Anyway, it went like this:
My mother, Maureen O‘Malley back then, came to New York in the spring of ’59. She was 20, her parents staked her to a year, and she arrived with a carefully thought out plan to be amazing at something. Well, the year went by without much happening and she was miserable because she was afraid she was going to have to leave New York and return, in disgrace, to Brooklyn.
Early one morning, after a night when she couldn’t sleep at all, she started wandering around the city. It was raining, she had her umbrella, she sat in the rain under her umbrella on a bench in Washington Square Park, and felt sorry for herself. Then she saw my father for the first time.
“There he was,” she told me, “this devastatingly handsome man”—that was an exaggeration, he looked like me—and he was obviously, miraculously, even more unhappy than she was. He was just thrashing through the rain, pacing and thrashing, until, all at once, he stopped and sank onto the bench beside her. But not because of her. He didn’t realize she was there. He didn’t have an umbrella so my mother shifted hers over to him.
“Despair,” my mother told me, “can be attractive in a young person. Despair in a young person can be seductive.”
Well, eventually she got tired of him not noticing the wonderful thing she was doing for him so she said, a little too loudly:
“Can I help you? May I be of help to you?”
Because he’d been crying.
And he jumped! Man, he shrieked!
But he stayed anyway, and they talked, and I was born, the end.
Okay. So, my mother had been telling me that story for about ten years before it occurred to me to ask: “Why was he crying? What was my father so upset about the first time he met you?” “I never knew,” she said. He just told her he was fine, she took him to breakfast, they talked about nothing, and I guess she kind of gawked at him. And the more she gawked, I guess the happier he felt, because by the end of breakfast it was as if nothing had happened and they were laughing and my mother was in love and the worst day of her life had become the best day of her life.
When she first came to New York, my mother would stay up till dawn debating Abstract Expressionism and Krapp’s Last Tape, and then she’d sneak out to a matinee of one of those plays you could never remember the plot of where the girl got caught in the rain and had to put on the man’s bathrobe and they sort of did a little dance around each other and fell in love. And there wasn’t even a single good joke, but my mother would walk out after and the city seemed dizzy with this absolutely random happiness, and that’s how she met my father.
She’s hardly ever home anymore. She travels from city to city.
I think she’s looking for another park bench, and another wet guy. That’s okay. I hope she finds him.
THREE DAYS OF RAIN
BY RICHARD GREENBERG
The son of a famous architect has returned to his late father’s New York apartment after disappearing for a year. Not entirely stable, WALKER relates his version of the past as HE tries to come to grips with the present.
SCENE
WALKER ’s bed, in a somewhat dilapidated, spartanly furnished apartment located on a winding street in downtown Manhattan
TIME
Middle of the night
WALKER: Meanwhile, back in the city. . . . Two nights of insomnia. In this room, in the dark . . . listening . . . soaking up the Stravinsky of it. . . . No end to the sounds in a city. . . . Something happens somewhere, makes a noise, the noise travels, charts the distance: The Story of a Moment.
God, I need to sleep! (HE lets out a breath, takes in the room.)
Yes. All right. Begin. (Lights fill in. WALKER addresses us.)
My name is Walker Janeway. I’m the son of Edmund Janeway, whose slightly premature death caused such a stir last year, I’m told.
As you’re probably aware, my father, along with that tribe of acolytes who continue to people the firm of Wexler Janeway, designed all—yes, all—of the most famous buildings of the last thirty years. You’ve seen their pictures, you may have even visited a few. That Reform Synagogue in Idaho. The new library in Bruges. The crafts museum in Austin, that hospice I forget where, a vertical mall in Rhode Island that in square footage actually exceeds the state of Rhode Island.
Years and years and years ago, with his late partner, Theodore Wexler, my father also designed three or four buildings that truly are distinguished, chief among them: Janeway House.
I know you know that one.
Everyone’s seen that one picture, LIFE magazine, April of ’63, I think, where it looks lunar, I mean, like something carved from the moon, mirage-y—you remember that photo? It’s beautiful, isn’t it? It won some kind of non-Pulitzer Prize that year. People have sometimes declined my invitation to see the real place for fear of ruining the experience of the photograph.
Well. The real place, as it happens, is a private home out in the desirable part of Long Island. My grandparents commissioned it of my father, using all the money they had in the world, because, I guess, they loved him so much. Apparently, there was something there for a parent to love. Hard to imagine how they could tell, though, since he seldom actually spoke. Maybe he was lovable in a Chaplinesque way. Whatever, their faith paid off. The house is now deemed, by those who matter, to be one of the great private residences of the last half-century.
It’s empty now.
My sister and I will inherit it today.
We’ll be the only family present. Unless you count our friend, Pip, who is my late father’s late partner’s torpid son.
My mother would be with us, too, of course, but she’s, um, like, well, she’s sort of like Zelda Fitzgerald’s less stable sister, so she can’t be there. She’s elsewhere, she’s . . .
So, then, this is my story as I know it so far:
My father was more-or-less silent; my mother was more-or-less mad. They married because by 1960 they had reached a certain age and they were the last ones left in the room.
And then they had my sister who is somehow entirely sane.
And then they had me.
And my father became spectacularly successful, and his partner died shockingly young, and my mother grew increasingly mad, and my sister and I were there so we had to grow up.
VIA CRUCIS
BY ALBERT INNAURATO
JOHN is 30 and in his first job, teaching basic playwriting to all comers and a survey course of the “Modern Drama. ”It’s a big college, and they do lots of plays. JOHN, in pursuit of tenure (down the road some), has agreed to play a role in a fashionable play by a young lady, younger than HE is, who has gotten much ucclaim and a Genius Grant. HE went to Yale School of Drama, so did she.
SCENE
The stage, during a break in a frenzied rehearsal
TIME
Today
JOHN: God. I never thought going to the bathroom would be so painful. I have to run it out, it burns. And don’t you smirk at me, it’s not VD. Jesus, I wish this break would end. I bet they’re all up in the office, drinking! They can’t face this piece of shit any more than I can!! And it got a Genius Grant! This is the twenty-first century—it can’t be because she’s female any more, can it? Aren’t they over that? And she’s white, and not handicappable, and single and probably loved, and certainly whole, and she’s got her fucking meal ticket written for the next forty years. I had to beg for this job, and it’s only because Doc finally had a stroke at 89 that they needed me. Of all the sewage-strewn bad luck, to end up back here. I’d fled, goddamn it, I’d FLED!!!!!
Get away from me. I’m not going to run lines with you, her lines, God give her VD. I saw her and knew the enemy, she was in the class that came in my third year. She had this glow—some people smell of luck you know? One sniff, everybody who can write a check rushes to do it. Oh, Jesus, it still burns—do you fuckin’ want to point out one goddamn line in this Sanctum Sanctorum of manure that lives. Look, I had this fat girl with bad skin in my fuckin’ playwriting cla
ss. She had talent. Wrote this short play we read. Was about all these people—we thought—trying to get upwards somehow. It was a riddle of some kind. “OK, Sarah,” I said, “what’s the riddle?” “It’s a glass jar full of fancy olives, and they’re all trying to get picked. It’s about you!” Gave me pause, and that’s more than this minaret of manure does. I’ve got to pace some.
I had this revolutionary procedure at Yale. My mother stuck a pencil up my dick when I was 11. She said she was schizophrenic and a penis was a dangerous thing, intact. I’m not sure, but I think they patted her on the head and gave her an annuity. They put me in prison, they called it a home. Could have fooled Charles Manson. Left me with chronic urethral strictures. They stick a pipe up you, it’s called a sound. They start rubber, then build up to steel—that’s so you can pee again—for a while. But that just makes the strictures worse, because of the force and trauma. So they had this new operation. They cut you, you see—the area they work in is the size of a pencil point—they cut you, turn you inside out and give you a hole under your balls. You pee sitting down for six months. Then they try to remake you, so the stricture is absorbed, and you can piss again, like a man, like a horse! But one tiny slip—so I pee a lot and it burns and yes, I have to go again but I’m not giving in, and I’ll never have children. (Yells.) Hey, director and older actors we need you on the stage!!!! Oh, where the fuck have they fled? Maybe they all hopped the train for fucking New Haven to try and get Genius Grants. Old codger genius grants! I’m sure they have them. If only I wasn’t so fuckin’ needy—for tenure, for a good stream, for some kind of success in life . . . if only . . .
(HE thinks.) “In Darkness Let Me Dwell.” It’s going through my head. It’s a song by John Dowland. “Semper Dowland, semper dolens”—his motto. I’d like to keep writing plays, some of what I did was good. . . . But I feel obsolescent. We have movies now, we have 4,121 channels on your basic primitive TV, there’s On Demand, there are DVDs—plays? Whatever fucking function the theater had way back when—gone!! (Whistles.) You know at Yale they have this program for critics—yes, they have to be taught to hate! I sat in on one of their seminars. They never talked about plays, old, new, weird—never! It was all movies. About the earliest movies, about thirties movies, about the auteur theory—a cliché nowadays in case you want to apply—about the irrelevance of narrative in the motion picture, about myth and the motion picture, about irony in the moving image, about the transcendence of animation. They took a poll one day of the greatest artistic achievement in the twentieth century. It was a foreign film about a donkey that keeps getting beaten for two hours. I was about to scream, “I am that donkey,” when they started on the value of TV, especially subversive cartoons.
Oh God, I’m a eunuch and an anachronism: I believe there is a point to the live theater, to words as spoken, to the feeling that an actor is breathing right there, in space, in time, and can die or give birth, or even in some mysterious way, live for you—right there. I’m so ashamed, I haven’t told anyone the surgeon slipped. Not my father, not the girls who hang around outside my classrooms. I want to grab someone in the street and shout, “Make me whole, please, please, make me whole.” And now, now—I can’t hold it any longer—I have to pee again. If they come back—ask them to wait for me. I can’t afford to be difficult.
THE VIOLET HOUR
BY RICHARD GREENBERG
In this messy new publishing house, GIDGER is the ageless “flunky” to young boss John Pace Seavering. They are both looking for some theatre tickets lost amidst the clutter. When speaking, GIDGER ’s manner is somewhat extravagant.
SCENE
John Pace Seavering’s office and its anteroom in a Manhattan tower
TIME
April 1919. Early afternoon to early evening.
GIDGER: Every night it’s the same thing. I return home to my garret after my day of . . . this . . . and I ask him, dutifully, Would you like to be walked?
And INVARIABLY he replies: Yes, I would like very much to be walked.
Never ONCE does he inquire as to whether I really FEEL like walking him. Never ONCE has he picked up on my mood.
Would you like to be walked?
Yes, I would like very much to be walked.
Garish mandibles dripping leash.
Tail swishing like a bobbin, like a SHUTtlecock, the long-sought machine of perpetual motion.
Would you like to be walked?
Yes, I would like very much to be walked.
Would you like to be fed?
Yes, I would like very much to be fed.
Well, maybe I DON’T FEEL LIKE IT!
Maybe I need a DRINK and a FOOT RUB!
Nono!
Would you like to be walked?
Yes, I would like very much to be walked.
Would you like to be fed?
Yes, I would like very much to b—
A DOG’S LIFE? You know who leads a dog’s life?
A DOG’S MASTER.
I’m going to have him killed.
[JOHN: You’re not.
GIDGER: I’m seriously considering it.
JOHN: You wouldn’t kill—What’s his name?]
GIDGER: Sir Lancelot. But sometimes I call him Lance and sometimes I call him Sir. Sometimes I call him Lancie, sometimes I call him La. Sometimes I call him Celot, sometimes I call him Slut. Sometimes I call him Lut sometimes I call him Sla sometimes I call him Ut. With each new name, I HOPE to call forth some as yet undiscovered and admirable aspect of his personality.
(Shakes his head sharply, a definite punctuation.)
[JOHN: (Mildly.)You’re not going to kill your puppy.
GIDGER: (The anguish of the powerless.) Can’t I even kill my dog?
JOHN: No.]
GIDGER: What do I have?
I live in Queens!
THE VIOLET HOUR
BY RICHARD GREENBERG
At 25, JOHN PACE SEAVERING is starting a publishing house, but can’t decide what to publish. When a mysterious machine arrives in the office which provides the future of the protagonists, JOHN is confused about his existence, and also about Rosamund Plinth, who left the office threatening suicide. Here HE speaks of a conversation HE had “yesterday. ”
SCENE
JOHN PACE SEAVERING’s office and its anteroom in a Manhattan tower
TIME
April 1919. Early afternoon to early evening.
JOHN: It wasn’t much of a conversation.
But he transcribed every word.
Why did he take it all down? Why are we all such recordists?
Don’t we know that . . . ?
Everyone’s taking everything down as if it’s historical, as if it’s historic.
As if it’s witty or sums up the Times.
All of us confident, all of us aquiver with self-importance. I’ve read things I said three weeks ago, and things I said three years ago, and things that were said back to me. And things that were not said quite that way, and things that were said back but not quite so well.
Gidger?
(Beat.)
We all sound alike.
I thought we were each unique.
I held our distinctions in such high regard.
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