One on One

by Rebecca Dunn Jaroff

  So began my love affair with Nature. It is impossible to estimate the influence of these early events on my development . . . as today I stand before you not to accept yet another award, but to pass on the legacy . . . of love. I know we are all waiting impatiently to hear from this year’s winner, who has so diligently devoted him/her self to observing these creatures in their native surroundings! So—without further ado: The Tree Warden Society of The Home Parish Council of Wombourne, South Staffordshire, hereby presents a FIRST for Animal in Its Natural Habitat Appreciation to—

  Scout Ernesto Hermon and his outstanding work, “Defenestration and the Little Finches.”

  Ernesto, do come up and tell us—how does it feel to come first?

  (Lights up on the audience. The actor on stage quickly discards the helmet and part of his gear to reveal scouting attire as HE becomes THE YOUNG SCOUT, ERNESTO. HE should distinguish THE YOUNG SCOUT by both age and accent. Perhaps a Cockney? HE begins shyly.)

  This is my first time. I don’t know what to say. There are so many people I—I couldn’t have done this without me Mum, me Da, the good Lor—

  (Suddenly HE sees something and freezes. Cautiously HE gropes in his pocket for a telescope and slowly extends it—the sexual metaphor should not be lost—HE can barely contain his excitement.)

  Don’t move. Don’t breathe. . . . (Scanning the audience.) There! A snag-toothed warbling frustration! And there—a belly-throated regret! Wait, it couldn’t be—it is! A red-breasted lust! And right next to her—the sleek-throated shame! Oh, what a pair . . . this is my. . . . Ah!. . . The full-breasted loneliness is feeding her babies! Oh! The flat-footed failure is laying an egg!. . . (Gasp!)—I don’t believe—so rarely seen in these parts: A dark-hued blue-crested sadness. (Whistles.) Look at that wing span . . .

  (HE exits looking through the telescope.)

  NEW YORK

  BY DAVID RIMMER

  THE CAREGIVER can be virtually any age —HE just needs to show the strain of his profession, dealing with a phenomenal number of patients. The scene was written as part of a full-length play commissioned for a benefit for 9/11 victims, so on one level it can be taken as a man living through the aftermath of that time, which was an overwhelming period for therapists. On another level it could just be a universal expression of stress, overwork, and personal pain, all mixed up with a crazy sense of humor.

  SCENE

  A psychiatrist’s office

  TIME

  Fall 2001

  CAREGIVER: So I get to the office. There’s a manic depressive, two paranoid schizophrenics, a delusional, a denial, a psychotic episode, two unresolved Oedipal complexes, father and son—an anal retentive, an anal explosive, an anal compulsive, an anal confused. Post-traumatic stress disorder—big on that now. A little syndrome, a little deficit, a little this, a little that. Just another day at the orifice.

  Dreams, fantasies—low self-esteem, high penis envy, fear of phobia. Obsessive-compulsive disorder, compulsive-obsessive disorder, rejection, projection, protection, detection, confection, which direction? “Help! I need help! Help!” So do I! Jeez! D’you have any idea?

  Nightmares, hallucinations, fear of interpersonal relationships, a partridge in a pear tree. A guy who keeps asking, “Do babies get boners? Do babies get boners?” The acid flashback that never ends—takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’! Triskadeskaphobia—fear of Triscuits. The screaming meemees—Nature-Nurture! Nurture-Nature! Yin yang, walla walla bing bang!—Yes, babies get boners!. . .

  I have that dream where you go back to college and you don’t know the course and you take the final exam? Except I go back to med school. I know the course, I ace the final exam, I take everybody in the class’s final exam, I take everybody in the school’s final exam, I go before all the teachers’ review boards and I ace them—and I end up ruling the world but I have to abdicate because of insomnia. If I could get some sleep, I could have that other dream that I like so much, the one where the ham sandwich eats me. Jeez, who do you go to when you get burned out? And who does he go to? And him and him and him and her and her and her, all the way down to the last guy—and who does he go to? Me?. . . Cause that’s scary. I haven’t messed up my job . . . yet. I’m fine, aren’t I? I’m fine. You know what I need? More patients. You know any? I had a girlfriend somewhere along the line. Infantile sexuality. God, I’d kill for some infantile sexuality now.

  (Sad and tired.)

  Grief. Despair. Loss. Loneliness. Fear. Anxiety. The shakes. Just an old-fashioned case of the blues. Whatever you call it, they got it. Tommy, Jenny, Rashid, Miguel, Heather, Dov, Angie, Guiseppe, Bob, Fred, Tasha, Kelly, Mr. Winters.

  (Takes a breath.)

  And that was Tuesday. Before lunch.

  ON MY HEAD

  BY THADDEUS RUTKOWSKI

  THE SPEAKER is a 30-something Asian-American man whose native language is English. HE has dark, straight, medium-length hair. HE is dressed casually: jeans, dark sneakers, a solid-color shirt.

  SCENE

  Anywhere, USA

  TIME

  The present

  SPEAKER: My first haircut was a flattop. I got it below street level, in a decrepit barbershop my father took me to. Outside, there was a kinetic red-and-white signpost. Inside, there were cast-iron chairs with leather strops hanging from their sides. The whole place smelled like scalps.

  The barber used electric clippers on my head. Behind my ears, the clippers made my entire skull vibrate. Then the barber applied a paste that made my head look like a burr.

  I used a comb on my head, along with a large dose of goop. When I was finished, my head looked like a skillet.

  Later, my mother gave me a trim. When she was finished, I looked like I was wearing a helmet that had failed to stop a grazing bullet.

  For a long while I stayed away from barbers of all stripes. My hair grew until it reached my back.

  One day I saw some boys with Mohawk cuts. But these boys weren’t Mohawks; they weren’t even Native Americans. They were just a couple of white boys trying to look like Native Americans. Even so, I decided to get a brush of my own.

  One night I went into a convenience store, and the cashier asked me, “What are you?”

  “I’m a boy,” I said, “I guess.”

  “Seriously,” the cashier said, “I can’t tell.”

  Another time, at a border between countries, a guard looked at my passport and asked, “Who is this? Is this a little girl?”

  “It is not time for jokes,” I said in the guard’s language.

  “For me,” the guard said in my language, “it is always time for jokes.”

  On another occasion I walked through an airport and was stopped by two plainclothesmen. “Do you take acid?” they asked. “You look like you do.”

  Later, a girlfriend talked me into getting a layered style and a body wave. After I got them, she said, “You look so good I want to have sex with you right now.”

  Later still, I was invited to a “clipping party,” where men with short hair were getting their hair cut even shorter by a barber wearing Army fatigues. The sergeant/barber buzzed the clip-ees’ heads with electric shears. A man with a razor hanging from his belt stood nearby. He said his name was Bic. I flipped through a scrapbook of boot-camp photographs, but I didn’t sign up for a haircut.

  One time, I met a performer whose hair was shaped like a cylinder. The cylinder was about twelve inches high. I spoke to him, but our conversation had nothing to do with appearance. The next time we met, the cylinder was gone and he was wearing a hair net.

  These days I go to a cutter who has hair that resembles my own. When he asks me what I want, I say, “I want my hair short in places but long in others. I want it long enough for a ponytail, but I also want to see bare scalp. I want words scored in the stubble. I want to wear ceremonial hair gear. I want to be stopped by cops. I want to be on television. I want groupies. I want a style among the top one hundred. I want to meet relatives. I want to be photograph
ed with family.”

  ORSON’S SHADOW

  BY AUSTIN PENDLETON

  KENNETH TYNAN, a British drama critic, early 30s with a smoker’s cough, has suggested that Orson Welles direct Laurence Olivier in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. Welles and Olivier are about to arrive for the first reading. The stage manager has just gone off into the wings.

  SCENE

  The stage of the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin. There is a ghost light. Furniture of a medieval tavern is scattered across the stage.

  TIME

  1960

  KEN: (HE indicates us, moves forward and addresses us.) I didn’t want to turn that nice young man into a receptacle for exposition. However willing he might be. I mean, this could have turned into one of those dreadful scenes in which he asks me questions and I answer them, until, with clumsy spontaneity, we have told the audience the entire forty-five years of Orson’s life to date. Like the maid who answers the telephone at the beginning of the play. (HE mimes a phone and imitates a maid.) “Hello? Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Welles has stepped out—well, you see, he’s walking on the moors—well, I don’t know how long, you see he’s brooding—Why is he brooding?—Because they tore up ‘is contract at RKO in 1941—How many years ago was that?—Well, nineteen years, wasn’t it, because you know what year it is now—You don’t?—It’s 1960!—Oh, it’s been nineteen long and bitter years ’ere, yes, they tore up that contract after ‘e made Citizen Kane, took away ’is right to final cut they did, and ‘im having lost his mum to the jaundice when he was nine, poor little tyke—What’s final cut?—Well, Mr. Zanuck, final cut is where nobody can touch the filum after Mr. Welles cuts it the way ’e likes it, and they took it away after Citizen Kane, they did—What’s Citizen Kane? Why just today the gardener says to me, ‘Bessie, it revolutionized the art of the motion picture! I particularly admire his use of deep focus.”’ (Back to his own voice.) Well, you see what I mean. The plays were like that. Oh, I fought it. With every breath in my body, which is not saying a great deal because I really do smoke too much, but of course no one took really seriously a word I wrote. You see, I am a critic. What is a critic? A critic is no one. A critic is a man who cowers in a train compartment before a woman whose baleful eyes are saying, “I’m sure I have no idea why you were so unkind to poor Vivien Leigh.” I tell you, I came to cherish the idea that there was more to life than this. And so I decided to approach Sir Laurence Olivier—my hero, really, in case you’re interested—to ask if I might work with him to create the National Theatre of Great Britain, which he is soon to form, to, well, advise him. I realized that if I’m to get him to hire me I must present him with an idea that will appall him so much he will always remember it was not his. Well, he needs a director for a play he’s doing, and I’m proposing Orson. I’m using Orson. I’m using my best friend. I’m using the man I wish had been my father. My real father was not, you see, married to my mother. I am illegitimate. This is an advantage for a critic, actually, as when you write harshly of someone and they call you a bastard, you can receive it as a simple statement of fact. What is the point of what I’m saying? Oh, yes. No, I’m not using Orson, I am trying to help him. All those films he made since Citizen Kane, since they took away his right to final cut, all those marvelous films butchered by the studios, I feel grief, raw grief when I think about it, mitigated only slightly by the fact that it was his own fucking fault. Or much of it. Or not much of it at all, really. I don’t know. Do you have friends like this? Never mind.

  ORSON’S SHADOW

  BY AUSTIN PENDLETON

  At the suggestion of the British drama critic KENNETH TYNAN, Orson Welles is directing Laurence Olivier in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. Rehearsals have begun and Orson no longer feels welcome on the project. KEN and Orson are onstage, tense and silent. After a moment, KEN comes forward and speaks to us.

  SCENE

  The stage of the Royal Court Theatre in London. Perhaps part of the set for Rhinoceros is in place.

  TIME

  1960

  KEN: We’re two weeks in. It’s been—it’s been—I must say I’ve been harsh sometimes about things I have reviewed. Particularly if it’s been the work of people I admire. I suppose I’ve thought if they’re capable of greatness they should bloody well achieve it! That surely all they need is a cheerfully administered humiliation, as by a brisk, demented, fourth-form rugby coach, to lash them on. What I see now is that they’ve done anything of any worth at all is a miraculous achievement. Because they are in fact insane. [(Orson gets up, leaves the stage.)] He hates it when I talk like this. But then I talk too much when I’m around him. I’ve followed him for years all over Europe like a yapping hound pursuing a large, drifting air balloon, as he floated about, after his exile from Hollywood in 1948, trying to raise money for his films himself, from Hungarians and Middle Easterners, at long dinners in hotel dining rooms in Venice and Madrid, in which he told them of his dreams of filming Don Quixote or of finishing his filming of Othello, and they asked him what it was like to have sex with Rita Hayworth. Or, if they mentioned his work at all, why he hadn’t made a decent film since Citizen Kane. And he believes that that’s what I think, too, which it is not. I try to tell him he’s a living genius, and once one is called a living genius one only exists to disappoint. I tell him the only reason that they miss those early works is that they want to be that age again, discovering him, discovering the world, but, wait, I tell him, when he’s dead they’ll see the value of everything he’s done—

  O. T. FAIRCLOUGH AND ROGER MAIS

  BY CLIFFORD MASON

  ROGER MAIS, a social revolutionary and prolific writer from Jamaica, explains to legendary editor O. T. Fairclough that the aftermath of independence from white colonial rule is not going to be easy or equitable for all Jamaicans.

  SCENE

  Jamaica, during a dockworkers’ strike

  TIME

  1940

  ROGER MAIS: When independence comes you will have a complete and clear majority. Means you can do anything you want, anything. But it’ll take a while. First you’ll have to train the yard boys, the brethren, the rank and file how to read and write and ride in an elevator and wear shoes every day and how to eat with a knife and fork. I know, just outside this office there are a dozen people who can read and write and know how to ride in an elevator and how to eat with a knife and fork. And they’ll all be wearing shoes. But that’s because they’ll all be the middle class, whatever their color. They went to the right college, have the right family name, live in the right neighborhood. But they’re less than one percent of all Jamaicans. Now if we were in the country or the ghetto I doubt if you’d find one in thirty who could pass on all points. Don’t get me wrong, feet work better without shoes as long as they don’t have to walk on hard man-made surfaces, and eating with your hands is the most civilized way to eat. As to reading and writing, well, the thirst for knowledge is certainly there. Go down into town and you’ll see a man at the top of King Street, in the yard next to the parish church, reading the newspaper out loud to at least two dozen people. As for the elevator. Well, technology can intimidate the most sophisticated of us. A president of the United States, William Henry Harrison, was the first resident of the White House after the electric light was installed, and he was so afraid of it he wouldn’t go near it, not even to turn it on or off. The black servants had to do it. Each morning they would arrive for work and find all the lights in the White House burning from the night before. Only then were they turned off. So what is the point? Just this. You’ll never have the idyll of independence that you’re dreaming of, even after the Englishman leaves and your ninety-nine percent try to take over. Because by then it will be too late. The black middle class, the jet black ones, are the worst snobs, the worst racists, the most cruel of all masters and the most abject of black Englishmen. And you damn well know it. You think after worshipping Lord Haw-Haw’s fourteenth class of Englishman for three hundred years they’re going to throw out the caste system, get rid of domesti
c service, do away with graft for every petty bureaucratic service that’s theirs by right anyhow, respect a black face that isn’t educated and well off just because it’s a black face and what they’ve come from. If you do you’re a bigger fool than I take you for. I can go anywhere on this island, anywhere, good neighborhood or bad, and I’ll be treated like a king because of my half-white face. The ones who hate me know they can’t do a damned thing about it because there’s too much power behind that half-white face. And when the day comes that they can kill me and get away with it, it’ll be too late. The only thing they’ll want to kill for then is power, raw naked power. And they’ll kill you as soon as kill me if that’s how they can get it. And they’ll be right because you don’t represent them, you represent yourself. You even represent me. And no matter how much you despise the black middle class, you’re one of them. Would you let your daughter marry a servant’s son? Hell no. And that’s what’s going to destroy your idyll. By the time the Englishman leaves it will be too late. He’ll have corrupted you beyond the point of redemption. He probably already has.