DORIS: So who wrote it?
ROSE: Wrote what?
DORIS: “Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard.” It was a fifteen-dollar question on the radio yesterday, but you were out. I ran to call you.
ROSE, suppressing a scream: Who wrote Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”?
DORIS: By the time I got back to the radio it was another question.
ROSE: Doris, darling . . . Slowly: Gray’s “Elegy in a—
Fanny laughs.
What are you laughing at, do you know?
FANNY, pleasantly: How would I know?
LUCILLE: Is it Gray?
Rose looks at her, an enormous sadness in her eyes. With a certain timidity, Lucille goes on:
Well, it says “Gray’s Elegy,” right?
DORIS: How could it be Gray? That’s the title!
Rose is staring ahead in an agony of despair.
FANNY: What’s the matter, Rose?
DORIS: Well, what’d I say?
FANNY: Rose, what’s the matter?
LUCILLE: You all right?
FANNY, really alarmed, turning Rose’s face to her: What is the matter!
Rose bursts into tears. Fanny gets up and embraces her, almost crying herself.
Oh, Rosie, please . . . don’t. It’ll get better, something’s got to happen . . .
A sound from the front door galvanizes them. A man calls from off: “Hello?”
DORIS, pointing: There’s some—
ROSE, her hands flying up in fury: Sssh! Whispering: I’ll go upstairs. I’m not home.
She starts to go; Moe enters.
DORIS, laughing: It’s Uncle Moe!
MOE: What’s the excitement?
ROSE, going to him: Oh, thank God, I thought it was the mortgage man. You’re home early.
He stands watching her.
FANNY: Lets go, come on.
They begin to clear table of tray, lemonade, glasses, etc.
MOE, looking into Rose’s face: You crying?
LUCILLE: How’s it in the city?
ROSE: Go out the back, huh?
MOE: The city is murder.
FANNY: Will you get your bills together? I’m going downtown tomorrow. I’ll save you the postage.
ROSE: Take a shower. Why are you so pale?
LUCILLE: Bye-bye, Uncle Moe.
MOE: Bye, girls.
DORIS, as she exits with Fanny and Lucille: I must ask him how he made that lemonade . . .
They are gone, Moe is staring at some vision, quite calm, but absorbed.
ROSE: You . . . sell anything? . . . No, heh?
He shakes his head negatively—but that is not what he is thinking about.
Here . . . She gets a glass from the table. Come drink, it’s cold.
He takes it but doesn’t drink.
MOE: You’re hysterical every night.
ROSE: No, I’m all right. It’s just all so stupid, and every once in a while I can’t . . . I can’t . . . She is holding her head.
MOE: The thing is . . . You listening to me?
ROSE: What? Suddenly aware of her father’s pressure on Moe, she turns and goes quickly to him. Go on the back porch, Papa, huh? It’s shady there now . . . She hands him a glass of lemonade.
GRANDPA: But the man’ll see me.
ROSE: It’s all right, he won’t come so late, and Moe is here. Go . . .
Grandpa starts to go.
. . . and why don’t you put on your other glasses, they’re much cooler.
Grandpa is gone. She returns to Moe.
Yes, dear. What. What’s going to be?
MOE: We are going to be all right.
ROSE: Why?
MOE: Because we are. So this nervousness every night is unnecessary, and I wish to God—
ROSE, indicating the table and the cards spread out: It’s just a fortune. I . . . I started to do a fortune, and I saw . . . a young man. The death of a young man.
MOE, struck: You don’t say.
ROSE, sensing: Why?
He turns front, amazed, frightened.
Why’d you say that?
MOE: Nothing . . .
ROSE: Is Lee . . .
MOE: Will you cut that out—
ROSE: Tell me!
MOE: I saw a terrible thing on the subway. Somebody jumped in front of a train.
ROSE: Aaaahhh—again! My God! You saw him?
MOE: No, a few minutes before I got there. Seems he was a very young man. One of the policemen was holding a great big basket of flowers. Seems he was trying to sell flowers.
ROSE: I saw it! Her spine tingling, she points down at the cards. Look, it’s there! That’s death! I’m going to write Lee to come home immediately. I want you to put in that you want him home.
MOE: I have nothing for him, Rose; how can I make him come home?
ROSE, screaming and weeping: Then go to your mother and stand up like a man to her . . . instead of this goddamned fool! She weeps.
MOE, stung, nearly beaten, not facing her: This can’t . . . it can’t go on forever, Rose, a country can’t just die!
She goes on weeping; he cries out in pain.
Will you stop? I’m trying! God Almighty, I am trying!
The doorbell rings. They start with shock. Grandpa enters, hurrying, pointing.
GRANDPA: Rose—
ROSE: Ssssh!
The bell rings again. Moe presses stiffened fingers against his temple, his eyes averted in humiliation. Rose whispers:
God in heaven . . . make him go away!
The bell rings again. Moe’s head is bent, his hand quivering as it grips his forehead.
Oh, dear God, give our new President the strength, and the wisdom . . .
Door knock, a little more insistent.
. . . give Mr. Roosevelt the way to help us . . .
Door knock.
Oh, my God, help our dear country . . . and the people! . . .
Door knock. Fadeout.
Lights come up on company as the distant sound of a fight crowd is heard and a clanging bell signals the end of a round. Sidney enters in a guard’s uniform; he is watching Lee, who enters smoking a cigar stub, wearing a raincoat, finishing some notes on a pad, his hat tipped back on his head.
SIDNEY: Good fight tonight, Mr. Baum.
LEE, hardly glancing at him: Huh? Yeah, pretty good.
Sidney looks on, amused, as Lee slowly passes before him, scribbling away.
As Banks speaks, Soldiers appear and repeat italicized words after him.
BANKS: When the war came I was so glad when I got in the army. A man could be killed anytime at all on those trains, but with that uniform on I said, “Now I am safe.”
SIDNEY: Hey!
LEE: Huh? Now he recognizes Sidney. Sidney!
SIDNEY: Boy, you’re some cousin. I’m looking straight at you and no recognito! I’m chief of security here.
BANKS: I felt proud to salute and look around and see all the good soldiers of the United States. I was a good soldier too, and got five battle stars.
Other Soldiers repeat, “Five, five, five.”
LEE: You still on the block?
SIDNEY: Sure. Say, you know who’d have loved to have seen you again? Lou Charney.
LEE: Charney?
SIDNEY: Hundred yard dash—you and him used to trot to school together . . .
LEE: Oh, Lou, sure! How is he!
SIDNEY: He’s dead. Got it in Italy.
BANKS: Yeah, I seen all kinds of war—including the kind they calls . . .
COMPANY: . . . peace.
Four soldiers sing the beginning of “We’re in the Money.”
SIDNEY: And you knew Georgie Rosen got killed, didn’t you?
RALPH: Little Georgie.
SIDNEY: Sold you his racing bike.
RALPH: That got stolen.
LEE: Yes, yes! God—Georgie too.
COMPANY, whispering: Korea.
RALPH: Lot of wars on that block.
One actor sings the first verse of “The Times They Are
A-Changin’.”
SIDNEY: Oh, yeah—Lou Charney’s kid was in Vietnam.
The company says “Vietnam” with Sidney.
Still and all, it’s a great country, huh?
LEE: Why do you say that?
SIDNEY: Well, all the crime and divorce and whatnot. But one thing about people like us, you live through the worst, you know the difference between bad and bad.
BANKS: One time I was hoboin’ through that high country—the Dakotas, Montana—I come to the monument for General Custer’s last stand, Little Big Horn. And I wrote my name on it, yes, sir. For the memories; just for the note; so my name will be up there forever. Yes, sir . . .
SIDNEY: But I look back at it all now, and I don’t know about you, but it seems it was friendlier. Am I right?
LEE: I’m not sure it was friendlier. Maybe people just cared more.
SIDNEY, with Irene singing “I Want to Be Happy” under his speech: Like the songs, I mean—you listen to a thirties song, and most of them are so happy, and still—you could cry.
BANKS: But I still hear that train sometimes; still hear that long low whistle. Yes, sir, I still hear that train . . . whoo-ooo!
LEE: You still writing songs?
SIDNEY: Sure! I had a couple published.
RALPH: Still waiting for the big break?
SIDNEY: I got a new one now, though—love you to hear it. I’m calling it “A Moon of My Own.” I don’t know what happened, I’m sitting on the back porch and suddenly it came to me—“A Moon of My Own.” I ran in and told Doris, she could hardly sleep all night.
Doris quietly sings under the following speeches: “. . . and know the days and nights there in your arms. Instead I’m sittin’ around . . . ”
LEE: How’s Doris, are you still . . .
SIDNEY: Oh, very much so. In fact, we were just saying we’re practically the only ones we know didn’t get divorced.
LEE: Did I hear your mother died?
SIDNEY: Yep, Fanny’s gone. I was sorry to hear about Aunt Rose, and Moe.
LEE, over “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” music: After all these years I still can’t settle with myself about my mother. In her own crazy way she was so much like the country.
Rose sings the first line of “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries.” Through the rest of Lee’s speech, she sings the next four lines.
There was nothing she believed that she didn’t also believe the opposite. Rose sings. She’d sit down on the subway next to a black man—Rose sings—and in a couple of minutes she had him asking her advice—Rose sings—about the most intimate things in his life. Rose sings. Then, maybe a day later—
LEE and ROSE: “Did you hear! They say the colored are moving in!”
LEE: Or she’d lament her fate as a woman—
ROSE and LEE: “I was born twenty years too soon!”
ROSE: They treat a woman like a cow, fill her up with a baby and lock her in for the rest of her life.
LEE: But then she’d warn me, “Watch out for women—when they’re not stupid, they’re full of deceit.” I’d come home and give her a real bath of radical idealism, and she was ready to storm the barricades; by evening she’d fallen in love again with the Prince of Wales. She was so like the country; money obsessed her, but what she really longed for was some kind of height where she could stand and see out and around and breathe in the air of her own free life. With all her defeats she believed to the end that the world was meant to be better. . . . I don’t know; all I know for sure is that whenever I think of her, I always end up—with this headful of life!
ROSE, calls, in a ghostly, remote way: Sing!
Alternating lines, Lee and Rose sing “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries.” The whole company takes up the song in a soft, long-lost tonality. Robertson moves forward, the music continuing underneath.
ROBERTSON: There were moments when the word “revolution” was not rhetorical.
Ted Quinn steps forward.
QUINN: Roosevelt saved them; came up at the right minute and pulled the miracle.
ROBERTSON: Up to a point; but what really got us out of it was the war.
QUINN: Roosevelt gave them back their belief in the country. The government belonged to them again!
ROBERTSON: Well, I’ll give you that.
QUINN: Of course you will, you’re not a damned fool. The return of that belief is what saved the United States, no more, no less!
ROBERTSON: I think that’s putting it a little too . . .
QUINN, cutting him off and throwing up his hands: That’s it! . . . God, how I love that music!
He breaks into his soft-shoe dance as the singing grows louder. He gestures for the audience to join in, and the company does so as well as the chorus swells . . .
END
PLAYING FOR TIME
1985
A screenplay based on the book by Fania Fénelon.
Fade in on Fania Fénelon singing. Her voice is unheard, we hear only the opening music.
Cut to a sidewalk café in the afternoon. German soldiers relax, accompanied by French girls. We are in German-occupied Paris, 1942.
Cut to the Nazi flag flying over the Arc de Triomphe.
Cut to Fania accompanying herself on the piano in a Parisian ballad warmed with longing and wartime sentiment. The audience, almost all German troops and French girlfriends, is well-behaved and enjoying her homey romanticism, which salts their so-far epic conquests with pathos and a bit of self-pity.
Nothing in her manner betrays her hostility to Nazism and its destruction of France in the recent battles. She hopes they are enjoying their evening, promises to do what she can to help them forget their soldierly duties; but to the knowing eye there is perhaps a little extra irony in a look she casts, a smile she pours onto the upturned face of a nearby officer that suggests her inner turmoil at having to perform for the conqueror. She is radiant here, an outgoing woman who is still young and with a certain heartiness and appetite for enjoyment.
She is roundly applauded now at the number’s end, and she bows and backs into darkness.
Cut to a train of freight cars, moving through open French farmland.
Cut to the inside of one freight car. It is packed with people, many of them well-dressed bourgeois, sitting uncomfortably jammed in. The ordinariness of the types is emphasized, but above that their individuation. Moreover, while all are of course deeply uneasy and uncomfortable, there is no open alarm.
A husband is massaging his wife’s cramped shoulders.
A mother is working to remove a speck from a teenage daughter’s eye.
Worker types survey the mass with suspicion.
A clocharde—a beggar woman off a Paris street—wrapped in rags, and rather at home in this situation, surveys the company.
A second mother pulls a young boy away from a neighbor’s bag of food.
Chic people try to keep apart; they are soigné, even bored.
Students are trying to bury themselves in novels.
Two intellectuals scrunched up on the floor are playing chess on a small board.
A boy scout of twelve is doing his knots on a short rope.
An old asthmatic man in a fur-collared coat is urged by his wife to take his pill. He holds it between his fingers, unhappily looking around for water.
Cut to Fania, dressed in a beautiful fur coat and fur hat; her elegant valise is at her feet. She is carrying a net bag with some fruit and a sausage, bread,
and a bottle of water, which she offers the old man. He gratefully accepts it, takes his pill, drinks a sip, and returns her the bottle.
Beside Fania on the straw-covered floor sits Marianne, a girl of twenty, quite well dressed and overweight. Marianne has an unmarked, naive face. She is avidly glancing down at Fania’s net bag.
FANIA: Have another piece of sausage, if you like.
MARIANNE: I’m so stupid—I never thought to take anything.
FANIA, kindly: Well, I suppose your mother has always done that for you.
MARIANNE: Yes. Just a tiny piece . . . She breaks off more than a tiny piece. I still can’t believe I’m sitting so close to you! I have every one of your records, I think. Really—all my friends love your style.
Marianne bites her sausage and chews sensually.
FANIA: Do you know why they arrested you?
MARIANNE—glances about nervously for an interloper: I think it was because of my boyfriend—he’s in the Resistance.
FANIA: Oh!— Mine too.
MARIANNE, reaches under her coat: I adore him! Maurice is his name.
She hands a snapshot to Fania who looks at it and smiles admiringly. Then Fania opens her soft leather purse and hands a snapshot to Marianne.
FANIA: He’s Robert.
MARIANNE, looking at photo: Oh, he’s fantastic! —a blond! I love blonds. They return photos. In the prison they kept beating me up. . . .
FANIA: Me, too.
MARIANNE: . . . They kept asking where he is, but I don’t even know!—They nearly broke this arm. Glancing around: But somebody said it’s really because we’re Jewish that they picked us up. Are you?
FANIA: Half.
MARIANNE: I’m half too. Although it never meant anything to me.
FANIA: Nor me.
They silently stare at the others. Marianne glances down at Fania’s food again.
FANIA: You really shouldn’t eat so much.
MARIANNE: I can’t help it; I never used to until the prison. It made me hungry all the time. I just hope my boyfriend never sees me like this—you wouldn’t believe how slim I was only a few months ago. And now I’m bursting out of everything. But my legs are still good. Don’t you think? She extends her leg rather childishly. I still can’t believe I’m sitting next to you! I really have all your records.
The Penguin Arthur Miller Page 103