The Best American Short Plays 2010-2011 Read online

  If this doesn’t disappoint: I am sadly Tammy.

  SAMPSON Then I am happily entranced.

  DIRTY VICKI I can’t release your grip.

  CONNIE That’s okay. Sampson’s your son?

  DIRTY VICKI No. He’s ours. Our only one.

  CONNIE I never knew.

  DIRTY VICKI And now you do.

  MOLLY FORGE My elbows have locked.

  CAPTAIN TWISTER So have mine. My neck bones too.

  MOLLY FORGE Are we cursed together?

  CAPTAIN TWISTER Not cursed. Clasped, my love, clasped together, forever.

  [CAPTAIN TWISTER and MOLLY sway. DIRTY VICKI and CONNIE stand hand in hand. TAMMY stops juggling and steps forward.]

  TAMMY Though we’ve sorted through this disarray,

  We hope you take something from our little play:

  Patrons, travel far and keep your limbs loose,

  But when it happens don’t let yourself refuse:

  It is improbable and impossible to flee

  When braced with St. Matilde’s Malady.

  [Dance party! Everyone dances with frozen limbs. Slowly their entire bodies freeze up until the end when everyone freezes together. The music plays on.]

  • • •

  Lobster Boy

  Dan Dietz

  Lobster Boy by Dan Dietz. Copyright © 2010, 2012 by Dan Dietz. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  CAUTION/ADVICE: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that performance of Lobster Boy is subject to a royalty. It is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America, and of all countries covered by the International Copyright Union (including the Dominion of Canada and the rest of the British Commonwealth), and of all countries covered by the Pan-American Copyright Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention, the Berne Convention, and of all countries with which the United States has reciprocal copyright relations. All rights, including professional and amateur stage performing rights, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound recording, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, information storage and retrieval systems, and photocopying, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved. Particular emphasis is placed upon the matter of readings, permission for which must be secured from the author’s agent in writing.

  Inquiries concerning rights should be addressed to Jonathan Lomma, WME Entertainment at [email protected].

  Dan Dietz

  Dan Dietz’s plays include Tilt Angel, tempOdyssey, Americamisfit, and The Sandreckoner. His work has been commissioned, developed, and presented at such venues as Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Guthrie Theater, the Public Theater, the Kennedy Center, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, the Playwrights’ Center, and the Lark Play Development Center. Dietz has been an NEA/TCG Theatre Residency recipient, an NNPN Rolling World Premiere recipient, a Jerome fellow, and a James A. Michener fellow. Dietz has twice been a recipient of the Heideman Award. His latest play, Clementine in the Lower Nine, received its world premiere at TheatreWorks (Palo Alto, California) in October 2011.

  • • • Production History • • •

  Lobster Boy was originally commissioned and produced by the eXchange in 2008 as part of “The Scariest,” an evening of short plays. The play subsequently received the 2009–2010 Heideman Award from Actors Theatre of Louisville, and received its world premiere performance in the 2010 Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville.

  Characters

  A MAN in his 30s, calm, thoughtful, intellectual, reserved.

  Setting

  Any place suitable for a lecture with slides.

  Note: It is crucial that—with the exception of the Mozart aria—no attempt be made to use actual pictures or sounds in the realization of the slides. The slides are meant to be text, letters, and symbols, nothing more.

  • • •

  [A MAN stands, perhaps at a podium, a glass of water within his reach. Behind him a slide is projected that reads: LOBSTER BOY.]

  MAN There once was a boy. He had a little brother. They were born two years apart.

  Slide: PICTURES IN YOUR HEAD:

  A BOY (AGE 14)

  HIS BROTHER (AGE 12)

  A LOBSTER (AGE INDETERMINATE)

  They lived in a house. In a working-class neighborhood. In that kind of dead zone between the city and the suburbs.

  Slide: PICTURES IN YOUR HEAD:

  A HOUSE (SMALL)

  A NEIGHBORHOOD (ALSO SMALL)

  A LOBSTER (MEAL-SIZED)

  Their father was a boxer. Their father was unsuccessful. He left to remedy this.

  Slide: PICTURES IN YOUR HEAD:

  A MAN (TOUGH)

  A PAIR OF BOXING GLOVES (TOUGHER)

  A LOBSTER (CHITINOUS)

  He never came back.

  [Slide out.]

  Which meant that their mother had to work day and night shifts to support them. Which meant that “the job” fell to the older brother. The job was time consuming, intimate, and went like this: the younger brother stood in his underwear, and the older brother looked at his younger brother’s body, from a distance of one to three inches. Here is a brief list of what the older brother was looking for:

  Slide: CUTS

  BURNS

  PUNCTURES

  PERHAPS A MISSING TOE

  &c.

  The reason for this was thus: the younger brother had been born beautiful, healthy, and entirely without the ability to feel pain. Thus what to us would be this:

  Slide: SOUNDS IN YOUR HEAD:

  A KNIFE SLICING SOMETHING

  A PERSON SAYING “OW!”

  A BAND-AID BEING APPLIED

  To him would be this:

  Slide: A KNIFE SLICING SOMETHING

  . . .

  . . .

  Every night of every day of the older brother’s life was devoted to scanning over his younger brother’s body, like the way you might look up a difficult word in the dictionary.

  Slide: nociceptor (no•si•sep•tr) n. a sensory receptor for pain stimuli, usually found in great bundles in the body’s most sensitive parts

  Something was wrong with the younger boy’s nociceptors. Also his brain, but the older boy never really understood that part. What he understood was that his brother’s condition, combined with his father’s absence and his mother’s brutal work schedule, meant that any and every responsibility that placed one within any distance of a heated stove, a bladed knife, a lawnmower, etc. was up to him. So while the younger brother came home from school and did this:

  Slide: WATCH TV

  RIDE BIKE

  PLAY VIDEO GAMES

  The older brother came home from school and did this:

  Slide: FIX SINK

  MOW LAWN

  COOK DINNER

  And more importantly, this:

  Slide: HAVE NO FRIENDS

  So while everyone else looked at his younger brother and saw this:

  Slide: BEAUTIFUL BLOND HAIR

  GOOFY BIG EARS

  AN EVER-PRESENT GRIN

  More and more, he looked at his younger brother and saw this:

  Slide: THAT WHICH MAKES ME WORK

  THAT WHICH MAKES ME TIRED

  THAT WHICH MAKES ME ALONE

  Which brings us to lobsters.

  Slide: PICTURE IN YOUR HEAD:

  A POT (FILLED WITH WATER [BOILING])

  A HAND (FILLED WITH A LOBSTER)

  A LOBSTER (FILLED WITH ?)

  There is a bit of a debate raging over whether lobsters, upon being tossed into a pot of boiling water, feel what we as human beings with a spinal column, limbic system, and frontal cortex would recognize and categorize as “pain.”

  Slide: SOUNDS IN YOUR HEAD:

  A KNIFE SLICING SOMETHING

  A PERSON SAYING DAMNIT!

  A SECOND BAND-AID BEING APPLIED

  It’s not a new debate,
and the jury seems permanently out on this one, but there is some disagreement over the gray areas. However, gray areas do not fit neatly into a ninth grade biology class, nor into a fourteen-year-old boy’s mind.

  Slide: PICTURES IN YOUR HEAD: A GRAY AREA A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY’S MIND AN AWKWARD MOMENT

  Particularly a fourteen-year-old boy who has grown extremely tired of knowing about the subtle changes in his brother’s body before said brother does.

  Slide: CONVERSATION IN YOUR HEAD:

  A: “Dude, you’ve hit puberty.”

  B: “Really?”

  A: “Yep: look.”

  B: “Oh yeah, thanks.”

  So imagine this boy’s ears perking up when he hears his science teacher proclaim, without a hint of doubt, that lobsters, having evolved with only a chitinous outer shell and a few ham-fisted nerve bundles, simply do not have the physical capability to feel pain during those pre-bisque preparations.

  Slide: PICTURES IN YOUR HEAD:

  A POT FILLED WITH WATER (BOILING)

  A SCIENCE TEACHER (LECTURING)

  A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY (LISTENING)

  Now imagine the same ears on the same boy perking up past what seems humanly possible upon hearing this next factoid: that lobsters, lacking an apparatus capable of sensing and processing pain, almost certainly also lack the ability to feel...fear.

  Slide: PICTURE IN YOUR HEAD:

  A PLAN (UNFOLDING)

  WITHIN A BRAIN (BOILING)

  BEHIND THE EYES (DISTANT, INTENSE) OF A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD-BOY

  It was a simple plan that unfolded itself inside the boy’s mind at that moment. One based more on a childhood sense of the tautological than on any depth of consideration. If animals that do not feel pain consequently do not feel fear, then the best and perhaps only way to give a good jolt of shock therapy to his twelve-year-old brother’s nervous system and grow those prematurely burnt-out nociceptors into ones capable of experiencing the prick of a needle, the crack of a baseball in the face, the sizzling rush of okay-that-bathwater-is-gonna-give-me-second-degree-burns-now was to scare the complete and thorough Jesus out of him.

  Slide: A BRAIN (BOILING) BEHIND THE EYES (DISTANT, INTENSE)

  Slide: THE EYES (DISTANT, INTENSE)

  Slide: THE EYES

  [Slide out.]

  Slide: A PAUSE

  [A Pause. A sip of water. Slide out.]

  The thing about drowning is, it’s not about the pain.

  Slide: DROWNING = PAIN?

  It hurts, by all accounts, but that’s really secondary to the experience. No, the thing about drowning is, it’s all about the horror.

  Slide: DROWNING = FEAR

  It generates in one a fear that comes from a place deeper than logic, deeper even than the brain. It comes from the body itself. It’s as though every organ, every cell within you recognizes that something is going horribly wrong, and if that something is not fixed, and soon...In short, it brings about absolute physical panic.

  At least, this was the thought inside the fourteen-year-old boy’s mind...

  Slide: THOUGHT = (DROWNING = FEAR)

  ...as he rushed back from his school to his neighborhood...

  Slide: (NEIGHBORHOOD [HOUSE (POOL)])

  ...within which sat his house...within which (or just outside of which) sat its swimming pool...over which rested a simple yet crucial feature: a heavy, black, tightly fitting tarp, which snapped into place via a series of hard metal studs circling the pool.

  Slide: (NEIGHBORHOOD [HOUSE (POOL [TARP ])])

  WATER

  The tarp had a history of being employed in a manner not intended by its creators. For it could not help but be noticed by the two boys that their father had left behind a number of pairs of used, torn, pungent-smelling gloves.

  Slide: PICTURE IN YOUR HEAD:

  BOXING GLOVES

  And it also could not help but be noticed that the tarp, once in place, etched out a space roughly analogous to that of a boxing ring.

  Slide: (TARP ) = BOXING RING

  WATER

  It supported the boys surprisingly well at six and eight, began to sag beneath their weight at nine and eleven, and now...well, they liked to think of it as adding an advanced level of difficulty to an otherwise rote form of entertainment. Besides, it was black, which concealed bloodstains from their mother. The snaps took a surprising amount of effort to pry loose, and in the end the boy could only uncover about a quarter of the pool before his fingers were rubbed raw and the pain forced him to stop, as it would anyone with a normal body. But a quarter, positioned directly over the deepest end of the pool, was enough. He peered for a moment at the shimmering, stale-looking water quivering just beneath the tarp’s surface. Then he gently laid the corner back down onto the concrete edge of the pool, and waited for night to fall.

  Slide: PICTURE IN YOUR HEAD:

  NIGHT (FALLING)

  It is astonishing to me what people assume about children. About what children are capable of.

  Slide: PICTURE IN YOUR HEAD:

  STARS (TWINKLING)

  Mozart composed the melody to “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” when he was just a boy. By fourteen he’d written his first opera.

  [Suddenly, “Nel sen mi palpita dolente il core” from Mozart’s Mitridate, Re di Ponte bursts into our ears—perhaps starting at the intense, terror-filled final thirty seconds.]

  Slide: PICTURE IN YOUR HEAD:

  A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY WITH AN OPERA IN HIS EYES

  An opera. At fourteen. It ends with a suicide.

  [A moment, as the MAN stares beyond us, through us, into something unseen. Then the music ceases, and the MAN’s eyes refocus.]

  Slide: PICTURE IN YOUR HEAD:

  NIGHT (FALLEN)

  When it was dark out, and the tarp’s surface nothing more than a black blob in the backyard, the older brother entered the younger brother’s room and tossed a pair of boxing gloves onto his bed. It was a gesture in need of no words. The routine was understood. The younger boy donned his gloves and the older boy helped him lace up. Tightly. Then the two boys raced down the stairs together, rushed through the living room, and out the back door. With a howl of joy...

  Slide: SOUND IN YOUR HEAD:

  JOY

  ...the younger boy leapt onto the surface of the tarp, while the older boy, for the first time ever in the history of their game, stopped short. The second the younger boy’s feet hit the tarp, the undone corner sank beneath his weight and the water sucked him right under.

  Slide: SOUND IN YOUR HEAD:

  A SPLASH

  The older boy’s goal had always only been to instigate fear within the younger boy. He saw it (and he knows now, believe me he knows this must seem at best bizarre and at worst rather sick) but he saw it as a sort of gift.

  Slide: PICTURES IN YOUR HEAD:

  A CORNER OF A TARP (SINKING)

  A BODY UNDER THE TARP (FLAILING)

  A PAIR OF LUNGS (CONSTRICTING)

  A gift given, as many gifts are, that it might benefit not only the receiver but the giver as well.

  Slide: PICTURES IN YOUR HEAD:

  A YOUNGER BOY (PANICKING)

  AN OLDER BOY (WATCHING)

  STARS (TWINKLING)

  For if the younger brother were to be scared deeply enough, he might regain his ability to feel pain.

  Slide: SOUNDS IN YOUR HEAD:

  CRYING

  GURGLING

  SMACKING (GLOVED FISTS AGAINST UNDERSIDE OF TARP?)

  And if he regained his ability to feel pain, he could be as afraid of it as the rest of us.

  Slide: PICTURES IN YOUR HEAD: AN OLDER BOY (BY THE POOL)

  BOXING GLOVES (REMOVED)

  BARE HANDS (REVEALED)

  And if he was as afraid of pain as the rest of us, he would seek to avoid injury.

  Slide: PICTURES IN YOUR HEAD:

  AN OLDER BOY (KNEELING)

  BARE HANDS (SWEATING)

  BLACK TARP (WAITING)

  And if he
sought to avoid injury, it would no longer be necessary for the older brother to carry the entire load of the house upon his back, take care of everything, all without a mother or father around to guide, to assist, to encourage, to offer more than a symbolic presence in his already ancient-feeling life.

  Slide: SOUNDS IN YOUR HEAD:

  CRYING

  GURGLING

  MUFFLED SCREAM (A BOY’S NAME?)

  And then, as if adding one last insult to the labor of his days, to check for injuries every night upon a body that ought to know its own damn surfaces by now.

  Slide: PICTURE IN YOUR HEAD: