Author: Jim McGhee

The Last of the Dutch Hotel is a shorter script for a man and a woman, Harry Cust and Lady de Grey, both a bit past their prime.  They are seated at a table on the terrace of a Dutch seaside resort motel.  It is autumn and we hear the sounds of the ocean and gulls, and “an old scratchy recording of ‘Au fond du temple saint’ from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers.”  Lady de Grey complains about the sausages they were served for breakfast and notes that some of the guests have disappeared.  Harry says that he has tried to talk with the staff but they don’t seem to speak English or even Dutch.  Lady de Grey doesn’t like the way the waiter with an eye patch looks at her.  Harry doesn’t believe her when she tells him that the summer house where they used to meet has been torn down.  Nor does he believe her when she tells him that an entire wing of the hotel has been abandoned.  Lady de Grey thinks the handwriting of a note she received resembles Harry’s love notes to her years earlier.  The note says:  “Where were you on the 19 of October?”  Neither is sure if that is today.  Lady de Grey says she saw a man that is dead walking by the trees.  She complains about the incessant rain and cold and Harry notices that the bathing machines and life lines have been removed.  Lady de Grey wonders if they have wasted their lives.  She notices something, a seal, a walrus, in the water, but then thinks that two people are copulating.  Harry’s vision is failing but he thinks it is a large mass of seaweed  moved by the tide.  Neither can remember when their affair began and each asks if the other killed Lady de Grey’s first husband.  Harry looks through his spyglass at the object in the water and discovers that the couple is a young version of Lady de Grey and himself.  Taking the spyglass Lady de Grey sees the couple and also a creature moving rapidly toward them.  Harry is preoccupied with the waiter staring at them with something in his hand.  Lady de Grey screams that the monster is dragging the couple into the ocean.  Harry says that the waiter has a meat cleaver.  Lady de Grey says that the monster is devouring the couple and Harry tells her that he thinks he knows what’s on the menu for lunch.

An even longer play for two women, Gorgons, uses blackouts, appropriately, to separate the scenes as in a movie.  The simple unit set contains a sofa, a bed, a makeup table with mirrors, a staircase, a few chairs and a table.  Action is continuous and music plays during the very short blackouts.  The characters of the title are Ruth and Mildred, actresses who have been in the movie business for a long time.  Ruth visits Mildred backstage after a stage performance to offer her a script that Ruth thinks would make a good movie, but she needs Mildred to play opposite her.  The women insult each other and agree that they have never been friends, but Mildred says she will read the script that Ruth thinks will put them both “back on top” again.  Ruth says that Mildred will play the sister who is the “washed up, psychotic bitch”  that the sisters live in an old Gothic mansion, were once  a famous tap-dancing act called Enid and Bunny, and that they both loved a handsome, tap-dancing comedian named Bob.  When Ruth thinks she sees a rat, Mildred walks over and steps viciously on it.  We hear the rat’s squeal and, after the blackout, “rather harrowing Hitchcockian thriller music.”  The music ends as the lights come up on Mildred (Bunny) at the top of the Gothic mansion staircase in a fright wig and housecoat.  She wonders where Bob is, and Ruth (Enid) comes on in a wheelchair to tell her that Bob sent her a present, in a box in the shadows at the top of the stairs.  Mildred/Bunny opens the box and discovers Bob’s head which she throws down the stairs.  Ruth/Enid asks Nigel, the director of the movie, if they can shoot the scene again because the head didn’t bounce the way she wanted.  She throws the head back to Mildred/Bunny and she reprises the scene, throwing the head more forcefully.  But Ruth/Enid is not satisfied and throws the head back up to Mildred/Bunny.  Tired, complaining of sore feet, Mildred wants to leave but Ruth/Enid persuades her to stay and have a turkey sandwich that she made.  The women talk of their unsuccessful relationships with men, their absent children, and resume their work on the scene as the lights go to black and we hear “ominous, harrowing music.”  In an eerie moonlight effect in the Gothic mansion, Ruth/Enid wheels on her chair, asking for Bunny.  Mildred/Bunny   enters, dragging an ax, telling Ruth/Enid that if she is afraid she can get up and run away.  Ruth/Enid insists that she cannot walk and screams loudly as Mildred/Bunny gets close to her with the upraised ax.  The scream is too loud for Mildred, who breaks character and asks Nigel if they can take a break.  The women insult each other’s acting ability, appearance, and sexual behavior.  Mildred thinks that Ruth hates her because Mildred slept  with French, one of Ruth’s husbands whom she barely remembers.  Mildred suggests that they do their work like “the old warhorses” they are and be done with it.  She asks that in the baked rat scene Ruth/Enid remember that Mildred has a herniated disc and will need help getting Ruth/Enid out of the bed.  We hear ominous music in the blackout and then see Ruth/Enid in the bed, the wheel chair just out of her reach.  Mildred/Bunny comes on with a dinner tray with a covered dish on it.  Ruth/Enid screams when she lifts the cover and sees a baked rat.  Ruth/Enid says she needs to make a phone call and asks for help getting into her wheelchair.  As Mildred/Bunny tries to move her, Ruth/Enid makes her body a dead weight and Mildred screams and falls to the floor with Ruth on top of her.  Mildred tells Nigel to call an ambulance and we hear the siren in the blackout.  The lights come up on Mildred in bed.  Ruth comes in with a box of chocolates, apologizing, and hoping that they can finish the movie.  They decide that what they both love is the work, although Mildred prefers the theatre to movies.  But then they start trading insults again only to realize that they need each other.  Ruth says that she likes sex, and Mildred says that sex is horrible.  Ruth agrees, but then the insults continue.  Ruth says she was born into a large, poor, immigrant family, unloved.  Mildred shares the information that she inherited a Puritanical streak from her New England family who disowned her when she said she wanted to be an actress.  Ruth helps Mildred out of bed toward the bathroom and, left alone in the light, carries on a conversation with Mildred in the darkness.  Ruth regrets the fact that her children loathe her and Mildred says she can’t talk to her daughter without hearing her own mother’s voice squawking.  Ruth asks Mildred to help her finish the movie and we hear the toilet flushing and then in the blackout the sound of a powerful orchestra.  In a spotlight, dressed up, holding an envelope, Mildred announces that the winner of the Best Actress Academy Award is Ruth St. Ives for Gorgons.  Mildred smiles grotesquely as she gives Ruth the statuette and steps back for Ruth’s acceptance speech.  In a long litany of people she is thankful to, Ruth mentions her cockatoos and her cat, Mr. Poopy, but not Mildred.  The music and applause fade in the blackout and the lights come on Ruth’s house.  We hear crickets and a loud banging on the door.  Ruth, in a robe, lets in Mildred, still in her gown, rather drunk, furious that Ruth didn’t mention her and deliberately humiliated her.  She grabs the Oscar and Ruth tries to get it back.  They struggle and fall over behind the sofa.  We see Mildred’s arm, holding the statue, come up and then down, violently, several times and we hear Ruth’s screams.  After a silence, Mildred stands, spattered with blood, holding the bloody statuette.  She compliments Ruth on her death scene performance.  We hear sirens and Mildred explains that she probably set something off when she climbed over the barbed wire fence.  A bright light shines into the room and Mildred takes it for a spotlight and speaks to the Academy, thanking them for the award.  She concludes by saying that movies are like life, futile and stupid, but “when they’re over, what else have we got?”  Lights out.

The Watchers is a longer one-act play set in a room on the upper floor of an old building in a city.  There is a table littered with pizzas and meatball sandwiches. On the table is an old phone; there are two wooden chairs facing the audience.  The two men, Johnny Murphy and Joe Antonelli,  have binoculars and as the action begins Antonelli, the taller of the two, is looking through his binoculars at the auditorium darkness while Murphy is finishing a piece of pizza.  Murphy tells Antonelli that he is lucky because women like him and says that the “guy” they are looking for will never show up.  Antonelli says that he sees the girl.  Looking at her with his binoculars, Murphy says she is a sweet girl and wonders if it is her place.  The men talk about a girl named Mary, skunks, crows, David Hume and billiard balls, nicknames, the possibility of someone watching them as they watch others, .  The girl apparently disrobes to take a shower and Murphy is convinced that she knows she is being watched.  Antonelli suggests that Murphy’s idea of an infinite regress of people watching other people could be a circle, a universe that is finite but unbounded.  Murphy wonders if what they are doing is all they have ever done, that what they think is their past is an illusion, that they are in a room in hell.  Antonelli says that even if they are being watched, if they are not aware of it, it doesn’t matter.  Murphy wonders why they are watching, or what the people did, or the person they should report to, or when they last got paid.  When he asks Antonelli what he wants, Antonelli replies that he wants Murphy to shut up.  Antonelli says that he wants to touch the girl they are watching, or at least be in the same room with her.  He says that when Murphy goes to the bathroom, he called her on the phone but hung up when she answered.  He thinks though that the call had meaning for her.  He says he remembered the girl’s phone number, but he doesn’t know how, and he thinks he used to know her.  He thinks he might try to bump into her on the street and ask directions, but Murphy says he knows he can’t do that because it would be fraternization which is against the rules.  Murphy says that maybe he can’t keep quiet because he wants Antonelli to kill him   The telephone begins ringing, again and again, until Antonelli picks it up.  No one is there.  Looking through his binoculars, Antonelli says that he thinks he sees a man in the shadows.  Murphy thinks that he and Antonelli have been set up by unknown persons for unknown reasons.  He says that he saw Antonelli crying as the man and the woman across the street were “doing the act of darkness.”  Antonelli denies it but Murphy believes the phone call was to make sure they were still in the room and that someone is coming for them.  Antonelli loses his temper and tells Murphy he doesn’t want to look any more, that he wants to be blind.  There are five loud knocks on the door, a pause, five more, a pause as the men look at each other, then three very loud knocks and blackout.

In Hagridden, another Pendragon-related short play, two members of the DeFlores traveling carnival show in the 1920s–Broglio, a strongman in his forties, and Carmelita, his wife, in her thirties–are talking at night.  In the darkness we have heard a scratchy recording of Chaliapin singing Mephistopheles from Gounod’s Faust, and as the lights come up we see Broglio, wearing only his trousers, drinking at a table while Carmelita, in her slip, sits on the bed reading a novel by the light of an old lantern.  Broglio says he dreams of an enormous moth fluttering behind him and complains of Carmelita reading penny dreadful novels about ridiculous people who do monstrous things to one another.  He complains that she is always picking at him, but she says he should read more and then reads aloud a passage from the novel.  She thinks the passage is beautiful and says she escapes into fantasy because her life in the carnival is a mind-numbing pandemonium.  Speaking his thoughts aloud, Broglio says that in the worst of her books a shirtless man with bulging muscles and wild eyes strangles a woman wearing only a slip.  He speaks again of the moth leaving its horrible, choking powder all over him.  Carmelita describes the book in which the crazed husband strangles his wife and puts her body in a trunk which he dumps in a pond.  When he returns to his bedroom the woman is there reading a book to him about a man who strangles his wife and puts her in a trunk.  She says the story has a kind of circularity, an ambiguity, but Broglio says that that’s not right, that stories should have endings with certain meanings.  Carmelita says the interesting thing is whether the woman is really dead or not.  Perhaps she escaped from the trunk or perhaps she comes back as a ghost, a figment of his tortured imagination come back to haunt him because he is torn by guilt and because he still desires her.  Or, she says, perhaps it’s a game in which the wife picks at, teases, the husband to pull him back into the world.  She speaks of a strong man being afraid of a moth and teases Broglio about a former lover.  Broglio tells her to stop and begins waving his arms around as if tormented by moths.  Carmelita says that he strangled his wife Carmelita not for sleeping with Ulysses DeFlores but for never letting him forget that she allowed Jack Basileus to deflower her in a hammock when she was a girl.  She puts the book down as Broglio moves toward her and puts his hands around her neck.  Strangling her, he pulls her up and kisses her lips as the light fades and goes out.

In Lightning Rods, the two fathers that Margaret mentioned in Gazebo, Silas Quiller, her father, and Bert Astor, Gretchen’s father, both 55, are on a downsloping rooftop in 1919.  Silas is putting up lightning rods and Bert is sitting, watching him.  We hear the sound of thunder in the distance.  Bert says that a storm is coming and that he came up on the roof because he wanted to see a man dumb enough to put up lightning rods in a thunderstorm.  He asks if Silas is bothered by people talking about their relationship, of Silas building a house next door for Bert and his wife.  When Silas asks Bert to get him a lightning rod, Bert refuses, and Silas gets it himself as Bert warns him to be careful.  Bert talks about his dead wife, Barbary, who had “tits for the ages,” who lived in the poorest area in town, and who had a reputation for being the “biggest slut in Pendragon County.”  Silas, he says, married the petite Potdorf girl from a land poor but respectable old farm family, and he says that if Silas is bothered by his wife’s family then he and Silas could just kill them.  He wonders, since the storm is getting closer, if Silas would like to go inside and take turns screwing his wife, or his daughter.  Silas tells him to shut up and after a pause Bert remarks that he misses his wife who got into a tub and cut her throat.  He says that Silas actually seemed to like his wife while Bert could never stand her (although he does enjoy fucking her).  Silas asks Bert if he loves his children, and Bert replies that Clyde and Gretchen could be anybody’s children.  He asks Silas if he loves his children and when Silas says he does Bert wonders which of Silas’ children are his.  He says Maggie looks like her mother, Con looks like Bert’s dead brother, and Clyde looks like a moose.  He says neither his son Clyde nor Silas’ son Clyde have as much brain as ear wax and asks why Silas named his first-born Clyde.  Silas says it was after his mother’s father who died in the Battle of the Wilderness.  Silas again asks Bert if he loves his children and Bert says that that is an awfully funny question coming from a man who is putting up lightning rods with big ass bolts of lightning coming towards them.  Silas says that Bert’s son is engaged to Silas’ daughter and his son is engaged to Bert’s daughter.  Silas tells Bert that he walked in on his daughter while she was taking a bath and told her to lock the door in the future.  Silas says that Bert’s daughter is troubled and asks what Bert did to her.  Bert says that Silas  is feeling remorse for the stealing and raping and killing they did out west and tells Silas he has to turn off that part of his brain that feels bad about it.  He says that’s the secret of success in America.  Silas says the sight of his naked daughter’s body in the bath brought it all back to him.  Bert wants to get off the roof before they’re both fried like a couple of pork chops.  He says he’s on the roof because Silas is the only friend he has.  Silas asks Bert if he came to where Silas was living to blackmail him about the past.  Bert says that Silas is his only friend and that they have things, memories, between them.  Silas asks if Bert loves his daughter and when Bert says every chance he gets Silas tells him to come over to help put up the lightning rod.  He asks Bert if he loved his wife and if he wants his daughter to end up the same way.  He orders Bert to help him.  As we hear the sound of the storm approaching, Bert says his wife was lonesome and lost when he met her and he told her to sleep with Silas, even though she didn’t want to, because he was sleeping with Silas’ wife, even though he didn’t like her.  He says his daughter used to trust him but some things you got to put out of your head.  Lightning flashes and thunder is very close as Bert moves shakily to Silas, slips, and clutches both hands around the lightning rod as he falls on the wet roof.  Silas stands holding the lightning rod and tells Bert when he asks that he is Bert’s friend.  There is an “enormous lightning bolt and thunderclap” as the lights go to black.

In another Pendragon-related play, Gazebo, two friends, Margaret and Gretchen, with Margaret’s younger brother, Con, carry on conversations that took place between 1912 when the women were seventeen and 1938 when they are forty-three, but much of the play occurs in 1928 when the women were thirty-three and Con was twenty-seven.  Nigro specifies that the actor playing Con should be no older than that and the women should be in their early thirties.  In the darkness we hear a cello version of Faure’s “Sicilienne,” rain falling, and a distant storm.  As in other Nigroscripts, characters sometimes talk to themselves, remembering images of past events, sometimes to each other, and sometimes to the audience.  Gretchen begins the dialogue by speaking of storms, of being unable to sleep, of voices whispering in the gazebo, of something leering at her through rotten trelliswork, of “his hands.”  Margaret matter-of-factly tells the audience that Gretchen has always been her best friend, that they have lived next to each other all their lives and married each other’s brothers.  Gretchen speaks of headlights coming toward her in the rain, and Margaret says that Gretchen saved her from drowning at Grim Lake.  Con speaks of driving in the rain with Violet and May and seeing someone by the side of the road.  Margaret says that three people died in the crash.  Gretchen tells us that Margaret had two brothers, Con, and the one she married.  Margaret says that three witnesses swore there was a fourth person in the car before it crashed.  Con and Gretchen begin talking about the voices Con hears whispering and which Gretchen can’t hear because, according to Con, she closes up and never listens.  Margaret says that all the girls always loved Con.  Gretchen tells Con to stop looking at her, that she doesn’t like it, and as they talk Margaret interjects reminiscences of giving Con baths when he was small and of how he like to fix clocks.  She and Con then talk of clocks and time until Gretchen speaks again of the headlights.  Gretchen tells Con that she has seen him at the lake with Glynis and Jason.  Margaret then asks about her mother who lives with Gretchen and suggests that she and Gretchen could simply change houses, a suggestion that Gretchen rejects.  Con wonders who his father might have been and tells Gretchen that their fathers knew each other out west, that his Dad came back with money and married the Potdorf girl.  Then Gretchen’s Dad showed up, dirt poor, and was given a job as foreman of the cheese factory, and lived in the house next door that Con’s father built for  him.  Con says their parents had secrets and offers to share a secret with Gretchen, but she says she doesn’t have any secrets.  He asks her why she married his brother, tells her that she is beautiful, and asks what she saw at the lake when she spied on them.  She says she saw three naked people and adds that she hates the water.  Margaret speaks of her husband Clyde who disappeared with Gretchen’s husband on a trip to Great Slave Lake.  She says Gretchen’s brother Clyde and Jason Cornish and Jimmy Casey went to war but Con didn’t go because he had a bad heart.  Gretchen says that Harry MacBeth arranged to have Con marry his daughter Glynis who loved Jason.  She tells Con that he compulsively betrays people and Con says that she won’t let her husband touch her.  As Margaret remembers practicing on the cello, Con reminds Gretchen that she used to babysit him.  Margaret remarks that something we believe we hate turns out, after a time, to be something we absolutely cannot do without.  Gretchen mentions the headlights again and Con, now the driver of the car, tells her to get in.  Gretchen remembers blood on her dress, between her legs, something crawling out of her in the rain.  Con, sitting next to Gretchen on the gazebo steps, says that she taught him more than Chinese Checkers.  Margaret remembers the two fathers going up on the roof in a thunderstorm and being struck by lightning as they held on to a lightning rod they were installing.  Gretchen speaks of finding her mother in red water in the bath and remembers seeing her brother kiss Margaret in the gazebo and being filled with fury and later pushing Margaret into the lake where she hit her head on a rock.  Gretchen dove in and pulled Margaret out and revived her.  She says Margaret didn’t remember what had happened but was never the same after her head injury, although her cello playing improved remarkably.  Con and Gretchen then speak lines from the time of the car accident when Con pulled over to pick up Gretchen (apparently pregnant with his child).  Gretchen was furious with Con and clawed his hands off the wheel of the car.  Margaret speaks of a dream she has of driving late at night in a rainstorm and swerving to avoid two red eyes in the dark and then to avoid the oncoming car which spun round and crashed.  She sees the two girls, Violet and May Pelly, and her brother Con, dead.  She says when she can’t sleep she goes out to the ruined gazebo and plays the cello.  Con kisses Gretchen “very tenderly” and Margaret begins to play Faure’s ” Sicilienne” as the lights fade and go out.

In The Wind Among the Reeds, two characters from the Pendragon cycle, Molly Rainey, 63, and her husband Cletis, 67, are having breakfast in the kitchen.  It is summer and Cletis is talking to a parakeet in a bird cage, explaining to Molly that he is trying to teach the bird to talk.  He asks if there is any meat loaf left and is told by Molly that what he ate was dog food, not meat loaf.  Molly is bored and is worried about their son, Billy, who lives in a trailer, plays the tuba, and talks to his weiner dogs.  Cletis defends Billy, suggesting that he may be a misunderstood genius, but Molly says Billy is a moron, that her life is a failure, and she wants a divorce.  She starts taking clothes out of the dresser to put in a suitcase, saying that she needs some culture in her life and that Cletis has never taken her anywhere.  Cletis reminds her that he took her to a vaudeville show at the Palace Theatre in Canton, and he goes on to describe a French performer who did a whole program of fart impressions, concluding by putting a tube up his ass, sticking on ocarina on the end of the tube and playing the 1812 Overture.  When Molly says that she always wanted to be an opera singer, Cletis tells her that she sounds like a moose with his balls caught in a wood chopper.  Molly closes the suitcase, leaves, then comes back, asking Cletis what he is going to do without her since he can’t see, drive, or cook.  Cletis says he’ll be fine and wants to know what happened to set her off.  She says that Lewis, her sister Lizzy’s husband, is going to die and then she asks Cletis if he tried to kiss her sister Jessie in the barn almost fifty years earlier.  Cletis protests that they were all teenagers back then and wonders why Molly didn’t marry somebody else.  She says that Lizzy and Lewis really love each other and that she is running away because she doesn’t want to watch Cletis get old and die.  Cletis tells her that you can love something and stick with until one of you dies or you can run off and die alone.  Molly starts unpacking her clothes and tells Cletis that maybe she’ll make meat loaf for lunch.  Cletis starts talking to the bird again and the lights fade and  go out.

Rasputin is a long one-act play for two characters, a girl, Anastasia, and Rasputin, “a tall, gaunt man with piercing eyes, long black hair and a black beard.”  The unit set “surrounded by darkness” has a bed, a table, and some wooden chairs.  Anastasia begins with a “once upon a time” story of a girl who is lost in a forest in the winter.  A leaf tells her to go to the Czar, who looks very much like her father, and who orders the world to come alive.  The girl wakes up and realizes she has been dreaming and is nearly covered with snow in the dark forest.  From the darkness, the voice of Rasputin tells her that she must tell him her name, date of birth, place of residence, and names of family members.  Anastasia keeps saying that she does not know, that she cannot remember.  He tells her to close her eyes and asks her what she sees.  She remembers riding through the woods on a wagon in the night with snow falling.  She says she has sisters and a brother and that she comes from a palace where she was a Grand Duchess.  Rasputin lights a lamp so that Anastasia can see him.  He asks her if she is from Ekaterinburg, a name she refuses to say, but he tells her that if she will not speak her name she is reducing those who created her to nothing.  She finally says her name and then the names of her sisters–Tatiana, Marie, and Olga–and her brother Aleksy.  Rasputin says she remembers someone else, but Anastasia says she doesn’t want to remember him because he smells like death and is a horrible person.  Rasputin says she lived in a brothel and her father was a pig-fancying moron.  She says her father was Emperor of Russia and Rasputin asks her what she is doing in this shithole.  He pours some vodka into a tin cup, drinks some, and offers the cup to her.  She takes it and throws the vodka in his face.  He wonders whether it would be kinder of him to help her remember or help her to forget.  He says he can have intercourse with her whenever he wants but he prefers the challenge of seducing her.  He says if she has just one drink of vodka he’ll tell her where her parents and siblings are.  But when she takes the drink he says she must tell him where her family is or else kiss him.  She finally says, “Ekaterinburg,” and he asks her if she remembers sitting in his lap as he told her stories.  He repeats the “once upon a time” story which Anastasia said at the beginning of the play, with the variation that the leaf tells the girl to go to God.  Rasputin says that her father was a very stupid man who sent thousands of soldiers out to be butchered and he is now in Ekaterinburg with the rest of his family, dead, covered with dirt and being eaten by worms.  Anastasia describes how they were taken to a cellar and shot.  She was hit and stabbed until she lost consciousness and thinks she must have died and is in hell.  When Rasputin mentions the wagon she remembers a man telling her that he found her still alive as he was burying the corpses and took pity on her.  She wonders why she didn’t die with the rest and Rasputin suggests that perhaps, as she was dying in the cellar, she imagined the woods, and the wagon, and the cottage, and him; that perhaps this is a vision she has just before her death.  She asks which version is true–is this a vision or did she really escape?  He says she must choose the role she will play–a madwoman who thinks she is the Grand Duchess Anastasia, a conniving Polish whore impersonating Anastasia, the Grand Duchess herself miraculously saved but driven mad by what happened, or the girl dying in the basement.  When she says she is cold he puts his coat over her shoulders and she tells again the story of the girl lost in the dark forest with the variation that the leaf sends her to Death.  She pauses, then says that her name means resurrection.  Rasputin kisses her tenderly on the lips and as the light fades and goes out we hear the sound of the wind.

Drury Lane concerns two characters from the Pendragon cycle, James Rumpley, 40, and Jane Armitage, early 20s, on the stage of Garrick’s Drury Lane Theatre in the mid-eighteenth century, surrounded by darkness.  Jane says she is tired of rehearsing and James says they must get it right or Garrick will dismiss them.  He says that Garrick likes Jane and that she asked for his help.  He wonders what she gave him in return, and when Jane says, “Nothing,” James, in a fury, grabs her arms and shouts, “WHAT DID YOU GIVE HIM IN RETURN?”  After a slight pause, he lets her go and asks if “that” was too much.  She says it’s always been too much because James has always been a victim of passions beyond his control.  She says that Garrick might have saved him, that their child needed his help but that James preferred to turn thief because of pride, drink, and low company.  She shouts that he has sacrificed his wife and child to his stupid, self-destructive pride.  He agrees that what she says might be the truth but that it sounds too much like a play.  When Jane says that the son is in America, James says that he doesn’t like the scene and wants to do something else.  She says they cannot rewrite the scene but only play it.  James wants to do the seduction scene and warns Jane of the dangers of a life in the theatre.  He kisses her and says that they must not do the scene of his deflowering her.  Jane says they have begun and might as well finish it.  She wants James to deflower her again.  He remembers that she said that she wanted to haunt the theatre when she died.  He says all theatres are haunted and that “this is a play.”  He says he was a carnival boy who became an actor and she was an innocent country girl and they made love on “this” stage one night.  She got pregnant and he drank what money they had.  When she asked Garrick for help he hated her for it and became a thief.  He was caught and hanged as she watched with their son.  Then she died and the boy went to America and they keep rehearsing the play of their lives again and again, forever.  Jane says that she wanted to haunt the theatre when she died and he tells her that she is.  She thinks it is a beautiful story and that they might make a play of it.  James says, “We might.  We have.  We will.”  She thinks their son will be an actor and that she will perhaps forgive James.

In Creatrix, two teen-age girls, Tiffany and Kimberly, in pajamas with their backs against the end of a bed, stare downstage into the eerie light of a tv set.  We hear the tape they have been watching rewind as Tiffany says they have watched the movie one hundred and thirty-seven times.  Kimberly says the movie makes her happier than anything in the world.  Tiffany says that after you watch the movie so many times you feel as if you made it yourself.  She says no one understands them and that the movie gives them the power to do unspeakable things to the people who order them around.  The girls decide to become the girls in the movie and talk about fantasy lives, deciding that life would be simpler if their mothers were dead.  They say they could put a brick in a stocking and beat Kimberly’s mother over the head with it.  Kimberly thinks this a beautiful story, but Tiffany wants to do it “for real,” to make their own movie.  Kimberly thinks a person would need to believe “very much” to make such a movie.  Tiffany puts Kimberly’s hand on her heart and puts her hand on Kimberly’s heart, asking her if she can feel the “great creatrix of the universe throbbing and seething and writhing beneath our flesh?”  Kimberly wonders where they can get a brick as the light fades and goes out.