Best Monologues from the Best American Short Plays, Volume Three Read online

  [Slight pause.]

  Not everything goes. [. . .] I know what you want me to say. You want me to say I played the piano because I loved it and I loved music, and then you can say, “That’s all you need, isn’t it?” Well, no, it isn’t. I need more. I need to be seen. I need to be recognized. I want my hands back. I want my nerves, my life. I don’t want to be working in a fucking funeral home. But this is my life now, so why would I want a goddamn piano?! Like I need another reminder of what a failure I am? What possible use would I have for it?

  David Rusiecki

  excerpt from

  Kid Gloves

  from

  The Best American Short Plays 2012–2013

  setting

  CLAUDIO’s desk.

  time

  The present.

  [We see CLAUDIO in his late twenties, in a business outfit, suit and tie, sitting at his desk reviewing papers. A framed photo of a woman and a folder sits on his desk along with a desk calendar, laptop, keyboard, and mouse. An empty chair on the other side of the desk faces him.]

  CLAUDIO It’s Friday, it’s payday. I’m good, appreciate you asking. Now, I wanted to start by thanking you for your help this past year. We’ve seen some significant growth as a department and we’re hoping to continue to improve on our system enhancements. We’ve announced strong results for the fourth quarter and the full year. We improved our performance during the last quarter but we lost some momentum in other areas. Bear in mind, while we are segmented, every area measures their numbers the same way. The process is very similar in the East as it is in the Midwest, to the South region to out here in the West. And, of course, the data we come up with lends itself to things we can update in the future. It all boils down to adaptability. Adapt or die, nothing personal, just business. It’s all about change. As you know, change energizes us. You have to embrace change. Not everybody here embraces change. Our employees are naturally stubborn in their ways. I understand, I get it. How’s the ancient Chinese proverb go again? “The most consistent thing in life is change . . .” [. . .] Now the key is to follow through with these numbers, continue to improve our processes, find new efficiencies so no details go overlooked, and do our best to try to make us better. My job is to call it out when something isn’t working. Why duplicate efforts, you know? Yet at the same time, have employees bring up issues and ideas, provide candid feedback, cut out unnecessary steps, streamline the process, and work together to make sure we’re all on the right track. Any questions so far?

  Cary Pepper

  excerpts from

  Come Again, Another Day

  from

  The Best American Short Plays 2011–2012

  setting

  The living room of Ivan Foley, aged forty.

  IVAN Goddamn bastards! Stupid pricks! For two months you give ’em your best, while they sit there and sip it through a straw! . . . Then they narrow it down to you and some other bimbo, and throw you against each other for another month, while they make up their minds . . . Finally, they name a day when they’ll tell you who beat out the other, then they cancel the final interview, say they need more time, and they’ll call in an hour! Sure! What do they care! They’re safe and secure behind their desks! They’ve got a job! What do they care about what you’re going through!? How many times do they expect you to pour yourself through a tube? How many times do they think you can!? . . . They’ll call in an hour! . . . Suppose I wasn’t here to get the call? Then what? . . . Would they panic? . . . Would they sit by their phone all day, dialing and dialing until they got me in? Or would they just call the other guy? “What the hell, one’s as good as the other!” . . . Goddamn, inefficient, inconsiderate, insensitive . . .

  • • •

  IVAN Wait a minute! I see it all now! You are crazy! There never was a contract on me. You’re just some street lunatic who picked my apartment at random, and now I’m paying the price! This isn’t something that’s organized, or paid for. This is just some freaky bit of city madness that’s found me . . . Like the sickos who push people onto subway tracks, or walk down the street hacking up total strangers with meat cleavers . . . You manage to keep the insanity off you for years and years, and then one day, for no reason at all, out of nowhere, it suddenly finds you . . . I’m right, aren’t I? This whole thing . . . You’re just improvising as you go along. There was no contract . . . That call was just someone calling to shoot the shit and it turned out to be a lucky dramatic touch. It’s all you, right? . . . I mean, you can tell me. You’re still sitting there with the gun.

  [Long pause.]

  John Guare

  Blue Monologue

  from

  The Best American Short Plays 2007–2008

  one of seven works collected by Daniel Gallant under the heading Five-Story Walkup

  You have to understand Queens. It was never a borough with its own identity like Brooklyn that people clapped for on quiz shows if you said you came from there. Brooklyn had been a city before it became part of New York, so it always had its own identity. And the Bronx originally had been Jacob Brock’s farm, which at least gives it something personal, and Staten Island is out there on the way to the sea, and of course, Manhattan is what people mean when they say New York.

  Queens was built in the twenties in that flush of optimism as a bedroom community for people on their way up who worked in Manhattan but wanted to pretend they had the better things in life until the inevitable break came and they could make the official move to the Scarsdales and the Ryes and the Greenwiches of their dreams, the payoff that was the birthright of every American. Queens named its communities Forest Hills, Kew Gardens, Elmhurst, Woodside, Sunnyside, Jackson Heights, Corona, Astoria (after the Astors, of all people). The builders built the apartment houses in mock Tudor or Gothic or colonial and then named them the Chateau, the El Dorado, Linsley Hall, the Alhambra. We lived first in the East Gate, then move to the West Gate, then to Hampton Court. And the lobbies had Chippendale furniture and Aztec fireplaces, and the elevators had Roman numerals on the buttons.

  And in the twenties and thirties and forties you’d move there and move out as soon as you could. Your young married days were over, the promotions came. The ads in the magazines were right.

  Hallelujah. Queens: a comfortable rest stop, a pleasant rung on the ladder of success, a promise we were promised in some secret dream. And isn’t Manhattan, each day the skyline growing denser and more crenellated, always looming up there in the distance? The elevated subway, the Flushing line, zooms to it, only fourteen minutes from Grand Central Station. Everything you could want you’d find right there in Queens. But the young marrieds become old marrieds, and the children come, but the promotions, the breaks, don’t, and you’re still there in your bedroom community, your life over the bridge in Manhattan, and the fourteen-minute ride becomes longer every day. Why didn’t I get the breaks? I’m right here in the heart of the action, in the bedroom community of the heart of the action, and I live in the El Dorado Apartments and the main street of Jackson Heights has Tudor-topped buildings with pizza slices for sale beneath them and discount radios and discount drugs and discount records and the Chippendale-paneled elevator in my apartment is all carved up with Love to Fuck that no amount of polishing can ever erase. And why do my dreams, which should be the best part of me, why do my dreams, my wants, constantly humiliate me? Why don’t I get the breaks? What happened? I’m hip. I’m hep. I’m a New Yorker. The heart of the action. Just a subway ride to the heart of the action. I want to be part of that skyline. I want to blend into those lights. Hey, dreams, I dreamed you. I’m not something you curb a dog for. New York is where it all is. So why aren’t I here?

  When I was a kid, I wanted to come from Iowa, from New Mexico, to make the final break and leave, say, the flatness of Nebraska and get on that Greyhound and get off that Greyhound at Port Authority and you wave your cardboard suitcas
e at the sky: I’ll lick you yet. How do you run away to your dreams when you’re already there? I never wanted to be any place in my life but New York. How do you get there when you’re there? Fourteen minutes on the Flushing line is a very long distance. And I guess that’s what concerns me more than anything else: humiliation. The cruelty of the smallest moments in our lives, what we have done to others, what others have done to us. I’m not interested so much in how people survive as in how they avoid humiliation. Chekhov says we must never humiliate one another, and I think avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy and probably of our lives.

  I went to Saint Joan of Arc Grammar School in Jackson Heights, Queens. The nuns would say, If only we could get to Rome, to have His Holiness touch us, just to see Him, capital H, the Vicar of Christ on Earth—Vicar, V.I.C.A.R., Vicar, in true spelling-bee style. Oh, dear God, help me get to Rome, the capital of Italy, and go to that special little country in the heart of the capital—V.A.T.I.C.A.N. C.I.T.Y.—and touch the Pope. No sisters ever yearned for Moscow the way those sisters and their pupils yearned for Rome. And in 1965 I finally got to Rome. Sister Carmela! Do you hear me? I got here! It’s a new Pope, but they’re all the same. Sister Benedict! I’m here! And I looked at the Rome papers, and there on the front page was a picture of the Pope. On Queens Boulevard. I got to Rome on the day a Pope left the Vatican to come to New York for the first time to plead to the United Nations for peace in the world, on October 4, 1965. He passed through Queens, because you have to on the way from Kennedy Airport to Manhattan. Like the borough of Queens itself, that’s how much effect the Pope’s pleas for peace had. The Pope was no loser. Neither was I. We both had big dreams. Lots of possibilities. The Pope was just into more real estate.

  My parents wrote me about that day that the Pope came to New York and how thrilled they were, and the letter caught up with me in Cairo because I was hitching from Paris to the Sudan. And I started thinking about my parents and me and why was I in Egypt and what was I doing with my life and what were they doing with theirs, and that’s how plays get started. The play I wrote next was autobiographical in the sense that everything in the play happened in one way or another over a period of years, and some of it happened in dreams and some of it could have happened and some of it, luckily, never happened. The play was a blur of many years that pulled together under the umbrella of the Pope’s visit.

  In 1966 I wrote the first act of this play, and, like some bizarre revenge or disapproval, on the day I finished it my father died. The second act came in a rush after that. But then the steam, the impetus for the play, had gone. I wrote another draft of the second act.

  Another: a fourth, a fifth. A sixth. I was lost on the play until 1969 in London, when one night at the National Theatre I saw Laurence Olivier do Dance of Death and the next night, still reeling from it, saw him in Charon’s production of A Flea in Her Ear. The savage intensity of the first blended into the maniacal intensity of the second, and somewhere in my head Dance of Death became the same play as A Flea in Her Ear. Why shouldn’t Strindberg and Feydeau get married, at least live together, and my play be their child? I think the only playwriting rule is that you have to learn your craft so that you can put onstage plays you would like to see. So I threw away all the second acts of the play, started in again, and, for the first time, understood what I wanted.

  Before I was born, just before, my father wrote a song for my mother:

  A stranger’s coming to our house. I hope he likes us.

  I hope he stays.

  I hope he doesn’t go away.

  I liked them, loved them, stayed too long, and didn’t go away. The plays I’ve written are for them.

  Murray Schisgal

  Naked Old Man

  from

  The Best American Short Plays 2008–2009

  Note:

  Though there’s only one speaking part, the cast of characters is to be published as a program note.

  cast of characters

  JOSEPH HELLER, novelist, Catch-22, etcetera; 1923–1999

  ROBERT ALAN AURTHUR, sole producer, co-screenwriter of All That Jazz, etcetera; 1922–1978

  ARTHUR KUGELMAN, creative director at advertising agency; 1928–1999

  MURRAY SCHISGAL, playwright, Luv, etcetera; 1926–

  set

  A seven-room apartment on Central Park West. A dining area adjoining the kitchen: a glossy, square, mahogany table, four matching, square, ladder-back chairs.

  Upstage a long, rectangular, serving table on which we see the following: center, a bowl of fruit; to the right, on a silver tray, two or three large bottles of mineral water and glasses; to the left, several framed family photographs.

  time

  Spring, early evening, 2009.

  [Lights: Rise and gradually change from natural lighting to artificial lighting. Sound: Softly, Berlioz’s “Requiem.”]

  [Offstage, in the foyer, we hear MURRAY SCHISGAL speaking in a didactic voice to his wife, REENE (pronounced Renee), who is getting ready to leave the apartment.]

  MURRAY [Offstage.] Go slow. Take your time. There’s no hurry. Don’t rush. Be careful. Look where you’re walking, especially on the corner of 86th Street. Make sure you look first to the left, then to the right, don’t trust the lights, those cars come at you from every direction. And watch where you walk. The sidewalks and gutters are often in disrepair, cracked, caved in. You don’t want to trip. You don’t want to fall. You don’t want to fracture your wrist or your fingers again. Please. Do it for me. And if the bus doesn’t come in five minutes, grab a cab. Use your cell phone if you’re having any problems. I’ll be here. I’ll be home. I’ll be waiting up for you.

  [Sound: We hear the entrance door open and slam shut. Lights: Rise on dining area as . . . Sound: Berlioz’s “Requiem” fades out.]

  [MURRAY enters: his hair (possibly a beard) is disheveled. He wears bruised sneakers, khaki trousers, an open-necked, faded, denim shirt, and a maroon cardigan sweater, unbuttoned.]

  [When seated, he will be at the head of the table, center. Seated from his right to his left are the specters of his grievously missed friends: ROBERT ALAN AURTHUR, JOSEPH HELLER, and ARTHUR KUGELMAN (aka BUNNY). They exist and speak only in MURRAY’s imagination (no problem for a playwright).]

  Sorry I’m late. My apologies. Reene usually leaves earlier. But tonight she’s having dinner with her friends at Calle Ocho, a South American restaurant on Columbus Avenue. She doesn’t have that far to travel. I’m somewhat discombobulated now that you’re all here; apprehensive is probably the preferable word. I was afraid you’d think me presumptuous, if not paranoid, in asking you to come visit with me this evening. By the way, if I can get you fellows anything, please speak up.

  [At the serving table, MURRAY unscrews the cap and pours himself a glass of mineral water. JOE speaks.]

  How many friends is Reene having dinner with? Is that what you asked, Joe?

  [He waits for JOE’s assent.]

  Six of them. They play bridge at a midtown club, three, four times a week. It’s been terrific for Reene, a lifesaver. It gets her out of the house, keeps her busy, mentally challenged, and happy. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to those six women. Not only do they play bridge together, three, four times a week, they also call each other almost every day, meet for lunch, dinner, go shopping, go to Weight Watchers, go to bridge classes, go to the playground to watch their grandkids on the swings and monkey bars until the cows come home.

  [He wipes his brow with a handkerchief.]

  I’ll give it to you straight, fellows, I’m envious of Reene for having these six friends. And here’s the irony of it.

  [Heatedly.]

  Years ago, I . . . I was the one who had the friends. She didn’t have any friends. The friends she had were my friends, not her friends. They were all my friends. If I wasn’t hanging out with you fellows, I was h
anging out with friends on whatever play or film I was working on, with friends from Commedie Productions, where, as you know, I was consultant and producer for eighteen years; I also had friends from high school, college, law school, friends from the Actors Studio, the Ensemble Studio, the Writers Guild, the Dramatists Guild, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences!

  [A change of tone.]

  Hey, gimme a break, will you? I had friends up the gazoo. I’m not exaggerating. I had friends I didn’t even like, but they were my friends nonetheless. I’d estimate I must have had literally hundreds of friends during my lifetime. And they were close friends, not mere acquaintances. We hung out together, spent weekends together, boat trips, vacations . . . You name it, we did it. But don’t ask me what happened to them. I looked around one day and they were gone, disappeared, popped into thin air like bubbles from a bottle of seltzer.

  [BOB speaks.]

  Are you serious, Bob?

  [Laughing.]

  You’re asking me how it feels to be an old man?

  [BOB speaks.]

  No, no, I’m not offended. Frankly, I approve your choice of words. I am an old man. You were never one to soft-pedal it. I do miss you. Enormously.

  [BOB speaks.]

  I know where you’re coming from, you don’t have to apologize. You left us early, at fifty-six, if memory serves.

  [BOB speaks.]

  No, no, it’s no imposition. You can’t imagine how much I appreciate you fellows coming here this evening.

  [Musingly.]

  Well, let’s see, how does it feel to be an old man? To start off with, you wake up one day and you realize that there are countless worlds out there that you somehow missed the first time around.

  [Emphasizing each phrase.]

  Worlds to see . . . to taste . . . to touch . . . to study . . . to reflect on, to gorge yourself on. I’ll paraphrase Tolstoy: Being old is the most adventuresome part of your life. The great man knew of which he spoke, more so than did poor, sad Jacques who described old age as “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” Certainly in the early seventeenth century that must have been the case, but certainly not in the early twenty-first century. Frankly, knock wood . . .