Author: Jim McGhee

     A train at night and a Mexican cantina are represented by a unit set in Ghostland, a play for four actors.  In the darkness we hear “Cielito Lindo” played rather eerily by a mariachi band until the music is overcome by the rhythmic clattering of a train, then the scream of the train whistle as lights come up on Ambrose Bierce, 71, sitting in a SR train seat opposite Dr. Hern.  (The actor who plays Hern also plays Mark Twain and William Randolph Hearst; another actor plays H. L. Mencken and Jack London; and a fourth actor plays Pancho Villa.)  Hern asks Bierce if he is familiar with non-Euclidean geometry or of a space in which it would be possible to turn a rubber ball inside out “without a solution of its continuity.”  Bierce responds humorously to Hern’s description of wormholes and insists that the train is heading south.  Hern opens the window and leans out to show Bierce the position of the stars and moon as evidence for the northerly direction of the train.  Bierce puts his foot on Hern’s butt and pushes him, screaming, out the window.  Mencken appears with a large black satchel which, he says, contains the cremated remains of the critic, Pollard. Bierce pulls a long bone out of the bag, then a ball of string, and then a skull.  Mencken recognizes Bierce and tells him he admires his writing.  Bierce describes two short scenarios in which people inexplicably disappear into Ghostland, the faery realm of Celtic mythology that is parallel to our own.  Mencken says it sounds like malarkey to him and Bierce invites him to take a look out the window.  Mencken opens the window, leans out, and, like Hern, is kicked screaming from the train.  Bierce picks up the satchel as we hear a loud train whistle and the train jolts, throwing Bierce backward with the satchel as the lights go out.  We hear brakes screeching, gunshots, horses and women shrieking, and then the mariachi band playing.

     When the lights come up we see Bierce face down under a table in the cantina, his arms around the satchel.  Villa sits at the table, drinking, telling Bierce that the train was liberated by the glorious forces of the revolution.  Gunfire rips through the cantina and Villa takes out his gun and goes off.  Jack London dives under the table with Bierce.  They recognize each other and Bierce tells London that his writing stinks and that nothing written in America is worth a bucket of slop.  He says Stephen Crane is a “shameless hack,” Theodore Dreiser “boring and incompetent,” and Henry James “an incomprehensible old woman.”  London says that Bierce told a woman, Gertrude, that he had a suitcase full of documents that would put Hearst in jail for a hundred years.  London says he has been sent by Hearst to retrieve the suitcase and doesn’t believe Bierce when he says the satchel is full of bones.  We hear wind blowing and the beating of a heart that increases in volume as the stage darkens and pulses with red light, then the piercing scream of a train whistle as the lights go to black and the heartbeat resolves into the clattering of the train.

     Lights come up on Bierce in the train sitting opposite Mark Twain.  Bierce, saying it is 1913 and Twain died in 1910, rips off Twain’s mustache and wig to reveal Hearst.  When Hearst tries to grab the bag, Bierce pulls the emergency cord and tries to climb out the window, saying they have arrived at Owl Creek Bridge.  Hearst yanks the bag away and Bierce falls screaming.  We hear a loud splash and Hearst pulls a ball of string, a rubber ball, and a skull from the bag.  As he sticks his head out the window to yell at Bierce, the train lurches forward, and Hearst falls screaming out the window.  We hear a loud splash, the sound of the train moving, the mariachi band, and as the lights fade the sound of the train moving farther away, a distant train whistle, and then the hooting of an owl in the darkness.

In Exposition, two characters from the Victorian period, Haggard and Leaf, (whom we have met in earlier Nigro plays) begin conversing as if they were starting a play, but each character knows what the other is going to say, repeating the phrase, “As you well know.”  They have been providing the exposition for plays since the beginning of time.  But when Leaf asks to be reminded of the matter of the dead sheep, Haggard asks, “What sheep?”  Leaf asks if they are lost and should start over.  The phone on the desk rings and Leaf eventually picks it up, handing it to Haggard, saying it is for him.  Haggard is dubious, but Leaf says it is in the script.  Haggard talks into the phone and hangs up saying it was a wrong number.  Leaf says that Haggard was having a conversation on the phone and asks if the caller was not General Beauregard telling them about the destruction of his plantation by boll weevils and the imminent arrival of his beautiful and mad daughter Ermengarde who may or may not have murdered her lover, the Satrap of Bangalore.  Haggard says it was not General Beauregard but each time the phone rings Leaf insists it is.  Haggard tells Leaf that a decision has been made to cut the entire exposition scene, starting the play in the middle.  Leaf thinks that is insane, but Haggard tells him that the scene is over and he is leaving.  Shaking Leaf’s hand, he walks off.  Leaf says he can’t be left alone, that starting with a monologue is absolute poison.  But he tries anyway, talking to a Haggard who is not there, imagining that the phone is ringing, answering it and telling General Beauregard that a decision has been made to cut the exposition.  Leaf thinks the phone has been cut off and is perplexed as the stage lights start to dim.  He speaks into the phone, saying that he will have to call back, that the play is apparently starting.  “As you well know.”  Darkness.

Mind the Gap, requiring a man in his late 50a and a woman in her 20s, is set on a wooden bench in an old European train station.  (A note says that the writer W. G. Sebald drove into an oncoming lorry and was killed on December 14, 2001.  He probably suffered a heart attack driving his daughter home.)  As lights come up on the characters sitting on the bench, we hear footsteps and voices echoing in the distance.  Max notices that Anna is reading a book by Sebald, a writer Max finds unusual and rather difficult.  They speak of memories, happy and unhappy, and ambiguity in Sebald’s work.  Max says that he sometimes feels that he has written Sebald’s work himself, that the numinous symbols of the writer are significant to him as well.  He says he was drawn to Anna when he saw her sleeping and knew, although he cannot explain what it was he knew.  Anna says that when she was a child her father told her that when a person dies they go to a big room like the one they are in where people wait for trains to take them to unknown destinations.  Max says, “Mind the gap,” explaining that the sign by the tracks warns of the danger of stepping into the abyss between life and death, two inexplicable realities.  Max speaks of one of Sebald’s narrators who returns to his village but nobody recognizes him, and he observes life as a spectator, noting coincidences that seem to give meaning to existence.  Max begins to remember driving with his daughter and feeling a sudden pressure in his chest and seeing something very large coming directly at them.  Anna thinks she remembers driving with her father, and Max tells her that the train that has arrived is for him, not her.  Max says she must go through a door back to where she was before she got to where she is.  Max takes out a small camera and takes her picture.  Anna, leaving, stops and says, “Papa? . . . Mind the gap.”  He says he will, she goes, and the light fades out.

New Year’s Eve at the Flowers Boarding Hotel, part of the Pendragon Cycle, is a one-act for four men and two women, set in Armitage, Ohio, on New Year’s Eve in 1899,  The unit set represents a comfortable parlor of the hotel.  Loopy Rye, the village idiot, is picking out a tune on the piano as James Rose on the sofa looks at his brother Hugh whose wife is having a baby in the doctor’s office in the next room.  Doc Braine comes in to tell Hugh that his wife is fine and the baby will come when it wants to.  He takes out a flask and drinks, telling Hugh that it’s New Year’s Eve and his hand is steadier with a few drinks.  Doc says that Vonnie (his housekeeper and receptionist) is driving him crazy.  The men talk about Vonnie being acquitted of killing her father and giving her baby to Odin Grim’s wife.  Doc wonders when the fireworks will begin and questions the capabilities of the Proctor brothers who run the fireworks factory.  Zinnia, the 50-year-old woman who runs the hotel, says Hugh’s wife is all right but that the baby doesn’t want to come out.  Doc goes to check and Zinnia says that Vonnie, who can turn a grown man into a bowl of cranberry sauce, is making the men crazy.  Vonnie tells Zinnia that Doc wants her.  Loopy tells Vonnie that James thinks the end of the world is coming at midnight.  After Vonnie leaves, James tells Hugh that he had a vision of the world disappearing and that he has a big sin to confess.  He says he fathered Vonnie’s baby, and that her father went crazy when he found out, and Vonnie killed him.  Hugh says a burglar killed the father and that James is having a mental breakdown.  As director of the local theatre group, James says that when he heard Vonnie do Juliet’s speech “take him and cut him out in little stars,” he fell hopelessly in love with her.  When Doc comes in Hugh asks him if Vonnie ever identified her baby’s father.  Doc says no and Loopy comes in to say that the baby is coming.  Doc goes back in; James insists that the world is going to end; Hugh says maybe someday but not now.  Vonnie says the baby is a girl, born in the first minute of the new year.  Hugh goes in to see the baby and we hear the sound of an explosion as the fireworks start.  James apologizes to Vonnie for taking advantage of her.  She says she needed somebody to hold her and love her and he was there.  She is not sorry and he should not be apologizing.  Loopy brings in a bowl of popcorn which he gives to Vonnie before he sits down to play the piano and sing “Hello, My Baby” as the lights fade out.

Don Giovanni is a long one-act for four men and three women.  On the upstage side of the upper platform of the unit set is a balcony reached by a trellis, the bottom of which can be seen through a central arch under the platform  Steps left and right lead to the upper platform.  At the top of the SR steps is a door that opens into a bedroom; at the top of the SL steps is a window frame from which Don Giovanni can talk to Leporello in the street below.  The lower level is the street and the inside of a house represented by a table and chairs left and a bench right.  A trapdoor down center goes to the basement of the house and to Hell.  There are escape stairs on the upper platform left and right.

     We hear the opening notes of the overture to Mozart’s Don Giovanni as lights come up and Leporello speaks to the audience about working for Don Giovanni who, he says, is going to hell for sleeping with so many women.  Don Giovanni asks him if he has been talking to an invisible friend and says that they have to climb up the trellis to Donna Anna’s bedroom.  He says that his only sin is that he loves too much.  Leporello warns Don Giovanni about Donna Anna’s father, the Commendatore, but Don Giovanni puts on a mask and starts climbing the trellis.  Complaining to the audience, Leporello follows and we hear the first bars of “La chi darem la mano” as the lights come up on Donna Anna’s bedroom.  Don Giovanni and Leporello are hiding as Donna Anna and her maid Zerlina enter.  Donna Anna complains that her father keeps her locked up tighter than an oyster and says that sometimes she prays that a handsome man in a mask would climb up on the balcony, hide behind the curtains, then leap out and make passionate love to her.  Don Giovanni says her prayers have been answered,  but Leporello warns them that Donna Anna’s father has just returned.  The Commendatore climbs the steps to the door and pounds on it because Zerlina has locked it.  The women tell him they are naked; the father threatens to break open the door; Donna Anna kisses Don Giovanni as the father does break through the door, drawing his sword and chasing Don Giovanni around the room.  When the father falls and drops his sword, Don Giovanni grabs it and the Commendatore, lunging toward him, is run through.  He vows to come back from the grave and drag Don Giovanni to Hell.  The lights fade as Don Giovanni and Leporello climb down the trellis, the Commendatore dies, and we hear “Or sai chi lo’onore.”

     On the street level, Don Giovanni tells a distraught Leporello that they have to leave.  After Don Giovanni climbs the steps, telling Leporello to hurry, Leporello tells the audience that he doesn’t understand why women fall into bed with Don Giovanni and not with him.  He concludes that life is a joke and death is the punch line.  Donna Elvira enters and asks him where her husband, Don Giovanni, is.  Leporello tells her that the man she thought was a priest was a horse doctor from Barcelona.  Donna Elvira shakes Leporello like a rag doll, but he insists that Don Giovanni is dead, until Don Giovanni sticks his head out the upstairs window, yelling for him.  Donna Elvira runs up the steps, embracing Don Giovanni until they fall on the bed.  Leporello runs up the steps and we hear the sound of an angry mob approaching as Leporello drags Don Giovanni, with Donna Elvira hanging on, to the balcony.  The mob sounds get louder as the light fades and we hear “Non mi dir.”

     Light with the shadows of bars then come up down center on Don Giovanni, Leporello, and an old man who turns out to be Casanova.  Don Giovanni assures Leporello that something always turns up to get them out of difficulties like prison. Introducing himself, Casanova tells Leporellothat men are unsuccessful with women because they do not fully appreciate them.  Donna Elvira, having bribed the jailer, comes in and hits Casanova for propositioning her.  He looks for his teeth as the others leave and we hear “Viva la liberta.”

     The next scene occurs at night, with thunder, lightning, and rain.  A statue of the Commendatore has been set up in the arch of a cemetery tomb under the platform.  Leporello tells Don Giovanni that they are in the Commendatore’s tomb, but Don Giovanni tries to explain to Leporello that he loves all the women he has encountered.  Leporello thinks the statue has moved and Don Giovanni invites the statue to come to dinner with him and his daughter at the next full moon.  But, as Don Giovanni turns away from the statue to drink, the statue speaks:  “As you desire.”  Leporelloscreams and as he and Don Giovanni leave, the statue slowly lifts an arm with a clenched fist, shouting:  “KILL, KILL, KILL, KILLLLL, KILLLLLLLLLLLLLL.”  The lights fade and we hear “Bisogna aver coraggio.”

     In moonlight, Don Giovanni and Leporello have climbed the trellis to the balcony and are sneaking into Donna Anna’s bedroom when they are met by Zerlina who tells them that Donna Anna has been having dreadful nightmares.  Don Giovanni goes down the steps and finds Donna Anna sitting in a rocking chair, blaming herself for her father’s death.  Don Giovanni says that her father had no right to imprison her, kisses her tenderly, and persuades her to eat some soup.  We hear “A cener teco m’invitasti” as the lights fade.

     In moonlight we see Donna Elvira climbing up the trellis with a knife and hiding behind the curtains as Leporello enters telling Zerlina that he believes Don Giovanni is a changed man because he is taking care of Donna Anna without having sex with her.  Rejecting Leporello’s offer of marriage, Zerlina warns him that Donna Anna may remember that Don Giovanni killed her father.  Noticing the full moon, Leporello tells Zerlina that the statue of the Commendatore is coming to dinner and will drag Don Giovanni down to Hell.  Entering below, Don Giovanni refuses to leave because for the first time in his life he is truly in love.  Donna Anna enters with a box of wooden puppets she has carved.  Donna Elvira looks down on them from the balcony, noticing how tender Don Giovanni is with Donna Anna but still resolved to kill him.  She descends the steps, telling Donna Anna that she is Don Giovanni’s wife, twice ruined and abandoned by him.  We hear the sound of three loud knocks and Zerlina says that someone is at the back door.  Three louder knocks prompt Leporello to urge Don Giovanni to run away.  Don Giovanni admits to Donna Anna that he killed her father by accident.  He says he is sorry and loves her.  Knocking continues as Zerlina goes through the upstage arch and Leporello gets down on the floor trying to locate the trap door.  Zerlina screams and runs in saying that the statue is walking.  The statue appears as Leporelloopens the trap door.  Don Giovanni asks forgiveness of the statue and they shake hands, but the statue continues holding Don Giovanni’s hand as they descend the steps of the trap where a red glow is shining up.  Don Giovanni grabs Leporello and pulls him down the steps as we hear groans of pain and horror mixed with distorted music from the last scene of Mozart’s opera.  Zerlina slams the trap door shut and drags Donna Elvira away from it.  Donna Anna opens the trap saying that there’s nothing left but ashes and a little pile of bones.  All three women look into the trap.  When Donna Elvira asks what they are going to do, Donna Anna says that they can have a puppet show with the naked puppets singing opera.  Lights fade on them and we hear the last measures of the opera.

Mysterium is set on the deck of an ocean liner at night.  Freud and Jung are returning to Europe after visiting America.  Jung thinks America is “a wonderful place,” “intensely numinous,” charged with the “tremendous mystery of the uncanny other.”  Freud says that America is “a pig hole,” the “most vulgar sewer on earth,” “almost entirely constructed of greed, vulgarity, stupidity, self-congratulation, bigotry, and the worship of violence.”  When Jung suggests that they analyze each other’s dreams, Freud refuses to give up what he considers his authority and thinks that Jung may want to kill him.  They squabble, which Jung thinks is good, and Freud says they have to agree on the fundamental doctrine.  Jung says there is no doctrine and, when Freud accuses him of excapades with women not his wife, Jung replies that everyone knows that Freud has been sleeping with his wife’s sister.  The call each other hysterical and Jung cautions Freud about fainting.  A steward enters and asks them to be quiet because some women in the ballroom heard them talking of penises.  He suggests that they separate until they have calmed down.  Freud says that Jung’s theories are “rubbish.”  He feels the ship may have hit something, an iceberg perhaps.  Jung says that Freud is jealous of him because he is younger and stronger and full of ideas.  Freud gets angry and faints.  When the steward enters again he tells Jung that the ship has hit an iceberg and there are a limited number of lifeboats with room for only one more, Jung himself.  Jung says he can’t leave Freud but, after the steward leaves, rationalizes that, as a doctor, he could be of help in the lifeboat which would be an excellent place to study psychological types.  He leaves; we hear singing, then gunshots; and Freud wakes up.  He sees Jung in the lifeboat waving up at him and then sees “that great white thing . . . looming up out of the darkness.  He thinks he must be dreaming and wonders what it could mean.  We hear singing as the lights fade out.

In A Fellow of Infinite Jest, Will Kempe enters a London tavern late at night in 1599 as Shakespeare sits writing a play.  Kempe complains about Hamlet’s advice to the players and learns that Falstaff, a part he enjoyed playing, is not in Henry the Fifth, but, like Yorick, dead.  Shakespeare says there will be no more jigs or improvisations; from now on they’re sticking to the script.  Kempe says the script is just a road map, that he is an entertainer, a comedian, who made it possible for Shakespeare to work in theatre.  Shakespeare says he is grateful but cannot allow Kempe to ruin his scripts with his old irrelevant slapstick routines that have nothing to do with the play.  Kempe rages that the theatre is not a building or words but flesh and blood and gonads.  He says he will be remembered in a hundred years and that Shakespeare is nothing.  He storms out but comes back in, and Shakespeare offers to put Falstaff into Henry the Fifth as long as Kempe says the lines as written.  Kempe refuses and Shakespeare says that Falstaff is dead.  Kempe says he will dance a jig on the smoking ruins of the theatre.  He leaves, Shakespeare writes, and the lights go out.

In Wraith, set in a pub (a table and two chairs) in London in 1946, John Keir Cross and Stephen T. MacFarlane, both thin, pale, fair men in their mid-thirties, talk about Cross’ wife sleeping with both of them.  Cross says he has dedicated his latest book of stories to Mac, as a joke that no one will get.  He admits to plagiarizing the stories about ghosts, puppets, and wraiths from Mac, and Mac asks if Cross has seen his wraith, a Scotch doppelganger who appears just before one dies.  Cross says that his wife is with Montgomery, and Mac says that she is lonely and that it must be difficult living with someone like Cross.  Cross says that a large rat once attacked his child after he had tried to summon the Devil on his BBC radio program.  Mac says the only way to get rid of one’s wraith is to die.  Cross says he plans to drink himself to death and wonders if anyone would notice if he strangled Mac.  Mac says he will die when Cross dies and leaves for the lavatory.  Audrey, Cross’ wife, enters, saying she has been nowhere for a long time but she is back and has read his book and liked parts of it very much.  She says she is glad that he signed his own name rather than hiding behind the name MacFarlane.  Cross says he can’t leave until his friend returns but Audrey says the bartender told her he has been sitting alone drinking and talking to himself.  After Cross and Audrey leave, Mac returns, says that he has been left to pay the tab, and finishes the drink Cross left for him.

Loopy Rye, part of the Pendragon Cycle, uses a unit set with, DR, a chair in the Flowers Boarding Hotel, Blaine Plum’s desk and chair facing downstage RC, a bench in the cemetery LC, and tombstones under an old tree DL.  Characters are onstage throughout the play which begins in 1925 but goes back to events that occurred in 1872.  We hear the sounds of a ticking clock and an old piano playing Chopin’s 13^th Prelude as lights come up on Loopy in the DR chair.  Blaine Plum, Lavinia’s father, is seated at his desk, Augustus Ballantine is on the bench, and Lavinia is sitting with her back against a tombstone.  Loopy as an old man talks about learning to tune pianos, mentioning names of characters in the Pendragon Cycle, and as the lights come up on Lavinia he identifies her as a lost girl.  Blaine (in 1872) tells Lavinia that she has to see Doc McGort because she has been vomiting every morning.  Augustus tries to talk with Lavinia in 1872 while Loopy in 1925 remembers how a family was found dead at Grim Lake.  He talks about how people treated him and how he likes rain, china bowls, sparrows, and the smell of horse manure and hay.  Blaine in 1872 tells Lavinia that Augustus has agreed to marry her, but Lavinia says she doesn’t even like him.  As they talk, Loopy tells us in counterpoint the history of Ghost Hill with herds of buffalo moving through the forest and Delaware Indians who lived in the caves.  Loopy says he likes to talk to the crows and thinks being the village idiot is a big responsibility because dumb people need someone they can feel superior to.  He says he gets uneasy when the Carnival comes to town and he moves to the tombstones to talk to Lavinia in 1872.  He warns her about coming to the cemetery at night, saying there are ghosts and a lot of people fornicating.  She asks him what he sees when he looks into people’s windows at night.  He says he has seen just about everything, including her taking baths.  He admits to leaving drawings of her on the back porch, but she doesn’t think he drew them.  She takes out a piece of paper and asks him to draw her.  As he does so, Blaine tells his daughter that if she doesn’t marry Augustus he will throw her out of his house without a penny.  She says that Augustus is not the father of her child and only says he is so he can marry her and get Blaine’s money.  When she tells him Loopy is the father of her child, Blaine says he is going to have Loopy locked up in a mental institution.  She realizes that her father has already put his plan in motion.  Blaine admits that Augustus told him that he saw Lavinia and Loopy in the cemetery.  Lavinia says that her father is paying Augustus to marry her.  Blaine says they are coming to take Loopy to the institution where he will be castrated and lobotomized.  Lavinia looks at Loopy drawing and tells her father that if he leaves Loopy alone she will marry Augustus and do whatever Blaine wants.  She says if any harm ever comes to Loopy she will take her child and disappear.  Blaine accepts her offer on condition that she never speak to Loopy again, never look at him or acknowledge his presence.  As we hear, faintly, the Chopin Prelude again, she walks to the bench and sits next to Augustus.  Loopy finishes the drawing, puts it on the tombstone, and goes back to his chair, becoming an old man again.  He tells us that Lavinia never said a word to him after that and would pass him on the street as if he wasn’t there.  He says she knew as she played the piano at night that he was outside her window but she wouldn’t look.  He says she died young and he sits by her grave at night.  He saw her through the window looking at his drawings.  He watched over her little girl and then the little girl’s children.  He says the best thing about love is that it doesn’t make any sense.  Like God.  And the crows.

Another two-character play in the Pendragon cycle, Draw a Face, Win a Pig, takes place in the law office of Jacob Armitage, 49, as Mary Casey, 24, accuses her mother of stealing and eating the pig she won at the county fair for drawing the best picture of George Washington.  She wants to sue her mother and father and everyone who ate some of her pig and says she will pay Jacob by allowing him to take certain liberties with her.  She says she has seen him looking at her with lust in his eyes and knows he visits a house of prostitution.  She says she is a virgin but will allow him to take certain negotiated liberties with her in the name of justice because her pig was like a child to her.  She says her father has a barn full of stacked-up pianos and that Jacob’s father drank himself to death so he knows what it is like to be trapped.  Since Jacob will be disbarred if he accepts sexual favors from a client, she says she will accept his proposal of marriage.  He admits he wants to sleep with her and asks, if he marries her, she will forget about the pig.  She says she will take that as a yes.