TBAS00fr(i-xxx;4bl) 6/10/09 7:59 AM Page iii The Best American Short Plays 2007–2008 edited with an introduction by Barbara Parisi APPLAUSE THEATRE & CINEMA BOOKS An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation New York TBAS00fr(i-xxx;4bl) 6/10/09 7:59 AM Page iv The Best American ShortPlays 2007–2008 Edited with an introduction by Barbara Parisi Copyright © 2009 by Applause Theatre & Cinema Books (an imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation) No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage or retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the pub- lishers, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper,or broadcast. Note:All plays contained in this volume arefully protected under copyright laws of the United States of America, the British Empire, including the Dominion of Canada, and all other countries of the International Copyright Union and the Universal Copyright Convention. Permission to reproduce, wholly or in any part, by any method, must be obtained from the copyright owners or their agents. Published in 2009 by Applause Theatre & Cinema Books An Imprint of Hal LeonardCorporation 7777 West Bluemound Road Milwaukee, WI 53213 Trade Book Division Editorial Offices 19 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10010 Printed in the United States of America Book composition by UB Communications ISBN 978-1-55783-750-9 [cloth] ISBN 978-1-55783-749-3 [paper] ISSN 0067-6284 www.applausepub.com TBAS00fr(i-xxx;4bl) 6/10/09 7:59 AM Page v To William and Gloria Parisi, Rochelle Martinsen, and my husband— Michael Ronald Pasternack TBAS00fr(i-xxx;4bl) 6/10/09 7:59 AM Page vi TBAS00fr(i-xxx;4bl) 6/10/09 7:59 AM Page vii contents Foreword: All the Things Your Are by John Guare ix Introduction by Barbara Parisi xv The Hysterical Misogynist 1 Murray Schisgal Elvis of Nazareth 29 Jay Huling A Roz by Any Other Name and Weïrd 55 B. T. Ryback Bricklayers Poet 111 Joe Maruzzo Laundry and Lies 129 Adam Kraar Light 149 Jeni Mahoney House of the Holy Moment 163 Cary Pepper The Disruptive, Discursive Delusions of Donald 193 Michael Roderick The Perfect Relationship 215 Jill Elaine Hughes TBAS00fr(i-xxx;4bl) 6/10/09 7:59 AM Page viii The Perfect Medium 233 Eileen Fischer Outsourced 281 Laura Shaine Dead Trees 293 Rick Pulos G.C. 311 Theodore Mann Five Story Walkup 329 Compiled and directed by Daniel Gallant Featuring: John Guare Neil LaBute Quincy Long Laura Shaine Daniel Frederick Levin Clay McLeod Chapman Daniel Gallant Acknowledgments 379 TBAS00fr(i-xxx;4bl) 6/10/09 7:59 AM Page ix foreword all the things you are by John Guare Ientered a one-act play contest my freshman year in college and won second prize. It was a spoof called She Conks to Stupor.Hey, it was a start. It gave me the experience of working with actors and hearing actual live-audience response. The one-act play as skit. Ikept writing one-act sketches for the yearly musical and one-acts for the contest but kept dreaming of the elusive, grown-up Holy Grail of writing the full-length play. In 1960, I saw Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story.Iwalked around for hours after seeing it, trying to decipher its power.What was this one-act saying to me? How could a one-act have so much power? I knew about one-acts like Strindberg’s The Stronger or Pirandello’s Man with a Flower in His Mouth or Arrabal’s Picnic on the Battlefield, even Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, which shared the bill with Albee’s, but those plays were European. Part of the terror of The Zoo Storyfor me was it had been written by an American only ten years older than me. TBAS00fr(i-xxx;4bl) 6/10/09 7:59 AM Page x x • The Best American Short Plays 2007–2008 Iwent to Yale School of Drama to learn how to write the three-act play. In my second year, I discovered Thornton Wilder’s one-act plays. The Happy Journey from Trenton to Camden so knocked me out that I wrote my version of it and called it The Happy Journey from 58th Street and Ninth Avenue to 59th Street and Eighth Avenue.It was an incident in the life of an old man and woman as he walked her from their tenement in Manhattan to the hospital on the next block. We would realize this would be the last time they would be together. Our professor said I had written a believable relationship with real emotional impact. The Nobel Prize! I expanded that playlet into a one-act called Something I’ll Tell You Tuesday,which we performed at Yale to great response. I played one of the parts myself and had the exhilarating experience of walking around within the mechanics of my own play. When I was twenty-five, I got into the Air Force Reserves, a six-month gig, a few days beforebeing drafted into the Army for two years. Safe! Here Iwas in Texas, a wise guy New Yorker with a masters from Yale. Everybody else was in their teens from the South and had barely finished high school. The drill sergeant screamed at me during some exercise: “You! What do you do when you’re not taking up my time?” “I am a playwright, Sir!” “What’s that?” he sneered at top volume. “I write plays. Sir!” “Like what?” He screamed. Isaid, proudly, “Something I’ll Tell You Tuesday.” He screamed, “I want to know now!” Iscreamed the title back at him. And it went on. If he didn’tlike me before, he really hated me now. Ihad to repeat a week of basic training. The one-act play as suffering for one’s art. Igot back to New York. Edward Albee had started a playwrights unit in atheatre on Van Dam Street. I expanded Something I’ll Tell You Tuesdayinto a one-act called To Wally Pantoni, We Leave a Credenza and presented it there. TBAS00fr(i-xxx;4bl) 6/10/09 7:59 AM Page xi Foreword • xi The one-act play as workhorse/stopgap until you figure out how to write that full-length play. Wally Pantoni was done on an NBC Sunday afternoon program called Experiment in Television. One act-play as TV drama. But I ached to write the full-length play. I wrote the first act of House of Blue Leavesfor the 1966 Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, which went over well. Except that everyone asked where’s the second act? I knew what the events should be, but I didn’t have the craft to write a second and third act with lots of people onstage. I only had the craft to write that first act. Ikept writing one-acts. In 1971, I had finally finished my three-act play (act two was in two scenes); House of Blue Leaveswas in rehearsal. Irealized in previews that Bananas, the female lead, needed a scene in the second act in order to complete the play. What could it be? I remem- bered a moment in Wally Pantoniin which the wife told her husband since she could no longer feel, she needed to be in a place where she could remember feeling. It fit. The one-act play as safety deposit box for a rainy day. The years went by. I only wrote one-acts when asked to by groups like the Acting Company to adapt a Chekhov short story, “A Joke,” into The Talking Dog,aShakespearesonnet into The General of Hot Desire. The SignatureTheater is a New York theatrethat devotes a season to the work of one playwright by presenting two or three revivals of that playwright’swork plus one new play. In 1998–1999, I was the lucky recipient. The last slot would be two parts of a trilogy I had written called Lydie Breezein rotating rep. (I was now writing trilogies!) Acouple of months beforeopening, the theatrerealized it did not have the resources to pull off this adventurous undertaking. Did I have a new play I could substitute? I had been thinking of Wally Pantoni and that old couple on their last day together, and wondering what they were like when they were young and on their first outing? TBAS00fr(i-xxx;4bl) 6/10/09 7:59 AM Page xii xii • The Best American Short Plays 2007–2008 I wrote a one-act based on painful family lore: the time my mother brought my father to New Hampshire to meet her family. She asked my father one favor: not to give her uncle Martin a drink. My father did and uncle Martin was dead by Sunday. My imagining of that event would be act one. I edited Wally Pantoniinto its act two. Young actors would play the couple in act one, old actors in act two. Icalled the play Lake Hollywood. We opened in time. The one-act play as lifesaver. The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis then produced Lake Hollywood. My exhilaration at having this sudden new play inspired me to do rewrites, allowing the same actors to play the young couple as well as the old. I had a field day. Dramatists Play Service published that version. In 2008, Amy Wright, a remarkably gifted actress and director who had been in the original Signature production, told me she felt my exuberant Minneapolis rewrites had disfigured my play. The only thing she liked was that the same actors played both the young and old couple. She asked my permission to present the Signature version of Lake Hollywoodat the HB Studio for a brief run. I said yes. The evening had a real effect. Was she right? Had I disfigured my play? The one-act play—keeping it simple? Or did I have two versions of the same play? Take your pick? I still don’tknow the answer to this question. Iwanted to show you the many faces of a single one-act play and raise a question: What is a one-act? Is the one-act play only a stepchild to the superior adult two-, three-act/full-length play? Weren’t the first Greek plays one-acts? Doesn’t a one-act mean one action? How will Oedipus find out who is the cause of the plague? How will Medea revenge herself on her husband who has abandoned her? The one-act as the original soul of tragedy? Edward Albee said a full-length play is simply the correct length the play must be to do its job. His play The Sandbox takes less then fifteen minutes to achieve its task of being an emotional knockout.