DONNY: What?
CHARLIE: Just seeing if you’re still listening.
DONNY: Sorry.
CHARLIE: Thinking about your girl?
DONNY: No.
CHARLIE: Yeah, you are.
DONNY: Charlie, I’m not. I’m telling you.
CHARLIE: I been there, kid. I know what you’re going through. Don’t make decisions based on fear. That’s death.
DONNY: I’m not. I . . . ]
CHARLIE: Listen to me. Here’s the deal, okay. There’s all these lives out there just floating around waiting for you to live them. You have all these choices to make. Every choice you make splits things off into another parallel universe that’s happening simultaneously to your own pathetic reality.
[DONNY: What?]
CHARLIE: There’s two lives in front of you right this second. A fork in the road, shall we say. Two roads diverged in the yellow wood. Which one you gonna take, bubba, huh?
[DONNY: I don’t know. Wait, what the fuck are you talking about?]
CHARLIE: Think about it. Most of the time we’re too afraid to live. We say, “I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t be with her. I don’t want to be happy.” We talk ourselves out of living. But it’s still out there. It’s waiting for you. It’s happening whether you choose it or not. It’s just a question of whether you’re gonna go for the ride or sit on the sidelines hopin’ and dreamin’. All you have to do is step into it. (Beat.) A life unlived is not a life at all.
THE MEAN REDS
BY MARK SCHARF
After seeing his alcoholic wife through recovery, MIKE then suffers a bitter divorce from her. HE is talking to two friends who have dropped by to see how HE is doing on his birthday.
SCENE
MIKE DRENNON s’ house on the outskirts of a small town on Maryland’s Eastern Shore
TIME
The present
MIKE: The only good thing about this birthday is that I don’t have to put up with my in-laws. Hell, now that I think about it, my life won’t be infected by those people at all. I won’t miss my drunken, whining fruitcake soon-to-be-ex mother-in-law who passed her neurotic genes down to my soon-to-be-ex wife. And I sure won’t miss Rose’s nasty, fat, manipulative bitch of a sister and her foul family either. Every time they come over here I have to lock myself in the bathroom so I won’t kill one of them. They think I have a weak bladder. I just can’t stand to be in the same house with them for more than ten minutes. You met them. How could you forget? That doofus-looking moron of a husband with a voice like a demented cartoon, “Uhhh, how’re you doin’, Sport?” The guy is bald straight up the middle, so he grows these three hairs from the side of his head out about four feet long and he curls them all together across his bald spot in a spiral pattern and shellacs them down on his head with about four cans of hair spray. His bald spot is all shiny from the hair spray and it shines through these huge pinwheels of stiff hair. He’s about six foot four and he’s spastic—he walks into the house and BAM! “Ohhhh, I’m sorry! Did I do that? Yuck, yuck, yuck.”
Yeah, they’re charming all right. Rose’s sister is about three feet shorter than her husband and about three feet wider. All she cares about is money and looking down her nose at everybody else. She thinks her children are these perfect, beautiful angels when she’s got them as screwed up as she is. They gave me the flu last winter. The nasty little mucous machines are always sick. They’re like little walking petri dishes of disease who get my kids sick every single time they come over here. And they look like a combination of the worst features of their parents. The boy looks like Moe of the Three Stooges and is about as bright. The girl’s a nasty butterball with a face like Alfred E. Neuman on the cover of a Mad magazine. They’re not children. They’re evil infectious trolls. I could never eat a piece of my own birthday cake ’cause I had to let one of them help me blow out the candles and they’d spit all over the cake. And at least one of them would find a way to sneeze on it.
Hate can be a very good thing, Mary Jo. There are some things that you should hate, that you need to hate like Nazis, and cancer—and my wife and her nasty family. A nice, healthy hate.
MEASURE FOR PLEASURE: A RESTORATION ROMP
BY DAVID GRIMM
As valet to a British lord, WILL BLUNT is the classic clown figure found in Restoration comedy. Here, HE contemplates the meaning of happiness while resisting a bottle of gin, or trying to. BLUNT is discovered, with his playing cards. An unopened bottle of gin before him. HE reaches for the bottle and stops himself.
SCENE
The Lustforth home, below stairs
TIME
1751, during the forty days known in the Christian calendar as Lent, which ends with the Spring Solstice
BLUNT: No. No, I mustn’t. Mustn’t mustn’t mustn’t. Pick a card, any card. I’ll tell you what you got. The Queen of Misery, that’s what. Who was the stupid pillock first thought love brings happiness? Love is scenes and screams and jealousy and acting like a cunt. I’ll tell you a secret: No one has the first idea what makes ‘em truly happy. “If only I was rich and tall and had a smaller bum.” “If I had nicer clothes and whiter teeth and people laughed at all my jokes and wanted to have sex with me.” If only if only if only. No. Seamus—that’s the only bloke I ever knew was truly happy. Dear wee Seamus down the pub who, standing up, was all of four foot eight. Used to be a chimney sweep. Not much job fulfillment covered in soot, coughing up black phlegm and—to add insult to injury—one day he fell in love. Yeh. Down the lane and round the bend there lived the Widow Thwacker. Big as a bloody Amazon, she was. Breasts like cannons and a face out of the Book of Revelations. Tortured him, she did. I tell you, it was nothing short of torture. And Seamus moping, pining, cursing his fate: criminal. Finally, poor bleeder couldn’t take it anymore. Got properly pissed as a Dutchman and, with a fist packed full o’ daisies, he comes knocking at her door. She thinks he’s havin’ her on, so she cuffs him twice about the head and slams the door shut on his hand. Now, friends, a sensible bloke might, when faced with this, give up. But not our Seamus. No. Each Sunday for three months he comes and stands there at her door. And each Sunday for three months, she growls and hits him on the head. “Why do you mock me, chimney sweep?” she says to him at last. Know what he says? “I do not mock you, beauty. You are the goddess of my dreams, my every waking hope’s desire. You are truth made flesh and bliss incarnate. Widow Thwacker, I’m in love.” I mean, for God’s sake! And that’s not the end of it, ’cos then and there he kisses her! On the lips! (Though considering his height, it may not have been the ones on her face.) And what did he feel at that moment? Pleasure? Arousal? Happiness? I’ll tell you what he felt, he felt the marble bust of Mister Thwacker come crashing down on his head. And she brought it down with such enormous force that his wee brain became unstuck and rattled round inside his skull. Now he still sits at his same corner down the local pub, but oh the grin he shines is one the like of which you’ve never seen. ’Course, he drools into his beer and wets himself when he forgets to go, but the Widow Thwacker’s there beside him tending him with care, for (as she likes to say), “This Seamus is the happiest little bugger I have known.” So I ask you, is that what a man must do to find his bliss? Is happiness only for children and the mentally deranged? Perhaps that is the price we pay to learn to be adults. What’s an adult then but a sad and lonely git who doesn’t have the merest clue of how to see or think or feel or talk to anyone at all. If happiness is born of innocence, I want it back. I want to run and laugh and dance and know that I’m alive. But more than that I want to know how to make Molly happy. I want to be the one who can. I want it to be me. So go on then: Pick a card. Any card. It won’t make a sodding difference. Happiness—Hell, I’ll drink to that. (BLUNT grabs up the bottle of gin, opens it and swigs.)
THE MERCY SEAT
BY NEIL LABUTE
On his way to work at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, BEN stopped off to see Abby, his lover and boss, and thus escaped
the catastrophe. A married man with children, BEN has been reluctant to inform his wife of his whereabouts. Instead, HE now feels that HE’s been presented a golden opportunity to erase the past and start a new life with Abby.
SCENE
A spacious New York apartment
TIME
September 12, 2001
BEN: Right? I mean, Jesus . . . you think I was born this way, like some cutthroat pirate of the high seas? Huh? Hell, I’m just trying to muddle through, that’s all, just muddle my fucking way through to middle age, see if I can make it that far. You like trivia so goddamn much, well, here’s a little tidbit for ya . . . I’m faking it. Okay? Totally getting by on fumes. I put my game face on and go out there and I’m scared shitless. (Beat.) You know what? I take that back. . . . This is me. I’ve screwed up every step of my life, Abby, I’m not afraid to admit it. Happy to, actually, I am happy to sing it out there for anybody who wants to hear. I always take the easy route, do it faster, simpler, you know, whatever it takes to get it done, be liked, get by. That’s me. Cheated in school, screwed over my friends, took whatever I could get from whomever I could take it from. My marriage, there’s a goddamn fiasco, of which you’re intimately aware. The kids . . . I barely register as a dad, I’m sure, but compared to the other shit in my life, I’m Doctor-fucking-Spock. No matter what I do or have done, they adore the hell out of me, and I’m totally knocked out by that. What kids are like. Yeah. (Beat.) And you, let’s not forget you. Us. Okay, yes, I haven’t done all that I’ve promised, said I’d do, I fuck up along the way. All right. But I’m trying, this time out—with you, I mean—I have been trying. Don’t know what it looks like, feels to you, but I have made a real go of us, and that is not a lie. It isn’t. And so then, yesterday . . . through all the smoke and fear and just, I dunno, apocalyptic shit. . . I see a way for us to go for it, to totally erase the past—and I don’t think it makes me Lucifer or a criminal or some bad man because I noticed it. I really don’t. We’ve been given something here. A chance to . . . I don’t know what, to wash away a lot of the, just, rotten crap we’ve done. More than anything else, that’s what this is. A chance. I know it is.
MY CHEKHOV LIGHT
BY FRANK GAGLIANO
A theatre professor nearing or just past 60, PETER PARADISE stands on a scaffold arranging lights in a college theatre while conversing with Martin Starr, a former beloved student who has made it big in television by selling out his craft. PETER refuses to let Martin or Carl, his student lighting assistant, into the theatre; they are unseen and unheard, but can hear PETER.
SCENE
Bodoni County Junior College
TIME
The present
PETER PARADISE: What?!—“Bitter?” Moi? “—Insulting?” Wherever did you get that?
—Of course I’m bitter! Of course I’m insulting! I had dreams for you, Martin; hopes for you, Martin. You were one of those rare student actors with talent and brains! And I knew you were going to make it and you knew you were going to make it and when you made it—you said—you’d pump the “obscene TV bucks”—your phrase, not mine—back into a theatre of substance and language and startling visions; into what I used to call—and in a phrase you would love to hear—what I used to call “the entertainment that confronts”; and you also said—No! Promised!—that you would keep your stage talent sharp, even while making your “obscene TV bucks”; and I believed you! because I needed to believe you, because I had stopped making “entertainment that confronts” and so—and, oh, how I do understand the five-and-dime psychology of it all—I needed to believe it from the person I was living through; the son, perhaps? I was depending on, perhaps? to fill out what once had been my vision? Perhaps.
Because I could feel that whatever vision—not to mention “energy”—I still had,
was going,
kept going,
had gone.
But you did not keep your talent sharp, and you held on to your “obscene TV bucks”—until now! And I know why you’ve come back to Bodoni County, Martin Starr, né Starovich—to your alma mater, Martin Starr, né Starovich. You’re here, Martin, to talk about giving the school a large check—a very large check, I’m told, to build a new theatre here—to tear down this space—this very space we’re in—my space—my space where we’ve been programming my Chekhov-Kaleidoscope—tear it down to build a new space, a new theatre—to be called—what?—The Martin Starr Theatre?—Oh! Cheap shot?! You don’t have that kind of an ego? Hm. We’ll see. And if I’m wrong I’ll apologize. But understand! I don’t want you to give your obscene bucks to this institution! So that my space can be torn down—and I intend to stop you!!!
NO! don’t come down “to calm me down”—not in here, I said!—the door!—Don’t open!—the light! THE LIGHT! Blinding! I’ll slip!—back in!—get back up there!
. . . yes. better. keep eyes closed. just for a second.
. . .yes.
Now I’m coming down!
—No! Stay in there! Stay up there!—I’ll MANAGE ALONE!
. . . There.
You see? I’m do
ing fine.
I’m com
ing down fine.
I can do it with
out your help—
with
out
any
one’s
help.
—NO, CARL! YOU, TOO! YOU STAY UP THERE!
There.
Feet on
the stage—on my stage!
. . . Good.
’NAMI
BY CHAD BECKIM
ROACHIE, a BlacklLatino in his late 20s, has come home late after spending the day smoking crack and gambling with the rent money. Here HE lies about these activities to his wife, Keesha.
SCENE
A shoebox apartment in Corona, Queens, New York City
TIME
Late evening
ROACHIE: I woulda been heah like on time, cept I couldn’t stop lookin at tha moon. Yo, you shoulda seen it, baby. That shit was fuckin amazin! I was walkin towards tha buildin an juss looked up and, boom! It was so ill. I had ta go up ta tha roof ta look at it. It was like, like tha kinda moon you see in them movies bout California or tha Wild West? Juss fuckin huge an orange an so, so bright! An I’m sittin there, all like, hypnotized an shit, juss starin at it. An I started thinkin of you—funniest shit, me lookin at tha moon an thinkin of you, knowin you prolly waitin for me in tha apartment, prolly heated at me—but I couldn’t make myself leave. An then, like, boom, I remembered—tha only other time I evah seen tha moon look like that was tha night when we was at that club in Ozone? Member? Like, one of tha first times we evah went out-out, like on a date out? An that Dominican niggah came out his face at you, an I gave that niggah tha beat-down of his life for disrespectin you, an afterwards we was sittin on some park bench, lookin at tha moon an talking? You member that night? How tha moon was? I was up there, on tha roof, lookin at tha moon an thinkin of you, thinking how I should get you ta see it, an then, before I knew it, it like, went away or whutevah. Got all, normal an shit. I’m sorry you ain’t see it, baby. That shit was hot. So thass where I been. (Beat.) Whah? Whah you lookin at me like that for?
THE NATURALIST
BY ROBIN GOLDFIN
This monologue was inspired by a letter in a British birding magazine. One actor, age 20s to 50s, can portray both THE NATURALIST and THE YOUNG SCOUT. HE should experiment and enjoy playing with the range of ages and accents.
SCENE
A small town in the north of England. THE NATURALIST is speaking to an audience at an Annual Scouting Awards dinner.
TIME
Just last year
(Lights up on an actor in hiking gear and a suitable helmet. HE is in the middle of his speech and has a strong north of England accent.)
THE NATURALIST: . . . Sole access to the attic was via trap door in the ceiling. By precarious means—I realize now how soon I might have departed this life—I entered the loft and re
corded egg laying, hatching, and fledging. For my tree, I chose the flowering cherry in the garden, recording bud changes, first leaves, first flowers, first fruits, and their development. My school was Highly Commended, and two medals were awarded, one tome.
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