In Brimstone Run, Bubber Rooks speaks to us from his house next to the junkyard by the dump up Shite Creek just outside of Armitage, a small town in east Ohio, around 1856. He says he became a falling down drunk because he wanted to sleep with his wife’s sister. Every time he would fornicate with Dolly, his wife, he would think about her sister. When the sister came to live with them after Dolly got pregnant, he couldn’t stop diddling Dolly who made noises like a squealing pig, only louder, knowing her sister Aggie could hear her through the paper-thin wall. Right in the middle of doing it he would get leg cramps but Dolly wouldn’t let him go so they just kept doing it, she squealing like a pig and he screaming in pain. He says his brother Jackson, who went off to the Mexican War and never came back, told him that the Devil lived out by Indian Caves near the spring where Brimstone Run starts. A long time ago someone had dug a bunch of deep holes to mine something and Bubber thought he could hear the Devil whispering although he couldn’t tell what the message was. He says when Dolly was nine months pregnant he got drunk and walked into the wrong bedroom where Aggie was standing naked. Dolly found them and started screaming and then her water broke and she fell backwards down the stairs and died, but the baby boy survived. He called his son Egg and married Aggie and they had two girls, Tootsie and Koralee. But every time he did it with Aggie he thought about Dolly. He continued drinking heavily and walked out to Brimstone Run and, leaning down into one of the holes to try to hear what the Devil was whispering, he fell and landed at the bottom of the hole like a broken toy. When he looked up he saw the moon and then his son Egg, five years old, looking down at him, and then he died. Ever since he’s been dead, he tells us, he’s been trying to figure out why things happened the way they did. Being dead is like being in a dream and Dolly follows him wanting more and more sex. When he makes love to her he doesn’t think of her sister but every now and then Dolly yells out the name of his brother Jackson. What he remembers all the time is his little boy looking down at him and he wonders who the boy is going to kill when he grows up, because the only true thing he taught him is that love kills somebody sooner or later. He says he still hears voices whispering that death is a dream. He says he wants to wake up.
Humpty Dumpty
Humpty Dumpty is performed by a large, round person, shaped rather like an egg, sitting on a wall. He tells us he is celebrating the completion of a thirty-seven-and-a-half-foot wall, part of his plan to make The Other Side of the Looking Glass great again. He says that he has nothing against the honest, hard-working rabbits coming to Wonderland who can contribute significantly to our way of life, but he doesn’t welcome rabbits from shit holes who bring their shit holes with them. He says we have already wasted too much time exterminating the rabbits who were already here when we got here, where of course we have always been and always will be because God gave us this country. He says he is in no danger of falling off the wall because his personal physician has certified that he is the most perfectly balanced egg in the observable universe; and, if he should ever fall, the White King, with all of his horses and all of his men, will put him back together. He says he has a very cordial relationship with the White King because for many years it has been his great honor and privilege to wash his dirty money. He says everything is a game and the point of the game is to win and rules don’t matter. He says he won’t take any questions from that uppity Alice person and asks that the lizards take her out and punch her in the face if she gives them any trouble.
He realizes that nobody’s listening to him and says he feels dizzy and speaks of a dream in which he is falling and feeling intense heat and thinks God is making an omelet. He wonders why God can’t go to the Waffle House like a normal person. He says he is confused and doesn’t know which side of the wall he is on. He says he doesn’t know where he came from and he doesn’t know who he is. Then he says it is just a dream, that he’s just a character in a nursery rhyme. He sees a strange dark shape above him and we hear the sound of a giant bird screeching and see a great shadow across the stage. Humpty says that God in the form of a giant bird has come to give him his just reward and take him to the Waffle House. Losing his balance, he falls over backwards on the upstage side of the wall, screaming. We hear the sound of an enormous splat and the lights black out.
Hologram
In Hologram, the last play in the trilogy, Laura sits in a wooden chair in a circle of light, and Stephen sits in another chair in a circle of light. They speak as if on the telephone but no telephones are visible. Laura tells Stephen she’s a little drunk, has started graduate school, and is having a party with friends. She wonders how his book is coming. He says he isn’t writing any more and wonders why she doesn’t answer his letters. She suggests that the woman in Stephen’s book who is obsessed with the praying mantis could have a daughter who is in love with her stepfather. There is a conspiracy between them that drives the mother out of her mind and makes her leave. Stephen says his book isn’t about that. When Laura asks, Stephen says he did touch her mother but also respected her boundaries. He asks Laura what she wants and if he can help her. She says she doesn’t need his fucking help. She says he can call anytime and leave her a message when she doesn’t answer. She says she wants him to suffer and then die. Or he could drive up to the university and have “hot, desperate, guilty, screaming sexual intercourse” with her and then she would eat his head. She says this isn’t real, that it’s just a dream, or his novel, or a hologram. She decides it’s a hologram and tells him to keep in touch.
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.
Panther
In the darkness on stage we hear crickets and the sounds of a woods at night, and then the lights for Panther come up on John Rose, a very old man, sitting on a fallen tree. The year is 1988 and John says that there is something waiting for him in the woods. He says that Jessie, his sister, long dead, told him to watch out for panthers. He reminisces about the members of his family who have passed, saying he would have died himself if he had not promised Jessie that, if she could not live to be a hundred, he would. He talks about seeing 21 wild turkeys, “like giant cockroach demons,” race across his back yard. He tells us his dreams of uncovering a hole in the side of a hill that is a portal to some terrible place, and of being in a dark theatre and seeing a girl in black, speaking to herself in a strange gibberish as she moves past him to her lover sitting alone in the front row. He feels warm breath near him in the darkness of the woods. He has endured his hundred years. He calls out “Jessie?” twice and the lights go to black.
Botticelli Venus
Botticelli Venus is a two-act play for seven men and four women with some actors playing two or three parts. The unit set—representing a Greenwich Village apartment in the present, Botticelli’s studio in Renaissance Florence, and the world inside Botticelli’s paintings– is composed of a labyrinth of steps and empty windows which are also picture frames. Lights come up on Simonetta/Natalya describing Botticelli’s painting, Primavera, as various characters speak from the window frames or from the shadows and Lorenzo, pounding on the door, calls to her as Natalya, her present-day identity. Botticelli sits to one side by an easel, drinking, and Lorenzo tells Natalya that she is needed for the opening of the exhibition. We hear a fanatical voice screaming and nuns moaning while Simonetta explains that she is the Botticelli Venus as Lorenzo de’ Medici appears (Florence, Italy, 1510), identified by Simonetta, and asks why Botticelli isn’t painting. We hear the voice of Savonarola in the darkness as Lorenzo de’ Medici blames him for burning Botticelli’s paintings and making him stop creating art. Botticelli says that everything will be destroyed and says that Lorenzo de’ Medici is a hallucination sent by the Devil. Lorenzo de’ Medici leaves and Simonetta says that he was trying to help. Botticelli says that Lorenzo de’ Medici is dead and that he doesn’t understand what Simonetta means when she talks about putting herself through grad school as a stripper. Lorenzo pounds on the door and tells Natalya she will be fired if she doesn’t come out. When she says she smells something, Botticelli says they are burning his paintings in the square and we hear Savonarola screaming. Giuliano de’ Medici enters (Florence, 1470s) and wants Botticelli to paint a portrait of the married Simonetta Vespucci. After he leaves, Simonetta poses for the portrait and tells him that she is a number of different people and feels that she can almost remember the future. Giuliano enters as the light fades on Botticelli and Giuliano tries to kiss Simonetta but his brother Lorenzo comes in and tells her not to trust anybody who has money. Simonetta says she dreams of being hunted in the woods, perhaps by Lorenzo, but his wife, Clarice, and his sister, Bianca, run in giggling, pulling the Romany Girl who tells fortunes from tarot cards and palms. Looking at Lorenzo’s hand she tells him he will cry at Easter but someone else will bleed. The women run off and Lorenzo tells Giuliano to leave Simonetta alone because he is making arrangements for him to marry Jacopo Appiani’s daughter. Simonetta returns and tells Lorenzo that the Romany Girl told his wife that she’ll never be a widow. Clarice thought that meant that Lorenzo would live forever, and Simonetta says that it just meant that his wife would die first. The Romany Girl also told Simonetta that she would die soon but would live forever. After Lorenzo leaves, Giuliano tells Simonetta that, if she loves him, she will meet him at midnight in the alley behind her house. She watches him walk away and tells Botticelli that he waited until sunrise. Botticelli tells her that everyone is in love with her and she says he needs to pay attention to the signals people give him. Vespucci, her husband enters and, after she leaves, he asks the painter if she says anything about Giuliano. Botticelli says she hasn’t said anything. Vespucci says he has never been so miserable in his live because he loves his wife but she won’t let him touch her. He wants Botticelli to find out who she’s sleeping with and when he leaves Simonetta speaks to the painter from one of the empty frames. He says he is drawing sketches from a Boccaccio story about a girl being eaten by dogs for all eternity. But when the real girl sees what happens she agrees to marry the man she had previously rejected. Simonetta says the story is an example of everything that’s wrong about the way women are treated. She says she is not sleeping with anybody and wants Botticelli to teach her how to paint. Botticelli says he spent years studying with Fra Lippo Lippi, now dead, who appears eating a chicken leg in one of the frames. He comes down to Botticelli as three Nymphs join them, draping themselves on Fra Lippo. He tells Botticelli he can’t be a great artist unless he learns to enjoy women. He and the Nymphs leave and Simonetta says she wishes she could have known him. Botticelli tells her to paint whatever she sees. He says he is afraid of her and that the only thing an artist can do is keep his head down and do his work. He kisses her, passionately, and she turns to go but comes back and punches him. He falls backwards holding his nose. She leaves but comes back, kisses him, and runs out. Lights fade out on him, ending Act One.
As Act Two begins, Giuliano tells Botticelli he wants him to paint another portrait of Simonetta. Lorenzo enters and tells them that Simonetta is dead. He and his brother leave and we hear the sounds of present-day Lorenzo pounding on the door, telling Natalya that the exhibition is going to open in an hour. Simonetta explains to Botticelli that Natalya “who I used to be in the future but not any more here in the past” works at a museum in New York City that is exhibiting Botticelli’s paintings. Poliziano appears in one of the frames with the three Nymphs and speaks of lust and love. Lorenzo pounds on the door and tells Natalya a taxi is waiting. Botticelli wants them to get out of his head, saying that none of them is real. Simonetta says that Natalya, the Russian girl, felt that she was the girl in Botticelli’s painting, the Botticelli Venus. The light fades and comes up on Botticelli brooding and Simonetta watching him. Her husband, drinking from a bottle, enters and says he poisoned his wife, slowly, and then suffocated her. He says that she was pregnant although he had never had intercourse with her. Vespucci tells the painter that Giuliano and his brother Lorenzo will be stabbed to death when the priest rings the little bell at the raising of the host during the Easter mass in the cathedral. Botticelli runs out and lights fade on Vespucci and come up on Pazzi and Bandini taking a sleepy Giuliano to church as Simonetta watches from the shadows. Giuliano moves upstage with the Romany Girl to look at her flowers. The bell rings and Pazzi stabs Giuliano again and again. Bandini and Pazzi run off and Botticelli rests Giuliano’s head in his lap. In darkness we hear the voice of Savonarola preaching and then light comes up on him in one of the frames with the three Nymphs listening. Simonetta tells Botticelli that Savonarola is a grotesque lunatic but Botticelli says that he has chosen God since art brings only suffering and pain. He tells her that after she died he painted her over and over but the emptiness inside him grew and grew. Simonetta says that to make art is as close to God as we can get because God is an artist. We hear the sound of loud knocking and two demons enter to take Savonarola into the square to be burnt as a public nuisance. The Nymphs follow. Botticelli tells Simonetta that Lorenzo de’ Medici has never been the same since his brother was killed in the cathedral. She tells him about a girl named Natalya who lived in Siberia and got a scholarship to study art in America, but who was raped and had a child. The boy left her when he was nineteen and Natalya gradually became, in her head, Simonetta Vespucci, the Botticelli Venus. Simonetta says the Russian girl is insane and Botticelli says it is his fault that Simonetta died. We hear more pounding on the door and a modern Lorenzo in a suit enters as Botticelli watches from the shadows. When Lorenzo tells Simonetta that the Botticelli exhibition opens in one hour, she says she is not Natalya and that her nineteen-year-old son has been stabbed to death in an orange grove in Phoenix. She tells Lorenzo to go away. She then tells Botticelli that she is not the Russian woman any more, perhaps never was her. She says she is the nymph Simonetta and only wants Botticelli. He says Botticelli is dead and her name is Natalya and she is an artist. She goes to the easel, looks at him, and begins to paint as the light fades on them and goes out.
Praying Mantis
In Praying Mantis, part of a trilogy of one-act plays, Steve and Laura are sitting on a back porch swing on a late summer night in 1994. Laura says she likes listening to crickets and watching the fireflies, feeling safe but thinking that something is waiting out there. She asks Stephen if he thinks she is unstable because her father and mother were unstable and abandoned her. He says nobody gets over anything. She says he is talking like he’s trying out rough drafts of his novel. She asks if the novel is about her mother and if there is a praying mantis in it. He says he married her mother because he loved her and Laura’s father had left them destitute. She wonders why Stephen stayed when her mother left and he tells her that her mother once told him that she would cut the hands off anyone who hurt her child. Laura tells Stephen that she has seen him trying to be good to her and she can’t help suspecting his motives. He says he will never hurt her, but she says he will hurt her because he loves her. She says she is cold and is going inside. She asks if he is coming inside. He says no but she doesn’t move as the light fades and goes out.
Midsummer
Midsummer (1m, 4w) is set in a wood near Athens with lush vegetation and shadows. Puck and four fairy girls—“sweet, pretty, and delicate”—are relaxing. Peaseblossom says that Puck is “absolutely manic,” and she doesn’t know what to make of this behavior. But, she says, not all fairies are alike. Cobweb, for example, is distracted and complex, Moth is always fluttering around, and Mustardseed is always critical. Mustardseed says everything excites Puck sexually and he’s always bragging. Puck says he saw the Great God Pan die because nobody believed in him, but his ghost still haunts the woods. When Puck tells Peaseblossom that pleasure and disgust are closely related, Cobweb mentions Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams which, she says, Hermia left in the woods. She says Freud isn’t born yet, that all times and places coexist in the forest, including some which are entirely imaginary. When Mustardseed says Puck is a lost, evil little thing, Puck says they are all evil things, all lost. Peaseblossom observes that throughout the woods creatures are kissing, copulating, killing, and devouring each other.
Puck says that long ago they were gods, that the wind moving through the trees is the breath of Pan, and the feeling of panic is the awareness of the presence of an ancient god reminding you that you’re going to die. Mustardseed says she would rather be a fallen god than a human. Puck says humans are degenerate monkeys. Moth thinks she is too young to die and Cobweb says that when the last person who believed in you, or at least remembered you, is gone, you’d be gone, too. Peaseblossom says they have to do something so people don’t forget them. Puck says that’s exactly what he’s been doing. They all sense something, and Cobweb suggests that perhaps Shakespeare is coming with more rewrites, perhaps cutting the scene. Puck says there isn’t any wind and urges them to listen. Lights fade out.
Anarchy
Anarchy is a two-act play for five men and three women about the trial and execution of Sacco and Venzetti The simple unit set has a Judge’s bench UC a couple of steps up with a witness stand beside it. Other locations—jail cells, exercise yard, offices, interrogation rooms, a courtroom, a theatre, a hotel room—are created with a few chairs and tables. There are no breaks between scenes and no set changes. As the play begins, Sacco and Vanzetti are on chairs left and right in circles of light and we hear a fusion of interrogations with the voice of the unseen Inquisitor asking them about riding in a car with a gun. They deny knowing the people they are asked about and insist they have done nothing wrong. John Rhys Pendragon, a journalist, sits in a chair next to Sacco, saying that he wants to write about him for newspapers. The light on Vanzetti goes out as Sacco tells Rhys that he writes lies. Rhys says he has been fired several times for writing the truth and he just wants to tell their side of the story. Sacco explains why he lied to the police and tells Rhys about his friend Salcedo who was thrown by the police from a seven-story window for being Italian in the wrong neighborhood. He says they needed a car to dump their Anarchist literature but the car wasn’t ready and then he and Vanzetti got arrested going home on the streetcar. He asks Rhys how his wife and children will be fed if he is in jail and tells him to write about his “rights.”
Sacco leaves and lights come up on Mrs. Johnson in the witness chair. She answers the Inquisitor’s questions, saying that the Italians who came for the car seemed nervous and that she feared for her life. She wonders when she will get her reward. The light fades on her and comes up on Rhys arriving in his hotel room where his daughter Anne is waiting for him. She wants her father to get her in to see Sacco and Vanzetti so she can write about them. She says she will never see him again if he doesn’t help her. Lights fade on them and come up on Angelo Guidobone in the witness chair. The Inquisitor’s voice asks about Guidobone buying a fish from Vanzetti on Thursday, April 15th. The light fades on the courtroom and comes up on the prison with Sacco and Vanzetti talking with Rhys and Anne. Sacco talks about doing plays about truth to raise money for the strikers and teach people about the oppression of the workers. We hear the sounds of a concertina and a drum as Rosa, Sacco’s wife, enters carrying a baby doll and a man’s hat. She puts the hat on the ground, saying that she and her husband have written this play to help striking workers. Sacco puts on a false mustache and hat and picks up a cane. Rosa asks for help for her starving child and Sacco tells her that her husband should go back to work if he wants their child to eat. He says that Italians were born to be slaves but she says that the workers will conquer all oppressors of the people. There is scattered applause as she finishes and as Rosa and Sacco bow a Poor Woman puts a coin in the hat and the lights fade on them and come up on Vanzetti explaining to Anne how Judge Thayer ignored contradictory evidence and bragged about it at a football game. We hear football music as lights come up on Judge Thayer in the stands, cheering for Dartmouth and speaking to an unseen person beside him, describing “those anarchist bastards” as “murdering opera singing ceiling painting cheese grating ararchistic greasy dago wop sons of bitches” that he wants to hang. The light switches our attention to Sacco in the witness chair explaining to the unseen Inquisitor that he was in Boston at the time of the shooting. Then Anne asks Rhys about her mother and says they have to find a way to save Sacco and Vanzetti. The two men are seen playing bocce in the prison yard as Vanzetti tells Sacco about the Puritans and the Pioneers, both of whom hated art because was an investigation into truth and they were sure they already knew the truth and just wanted to make money and kill people. He says they want to kill them because they’re Italians and ask questions. Sacco says he tries to remember his wife but his memories are mixed up with grief. He says he hasn’t slept with her for seven years; Vanzetti says that he has nobody. Sacco says he will kill the judge when he gets out and refuses to sign the appeal that Vanzetti has worked on. Vanzetti leaves and Sacco is left alone as we see Rhys reading a typescript that Anne has written. He tells her it’s very good but that she needs to put the most important thing up front. She calls him old=fashioned and storms out. He smiles as the light fades on him and comes up on Rosa berating Sacco because he won’t sign the paper. He says they are going to kill him no matter what he does. Lights fade on them ending Act One.
Act Two opens in the prison visiting room with Medeiros, a prisoner, telling Rhys that he was in the car during the Braintree robbery and Sacco and Vanzetti were not there. Medeiros says that two Italian guys did the shooting and Polish guy was driving the car. He wants Rhys to tell somebody. We hear birdsong and see Judge Thayer with pruning shears singing as he works in his garden. Rosa enters and shows Judge Thayer a picture of her son and daughter, asking how he can be so evil. He says he preserves order by destroying the natural world and tells her to go back with her children to whatever filthy sewer she crawled out of. He leaves her standing as lights come up on Rhys in a cell with Joe Morelli. Rhys tells Morelli that a witness described Joe’s gang as the ones who committed the Braintree murders. Morelli says Sacco and Vanzetti will be executed no matter that he says, and Rhys is just trying to get a story to sell more newspapers. Rosa tries to persuade Sacco to eat something and he finally agrees to have some soup that she pours out for him. Anne thinks that Sacco and Vanzetti are completely innocent but Rhys tells her not to get so emotionally caught up in the story that she only pays attention to the evidence that supports her version. He says she has to be open to both sides of any question. He says he thinks Vanzetti is probably innocent but he isn’t sure about Sacco. But he must write only what he knows, not what he believes. He leaves, saying he has an appointment with the governor to try to persuade him not to murder Anne’s friends. She runs after him. We see Governor in his office calling out to someone offstage about not letting “that son of a bitch John Rhys Pendragon” in to see him. He turns and Rhys is already there, asking that Governor at least commute their sentence, but Governor tells him to get out of his office. Rhys leaves and Governor looks over at Vanzetti, sitting, asking why Governor has come to see him. Governor says he wants to know the truth and Vanzetti tells him they got convicted because of who they are not for what they did. Lights come up on a jail cell in Boston with Anne and Dorothy Parker. Parker tells Anne that her father is the best and loves his daughter more than life itself. Rhys enters and tells Anne to leave because he has bailed her out. Parker tells Rhys that Anne is going to be just like him. Lights fade as they both leave and we hear birdsong as lights come up on Sacco and Vanzetti in the prison yard. Rhys and Anne enter and Sacco says he and his friends are soldiers, not murderers. Anne gives Vanzetti a copy of King Lear and Vanzetti says Americans want to kill life every place they find it. Lights fade on them and come up on Judge Thayer at night staring into the flames that are burning down his house. Sacco and Vanzetti appear next to him and Judge Thayer realizes he is having a dream. But Sacco and Vanzetti strap him into the judge’s chair and put a metal helmet on his head. We see “Horrible Frankensteinian flashes of electricity and buzzing” as lights flicker on and off. Judge Thayer shakes back and forth and screams in agony as the lights black out.
Rhys, drinking, tells Anne that he put her in a very expensive school so she would not be taken from him when her mother died. She says she hates him but he folds her in his arms as she cries and the light fades on them. The plays ends as Rosa, in a small circle of light, speaks to her unseen son, telling him to always remember his father and how brave he was and what his life meant. “They can’t kill you forever as long as somebody remembers.” The light fades out.
Grim Lake
The unit set for Grim Lake (6m, 3w), created by tables and chairs, represents all times and places at the Red Rose Inn in Armitage, Ohio, during the years 1791 to 1805, the action moving back and forth in time without set changes and with actors remaining on stage. Nigro prefaces the script with the information that, in 1791, Henry and Margaret (Mag) Grim, their son Thomas and his wife Clara Jane, and their daughter Daisy Grim Quiller, all disappeared or were murdered. “There are several stories about what might have happened to them.” The play begins in darkness with Jonas Grey Wolf gazing into a fire, speaking of the ubiquitous power of Manitou. As the fire goes out we see Polly Crow, 42, sitting on a wooden chair, staring into a downstage fire we can’t see. George Grim, 19, sits near her and his sister, Mary Grim Armitage, 21, is finishing cleaning. The voice of Robert Armitage is heard from upstairs, telling Mary to come up to bed. Mary wants Polly and George to go to bed. George says he sees things and thinks Polly does, too. Mary says she was seven when the event George dreams about happened and she doesn’t remember anything. She agrees with Polly that purple berries and bears drive people crazy. Mary says she doesn’t want to think about it; they’re dead and nothing will bring them back. Polly says it was the Devil, except he looked more like God. George says Polly was twenty-eight at the time and saw what happened. Polly says the Devil had long white hair and a white beard and a black suit; he had huge hands and his face was red and his eyes were blue. Mary says it was the Indians that killed them, but Polly says she can see Henry, Mag, Thomas, Clara Jane, and Daisy as clearly as if they were still alive. She says, at the time, she heard whippoorwills.
Lights dim on them and come up on Henry and Mag (in 1791). Mag thinks she hears something besides whippoorwills and Henry asks her if she has been eating purple berries again. When she calls Henry Enrico, he says his name is Henry. Mag says “he” is close, that he is coming for them. She wants Polly to put the children in the root cellar. Mag refers to Henry killing a Jesus and says she liked the way Henry walked the tightrope in his costume. She wants him to walk on his hands. When he says he’s too old, she says he was walking on his hands the night he killed Jesus. He says Enrico killed Jesus; he is Henry. Mag says that Mephistopheles is here and tells Henry to listen. We hear the sound of whippoorwills as the light fades on them and comes up on George telling Jonas he has been having dreams about the massacre. Jonas says the Indians were blamed, that he was blamed because he is half Indian. George says that white people saved Jonas and raised him like their own. Jonas says there is something evil in the lake and that it’s always a mistake to love. We hear whippoorwills and Jonas says he saw George’s father and Polly Crow and heard them talking about Jesus as an old man with white hair and beard appeared. Jonas says he went into the woods and when he came back they were all gone. He says something came up out of the water and advises George to leave the situation alone. We hear whippoorwills again as light fades on Jonas and George and comes up on Thomas Grim and Polly (in 1791).
Thomas tells her he has been dreaming of a creature living deep in the lake, a creature that came up and started devouring “us.” He says he hears voices in the woods and discloses that his wife Clara Jane, whom he met on a ship coming to America, never talks to him. Polly says that Daisy told her that Thomas hasn’t talked to her since she married Pete. Thomas says that Polly slept with both Old Man Rose and his son and has had a child by each of them. Polly tells Thomas that his parents are speaking German, not gibberish. Thomas denies that they can speak German and says that once he saw his father walking on his hands. Polly warns him about eating the purple berries, but Thomas says he saw Daisy and Clara Jane and his mother and father lying dead by the shore of the lake with blood everywhere. He says something pulled them into the water. Polly kisses him on the cheek as the light fades.
Polly crosses to George, Mary, and her husband Robert Armitage (in 1805) as Mary is berating George for asking questions about dead people. George says he wants to know what happened to his family and asks how five people can be killed in such a small town without anyone knowing what happened. Robert, who was eleven at the time, says there was blood everywhere, and Mary says she dreamed that something came out of the water and took them. George asks Polly about the man she thought was the Devil, and she says the man told her his name was Mephistopheles. We hear whippoorwills as lights dim on the others and come up on a younger Polly sitting in the woods as Mephistopheles DeFlores comes up behind her. Polly tells him he looks a little bit like God and Mephistopheles tells her about his twin children, a girl and a boy named Jesus. When Polly tells Mephistopheles he is very angry with his daughter, he says she married a clown who did somersaults on a tightrope and walked on his hands. He can’t forgive his daughter because she is responsible for the death of her brother, Jesus. Mephistopheles says he has been following his daughter and her husband for twenty-nine years. Polly says he should forgive his daughter and tells him about being taken by Indians when she was a child. She says that Henry and Mag Grim are over by the stand of maple trees. Mephistopheles tells Polly to take the children to a cellar because a storm is coming. He leaves and Polly tells Thomas that Mephistopheles is looking for Thomas’ parents because they killed Jesus at the carnival. Thomas tells Polly to hide in the root cellar with the children. Alone, Thomas talks about Revelation as the making known of what has been secret and leaves to find an ax.
Lights come up on Mag and Henry as Mag tells Henry that she loved him when his name was Enrico but she saw him in the woods with Clara Jane, his son’s wife, comforting her with his penis. Mephistopheles comes out of the upstage shadows telling them that he has pursued them across an ocean and nearly half a continent for three decades. He says he is tired and wonders if there’s any point to anything since before long everybody alive will be dead. Lights come up on Polly telling George about putting him and Mary in the root cellar and about seeing Clara Jane and Daisy kissing. Polly says she doesn’t know if the old man with white hair and big hands killed them. She says she remembers somebody saying, “Don’t look in his eyes.” Light fades on them as Thomas enters with an ax and asks where Mephistopheles is. Henry says Thomas must have imagined him, but then says that the old man went back into the woods. Mag says that Henry is fornicating with his son’s wife and Henry says that Clara Jane also slept with Thomas’ sister. He says Clara Jane can’t help it, it’s just her way of making friends. Mag says something is coming out of the water to kill them, but Henry thinks it’s just fog. Thomas believes it is retribution for all their sins. Light fades on them and comes up on George, Robert, and Jonas sitting at a fire (in 1805).
George says the past is a puzzle with most of the pieces missing and he doesn’t know what the truth is. Robert says we make educated guesses that are only illusions that keep us alive long enough to fornicate with a few women. We come from nothing and go to nothing. To find truth, read the tombstones. Jonas says that sometimes the Manitou whispers in a person’s head, but a person doesn’t always understand. Light fades and we hear the sound of whippoorwills in the darkness.
Don Nigro 