Night

The setting for Night, the second play in the trilogy, is a bedroom upstairs in an old house near a university in 2003 with a telephone on a night stand beside the bed.  Laura is showing Stephen where he will sleep and suggests he take his clothes off because he is all wet from standing out in the rain.  She asks if she can get him something to eat or drink, but he doesn’t want anything.  She says she’s not sure if she got his letters and tells him there is a party downstairs.  Stephen says he came to visit her because he was worried by her telephone call.  She says he has been drinking and asks if he has taken drugs.  He says he is not hallucinating and knows she has called him for some time.  She says it must be telemarketers.  He says that when he walks at night he feels somebody is following him and he has been hearing sounds in his house at night.  Laura suggests raccoons.  He says that the last time she called she said she had an idea for his novel.  He says she was talking about their relationship in the suggestive way she did the night before she left for college.  She says she still has dreams about feeling his hands pulling her from the water when she was drowning.  Then she tells him to lie down and rest and imagine that this is a chapter in his novel like the Red King’s Dream.  She almost touches his face, but doesn’t, and leaves.  The phone rings; Stephen answers asking if anyone is there.  Light fades out.