGoo. ELISE: Two thousand words. You know what that means?

RON: I’m inadequate?

ELISE: You think everything means you’re inadequate.

RON: It usually does.

ELISE: It means I can write a book in a month.

RON: You’re your own book of the month club.

Pause.

ELISE: My...essays...They’re really a memoir, but I never call them that, ‘cause who writes a memoir when she’s seventeen?

RON: Apparently you do.

ELISE: I don’t even know my real name! Who writes a memoir if they don’t know...? Joe came in the other day when I was calling social services trying to find out how I was left as a baby at Fall 2016 Proscenium 83

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the hospital. I thought I could get closer to learning my name. Whatever. Writing a memoir at seventeen, it’s...way pretentious.

RON: Welcome to being a literary artist. Put a little more work into sounding obscure, and people might “way” adore you.

ELISE: If you weren’t so goofy, what you just said would be “way” depressing.

RON: Isn’t that the major function of a dad? To be goofy? And depressing?

They smile. Beat.

ELISE: You’re...great. Thank you. You and Joe. I’ve got two dads. And I not only love them, I like them.

RON: It’s a lot harder to like a parent than it is to love them.

ELISE: Joe would feel the same way. You really dated him?

RON: You’re not supposed to embarrass me. That’s my job.

ELISE: How did it end?

RON: We became friends, that’s all.

Elise looks closely at him. Pause.

ELISE: Oh no. You’re still in love with him.

Silence.

RON: What? No, I’m not.

Elise becomes quiet.

ELISE: Please don’t lie. This isn’t a great time to lie to me.

RON: Don’t worry. It’s...

ELISE: (more quiet, sarcastic) Yeah, whatever, it’s way healthy for our family. It’ll help us stay together.

She goes into her bedroom, closing the door. Silence. The front doorknob jiggles. Tia comes in.

TIA: I’m never gonna walk off that veggie lasagna. I went all the way to Tompkins Square Park, ran into Kate Ramos. Our neighbor? Second floor? She told me she’d seen a movie last night, it was haunting her. I told her I was haunted by my dinner. Uh. You okay?

RON: I’m trying to run from love’s lonely offices.

TIA: (confused) That’s clear.

RON: You ever consider we’ve been through so much in our lives, and we haven’t learned a thing?

TIA: What. Since I left you’ve become the poster child for despair?

(Ron doesn’t seem to hear her, beat, she touches his arm) Look. When we started out, we had no idea what this was going to be like. But we know now that if there was a family discount somewhere, we’d more than qualify. This edgy woman with several chips on her shoulder bursts into your life with Joe. You’ve accepted it with grace and consideration. I’m grateful. I realize I don’t show it enough. I’m sorry.

She goes to the dishes and checks them out.

TIA: Joe is definitely the chef in our family. It’s good you and I switch off washing dishes.

You’re better at it than I am, though. I always leave a thin film of grime. A nurse who lacks cleanliness, that’s encouraging. At least I shower. Occasionally. What’s wrong?

RON: I’m fine.

TIA: You’re fine. You’re “fine.” You’re making me wanna form a support group for people who 84 Proscenium Fall 2016

are fine.

RON: I upset the kid with my old...issues.

TIA: Hold on. You upset her?

RON: I know, I know. When Joe and I met all those years ago, we dated a little.

TIA: (gentle) It’s okay, Joe told me.

RON: It never went anywhere. But it helped us become better friends. We were two young guys alone against the city. You can’t bond with someone that way after you’re successful. I mean, you can, but you never know if they’re taking advantage of you. Joe made me feel I didn’t need a makeover. When I did. But after a while, what I felt shifted, and...

TIA: (more gentle) You fell in love with him. I know, I love him too.

RON: You’re not...mad?

TIA: Are you kidding? You’re Joe’s best friend. I’m relieved you’ve accepted me into your life.

Besides, what’s not to love? He’s kind, he’s gentle, he puts up with me, I’m a pain in the ass.

RON: That’s something we have in common.

TIA: I don’t like to share my faults, but with you I’ll make an exception. My mom Monica still refuses to meet our family. She thinks I’m crazy, she’d break apart this family if she could.

That’s why I’ll never get married, I don’t need to hear her saying all the time, “You want me to help you with a divorce now?” Anyhow, a good relationship doesn’t need marriage to make it last. I hope.

RON: Why do you stay in touch with her?

TIA: I ask myself that. I think it’s ‘cause I can’t face being the kind of person who cut her mother out of her life. I know she loves me, in her own twisted divorce lawyer kind of way. It’s good to have someone you love who you don’t trust. Keeps you sharp.

RON: You’d do well in my business.

Joe comes in the front door, holding a large bouquet of daisies and a vase.

JOE: I had to walk everywhere to find these. For some reason daisies are popular in the East Village. Maybe people around here aren’t as edgy as I thought. At least I got her favorite. She can put them on her writing desk.

He knocks on Elise’s door. No answer. He enters her room. Then he returns, reading a note.

JOE: She’s gone. She says she’s messing us up, causing too many problems. She must have gone down the fire escape.

Tia and Ron rush to him, look at the note.

TIA: She’s not well enough to be out there on her own.

JOE: We have to figure out where she...

TIA: I’m going to look for her.

RON: Wait!

Tia exits, Ron following. They leave the front door banging. Joe remains, studying the note. He goes to the window. Looks out, searching. The lights shrink to cover him alone. He’s thinking hard where Elise might be. A long moment. Then he has a realization, his face showing shock.

Blackout. Intermission.

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Ron. RON: Joe figured out where Elise went. Found her at the New York Public Library, the mid-Manhattan branch, open until eleven. Hiding in the stacks. In the memoir section. She was okay, aside from spraining her left shoulder on the ladder of the fire escape when she ran off.

“Not my writing arm,” she pointed out.

She had a small satchel, with her laptop, a few books, and some other things. She didn’t have much money, and no food.

Of course, we had to report this, and the authorities wanted to take Elise from us. For good reason. It didn’t exactly bode well for us as parents. But Tia, Joe, Elise, and I met at length with Elise’s social worker, Claire, a close friend of Tia’s. It became clear the idea of losing this family, the only one Elise had ever had, was really why she ran. It didn’t help she was getting sicker, too. But Tia had the nursing skills to care for Elise at home, and Elise would soon turn eighteen and be emancipated anyway. So the authorities allowed her to stay with us, while monitored by them, on a probationary basis.

When Elise heard this, she said, “Isn’t everything in life on a probationary basis?” With that cheerful attitude, she definitely belonged with the three of us.

Elise even forgave me. Children do that, much more than we deserve. Tia wasn’t mad at me either. I made up for both of them.

They told Joe nothing.

Summer turned to fall turned to early winter, the coldest one in years. If guilt could be transmuted into heat, I could have warmed all of New York City.

Elise had taken back her essays for rewrites before I’d read them. Her favorite essayist was Lewis Thomas. She kept reading Lives of a Cell. She strongly felt someday religion and science would confirm each other, not the opposite. I began to experience the awe parents go through when their children become much more evolved than they ever were.

She asked us if she could take a leave from high school to write more. We said okay. For obvious reasons, no one spoke of college. We even got her a printer for her room. Joe, Tia, and I started taking as much time off work as possible, but because of the income my clients brought in, I was somehow promoted to partner. Elise threw me a little party. I asked her why. She told me it was because she planned on hitting me up for a loan. Then she got an odd look on her face and said, “Who gives up their life for a stranger?”

SCENE 2 Joe’s living room. Four and a half months later. Joe is having difficulty building a pile of kindling to light in the fireplace. He wears a thick black sweater. Ron enters from the front door. He puts down his shoulder bag, which manuscripts jut from, and he starts to undo a black winter jacket with way too many buttons and clasps.

JOE: Yo. RON: Talk about a cold snap. When I was depressed last winter my therapist said I could get a straitjacket. Or this. At least I’m indoors. With some warmth. (removes a sweater) AAAH. It’s colder in here than it is out there. (hurriedly puts the sweater back on) 86 Proscenium Fall 2016

Are you trying to save money by freezing us?

JOE: Dude. Get a grip. The heat went out in our building, okay?

RON: That’s never happened before.

JOE: First time in fifteen years.

RON: What about the super?

JOE: She’s cold, too. She’s working on it.

RON: Is the kid okay?

JOE: I was worried, but she’s fine. She’s calling this our Alaskan vacation.

RON: The insanity of youth.

JOE: Something like that. She asked about you earlier, about when you were getting home. You look scared. Did you just get another promotion?

RON: No. I sold Carla Winthrop’s book about how we’re moving away from a patriarchal society. I even suggested a title: Not Fast Enough.

JOE: At least three of us are being productive.

RON: (sotto, indicating Elise’s bedroom) How is she today?

JOE: You’ll see for yourself. Okay, I think. Considering. You look strange.

RON: That’s what she always tells me. Oh well, finally I look the way I feel.

JOE: You’ve been quiet around me.

RON: ...You sure?

JOE: (laughs) No, I’m not sure of anything.

RON: Who is?

JOE: It hasn’t been easy, has it. I appreciate your hanging in there.

RON: I could say the same thing to you.

JOE: I mean it.

Pause.

RON: You’re embarrassing me with your sincerity. My new assistant Claudia told me today about how her oldest friend stopped talking to her. Claudia dated her friend’s fiance a few times before her friend met him, and they never told the friend, who was kind of paranoid. When the friend found out, you can guess what happened.

The house of kindling Joe has carefully built collapses.

JOE: Don’t take this the wrong way, but do I care?

RON: After you and I dated, I never told you, but I kind of lost control of my feelings, and I-I fell in love with you. I sort of still am...

Joe laughs.

JOE: Good one!

Beat. Joe looks scared.

JOE: Wait a minute. You’re not serious?

RON: It’s not a big deal.

JOE: WHAT! ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND? THAT’S CRAZY. RON: (small voice)Yowza. Sorry I brought it up.

JOE: Nice timing. Things really weren’t stressful enough around here. Is there any other minor news you haven’t told me? Like, you’re moving to Peoria?

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RON: You could be a little more understanding.

Beat.

JOE: You’re right. I’m sorry. (beat) I don’t know how to help you with this.

RON: I’m not asking you to. I just thought, maybe, if we talked about it, I could move beyond it. You’re not going to get strange on me, are you?

JOE: Let me get back to you on that.

Elise enters from her room, in a heavy sweater, much paler than when we last saw her, her breathing labored. She carries the music box and a manuscript. She places the former on the dining room table, and the box gives off several notes.

JOE: That thing is like my conscience. It won’t stay quiet.

ELISE: Your conscience is a lot more insistent.

JOE: The great thing about nagging yourself is you know who to get annoyed with.

Elise hands the manuscript to Ron. ELISE: My book of essays. Final draft.

RON: I never got to read the first draft.

ELISE: You sound way mournful.

RON: I’m not. I’ll read this tomorr-Elise puts her hands on her hips, facing him.

RON: I’ll read this...Now? She nods. Ron exits with the manuscript to Elise’s bedroom, shutting the door.

ELISE: He’s the best. Whatever you’re thinking.

JOE: How come you seem to know all that’s going on?

ELISE: I found this great new thing. It’s called listening.

JOE: I tried that once. It was incredibly stressful.

Elise becomes faint. Joe steadies her. The faintness passes. He tries to get her to sit on the couch, but she refuses. She calms herself. Pause.

ELISE: Am I going to die?

Silence.

ELISE: Please don’t lie to me.

JOE: (trying to be honest)I don’t know. Maybe.

ELISE: Thank you.

She touches his arm.

ELISE: You’re chilly.

JOE: I’m about ready to build an igloo in here.

Elise lowers herself carefully to the floor. She joins him in constructing the house of kindling.

This time, it doesn’t fall.

JOE: I don’t know how to hold on to you.

ELISE: Hold on to Tia. That’s what matters.

JOE: She asked me yesterday if love is outside of time.

ELISE: What’d you say?

JOE: How do I know? I can’t even balance my checkbook.

88 Proscenium Fall 2016

ELISE: You really have a Ph.D. in philosophy?

JOE: Don’t start.

Elise looks out the window.

ELISE: It’s cold outside, but...clear.

JOE: And inside?

ELISE: Just cold.

Pause. The front door opens, and Tia enters, wearing her nursing uniform under a winter coat.

She is tense.

TIA: We overbooked appointments today. Got an hour and a half behind. It was totally stressful.

I felt terrible for the patients. It’s like: Okay, you’re sick enough to need a surgeon. But now, we’re going to act like we don’t want to see you, ‘cause you need just a little more uncertainty in your life. I had so many people get mad at me I stepped into the bathroom to cry for a few minutes. But for some reason I couldn’t. So I did squats. Not a good thing to do in your bathroom at work.

ELISE: Were you quiet? It’d be kinda scary to hear someone doing squats in a bathroom and not know what was going on.

TIA: (a horrified realization) Oh no. That’s why that patient was looking at me like that.

Pause. She takes off her coat. Then she puts it back on.

TIA: It’s freezing. You okay?

ELISE: I’m fine.

JOE: The furnace broke. The super’s on it.

TIA: Is that frost on the inside of the window?

JOE: We’re working on building an ice rink in here. Elise finished her book.

TIA: Oh, yay!

JOE: Ron’s reading it in her room.

Tia listens at Elise’s bedroom door.

TIA: He’s very quiet.

ELISE: I think he’s doing squats. I won’t like it when he criticizes my essays.

TIA: No worries, Ron’s always tactful. (cheery, to Joe) Right?

JOE: ...Uh...

Ron enters quickly, clutching Elise’s manuscript. He stops in front of them. Silence.

ELISE: This is comfortable.

RON: Sorry. I’m at a loss for words. Doesn’t happen often. Or as much as some people would like. Wait. (to Joe) Are you and I...okay?

A tense moment. Finally, Joe relaxes.

JOE: Yeah.

Elise whispers to Tia what Ron is talking about.

JOE: Am I the last to know about this? Typical.

RON: Your essays. They’re...beautiful.

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ELISE: You read a hundred and twelve pages in ten minutes?

RON: I read a lot faster than you think I do. But no. I read the first essay. Then I skimmed the rest of it to make sure the structure works.

ELISE: Does it?

RON: What do you think?

ELISE: (moved) You’re not lying. You’re treating me like a real writer.

RON: There’s one or two things I might do a little differently, but they’re not important. When I read something like this, it reminds me why I do what I do. These essays, they’re about...us.

JOE: Aren’t you making QUITE an assumption!

RON: She uses our names.

JOE: Oh. RON: I gotta admit, I was worried. No offense. You’re seventeen. When I was seventeen I was still trying to color-coordinate what I wore. I gave up and wore black.

ELISE: (holding back tears) I don’t know what to say.

Pause. Joe and Tia go to her.

RON: It doesn’t matter. You’ve already said it.

Ron pulls over a chair near the fireplace. Then he indicates to Elise he wants to read the manuscript out loud.

RON: Okay?

Pause.

ELISE: Okay.

JOE: Wait.

Joe starts the fire. The four of them stare at it.

ELISE: “Love like a burning city in the breast.” Edna Saint Vincent Millay.

TIA: “Love like a burning city.” (pause) Even her name was a poem.

Ron readies himself to read.

RON: Okay.

JOE: Wait wait!

Joe quickly turns on a table lamp by Ron, and dims the lights in the room.

RON: Some of us have control issues.

JOE: My whole life is a control issue.

When Ron reads, as they enter the past, the room will take on an unusual glow, of beauty and warmth. They have entered the world of Elise’s spirit, her soul, imbued in her writing. A subtle glow comes over the music box, too. Ron reads.

RON: “...And this was when I started to understand how love seeps into the smallest places. The smallest moments. Moments no one applauds, that disappear if you forget to look.

On my first night with the four of us, after a tense dinner of cheese fondue, I wanted to light a candle to signify our...beginning. I’d saved a candle, given to me years earlier, but it was nowhere to be found.

‘I’ll find it,’ Joe said.

JOE: I’ll find it.

90 Proscenium Fall 2016

(beat) I’ll find it.

Joe is back in that night. Then the others are, too.

ELISE: You won’t.

TIA: He could.

RON: Never trust a man who makes fondue with American cheese.

JOE: Would you all help! (to Ron and Tia) ‘Specially you two.

TIA: He’s kind of cute when he’s anxious.

ELISE: Can something good begin with an absence?

They search.

RON: (to Joe)If you don’t find it now, this is gonna bite you in the ass.

ELISE: Language, LANGUAGE, I’m a minor here.

JOE: The only thing minor about you is your tetchiness.

ELISE: A strange compliment is still a compliment. Thank you.

Joe and Ron search together.

JOE: You flush it out. Then I’ll bag it.

RON: I’m not sure if that was funny or disturbing.

ELISE: I remember I wrapped it in something.

JOE: It’s here, calling us. Keep on!

TIA: He’s an inspiration.

RON: When he doesn’t talk.

ELISE: I must’ve left it somewhere.

RON: (to Joe)You’re deluding yourself.

JOE: That’s for you to know and me to find out.

Their search intensifies. Joe discovers a white candle in a kitchen drawer, wrapped in a black stocking.

JOE: WAIT! WAIT! WAIT! Joe hands the candle to Elise, who raises it high in the air.

ELISE: YES! The others applaud, and she curtsies.

ELISE: ...I...Thank you...

JOE: Let’s do this!

Joe hands her matches.

ELISE: I was given this by an old woman, Dolores, who ran the foster home I was in when I was eight. She had a big pink face, short white hair, and this incredible...laugh. She isn’t around... anymore. She gave me Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and told me I’d need it when I got older.

She kept saying, “I’ve issued you a search warrant to investigate your own heart. But if you find something that demands your arrest, give yourself probation.” Once, when I was so sick I had to miss school, she gave me this candle, that her great-grandmother’d given her when Dolores was a girl. And that Dolores’d never lit.

JOE: You don’t need to light it, if you don’t want.

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ELISE: Does a candle have meaning if you never light it?

Elise lights the candle. It gives off an exquisite glow. They watch. Then it breaks in half and goes out. They are horrified. Beat. They crack up.

ELISE: That was so sad.

They crack up again. Pause.

ELISE: Wherever she is, she’s laughing right now.

Joe, Tia, and Ron look upward.

ELISE: Why do people always look up? She could be right here.

Joe, Tia, and Ron look around themselves, a little confused.

TIA: ...You think?

Pause.

RON: If she is, I’d like to ask her for a new candle.

JOE: So? ELISE: ...Yeah?

JOE: No candle?

RON: He has a gift for the obvious, except when he doesn’t.

From outside, the sound of rain.

ELISE: Listen to the rain.

They quiet, and listen. The sound is subtle but riveting.

RON: (softly)What if every one of those drops hitting the building was a gesture of kindness?

Joe grasps Ron’s arm. Pause.

JOE: Given how dirty this building is, you’re not far off.

From under the sink Joe produces a nub of an ancient candle in an old tin pan.

JOE: Speaking of which?

Ron looks closely at the candle and pan.

RON: If you’re trying to inspire us, it isn’t working.

ELISE: What is that?

JOE: This whole building was owned by a rich widow over a century ago. When I moved in twelve years ago, I found this candle and this old pan under the sink. Maybe they were hers.

TIA: I almost threw that out the other day.

Joe gives Elise the nub and she lights it in the pan. This time the glow is even more exquisite.

JOE: ...Wow. TIA: I’d like to thank her.

ELISE: ...The perfect light.

JOE: It is.

RON: (moved) You might actually be...

JOE: It is.

ELISE: When the moment whispers, you have to listen.

The candle dies.

ELISE: ...Oh. JOE: Wait. Look at the raindrops. On the glass.

The street lamps and night sky shine through raindrops on the windows, causing specks of blue light on the walls.

92 Proscenium Fall 2016

JOE: The rain is so soft, the street lights go right through it to the drops on the glass.

The specks of blue light increase in size, to an exquisite glow, with a mystical quality. It feels as though a divine presence has entered the room.

ELISE: I don’t think it’s that simple.

JOE: (mesmerized) I stand corrected.

TIA: That’s...

RON: ...What?

TIA: ...Nothing.

ELISE: The perfect light.

JOE: ...Is it?

They are back around Ron, reading the essay. The room retains a subtle, mystical glow. Joe turns a page for him.

RON: ‘Is it?’

No one answers.

But I know.

And I wonder, if you could always see that love, whenever it was there under the surface, could you go even more deeply, to where the past mixes with the present and future? Where all times are happening at once, and every moment affects every other moment. Where a moment in time never dies. Maybe that’s what God would see.

Pause.

ELISE: Or maybe not.

JOE: We’re out of the past and future now...

TIA: Mmm-hmm.

RON: Mmm. JOE: ...and we’re not.

They move closer to each other. Elise begins to hum softly, a haunting melody filled with life, love, and loss, yet somehow transcendent.

SCENE 3

Ron. RON: Are we ever more than a specific moment in time? Or is time itself an illusion?

These are thoughts to avoid while operating heavy machinery.

Joe was doing everything he could to hold on to us. Was it enough? I don’t know. That evening, despite our reaction, or perhaps because of it, Elise took back her essays again, wouldn’t let me finish reading them, told me the manuscript wasn’t ready yet.

She had an idea she’d been thinking of. She wanted to revise, and while she did this, she interviewed Joe, Tia, and I about everything that had happened since we’d met. She was beyond meticulous. Then she’d say, “I can’t believe it, this is my home.” We continued to hope.

Elise borrowed some money from me, a small but significant amount, she wouldn’t tell us why.

She kept writing about every event, whatever occurred, documenting it all. (beat) Until she couldn’t.

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SCENE 4 A hospital room. Several weeks later. Elise in a bed. Joe, Tia, and Ron by her side, looking ragged. Elise is clearly dying. Medicated by an IV, for the most part she is in little pain, but fighting somewhat to stay conscious. A pile of hospital masks and gloves lies by her.

ELISE: (indicates masks and gloves) Wearing them doesn’t help me anymore. Thank you for taking those off. When you wore them, I kept thinking you were gonna remove my tonsils.

Joe points at the masks and gloves.

JOE: I was never a fan of hospital chic.

RON: It’s too retro.

Tia strokes Elise’s face and holds her hand.

JOE: You know...

ELISE: ...What?

JOE: ...how we...about you...

ELISE: (gently teasing)Is he trying to say something? (beat, softly) Why is it so hard to say the things that matter most? (beat) Hold on to Tia. That’s what’s important. (to Ron) You, he can’t get rid of. I’m pretty sure. Why do they make hospitals look different from the world outside? I always wondered that.

JOE: ...Yeah.

ELISE: ‘Member. What you see isn’t always what’s there.

JOE: I’ve got a whole section in my bookstore on that. But no one seems to notice it. (pause) You need to know how much we...

ELISE: (lightly)Is he still trying to talk? So quiet in here. It’s like someone switched off the world. Is Dr. Nagel...?

TIA: I asked her if we could be alone with you.

ELISE: Good. Thank you for not reading the rest of my manuscript.

RON: Whatever you want.

ELISE: I left a surprise for you in my room. In a sealed carton.

RON: Is it ticking?

ELISE: Maybe.

RON: (beat, he means this) Thank you.

Ron and Elise look at each other.

JOE: I found something for you.

ELISE: (to Joe, as he takes her hand) Don’t stop being inappropriate.

TIA: Him? Never.

RON: That’s like asking me to stop being annoying.

ELISE: Would you guys have loved me if I wasn’t sick?

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Pause.

JOE: You want us to lie and say no?

ELISE: Why would I want that, you doofus. What’s the plural of doofus? Is it doofi? (pause) We’re all echoes of the people we love.

TIA: ...To me, you’re...

ELISE: ...I know. Me, too.

Pause.

ELISE: (to Joe)You picked a bad family to try to hold on to...

JOE: I don’t think so.

ELISE: Keep deluding yourself. You’re good at it.

JOE: “A strange compliment is still a compliment. Thanks.”

A wave of pain goes through Elise. The adults comfort her. It passes. Joe looks at Tia and Ron, who nod.

JOE: I found out your real name.

ELISE: (incredulous)...You...You did? Honest?

JOE: I’m serious.

ELISE: You look funny when you’re serious.

TIA: He does.

RON: He sure does.

JOE: (to Elise)You wanna know? You...all right?

ELISE: Do I look all right? It’s...funny, when I was five I heard the social worker talking to my foster mother then about how they never knew my real name, I’d been left as a baby on the hospital steps. I figured out the name I’d had for years was false. I insisted on choosing my own.

I had an imaginary friend I called Elise Windermere. When she gave me her name, she stopped being...imaginary. (pause) The thing about names is... (pause) Sorry, I’m being more cryptic than usual. I’m a little...frightened.

Joe takes her arm.

JOE: We’re here.

ELISE: I won’t fight with you about that.

JOE: ...What about the name?

ELISE: You’re pushy. Does this need to be a final decision? (pause, a deep realization) I don’t wanna know the name. You all are my family.

JOE: ...You sure?

ELISE: Pushy pushy. Family is only what’s between people. It isn’t legal...it isn’t...biological... and it definitely isn’t a name on a piece of paper. (pause) Am I a doofus when I’m serious?

JOE: No, I’m a doofus when you’re serious.

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TIA: He’s not alone.

RON: That makes three of us. I’m a proud member of the...doofi.

TIA: (to Elise) We’re all here.

Tia checks Elise’s IV and makes sure her position on the bed is comfortable.

JOE: You’re here.

ELISE: Am I? JOE: You trying to be funny?

ELISE: Always. And never.

JOE: You are here.

ELISE: Promise?

JOE: I do.

ELISE: How do you know, Mr. Philosopher?

JOE: I know.

ELISE: Keep it that way.

She seems to see something past the foot of the bed and gives an enormous smile.

JOE: What do you see?

Elise nods a little, and dies.

TIA: Oh, my baby.

Pause.

JOE: ...Oh. Tia checks Elise’s pulse.

RON: ...Is she...?

Tia nods and looks away.

JOE: Almost her last words, she asked me to hold on to you. And Ron. She was thinking of someone other than herself.

TIA: How unlike her.

Pause. Tia begins to cry and break down, then with a huge effort, she stops herself.

RON: ...Should I call...?

Ron indicates nurses and doctors outside the room.

TIA: She’d want us to spend a little time with her. Alone. First.

Silence.

RON: What happens...now?

JOE: I don’t know. (beat) ...I don’t know.

SCENE 5

Ron. RON: Elise’s funeral was two days later, Brooklyn, a small cemetery, where the hospital had a plot for foundlings. She’d insisted on being there, with this on her headstone, “Beloved of Joe, Tia, and Ron,” so other foundlings might see it and have hope.

We die a little inside with each person we love.

More people arrived than I ever expected. Friends from school. Every teacher of significance 96 Proscenium Fall 2016

Elise had. Nurses and orderlies on the ward where she volunteered. Other volunteers. Her social worker Claire. Her oncologist, Dr. Nagel, whom Elise’d once told me she felt sorry for. When I asked why, she said, “Her first name. It’s Ethel.”

Before the service started, Joe pulled me to him. To them. Tia smiled, more than a little broken.

We sat together, but during the service, when I went up and spoke, I had the oddest sensation of not being able to breathe, as if hearing someone else’s voice. It got stronger, and I excused myself.

I went to the apartment, to Elise’s room. It smelled of her, a subtle sweetness that would dissipate, and return. I found the box she’d left me. On top was a note in her handwriting, on a torn half of a piece of paper. It said, “Burned the manuscript. Inside are the ashes. Scatter them where you will.”

Of course when I tore open the box, a revised copy of the manuscript sat there. Pristine. And the other half of the piece of paper, with the words, “I’m laughing right now. And don’t look up, I could be right next to you.”

Also in the box was a will she’d had made, which explained the money she’d borrowed from me. She gave me her book, to do with as I pleased, though she told me to wait a while to read it, if I didn’t want to be too sad. She apologized for not paying me back the money, but said I was loaded so what did it matter. She drew a little smile next to that.

I couldn’t bring myself to read it. Not yet.

Joe, Tia, and I agreed we never knew this kind of pain existed.

SCENE 6 Joe’s living room. A few months later. Joe sits on the couch, clutching a large suitcase in his lap.

The suitcase appears full. Tia stands, edgy. They are trying to keep calm.

JOE: Is this permanent?

TIA: Is anything in life permanent?

JOE: You’re giving me hope through cynicism? (beat) I wanna help.

TIA: I know. This will help.

JOE: I don’t wanna help this way.

TIA: You’re a good person, Joe. JOE: Why does that have the ring of doom?

TIA: She loved you.

Silence.

JOE: I think of her every moment. Of every day. If she was here, she’d tell me to get a life. If I was here, I’d tell me to get a life. I haven’t read the manuscript. Have you?

TIA: I don’t feel I’ve earned the right-JOE: What does that mean?

TIA: --not yet anyhow.

Pause.

JOE: I understand why you’re doing this. I really do. Unless I think about it.

TIA: You spend extra hours at your bookstore. I’m working overtime. We don’t need to do that...

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We’re avoiding each other. When we’re home, we don’t talk. I cry alone in the bedroom, you probably do the same in here. (gently, her heart breaking) We haven’t...even touched...in months...

JOE: I’ve...tried...

TIA: (beat, with love, trying not to cry) I know you have. Thank you. Me, too.

JOE: We could see a counselor.

TIA: We did.

JOE: Not long enough.

TIA: Probably.

JOE: She asked me to hold on to you. It was the only thing she asked me to do.

TIA: I know...But being around each other, it reminds us of...and then we become...

Pause. They start to break down.

JOE: We’re a laugh a minute.

TIA: And a long minute it is. (beat) This isn’t fair, I’m sorry.

JOE: (sarcastic) No worries. (beat) None of this has been fair.

They look at each other, broken. Tia goes to Joe for the suitcase. He clutches it more tightly.

Then he lets her take it. She goes to the front door, turns, and their eyes lock, as though they are memorizing every detail of the other person. Tia exits. Joe sits. Alone.

SCENE 7

Ron. RON: So Tia was gone.

And there was more grieving.

I stayed an agent. Some things never change. I became famous, for an agent, but that’s not important.

Even the most famous agent can’t have everything.

From the advice in her note, I stayed away from Elise’s manuscript. I was...scared. Of what I’d find. What I wouldn’t find. I got in touch with my inner wimp.

Each week I went alone to her grave, put daisies on it. I’d tell her everything that happened. She deserved to know.

After seven months, I felt a sensation on my neck, as if her hand was pressing it gently. I couldn’t stay away from her memoirs any longer. I read them once. Then again. And again.

They were magnificent. I understood why she’d taken them back. She’d changed the form itself, that is, the conventional form of a memoir. She wrote a forward, calling the book an “emotion memoir.” Some parts literally occurred; others were a projection from her emotions of what did, could, might...happen. Truth in the deepest sense. The book was funny, and incredibly moving.

I’d never read anything like it. It chronicled our lives in detail, every moment up to her dying, 98 Proscenium Fall 2016

our family, Joe and Tia, even sadnesses like my love for Joe. And also what she thought could happen to us after her death. But filtered through her, so each moment was...alive.

She had me die near the end. I guess I could have been offended. But she had it occur heroically, with me trying to save a stranger. (pause, smiles) I liked the idea of me as a hero. It gave new meaning to the term “super-agent.”

Later, I understood...she was warning me, about what would happen if I continued in my feelings for Joe. Truth in the deepest sense.

In the book, Joe and Tia were separated after a terrible accident in which they lost their memories. After pondering this, I realized that was exactly what had occurred. Why else did Tia leave Joe, if not to run from their memories?

Truth...in the deepest sense.

I had to get it published. But like I said, a famous agent can’t have everything...

SCENE 8 Ron’s living room. Eight months later. Joe looks around. Ron is sitting.

JOE: I should come here more...You’ve redecorated. It’s...beautiful.

RON: My interior designer and I have a love-hate relationship. We love what he did to my apartment. And we hate each other.

Pause.

JOE: I haven’t heard from her in over a year.

RON: (sarcastic) That’s hopeful.

JOE: Uh-huh, right?

RON: Give it time.

JOE: Any more time and I’ll start to become senile.

RON: You’re already senile. Sorry, that’s not fair to people who are actually senile.

JOE: I’m impressed when you top your own insults.

RON: (gently)You’re hurting.

JOE: So are you.

Beat.

RON: Have you read Elise’s manuscript?

JOE: Tia took it when she left.

RON: I gave you two copies.

JOE: You did. I should have. I just...I can’t. Not right now.

RON: Don’t wait too long. You’ll regret it.

JOE: It’s been...

Pause.

RON: I know. I know.

Joe gives Ron a grateful glance, but is lower than we’ve ever seen him. Silence.

RON: I read Dostoyevsky used to keep a shoe box of newspaper clippings, because he said reality was more incredible than anything he could think of.

JOE: To cheer himself up, he wrote Crime and Punishment.

RON: I’m...sorry.

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JOE: We’re both sorry individuals.

Ron smiles weakly. Though sad, he is in a different place from Joe. JOE: I’m good at bad jokes.

RON: In the Dark Ages they put people who told poor puns to death.

JOE: (alarmed)Is that true?

RON: Not even remotely. (pause) ...Joe...I...we can’t...I can’t...do this...anymore.

JOE: What? Tell bad jokes?

RON: You know what I’m talking about.

Silence.

JOE: Maybe I do.

RON: We’ve been best friends coming on fifteen years, but I can’t keep feeling the way I do about you, it isn’t good for...either of us. It’s time to move on.

JOE: Huh. It’s interesting being the guy people leave.

RON: You can always call me if you need me, but otherwise...

JOE: Right, thanks!

RON: That isn’t warranted.

Pause. Joe seethes, then he gets himself somewhat under control.

JOE: Maybe it isn’t.

RON: I’ve thought a lot about this.

JOE: I bet you have. (pause) So the last fragment of what Elise wanted for us...of what we all had...disintegrates.

RON: That isn’t true.

JOE: (losing it, furious) HOW IS THAT NOT TRUE?!

RON: I’ve never seen you like this. This...low.

JOE: Welcome to the new me. (pause) You can leave now. What? What?

RON: Um. This is my living room?

Pause. Joe trying hard to be angry. They laugh. Another pause. The tension is lifted, something resolved.

RON: I’m relieved the real Joe is still in there.

JOE: That makes one of us. (beat) What is “real,” anyway?

Beat.

RON: Read Elise’s manuscript. When you can. (beat) I’m having trouble finding a publisher.

JOE: That’s surprising.

100 Proscenium Fall 2016

RON: Not really. She does something new with the form. She...remakes...it.

JOE: Like she did with us. (pause, with quiet love) Take care of yourself, old friend.

Pause. This is goodbye. They are moved.

RON: (gentle, light) Don’t be so earnest. (pause) I have great expectations for you, Joseph Peter Ludwick. Great expectations.

JOE: That makes one of us.

SCENE 9

Ron. A glowing, mystical light covers him.

RON: It’s incredible how we can make a choice, enacted in a short moment, that changes the rest of our lives. For the better.

If Elise taught me anything, it was that. “The not inconsiderable ability to affirm life in the midst of its opposite.”

I kept trying to get her book published. I wrote an afterword, explaining who Elise was. I arranged for any money from the book to go to a fund for foundlings.

And after everything, I couldn’t find a publisher who’d take it. So much for being a super-agent.

I thought of that night by the fireplace, with the four of us, what Elise did at the very end.

It made me not give up. I self-published her book. I did. Colleagues were incredulous. “You’re a partner at the Litman Agency, and you’re doing this?!” That was encouraging.

It became a regional bestseller. Two years later a big publisher grabbed it. Sales increased slowly, but never stopped growing. They’re still growing. Six years later, it’s been translated into nineteen languages. (deep smile, pleased about the following) And moron that I am, I never took a commission. But like Elise told me, I’m “loaded,” so what does it matter?

I hope--no, I believe--that she’s watching all this. And laughing.

Almost five years after I had that last talk with Joe, I met someone. I met someone. The human race never fails to amaze.

I felt the sweep of time passing. Among the possessions Elise left me I found a sealed letter.

Folded in an old book. Apparently something she’d forgotten to open. The envelope read, “For Elise Windermere.” (takes out an envelope, removes a letter, reads) “Dear Elise, As I write this, I’m looking out my window. You may not remember me, but we spent years together while you were growing up. The river is frozen. Winter is a time of sleep.

I’m wearing a white nightgown, sitting at my desk, my bare feet on a dark wood floor. Everything is perfect at the moment because my hair looks good. I want to remind you what you’ve probably forgotten: ‘Love isn’t a word. It’s a language.’”

There was no signature. So I searched the rest of the envelope. On the flap was written, “Letter to myself, to be opened in twenty years.”

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I got back in touch with Joe. A little. He hadn’t heard from Tia. He was starting to accomplish a great deal. He’d even begun publishing articles, working on his own book, titled Personal Existence In The Modern Age. His life was...austere. And...quiet. A whisper in an enormous room.

He was still calling for something he didn’t quite...understand.

I wished the best for him...I wondered what would happen to him...but I no longer needed to know.

Ron looks at the audience. Lights fade slowly on him.

SCENE 10 As lights fade on Ron, they rise on Joe, alone behind the counter of his bookstore. Evening. He is older, mid-forties. A red stand promoting a book, with copies of it, is by the counter. The store is changed: more welcoming, cozy. A woman browses outside. She enters. The sound of the door chime, with a magical, powerful beauty even stronger than before. The woman’s face is hidden by a hoodie. She browses shelves some distance from Joe. JOE: Need any help?

TIA: No. Definitely not.

JOE: Okay.

TIA: Sorry, I’m not being clear. I love philosophy. I minored in it.

JOE: Hold on. You “minored” in philosophy?

TIA: Mmm-hmm.

Pause.

JOE: Could you please step away from those shelves?

TIA: You want me to keep my hands up and not make any sudden movements? (pause) Maybe I will.

The woman approaches Joe. Then she removes the hoodie from her head. She is Tia. Her hair has gone gray. It is beautiful. They take each other in for a long moment. Mesmerized. The glowing light from when they first met covers them.

JOE: ...Hi. TIA: (dazed) Me, too. (beat) ...Yeah, I....

JOE: What? What?

TIA: Maybe I should go.

JOE: Or maybe not.

They come out of their daze, somewhat, as the lights return to normal. Tia glances around.

TIA: This place looks...great. You’ve changed it.

Joe smiles. Tia indicates the stand.

TIA: Her book’s everywhere.

JOE: Ron told me it’s an international bestseller. Twenty-eight languages, and growing.

TIA: You in touch with him...a lot?

JOE: We talk...maybe...twice a year. He and his spouse, Brad, might have a kid. (off her look) 102 Proscenium Fall 2016

I know, right? (pause, he means this) I’m really happy for him. For both of them. (beat) First they considered a surrogate mom, but they...thought about it...and they’ll probably adopt.

Brad’s great. Warm. But weirdly funny and angry.

TIA: Sounds like someone we know.

JOE: Sounds like everyone we know.

Pause.

TIA: It’s okay to be sad. But people from the past...even people who have died...they’re still a... presence. You just need to take a step...in their direction.

JOE: That’s what Elise used to tell us.

Tia indicates the copies of Elise’s book.

TIA: You read it?

Beat.

JOE: Uh-huh, a couple years ago. You? TIA: A bit after that.

Beat.

JOE: Takes a while to...absorb.

TIA: ...Yeah.

JOE: Hard to believe we went through...I mean, what she was seeing, compared to what I was.

But after reading it, I think I’m...closer to her.

TIA: Me, too. (beat) Me, too.

JOE: (about them in Elise’s book) You like being famous?

TIA: We’re not really, thank goodness. I’m glad she decided to changed our names.

JOE: What a relief. What’s that expression? (dramatic “police” voice) “Names have been changed to protect the innocent.”

They smile.

TIA: She’d find that funny.

JOE: She was always generous.

TIA: That, she was.

Pause. Tia looks uncomfortable. She has clearly been waiting to say the following.

TIA: Look...I’m sorry I’m left.

Pause.

JOE: (sad, but gentle) Nothing to be sorry for. I might have done it a little later if you hadn’t. We were both so... (pause, he tries to shake himself out of their sudden mood) Is this what people do on a Friday night in their forties, have depressing conversations?

They smile.

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TIA: Only people like us.

JOE: “Like...us.” Huh. You still a nurse?

TIA: Nurse practitioner now. Pediatric oncology. She would have wanted me to make a less... obvious choice.

JOE: I think she’d be pleased.

TIA: You do? Really?

JOE: I do.

Tia picks up a copy of Elise’s book from the stand. Joe comes around the counter to join her.

They look at the cover.

JOE: Burning Cities. By Elise Windermere. (pause) Funny, something happened to me that reminded me of her, though it wasn’t at all the same as what she went through. I went for a physical, hadn’t done that in years, with a stress test, and they found half my heart muscle had died. My heart wasn’t pumping nearly enough. A virus damaged it. Heart muscle can’t regenerate. They said I was going to...Put me on this crappy medication that made me feel tons worse, couldn’t catch my breath. So bad, I stopped it. I don’t mean breathing. The medication. Which I suppose was dumb. Then, ten weeks later, another stress test, they found they were wrong. The virus must’ve paralyzed the muscle. Temporarily.

So I’m...okay. But it made me wonder how you were doing.

Tia is speechless. Beat.

TIA: You’re kidding.

JOE: I’m not, I wondered how you were.

Tia becomes increasingly distressed.

TIA: No. No! They said you were gonna...?

JOE: (nervous and surprised he upset her)It’s nothing. I can show you the films if you want. (rambling) Gotta warn you, though, they’re boring to look at. Unless you’re a disturbed techno-geek. “Disturbed techno-geek,” that might be redundant. I-Tia kisses Joe. Their kiss grows passionate, with a depth of feeling from the years apart. When it is over, they are stunned. Pause.

JOE: I should get an incorrect diagnosis more often.

Tia is insecure.

TIA: What are you thinking?

JOE: Uh, I’m sorry I ate garlic for lunch?

TIA: ...Really.

Tia is more insecure. Pause.

JOE: I think I’m ready...now...

Pause.

TIA: People...things...they’ll tear us...everyone we love...apart. What do you do?

JOE: I’m not sure. Don’t love them?

Pause. She begins to leave. Joe says the following as much to himself as to her.

JOE: Or love them more.

She hears him and stops. She nods. The sound of Elise humming the earlier haunting melody by 104 Proscenium Fall 2016

Joe’s fireplace. Lights rise on Elise and Ron next to the fireplace in Joe’s living room. A continuation of that fireplace scene, but the room has even more of a holy glow and presence. As lights fade on the store, Joe moves toward the fireplace, holding Tia by the hand. They join Elise and Ron, gathering around Ron in the chair. Ron holds Elise’s manuscript. Elise stops humming. A pause.

JOE: That was...nice.

ELISE: Shhh.

The rain is heard.

ELISE: The soft sound of a small rain.

RON: (gently teasing) You are such a poet.

Pause. The adults shiver uncomfortably.

JOE: Fire’s running out.

TIA: Heat still broken?

JOE: Supposed to get fixed later tonight. You okay?

ELISE: Yes. Thank you.

JOE: There must be something we could burn.

The adults search for wood and find none. Elise takes her music box to the fire.

JOE: Wait. What are you...?

Elise sets the music box in the fire. As the box burns, we hear its tune, sadder and more beautiful than ever. The room darkens, pools of light form around each character. The stage and characters have become the music box. A pause.

ELISE: Shhh. We’re alive.

Each looks at the others. Slow fade of lights.

END OF PLAY

Fall 2016 Proscenium 105

Pericles Wet Ellen Margolis

Ann-Margaret Johnson/Sassafras Photos 106 Proscenium Fall 2015

A Conversation with Playwright Yussef El Guindi About the Playwright Yussef‘s play “Threesome” was recently produced at Portland Center Stage, ACT, and Off-Broadway with 59E59. His new play, “The Talented Ones,” was recently commissioned by Artists Repertory Theatre’s Table|Room|Stage Project and will premiere during Artists Rep’s 2016/2017 Season.

Yussef‘s other productions include “The Ramayana” (co-adaptor with Stephanie Timm) at ACT; “Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World” (winner of the Steinberg/American Theater Critics Association’s New Play Award in 2012; Gregory Award 2011; Seattle Times’ “Footlight Award” for Best World Premiere Play, 2011) also at ACT, and at Center Repertory Company (Walnut Creek, CA) 2013; and Language Rooms (Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award, as well as ACT’s New Play Award), co-produced

by Golden Thread Productions and the Asian American Theater Company in San Francisco. His plays, “Back of the Throat” (winner of L.A. Weekly’s Excellence in Playwriting Award for 2006), as well as “Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World”, “Jihad Jones and The Kalashnikov Babes”, “Such a Beautiful Voice is Sayeda’s” and “Karima’s City,” have been published by Dramatists Play Service. The latter one-acts have also been included in The Best American Short Plays: 2004-2005, published by Applause Books. “Ten Acrobats in an Amazing Leap of Faith” (winner of Chicago’s “After Dark/ John W. Schmid Award” for Best New Play in 2006) is included in “Salaam/ Peace: An Anthology of Middle-Eastern American Playwrights,” published by TCG, 2009.

“Our Enemies: Lively Scenes of Love and

Combat” is included in the anthology “Four Arab American Plays” published by McFarland Books. “Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World” was included in the September, 2012 issue of American Theatre Magazine.

And “Language Rooms” was published in Rain City Projects’ anthology Manifesto Series Volume 3. Yussef is the recipient of the 2010 Middle East America Distinguished Playwright Award. He holds an MFA from Carnegie-Mellon University and was playwright-in-residence at Duke University.

Can you tell us a bit about your background and why you started writing plays?

Quick edits of my life so far: born in Egypt, raised in London, college/university in Paris and Cairo, graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University, stints at a couple of theaters in San Francisco (the Magic and Eureka), playwright-in-residence at Duke University, currently a playwright residing in Seattle.

Originally, I wanted to be an actor. I got hooked at 15 when someone dropped out of a school play and I was asked (being well known as a ham in class) if I wanted to step in. I did. Loved it. Wanted to be an actor from then on, much to the consternation of my parents (even though my mother’s family had worked in the theater). In fact, I didn’t really stop thinking of myself as an actor first and a writer second until late in my 30’s. But eventually — for whatever reason — I suddenly became too self-conscious to lose myself in a role. I became too much the observer of my own character’s actions, and of what Fall 2015 Proscenium 107

An Interview with Yussef El Guindi

was happening on stage around me. The joy of entering a world via the nerve-ends of one particular character evaporated, and the pleasures found in creating a world and characters from scratch took its place.

the bedroom. It’s something you want to have happen but now you feel totally vulnerable and exposed. It’s rare where I don’t feel slightly humiliated after a first read through. Not always, but often. For me that is usually because I have overwritten the play (which I give myself permission to do in a first draft). And because it is overwritten the play feels interminable. A play really lives in the rhythm and pacing of its dramatic arc (set-up, delivery, punch-lines, beats: all that stuff), and it’s rare that I’ve nailed the correct pacing in a first draft. I first have to hear the play before I know for sure where I need to cut.

I should add that in conjunction with acting, my other passion was literature. My undergraduate degree was in “English and Comparative Literature.” I wrote poetry. I tried my hand at a couple of plays. I ended up studying playwriting when I couldn’t get into the acting schools I’d applied for. I taught playwriting at Duke University. So while I still thought of myself as an actor, the writing thing was always there. And when the acting bug finally left me, I started to JAW helped me get a better idea of that pacing think of myself, finally (at the ripe old age of issue and — with this play especially — with 40), as a playwright. the play’s unique tonal shifts. Meetings with the director, Chris Coleman, and subsequent reThat’s when my writing adventures really start- hearsals for the production, further clarified and ed to take off. helped me get to the play’s internal rhythms/ pacing.

Your play Threesome received an Off-Broadway Production with 59E59 Theaters and a Your play The Talented Ones was commisproduction at Seattle’s ACT Theatre after sioned by Artists Repertory Theatre as part premiering at Portland Center Stage. Can of its Table|Room|Stage Project, and will you tell us more about your journey with receive its World Premiere this season at this play?

Artists Repertory Theatre. Can you tell us about the process of developing this play?

The play, begun as a response to the Arab Spring, received a workshop at JAW at Port- The play began, as often my plays will, with land Center Stage. I had a wonderful bunch of a character’s simple declaration about someactors and a very skilled director who helped thing. As it so happened, that declaration turned me thrash the piece into something resembling out to be the play’s primary engine and overa play… A first workshop of a brand new play all thematic thrust. I’ve always found it strange is always a mild shock. You’ve been holed up how an innocuous comment or exchange bealone with these characters for months. Just you tween characters (whom I don’t yet fully know) and their drama. Suddenly you have a whole will light up my imagination and drive a play team of actors and a director cramming into this to completion, whereas well-thought-out plots imagined world of yours. It is a very odd sen- with theatrical potential may simply not regissation. Almost like you’re a bride and groom ter with whatever part of me (the unconscious, meeting for the very first time on your wedding I guess) from which my plays emerge. It’s rathday. And here you are finally alone together in er frustrating that the engineer in me that can 108 Proscenium Fall 2015

structure a play can’t move forward unless the unconscious swamp is also engaged. Which is to say, I have to feel the nerve-ends of my characters before I know what they’re doing there, what they want, and how they’ll act.

The other thing about The Talented Ones: I had previously gone through a 2-year phase where I had been writing what I hoped were crowd-pleasing comedies. None of which went anywhere. A dangerous thing to do: pander to what you think an audience might like. Then, starting with Threesome, and especially with The Talented Ones, I decided to go all out and write at the “top of my lungs” so to speak, and not care how the play might come across. Which is ideally how one should always write: honestly, and without worrying how a play might be received. At least in the first draft. Once you have the heart and soul of a play down on paper (hopefully), then you can start working on the craft elements.

these themes mean to you, and how do you incorporate them in your plays?

I left Egypt when I was three. So the immigrant experience is part of the gristle of who I am.

Even when I returned to Egypt for my undergraduate degree, I returned an immigrant — if not quite foreign, somewhat removed now, and not quite plugged in. When I continued on to America, I continued that immigrant journey.

So that odyssey of the traveler, of someone who comes in from the outside to try and make a new home in a foreign place is central to my identity. It’s not something I even think about when I write, it just sort of comes pouring out.

Then again, given the unanchored patterns of most people’s lives, where people rarely stay in one place but travel to multiple places for work, the immigrant experience is one shared by many. Including native born Americans who may travel from state to state in search of employment. (Doesn’t the surprise come when we The play was developed at the University of find someone born, raised and continues to live California at Santa Barbara’s “Launch Pad” in one place?) program, run by Risa Brainin, where it received a workshop production. Under her wonderful Regarding the American Dream: the ideals it direction I managed to hack away at a lot of the represents, in spite of its fraught history, is very verbiage and settle on a decent structure. Then seductive for someone in search of not just a Luan Schooler and Damaso Rodriguez at Artist physical home, but a soul home that one can Repertory Theatre approached me and asked if embrace and identify with. We are nothing if I was working on a new play. I mentioned I was not social creatures trying to find our tribes. I still trying to further develop and find a home felt extraordinarily deracinated and adrift most for this new, weird play. They read it, liked it, of my life. Coming to a country that was built, brought me and the play on board and, with the and continues to be built on the backs of immiadditional help and guidance of Jane Unger, grants — that says it welcomes such outsiders they helped me further develop and refine the (again, lots of qualifiers and fraught history one play. Now, hopefully, I’m within shouting dis- could interject here, but) — was a great salve tance of presenting a stageable play. to that part of me that wanted to feel like I belonged somewhere. The American Dream is Your body of work frequently touches also about reinventing yourself, however you upon ideas about the immigrant experi- choose to do that. There’s some risk to doing ence and the American Dream. What do that, of course. You may end up losing those Fall 2016 Proscenium 109

An Interview with Yussef El Guindi

connections to your past that make you who you are and, in the process, you may end up feeling even more alienated and adrift then you felt before — especially if your attempt at reinvention fails. But it is also very liberating. It’s a rush to feel you can start again, turn the page, face new challenges and go for something better. No shackles yet. Just a bunch of possibilities.At least theoretically/ideally. There’s of course no real getting away from the history that led you to the moment where you can now start again.

The actions that define you remain the actions that define you. Plus, things will happen (news events out of your control) that can superimpose an identity on you. While you’re busy trying to reinvent yourself, others may have already defined you (“Arab” “Muslim, “person-of-color”). For better, or worse (especially when those labels are turned into negatives).

Again, as with the immigrant experience, I do feel this experience is shared by many. A lot of us (most of us?) are engaged in the push-andpull of self-realization in an environment that is sometimes hostile to that attempt.

These, and related concerns find their way into my plays, includingThe Talented Ones.

Many of your plays are very comedic, while at the same time touching on dark subjects. What role does comedy play in your writing?

Comedy is also a way to get people on your side if you feel outnumbered. It lets people know you’re not a threat while at the same time empowering you. It lowers people’s defenses and becomes a soft way to skewer the people who you may feel are pushing you up against a wall.

Comedy shows up in my plays because something is usually terribly wrong. It shows up precisely because the situation may not be a laughing matter at all.

What inspires you?

I wish I knew. I have no idea what triggers a play. It could be an overheard snippet of conversation I hear on a bus or in a restaurant; or some innocuous line that pops into my head from a yet-unknown character in a vaguely sensed situation. I do know that if the play comes to me with all its issues sorted out then what’s the point of writing it? A play for me has to be an investigation of sorts. An exploration of a territory I sort of know in my bones but have yet to identify. And that might even remain somewhat of a mystery by the end of it. Yes, the play sort of needs to address the issues it raises and — regardless of your view of what constitutes a well structured play — you do have to be aware of the dramatic arc you’re creating and craft that in a satisfactory way. Even Becket dealt with dramatic arcs. But the unknown part of writing, that thing which prompts me to want to find out more, that might well remain a mystery by the end of the piece. But then that might also become the trigger for the next play.

I think comedy is often a defense to manage hostility/ instability, and find shelter when you feel exposed and vulnerable. It’s a means to defuse danger, to let the air out of a tense moment, or, in plays, to lighten a scene that might otherwise feel unbearable. It’s also a weapon that What kind of theatre excites you? helps you cope with that instability and hostility. You may not have the muscle, but perhaps All kinds. Plays that present a good argument/ you have the wit to fight back. moral dilemma (Bernard Shaw). Or a theatrical 110 Proscenium Fall 2016

spectacle (Robert Wilson). Or both (Tom Stoppard). Sometimes I like quite, lyrical pieces (Horton Foote); other times something a little more brash (Joe Orton). Many different plays, playwrights and styles.

What advice do you have for playwrights starting out?

It’s the standard advice: keep practicing your craft. Then gather friends and listen to what you’ve written. Or submit plays to workshops.

You need to hear what’s working and what’s not. Then rewrite. I can’t say writing has gotten easier over the years. It hasn’t. But what I’ve learned is not to panic when I don’t know how to move forward. You may need to step away for a day or two; or weeks, even months, before you get the new perspective you need to carry on with the play. That’s why I always try to have at least a couple of projects going.

The other thing I’d say: instinct is learned with practice. It took me a long time to trust my instincts. People will give you advice with the best of intentions. Your collaborators do want to help you, but they may inadvertently misidentify a problem and lead you to undermine your play. The advice must organically make sense to you before you make the changes. If it doesn’t make sense to you, wait. The merits of that advice may make sense later, or it may not. But don’t let yourself be browbeaten into making changes you’re not yet sure of.

Also, beware of audience feedback sessions.

For the reasons outlined above.

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My Birthday Party Wei He

Pulse by Ken Jawaroski 112 Proscenium Fall 2015

A Conversation With the Playwright About the Playwright Ken Jaworowski is an editor and critic for The New York Times. His plays “Never Missed a Day,” “Certain Souls” and “Believers” have been produced by the WorkShop Theater Company in Manhattan and elsewhere, and his fulllength play “Interchange” has been published

by Broadway Play Publishing. His collection of short plays, “Acts of Redemption,” was produced at the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

give the actors something interesting to work with, my job is done. Some writers secure a theme or a moral, then work backward. I’m the opposite – if I can tell an interesting tale, everything else is secondary. I’d like to foster a big idea, sure. But first and foremost, I’d love for the audience to be wrapped up in the plot, and to get a few laughs out of the deal.

Can you tell us a bit about your background and why you started writing plays?

Can you tell us about the process of writing your new play, Pulse?

As a kid I’d write my own short stories, and later, in graduate school, I was told I could subI never seem to have a plan when writing a mit a creative thesis rather than a research paplay. I just find a story and follow it. Two of per. I figured, I’ll write a play. I’m pretty sure the plots in “Pulse” had real-life inspirations. that play was terrible – I don’t have the guts to One was when a neighbor told me his son was go back and read it! – but it was fun enough being bullied in school, and wondered aloud if to write, so I said, I’m going to try that again. he should teach the boy to fight, i.e., if violence I did, and that next play was produced by the could be the answer. Perhaps it could, perhaps Gallery Theater in Brooklyn. Off I went. it couldn’t, I didn’t know. So I started on that story to consider what might happen.

In addition to being a playwright, you are Separately, one night at a party a gay friend told also an editor and theater critic for The New me about his coming out, when he was 16 or York Times. How does your work as a critic so. He’d confessed to his parents, and the next influence your playwriting? day they’d ordered him to leave their house.

This horrified me, and I began to think of my I see a lot of theater. For the past 15 or so years own family, which, when I was growing up, I’ve seen as many as 50 shows a year. The range was quite conservative. If I had been gay, how of shows runs from the banal to the brilliant. would they have reacted? I followed that ques- The bad ones have me grumbling, ‘My god, I tion and started to write. Later, I added a third can write better than that!’ The great ones have piece, and together they became “Pulse.” me thinking, ‘Oh, I wish I could write half as good as that.’

What do you want the audience to come away with?

What inspires you?

I hope to tell a good story. If I can do that, and I’ve had enough of books and plays about upFall 2016 Proscenium 113

Pulse Ken Jaworowski

per middle-class people with petty and easy-tosolve problems. I’m inspired by flawed people who have few resources, yet still strive to find dignity and beauty and wonder in their days.

What kind of theatre excites you?

Sorry to beat the same drum again, but I love great stories and monologues. Conor McPherson can put a person onstage, recounting a minor incident in his life, and I’ll feel like the world has shifted. Also, plays like ‘A Day in the Death of Joe Egg’ and ‘’Night, Mother’ break my heart, no matter how many times I read or see them.

What advice do you have for playwrights starting out?

Everyone seems to give the same advice (‘Write what you know!’ ‘Work hard!’) so I’ll go against the grain and say: See some bad or problematic theater. Think ‘I can write better than that,’ and then go, and write better than that. Also, if you’re working at a job you hate or are stuck in a situation that upsets you, congratulations – you’ve just found the best topic for your next play. David Mamet wrote ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ after some very unfortunate job choices.

And Eugene O’Neill’s real-life tragedies fueled his genius.

Lastly, there are no unbreakable rules in theater, but there is one rock-solid guideline: Remember your audience.

What projects are you working on now?

We’re working on getting my new full-length play, ‘The Patron Saints,’ onstage soon at the WorkShop Theater in Manhattan.

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Pulse is copyright © 2016 by Ken Jaworowski. All inquiries regarding rights shall be sent to the info@prosceniumjournal.com and will be forwarded to the playwright or their agent. Performances of Pulse are subject to royalty, and are fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America and all countries covered by the International Copyright Union. All rights, including professional and amateur productions, staged readings, television, motion picture, radio, translations, photoscopies, and all other reproductions of this play are strictly reserved.

Pulse

Ken Jaworowski

(Lights up on Charles, casually dressed. Perhaps 45? His first sentence is ominous, dark, pretentious. But after it leaves his mouth he shows who he really is - a friendly guy who loves to tell a story. Charles, like the others, should feel free to act out any actions, mime any movements.)

CHARLES: I was born dead.

(Beat) Gosh, I love starting off dramatically!

You feel everybody go ‘Ooooohhhhh!’

But it’s true. I popped out - no breath, no pulse, nothing.

Doctor tried something or other, finally said: ‘I’m sorry. Stillborn.’

My father was in the delivery room. Six-foot-five, 260 pounds. Ex-Marine. He and my mother were 37. They’d been trying for a child since they were 22.

My dad looks at the doctor and barks ‘No he ain’t!’

Pushes past the guy.

(Mimes holding a baby, and mimes the following actions) Picks me up in those huge mitts of his.

And shakes me once, softly but firmly.

Again.

(Beat, then quieter) Then one more time.

I spat up and started to cry.

My father handed me to my mother.

Kissed her on the forehead.

Then he turned back to the doctor and said: “What did you do with the money?”

The doctor is stunned: ‘Whaaa? What money?’

And my father says: ‘The money you were supposed to spend on medical school.’

Then my dad, he lets out one of his laughs that I bet shook every bedpan in the place!

(Lights down on Charles and up on Ron. Middle aged. His tie is loosened, perhaps his shirt has a wrinkle or two. Otherwise not too sloppy. He’s tired.)

RON: I think most people try to live a good life. Work hard. Get by. Not be bothered much.

There’s jerks out there, sure, but they’re a small percentage.

And they gravitate to management positions. So they’re easy to spot.

But what happens when good people get in a bad place? How do you judge then?

I’ve never been philosophical. But you can’t go through life without thinking sometime.

I’ve been doing a lot of that lately.

Started when my son comes home from school, askin’ for SuperShaper Magic Markers. My wife says ‘Tommy, we just bought you markers!’ He keeps askin’ for this certain kind, every day, and something smells fishy.

I’m not good at this.

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From left, Dan Lees, Amée Smith and James Huntington in Pulse, directed by James Wren, at the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Photo by David Bennett.

But I take him for a walk. Finally he tells me: This group of kids at school formed a little gang.

They tell the other kids what they want. If they don’t get it...

Christ: Sopranos, grade-school edition.

My wife calls the school, gets nowhere. Week later we meet the principal. She says she’ll need a formal accusation if we want her to poke around. Legal issues.

Off the record she says that’s a bad idea, the other kids will ostracize him. She tells us, the leader of the group is some kid Greg. His parents: both doctors, if you can believe it. They send him to the extended afterschool program ‘cause they ain’t got time for him.

The principal slips me the father’s phone number.

Wife looks at me when we get in the car.

Yeah, I’ll go see the guy.

This oughta be fun.

(Lights up on Diane. 30ish? Friendly, easy smile, talky. She ignores discussion of unpleasant things, glosses over them.)

DIANE: I was watching the History Channel, a program on the Greek gods. There was one, Sacreous, who was fated to walk a path of priceless treasures. But he could carry only one object.

If he chose to take something new, he had to leave behind what he was holding. So with everything Sacreous gained, there was always some kind of loss.

That’s where we get the word ‘Sacrifice.’

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Fascinating, huh? (Nods as if to say yes, then sort of turns it into a no.)

O.K., well, I think so.

I never had many choices. I’m doing O.K., though. Work in a restaurant, take care of my dad in my free time.

My mom left us when I was a kid. She couldn’t handle him always being sick. So I’ve looked after him since I was 11.

My dream was to be a nurse. I...I couldn’t leave my dad, though. Not to go away to school. But I get some satisfaction taking care of him, and talking to the customers at the restaurant.

So all is fine.

Well, until last week.

Dad was getting cranky, telling me to go out and have fun, stop worrying about him.

Then he started to feel faint.

And things weren’t so fine anymore.

CHARLES: If you have the choice between, One, growing up the son of an ex-Marine who’s a steelworker during the day and a church Deacon during the weekends, or Two, being covered with itchy boils until you’re 18...

Flip a coin.

Look, my father wasn’t a complete horror show growing up. I always had a roof, three squares, and yeah, some love. So no complaints here.

But...come on. Week after week of his sermons in church: Little bit of fire, little bit of brimstone, and a lot of military metaphors: ‘God is like your platoon leader! And God never abandons his troops!’

Oh, or his favorite: ‘God says to tell the truth! So don’t lie to your commanding officer!’

The love child of Douglas McArthur and Billy Graham.

O.K., Patton, can I go now?

But no, every Sunday there I am, standing next to mom and dad, shaking hands, greeting the flock. All angry inside and struggling not to show it.

He’d introduce me to a new parishioner, tell them the story of how I was born. He’d say: ‘God gave me only one son. But I’m praying He’ll give me a dozen grandchildren!’

Then he’d tousle my hair.

Years of this. Week after week after week. Always with the birth story. Always with the grandchildren comment. Maybe I could take it now. But when you’re a moody teenager and that’s all you hear...

I felt like I was going nuts.

I willed college to come.

RON: I call the guy four times before I get a return. Three days later, he fits me in. Soon as we sit down, he’s checking his watch. More than once I catch him with a smug little grin. He nods, does the ‘Mmm Hmm,’ but underneath...his tone is saying ‘Heh, my son sure is tough!’

Either that or ‘Your kid’s a wimp, huh?’

Shows me to the door. I know nothing’ll change.

Week later, scratches on Tommy’s face. Then he’s faking sick, says he don’t want to go to school any more. I can feel the fear coming off him.

I’ve never been ‘hands-on.’ My wife takes care of all that.

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But there’s two choices, right? Raise my kid to be a victim.

Or take a stand.

We buy a heavy bag. Gloves. Jump rope. Soon the basement’s like a scene outta Rocky III. I get Tommy up every morning, take him on a quick run. Sit him down every night after dinner, watch all the great bouts: Ali-Frazier. Louis-Schmelling.

Tyson-Holyfield One and Two. But hey - No. Ear. Biting.

Hagler-Hearns, Marciano-Walcott. Then lastly, a personal favorite, Sweet Sugar Ray Robinson.

Within a month the kid learns the moves. Soon he’s got a damn good punch.

Now before you say I’m reliving my youth through my son, let me say I’m only doing this to help the boy. No other reason.

Ah, maybe I am living through him a little.

It ain’t a crime.

DIANE: The doctor listened to dad’s heart. Took some tests.

Then he gave us the news. Dad’s heart had always been bad. Now it was worse. There’s a good chance he could live five more years. But no stress, no exertion. Lots of help. And he’d always need his heart tablets close by.

The next day, after I got home from work, I found dad packing a little bag.

He said was about to call a car. He was going to the ocean.

‘Oh yeah? Bring your Speedo. Going bungie jumping too?’

‘Come on, you’re not going anywhere.’

He said he’d been thinking. He was going to Grey Cliffs Park.

‘Oh sure! That’s, what, a mile hike after you park the car? Sit down. Maybe next month we’ll go to the boardwalk.’

He was adamant. He was going.

Then he started on ‘The Speech.’

He’s given it a hundred times. He says I’m wasting my life taking care of an old man. Tells me to live for myself, forget about him.

‘You need to let me go,’ he said.

‘So that’s why you want to hike at Gray Cliffs? With your heart? So I can be rid of you? Well, I don’t want to be rid of you, dad! I’ve told you, I don’t mind...’

‘You’re still young,’ he said. ‘You’ve given up too much. Let me go, Diane.’

‘Don’t say that!’

Then he pleaded, said he only wanted to see the place once more. He said he’d be careful, bring his pills, take it easy.

‘Do this one thing for me. Take me to Gray Cliffs. I never told you, but - that’s where I proposed to your mother.’

‘N--no. You’re not going! And don’t even think of trying to leave while I’m at work! No one is taking you anywhere! No one!’

(Beat) The next morning we got up.

And we drove out to Gray Cliffs.

CHARLES: I couldn’t get away to college fast enough.

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The entire first year, I went back home only four days.

Took a job so I could stay at school for the summers. Came home at the last minute for holidays, then left early, saying I had to rush back to study. Sophomore year, the same.

Junior year, I called my parents on a Sunday morning, when I knew they weren’t there. Left a message saying I wouldn’t be home that summer either.

Next day I walk out of my place. My dad’s standing there.

‘Haven’t seen ya in a while,’ he says. ‘Thought I’d drive up, spend some time with you.’

‘Dad, you drove five hours without calling?’

He said he called all the time, but I never answered or called back.

True. Okay. But... (Shrugs) So we walk the campus. Small talk.

Then he asks, why don’t I want to come home anymore? I blame it on work, classes. He knows I’m lying.

He just keeps looking into my eyes until I have to turn away.

I was like every kid that age: Emotional. Confused. Irritable.

And if I’m not already pissed off enough, this gets me more - him coming here unannounced, asking me all these questions. I don’t need this!

Soon we’re arguing over petty things. I say ‘Dad, just go home, O.K.? You don’t know a thing about me.’

Tries to put his arm around my shoulder: ‘Then tell me about you.’

‘You want to know about me? That what you really want?’

He said ‘Yes’ and that...honesty...in his face, that...calmness. I couldn’t take it. Not at 21. Not with what I’d been living with all these years.

Oh you really want to know, dad? You really want your truth?

He says ‘Yes’ again and I rip into him.

‘Let me ask you, dad - when’s the last time you saw me with a girl, huh? When’s the last time you saw me on a date? You keep telling everyone at church you’re gonna have a dozen grandkids. You really think that’s gonna happen?’

‘You see what I’m saying? I ain’t the kind to give you grandkids. That’s what I am, Pop.’ I’d expected this to be the moment the truth set me free. The moment when the sky would open up and I’d be strong and happy and... ...strong.

Instead...there I am, in the middle of campus. Sobbing like some baby.

And my dad, I see it wash over his face. Maybe he’s thinking what he’ll tell his parishioners or...or the guys at the VFW...or his old Marine buddies.

And that makes me break down more.

My eyes get so watery I can’t see. I’m not even sure he’s still there. But I say: ‘That’s what I am, Pop... ...That’s what I am.’

(Beat) And my father says to me: ‘I know what you are.’

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From left, Dan Lees, Amée Smith and James Huntington in Pulse, directed by James Wren, at the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Photo by David Bennett.

‘You are my son.’

And those huge mitts wrapped around me.

And I just kept crying in his arms.

RON: Last Tuesday I’m out of work early. Pull into the school parking lot to pick up Tommy.

He trots out, doesn’t see me yet. I’m about to beep until I notice who’s behind him. Yeah, Greg, same as in the class photo, grinning like his old man.

Before I can say something Greg whacks the back of Tommy’s head. Laughs with his little goon friends. They high-five each other, then Greg hits him again. Closed first.

I could go over, break it up. But I stay put, see how it plays out.

Greg’s taunting him, and Tommy’s not backing down. Then Greg throws a punch and Tommy ducks. Sails over his head. Another - a mile off. Then one more: swing and a miss!

Next thing I know, there I am, bobbing and weaving in the car!

Tommy: Wow! The punches are going right past him. I can see it in his face - all that anger, all that humiliation this kid put him through.

Then Tommy flicks out his first punch and Bam! - a fast five to the snotbox.

And I see fear. But it’s in Greg’s eyes. How’s that feel, ya little shit?

Boom! Another good shot. Then two more.

I put my hand on the door handle, ready to break it up.

But then I think of the kid’s dad. Heh. I can’t wait to avoid his calls! So...no.

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I’ll sit back, enjoy this.

Couple more jabs, two or three rights, then Tommy lets loose a hook that connects with this kid’s jaw and drops him like a sack of potatoes!

I yell out a Yahooo! in the car. And every victory song ever made, from Beethoven’s Ninth to We Are the Champions, plays inside my head! That’s my boy!

I hereby proclaim myself ‘Superfather.’

(His big smile begins to fade as he watches for a moment) Must been a hell of a shot...cause Greg, he’s not getting up.

The kids around him are looking nervous. I get out, run over.

There’s a little curb of cement behind him, where he hit his head.

He’s limp, eyes closed, and I got him in my arms and...

Somebody...somebody call an ambulance.

Wake up. Come on. Wake up!

Call an ambulance!

I feel for his...

(Motions to his own neck, where you’d feel for a pulse) Nothing.

(Starts to mimic performing CPR) Come on! Come on! Breath!

Oh Christ, he’s just a kid!

Breath!

Breath!

BREATHHHHHH! DIANE: Fifty yards then rest. Fifty more. Rest. It was a mile hike downhill from where we parked.

Things didn’t seem so bad walking down, but when I looked back to see how far we’d come - it was worse than I thought. It would be all uphill on the return. I don’t know what we’d do.

But we kept going. Too late to turn around.

Fifty yards. Stop. Then again. And after three hours we’re on the shore.

It was...gorgeous. We sat on a rock and looked out at the ocean. Just the two of us, there alone.

Soon...I got scared. Dad couldn’t catch his breath, and he was so pale. Then there’s the hike back.

It would be dark before we got to the car.

‘Dad, rest for a minute. You need to take a pill.’

I looked out at the sea. Tried to keep talking, to cover up how nervous I was.

‘It’s so peaceful here. Was it like this when you asked mom to marry you?’

And my dad said: ‘I proposed to that floozy in a bar in Trenton.’

Then he took out his bottle of tablets... ...and poured them into the ocean.

CHARLES: He’s stooped a little and needs a cane, but he still has the buzz cut.

I go back home once a month and sit in the pew, listening.

There was a time I’d swore I’d never return.

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Years make liars of us all.

We eat dinner, walk a little afterward. Talk about our work.

For me, all that studying at college paid off.

I cleared seven figures this year. Yesterday I quit.

I’ve decided to adopt a child. Someone...or sometwo, or maybe somethree...who need help.

Those who get overlooked.

After all, What good shall come of a man who shares nothing of his soul?

So shoot me. I listened sometimes.

I have this plan: Tomorrow I’m going back home. Next day, when I’m about to leave, my dad and I will be standing on the porch and we’ll shake hands. I’ll walk down to the car, and right before I get in, I’ll turn to him and call out: ‘Hey! You’re going to be a grandfather!’

Gosh, I love ending dramatically!

RON: We been at the hospital every day this week.

Two days after the fight Greg woke up.

Three days later he’s walking around.

Still more tests though. They might let him go home tomorrow.

My wife says we should be there when he’s released. Bring him a little present.

(He holds up a pack of SuperShaper magic markers. Rolls his eyes) Fuckin’ world.

I don’t know anything anymore.

I lay there in bed, thinking about it.

Some nights, I hear Tommy waking up from the bad dreams he’s been having.

It’ll get better in time, I know.

But the future don’t always help you get through the present.

When that happens...when I can’t sleep, when I hear Tommy wake from a dream.

I’m not sure what to do. I’ve never been good at this kinda thing.

So I go into his room in the dark.

And tell him it’ll be O.K. Then I...hold him.

I just... ...hold him.

DIANE: (Immediate pickup from her previous scene. She’s vividly angry.)

You crazy old coot! Why did you do that!? You...

If you weren’t sick I’d hurt you!

(A pause as she calms, takes on a quiet, sad tone) Dad... ...what are we gonna do now?

(Softly) He said, ‘We’re gonna let go.’

‘I can’t, Daddy.’

He said, ‘I don’t think you have a choice.’

And I’m not sure how it started - maybe it was that, or...he proposed to my mom in Trenton?

122 Proscenium Fall 2016

But god, we both started to laugh.

Then he was almost out of breath.

I put my arm around him.

And he leaned his head against me.

(Beat) I don’t think I’m going to tell you any more.

Not everything needs to be said.

So I’ll end it there.

Yeah.

I’ll stop now.

(The lights stay bright for perhaps a count of three, then cut fast to black.)

END OF PLAY

Fall 2016 Proscenium 123

Mai Dang Lao David Jacobi

Proscenium It All Starts Here.

Supporting playwrights. Encouraging discovery. Making theatre accessible.

124 Proscenium Spring 2015

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