Kenneth Lonergan: Three Plays (NHB Modern Plays)

Kenneth Lonergan

THREE PLAYS

This Is Our Youth

The Waverly Gallery

Lobby Hero

introduced by the author

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Preface by Kenneth Lonergan

This Is Our Youth

The Waverly Gallery

Lobby Hero

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Preface

Kenneth Lonergan

The plays in this edition were written in the 1990s and first produced in 1996, 2000 and 2001, respectively, in various Off-Broadway theatres in New York. Two of them, This Is Our Youth and Lobby Hero, were subsequently produced in London in 2002, and all three were recently revived on Broadway over the last three years. This edition gives me the opportunity to say a little something about them. But I’m really not sure I can add much to what I’ve already said elsewhere, and it’s always a bit tricky talking about your own work because there are a lot of good arguments against doing it at all.

For one thing, discussing what you are doing, have done, and would like to do is one of the best ways there is to stop doing it. Ernest Hemingway, who was if anything over-aware of what he was doing and how he did it, said somewhere that when you talk about your work you always run the risk of talking it away. This seems true enough. George Orwell, who was much less interested in himself than Hemingway was, shied away from discussing his books because he felt they ought to speak for themselves; i.e. if you need to clarify or expand on what you’ve written in a preface (like this one) there’s probably something missing from it that no preface can hope to provide.

Still, all kinds of wonderful writers have told us many fascinating things about their work, and the way they work, and it doesn’t seem to have done them any harm. Robert A. Caro just published a book called, aptly enough, Working, about how he approached his monumental biography of Robert Moses, and his still unfinished multi-volume The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Having read thousands of pages in these amazing books I was almost desperate to know how he went about writing them, and I wish he’d write three more books about how he does it. Many of George Bernard Shaw’s prefaces are as interesting as the plays they preface, which is saying a lot. I won’t say the preface to Saint Joan is better than Saint Joan, but it’s a pleasure to read even if you haven’t read or seen Saint Joan, or don’t intend to – which would be a mistake, of course. We have nothing at all from Shakespeare about his plays that is not contained in them, unless you count some very simple stage directions which he may or may not have written. This has obviously done the plays no harm. But it would be nice to have had a word or two from him anyway.

Of course, there are lots of writers who say things about their work you wish they hadn’t. Either they spoil your fun by telling you what they’re really writing about, when you thought they were writing about something more interesting, or they seem to insist that the only way to write anything at all is their way. ‘All really good plays start with X,’ they say. Or, ‘Without A, your play can attain a sort of B, but it will never reach the heights of C.’ This kind of thing is very annoying, especially since A always turns out to be the advice-giver’s specialty. They never say that flat-out, but nobody goes around explaining why true merit can only be found in others.

There is, however, one saving grace shared by the writer who lets the air out of her own balloon by showing you what’s inside it, and the writer who insists that his way is the only way: They’re both wrong. Because neither one knows, or could know, everything about him or herself, what he or she has written, or anything else for that matter. ‘No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader,’ said Robert Frost, rather bossily.

When Samuel Johnson, no actor, derided the notion that great acting requires genuine feeling and spontaneity, insisting rather that every gesture and inflection be carefully chosen and rigorously rehearsed without the smallest variation, it’s enough to make you shrivel up with boredom just thinking about it. Imagine if his famous sense of humour had been suffocated by the same strictures he laid on poor Garrick; strictures which encumbered his own prose, nearly but not quite to the point of obscuring the light cast by his extraordinary mind through those winding, epigrammatic, aggressively impersonal sentences.

Two hundred years later, Noël Coward was making equally snooty pronouncements about his own acting, and acting generally. ‘The actor can’t afford real emotions; he must be in complete control from the moment he steps onstage, etc.’ The truth, perhaps, but not the whole truth. Far be it from me to knock Noël Coward, but if his best acting had really been as devoid of spontaneous feeling as he claimed, nobody would have been listening to him say so forty years into his career. The same goes for his sixty plays, three hundred songs, twenty-five film scripts, twenty short stories, cabaret act, autobiography, diaries, letters, and novel.

So while it can be entertaining and instructive to hear something from the creator about his or her creation, the author’s opinions, interesting or not, are more or less beside the point. What the author sees is always more interesting than what he or she thinks about it. And if it’s something nobody else has ever seen, or ever seen in quite that way, or described from quite that angle, our author has something immensely more valuable to offer the rest of us than what he or she thinks about anything.

Which is why respect for the autonomy of what has been created is something worth cultivating. It’s also an idea worth inculcating in theatre audiences, who can’t help but approach every play they attend encumbered by their own slew of opinions, most of which have little or no bearing on what they are about to watch. But we get more out of the theatre when our eyes are open to more of what the theatre has to offer; and it’s better for our souls. It’s also better for the theatre. Not every insight is backed by energy sufficient to bash itself into the general consciousness. Not every idea is favoured by winds sufficient to succesfully navigate the choppy sea of our opinions, good, bad and indifferent. And everybody knows from personal experience that energy and favourable winds sustain a lot of ideas that are totally horrible. Survival of the fittest, a concept routinely misunderstood and misapplied as if it were some sort of mechanism for the general improvement of just about everything, has no bearing whatsoever on the health of the arts, which prosper better under cultivation than competition – like a farm or garden as opposed to, say, a jungle. I guess you could argue that the violent, open competition for survival in the jungle produces extraordinary life forms you just don’t see on a farm. But the truth is, the inside of your mind and the difficulties pursuing any line of work are jungle enough for the propagation of interesting life forms. Maybe a better model for the theatre would be a zoo. But whatever model you choose, I would certainly argue for the cultivation of experience over opinion.

It’s a hard row to hoe, and of course every sentence I’ve written here expresses an opinion. But it’s the value of maintaining a little scepticism about one’s opinions and one’s competence to define the life flickering in a play, or novel, or any work of art, that I would argue for – both in the artist and the audience.

The late Christopher Hitchens cautioned that the problem with open-mindedness is that it can lead to empty-mindedness. Maybe so. But no rational person can argue against flexibility of mind, any more than you can argue that it’s better for your muscles to be atrophied than supple. Minds, like muscles, shrink and stiffen if you don’t keep stretching them. The theatre is supposed to help us do just that. A theatre with more in it can stretch our minds farther than one constrained and constricted by what we think should be in it, or what we think is in it now.

There’s not much you can do about the influence of opinion over experience except to temper it as best you can. Maybe it’s better to separate them altogether. Or if you can’t do that, at least put them in their proper relation to each other. It was presumably on this principle that Shaw, writer of copious prefaces, recommended waiting to read the introduction until after reading the book.

July 2019

Simultaneous Dialogue

For characters speaking to each other, double dialogue laid out in side-by-side columns is meant to be spoken simultaneously: i.e., the actor saying the dialogue in the right-hand column is not to wait for the actor saying the dialogue in the left-hand column to finish, but to speak at the exact same time, taking his cue from the vertical placement of the text.

For example:

In the above, Character B says the word ‘They’ at the same time that Character A says the word ‘I’ and the word ‘Don’t’ at the same time Character A says the word ‘Well.’

However, for double columns in which two sets of characters are having separate but simultaneous conversations, the speakers start at the same time, but continue along only in reference to their own column.

For example:

In the above, Characters A and C start speaking at the same time, but then each column proceeds at its own pace, without reference to the other column.

While in some cases absolute precision is neither possible nor necessary, in general, the more precisely the actors try to stick to these rules, the better the double dialogue will work.

THIS IS OUR YOUTH

This Is Our Youth was first produced by The New Group (Scott Elliott, Artistic Director; Claudia Catania, Executive Producer) and performed at the INTAR Theatre, New York City, in October 1996. The cast was as follows:

This Is Our Youth was revived by Second Stage Theater (Carole Rothman, Artistic Director; Carol Fishman, Managing Director; Alexander Fraser, Executive Director), by special arrangement with Barry and Fran Weissler and The New Group (Scott Elliott, Artistic Director; Claudia Catania, Executive Producer) and performed in New York City in November 1998. The production subsequently transferred to the Douglas Fairbanks Theatre under the auspices of Barry and Fran Weissler and Eric Krebs. The cast was as follows:

This Is Our Youth received its UK premiere, produced by Phil Cameron for Background, Clare Lawrence and Anna Waterhouse for Out of the Blue (for and on behalf of Back to Blue Ltd), at the Garrick Theatre, London, on 15 March 2002. The cast was as follows:

From 2 April 2002, the cast was as follows:

The production was revived at the Garrick Theatre on 20 November 2002. The cast was as follows:

From 16 January 2003, the cast was as follows:

This is Our Youth was revived by Steppenwolf Theatre Company (Martha Lavey, Artistic Director; David Hawkanson, Executive Director) and performed at the Upstairs Theatre in Chicago in June 2014. The cast was as follows:

The production transferred to the Cort Theatre, New York City, in September 2014, produced by Scott Rudin, Eli Bush, Roger Berlind, William Berlind, Jon B. Platt, Roy Furman, The Shubert Organization, Ruth Hendel, Scott M. Delman, Stephanie P. McClelland, Sonia Friedman, Tulchin Bartner, The Araca Group, Heni Koenigsberg, Daryl Roth, Joan Raffe & Jhett Tolentino, Catherine & Fred Adler, with executive producers, Joey Parnes, Sue Wagner, and John Johnson.

Characters

DENNIS ZIEGLER, twenty-one years old

WARREN STRAUB, nineteen years old

JESSICA GOLDMAN, nineteen years old

Place

The play takes place in Dennis’s one-room apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Time

Late March, 1982.

ACT ONE

A cold Saturday night in March, 1982, after midnight. A small, impersonal pillbox studio apartment on the second or third floor of a somewhat run-down postwar building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan between Broadway and West End, lived in by DENNIS ZIEGLER. There are a TV and stereo, a lot of records, some arbitrary furniture, a little-used kitchenette, and a mattress on the floor in the corner. Scattered around the room are piles of the New York Post, sports magazines, and a lot of underground comic books. There is sports equipment in the apartment, if not actually in view. The room looks lived-in, but aside from a wall of photographs from DENNIS’s life, no effort whatsoever has been made to decorate it. It looks like it could be packed up and cleared out in half an hour.

DENNIS is watching an old black-and-white movie on TV. He is a grungy, handsome, very athletic, formerly long-haired kid, just twenty-one years old, wearing baggy chino-type pants and an ancient polo shirt. He is a very quick, dynamic, fanatical, and bullying kind of person; amazingly good-natured and magnetic, but insanely competitive and almost always successfully so; a dark cult god of high school only recently encountering, without necessarily recognizing, the first evidence that the dazzling, aggressive hipster techniques with which he has always dominated his peers might not stand him in good stead for much longer.

The buzzer buzzes. DENNIS is too cool to answer it right away. It buzzes again. He gets up and goes to the intercom.

DENNIS. Yeah?

WARREN (over the intercom). Yo, Dennis. It’s me, Warren.

DENNIS. What do you want?

WARREN (over the intercom). Yo, lemme up.

DENNIS hits the buzzer. Sits down and watches TV. There is a knock at the door. Again, he doesn’t answer it right away. Another knock.

(Off.) Yo, Denny.

DENNIS gets up and unlocks the door without opening it, then plops down again to watch TV.

WARREN STRAUB comes in the front door. He is a skinny nineteen-year-old – an odd, kicked dog of a kid with large tracts of thoughtfulness in his personality that are not doing him much good at the moment, probably because they so infrequently influence his actions. He has spent most of his adolescence in hot water of one kind or another, but is just beginning to find beneath his natural eccentricity a dogged self-possession his friends may not all share. Despite his enormous self-destructiveness, he is above all things a trier, easily beaten back but hard to knock down. His language and wardrobe are heavily influenced by DENNIS – but only up to a point, and he would be a good-looking kid if he eased up on his personal style a little.

He comes into the apartment lugging a very big suitcase and an overloaded heavy-duty hiking backpack.

Hey.

DENNIS. What’s with the suitcase?

WARREN. Nothing… What are you doing?

DENNIS. Nothing.

WARREN closes the door and puts down his stuff. Sits down next to DENNIS on the mattress and looks at the TV.

WARREN. What are you watching?

DENNIS. Lock the door.

WARREN gets up and locks the door. He sits down as before.

WARREN. What are you watching?

DENNIS flashes off the TV with the remote control.

DENNIS. Nothing. What do you want?

WARREN. Nothing.

DENNIS. I don’t have any pot.

WARREN. I don’t want any. I got some.

DENNIS. Let me see it.

WARREN produces a ziplock plastic bag carefully wrapped around a small amount of dark green marijuana. DENNIS opens it and smells it.

This is good. Where’d you get it?

WARREN. From Christian.

DENNIS. Can we smoke it?

WARREN. I’m saving it.

DENNIS. For what?

DENNIS takes the pot out of the bag and reaches for a record album.

He starts to crumble the pot onto the album cover.

WARREN. Just half.

DENNIS. Shut up.

WARREN. Just half, man.

DENNIS looks at him and crumbles the rest of the pot onto the album.

DENNIS. You got papers?

WARREN. You’re a fuckin’ asshole.

He gets up. DENNIS laughs.

DENNIS. There’s some papers on the table. Gimme one.

WARREN does not comply.

DENNIS (sharply). Hey! Give me a rolling paper. Do you know how much money you owe me?

WARREN takes out a small wad of bills, peels off a few, and drops them on the bed.

Where’d you get this?

WARREN. What do you care?

DENNIS. Well if you’re so rich then you can get more pot from Christian tomorrow, so give me the fucking rolling papers before I beat the shit out of you.

WARREN goes to the table and throws a packet of Club or Zig-Zag rice papers to DENNIS.

What happened, Jasonius kicked you out?

WARREN. No, man, I left.

DENNIS. You can’t stay here.

WARREN. I don’t want to stay here.

DENNIS. Why’d he kick you out? What’d you do?

WARREN. Nothing. I got stoned and he comes home and he’s like, ‘This apartment smells like pot all the time.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, ’cause I’m always smoking it.’ So then he’s like, ‘I want that smell out of this house.’ And then he’s like, ‘No, actually, I want you out of this house.’ Then he throws a few bills on the floor and is like, ‘There’s some cash, now pack up your shit and get out before I beat your fuckin’ head in.’ And I was like, ‘Whatever.’ So he went on a date with his whore, and I packed up my stuff and left.

DENNIS. Where are you going to stay?

WARREN. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll stay with Christian. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll stay in a hotel. Who the hell knows?

DENNIS. How are you going to stay in a hotel?

WARREN. I got money.

DENNIS. How much did he give you?

WARREN. He gave me some money.

DENNIS. Why? Like to thank you for leaving?

WARREN. I guess.

DENNIS. How much is this?

Putting the beautifully rolled joint in his mouth, DENNIS counts the money WARREN threw on the bed.

WARREN. Two hundred.

DENNIS finishes counting. From under the mattress he pulls a beat-up school composition notebook and flips through it till he finds WARREN’s name.

DENNIS. ‘Warren.’

He writes something in the book.

(Writing.) ‘Cleared, with stolen funds.’

WARREN. They’re not stolen, man, he gave it to me.

DENNIS closes the book, finds a match, and lights up.

DENNIS (holding in the smoke). Where did Christian get this from?

WARREN. I don’t know.

DENNIS slaps WARREN in the face, playfully but hard.

DENNIS. Don’t fuckin’ lie to me – where’d he get it?

WARREN tries to hit DENNIS back. They scuffle, but DENNIS is much bigger and stronger and stops him.

WARREN. Don’t fuckin’ hit me –

DENNIS. Where did he get it from?

WARREN. Why don’t you ask him?

DENNIS. Did he get it from Philip?

WARREN. No, he said he got it from some fuckin’ Rastafarian.

DENNIS. That guy Wally?

WARREN. I don’t know.

DENNIS. That guy Kresko?

WARREN. I don’t know. I don’t keep track of where you guys perform your criminal activities. Who cares? Gimme that.

DENNIS doesn’t move.