Tag: shorter plays

     Plum Pudding takes place in France in the 19^th century and requires a table with some chairs and an empty arch doorway up center.  Lights come up on Emile and Julie in her apartment.  A large covered pan is on the table and Julie tells Emile that it is indeed plum pudding that he smells.  Emile says that he has a mystical feeling about plum pudding and wishes his friend, Monsieur Fortgibu were present.  Entering through the arch from an earlier time comes Fortgibu as the lights dim a bit on Julie, and Emile recalls a time when he was a boy in 1805 and was invited to dinner at Fortgibu’s home.  Fortgibu says that he has just returned from England where he ate “the most wonderful dish,” one that he believes has never before been served in France.  This “almost supernaturally delicious” dish is called Plum Pudding.  Fortgibus tells Emile what he knows of the origin and history of plum pudding before wandering off into the stage right darkness looking for his big spoon.  Julie tells Emile that Fortgibu sounds a bit off his rocker, but Emile says that she has to hear what happened ten years later, when he passed by an out-of-the-way restaurant and smelled something “mysteriously evocative,”  plum pudding.  Emile says he walked into the restaurant and was told by the waiter, who has come through the arch, that the last plum pudding has been ordered by another gentleman.  The gentleman turns out to be Fortgibu, who comes through the arch, gray at the temples, but still vigorous.  Julie says that it was just a coincidence, but Emile says that he shared the plum pudding again with Fortgibu, who thinks that their chance meeting after ten years means something and that life is very much like plum pudding.  He complains of feeling dizzy and again goes off into the shadows.  Emile tells Julie that it has been 27 years since his first encounter with Fortgibu and 17 since the second and both involved plum pudding.  Julie says she doesn’t know anyone named Fortgibu and suggests that Emile has made up the story.  A maid enters to announce the arrival of Monsieur Fortgibu and a very old and confused Fortgibu appears in the archway, asking for Roxanne who apparently lived before her death in the apartment above Julie’s.  Emile tells Fortgibu that he has met him three times in his life and at all three times plum pudding was present.  Fortgibu thinks that it might mean something, but it’s more likely the illusion of coherence.  He says that plum pudding is part of “a jumble of random fluctuations in an ocean of meaningless cosmic gibberish,” part of a “rich hotch-potch of abstruse symbology.”  At Julie’s invitation, he sits to join them for the plum pudding.

 The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter is about Charles Lamb and his sister Mary.  The time of the action is the late 1790s and early 1800s and for the set Nigro writes that, in addition to a punishment stocks with holes for wrists and ankles, “a few old chairs, one a rocker, and a sofa will do, and a cabinet with silverware.”  We hear the sound of a ticking clock as lights come up on Charles and Mary sitting by a fire.  In the upstage shadows we can see Mother, Father, Aunt Hetty, and Jane, all sitting.  Charles says that Coleridge told him that his wife is trying to kill him.  Mary tells Charles that she knows she is a terrible burden to him but she is very grateful that he did not put her in Bedlam.  She tells him that there is a witch in the parlor with them but Charles says they and the cat are the only ones in the parlor.  He leaves and lights come up on the others.  Father speaks of being a butler for old Mr. Salt, Mother wants the cat, Aunt Hetty has difficulty remembering a parrot’s name, Jane talks about ducks, and the conversation becomes a hodge-podge of humorous misunderstandings.  But we learn that Coleridge’s wife has given birth, although Mother insists that Coleridge cannot be the father because he couldn’t stop talking long enough to put it in her.  Frustrated, Mary throws a spoon at Jane and then more silverware at the other characters.  She grabs a carving knife and stabs Mother in the heart, twice, threatening Jane who runs out, bumping into the re-entering Lamb.  He takes the knife from Mary, and as the lights go to black we hear the sounds of moans and shrieks, a madhouse cacophony.

     The lights come up on Lamb visiting Mary who is in a straight jacket.  She asks if they are going to hang her, but Lamb tells her the verdict was lunacy and that she will stay in the madhouse until she is better and can be brought home.  Mary says she is sorry for hitting Father in the head with a fork but that putting a knife in Mother’s heart was the only joy she has felt.  Lamb says he remembers his own temporary insanity fondly and swears he will never leave Mary. As he goes off, lights go to black, madhouse cacophony again, then lights up on Lamb, slightly drunk, in the stocks speaking to Mary in the straight jacket.  He enacts a story about having dinner with Wordsworth, Keats, Haydon, and “old deaf Landseer,” to whom he shouts parts of their conversation.  Lamb talks of a “red blubbery fellow,” possibly “old Ritchie,” who, according to Lamb, describes himself as a controller of stamps.  Lamb concludes his story by telling Mary that they are a pair that the world has never seen, she in a straight jacket for madness and he in the stocks for public drunkenness.  The light fades, allowing Lamb and Mary to go off stage where she gets quickly out of her straight jacket and runs back onstage carrying a package of books of Tales from Shakespeare, the book she and her brother wrote together.  They see that her name has been left off the title page.  Charles is angry and wants to punch Godwin, but Mary urges him to let it go and take a copy to Hazlitt, stopping to have a drink with Coleridge.

     Lamb asks Coleridge to stop wailing and Mary comes in asking if a crowd has died in the parlor.  Coleridge says that Wordsworth has broken with him and wishes he had married a woman like Mary.  She suggests he write to Wordsworth and to his wife.  Coleridge complains of the man from Porlock who knocked on the door as Coleridge was writing down his masterpiece about Kubla Khan.  When Mary says he must face his demons like everyone else, Coleridge leaves.  Lights fade and come up on Mary and the upstage group.  Mary says she is haunted by the fear that she will be ill again.  Mother wants the cat and asks Mary if she also murdered Aunt Hetty.  Aunt Hetty says she is right there, and Mary tells Mother that she had a nightmare that Mother had come back from the dead to ask her questions, like an oral examination at a university.  Mother then fires a series of questions that Mary answers, after which Mother tells Father that she had carnal relations with Old Salt every Friday for seventeen years.  Lamb, from the darkness, asks Mary whom she is speaking to, and the light changes so that the others are in the shadows.  But the voices upstage keep talking to Mary and she tells Lamb that she has to go back to the madhouse, that they will walk along the street on Christmas Day and pretend that they are sane.  The ghost people watch them go and Mother, after wishing them Merry Christmas, calls for the cat as the lights fade out.

Barbary Fox (3m, 3w), the most recent addition to the Pendragon cycle, takes place during the last decades of the 19^th century and the first decades of the 20^th in Armitage, Pendragon County, Ohio.  The unit set represents two houses and the yard between them created by a framework of a ruined gazebo and fragments of old houses with DR an old upright piano and bench, DRC a bed, and DL a round wooden table with chairs.  There are two window frames UL and UR, a door frame L, an old sofa C with a broken grandfather clock behind it, and old cabinet with liquor LC, and an old lion-footed bathtub on a platform URC.  The action moves back and forth in time and space continuously, and the actors enter and exit or remain in character on stage when not involved in a scene.  In darkness we hear the sound of whippoorwills and then, as lights come up, Magenta, wife of Silas Quiller, playing Faure’s Sicilienne on a slightly out-of-tune piano.  Barbary Fox is on the bed DR; Bert Astor, her husband, stands looking downstage from the UR window frame; Gretchen, Barbary’s daughter, is sitting on the sofa C; Silas stands by the liquor cabinet; and Rem Astor, Barbary’s uncle, is drinking at the DL table.  As Rem, drunk, talks to Barbary at a time when she was a child, Barbary tells Gretchen about her life as a child in the house when her uncle would lock her in the fruit cellar to prevent her from going to the carnival.  She says she sat on an old cot in the fruit cellar and read from a trunk full of old books.  Gretchen speaks of Barbary and Rem speaks to Barbary as a child, creating a counterpoint of past and present.  Gretchen tells us that she married Clyde Quiller, her next door neighbor, although his younger brother Con was so handsome that he gave her bad dreams.  Margaret, the sister of Clyde and Con, was Gretchen’s best friend and their father Silas was the best friend of Gretchen’s father, Bert.  When Silas asks Magenta why she keeps playing the piano, she asks him if he has been next door again.  She wonders why Bert, their next-door neighbor, married “that wretched girl from the dump.”  As Magenta boasts of her heritage, Rem speaks again to Barbary as a child.

     Gretchen tells us that her mother Barbary was haunted by the sound of whippoorwills and memories of being raised by her uncle Rem.  Barbary and Rem speak of their reactions to birds and then speak to each other about why he locks her in the fruit cellar.  He tells her not to let people know how smart she is.  We heat the sound of a grandfather clock ticking loudly, and Magenta, who has moved to the sofa, tells us that when she was a little girl she would lie in bed and listen to the owls and the clock.  Barbary says that when she was fourteen she hated men for the way they looked at her and talked about her behind her back.  She hoped that one day somebody would take her to see the ocean where she would wash away her sins.  Gretchen, in a sudden shift to a much later time, asks Magenta why she married Silas.  Magenta tells her that she can’t remember, that no sane person wants to be touched by any other person.  Barbary tells us that she made “an arrangement” with Rem’s two sons, Lemuel and Dobbs, to let her out of the cellar at night.  Gretchen confesses that she takes small objects from stores and from people’s houses and hides them in a box in her closet.

     We hear crickets as the lights create a night effect and Rem asks Barbary if she wants to hear a bedtime story.  She doesn’t but Rem tells her about a girl who sneaked out of her house at night and got eaten by pigs.  When Barbary tells Rem to leave her alone, Bert, at a later time, tells her that he can’t leave her alone.  He says he wants to marry her so that no one else will ever touch her.  When Barbary refers to herself as the town slut, Bert says he doesn’t “give a rat’s ass.”  The scene ends as Rem, from another time and place, tells Barbary she doesn’t know anything about love, and Magenta talks of “two damned fools” who tried to put up a lightning rod on the roof during a thunderstorm and got hit and killed by lightning.

     Gretchen, sitting at the table and illustrating the family history with glasses, tells us about two houses, side by side, with eight people living in them.  She married a Clyde who was not her brother, and her friend Margaret married the Clyde who was not her brother, and the women moved into each other’s house.  Gretchen says she is trapped in the house with her late husband’s insane piano-playing mother and that her life is desperately stupid because she killed her own mother.  Barbary, in a scene from the past, tells Gretchen that men can’t be trusted.  When Bert calls to Gretchen to come to him, she says she is taking a bath.

     Bert and Silas, drinking, talk about Silas’ desire for Barbary.  Bert says Silas hasn’t slept with her because of friendship; he tells Silas that he has permission to sleep with Barbary as long as Bert can sleep with Magenta.  Magenta tells Silas that she knows he wants Barbary.  When Silas says that Bert has a crush on Magenta, she asks him why he built a house next door for Bert and gave him a job managing the cheese factory.  She thinks Silas must have done something awful that Bert knows about.  Rem then talks about repairing a broken old doll and Barbary tells us about going back to the deserted house where she grew up and going down into the fruit cellar.  She names some of the books she read there and tells Gretchen that her sister Eva ran off with a knife thrower from the carnival and their cousins Lemuel and Dobbs went after her and were never seen again.

     Rem tells Barbary that her parents, Rem’s brother and his wife Tootsie, died in a bizarre accident when the wagon Rem’s brother was driving turned over in a rainstorm and crashed into a ravine.  Gretchen tells Silas that she has seen him coming out of her house when her father Bert is not there.  Silas tells her that his son Clyde has a crush on her.  The action shifts to Rem telling Barbary that people look down on them because they live on Shite Creek by the dump and the fireworks factory and the chicken plucking plant.  He says that the fruit cellar is the center of God’s brain.  Rem then tells Bert that he cannot marry Barbary, that she is not for sale.  He threatens Bert with a gun and tells Barbary that she doesn’t know what love is.

     When Magenta asks what happened to Silas, Bert says that he could forget about killing people but that Silas couldn’t.  Gretchen, from another time and place, says that she and Margaret look out their windows at each other, Margaret looking at the house where Gretchen is trapped with Margaret’s mother, and Gretchen looking at the house where she killed her own mother.  Bert tells Barbary a story about giving Lemuel and Dobbs money to kill their father, Rem, and, from the past, Rem gives Barbary a jewelry box he says belonged to the mother.  Barbary asks Silas what happened with Bert when the two of them were riding the rails and living in hobo jungles, and Silas tells her to take her daughter Gretchen and run away.  He says she knows what Bert is capable of.  Barbary tells Gretchen she knows what her father is doing to her and tells Bert that if he touches Gretchen again she will kill him.

     Gretchen tells us she should have run away, but now she is trapped forever.  Rem tells us he found Barbary holding her sister Eva after the wagon crashed and killed their parents.  Gretchen says she found Barbary in the bathtub with her throat cut and the razor in her hand.  Magenta wonders why two grown men (Silas and Bert) were putting up lightning rods during a thunderstorm.  She says they were both fried like bacon.  Barbary tells Magenta that she is not sleeping with Silas, and Magenta tells us that she went into the bathroom while Barbary was taking a bath and pushed her, causing her to fall and hit her head.  Magenta then took the razor and cut Barbary’s throat.  Magenta plays “Sicilienne” again as the lights fade and go out.  Playing stops.  Whippoorwills in darkness.

The set for Babylon is a room “in an old white house” with a big desk, some chairs, and several doors.  The five actors wear dark suits and are named Abe, Rummy, Karl, Georgy, and Dick.  Rummy is sitting at the desk, rubber-stamping pieces of paper, as Abe enters saying he needs to see Georgy.  Rummy offers to help but Abe says he has some concerns about the way things are going, that innocent women and children are being killed.  Rummy says they never should have gone after Georgy’s Dad and calls Sam a fucking psychopath.  He tells Abe not to shit on the carpet and resumes stamping as Karl enters to say that Georgy is coming.  Georgy shakes hands with Abe; Rummy tells Georgy that he is doing a terrific job, and Karl takes Georgy out of the room.  Abe repeats his desire to talk in private with Georgy and Rummy uses the intercom to ask for Dick.  Karl returns with a golf ball for Abe (a gift from Georgy) and Georgy comes back looking for a bathroom, saying that he hasn’t seen Abe for a long time.  Karl goes with Georgy so he won’t get lost on the way to the bathroom.  Dick enters wearing dark glasses and holding a cane.  He sits where there isn’t a chair and falls on his ass.  Rummy moves a chair toward Dick as Dick tells Abe that he really isn’t one of their group.  Georgy comes in, lost again, but Karl takes him out for a meeting.  Dick tells Abe that if he really wants to talk with Georgy he should sit next to him that evening at the theatre.  Dick orders Rummy to give Abe his tickets.  After Abe leaves, Dick tells Rummy that he is going to use Georgy’s tickets and take care of the situation with Abe.  Georgy returns, is told the meeting is over, and says he has been having nightmares.  Dick tells him he should not go to the theatre.  Georgy gives him his tickets and Karl comes in to take Georgy home.  When Rummy tells Dick to enjoy the show, Dick responds, “Rummy, I am the show.”

     Three men and one woman comprise the cast of Grand Cayman, a one-act in which the beach is represented by three deck chairs and a hotel room by two doors and, probably, a bed and at least one chair.  We hear the sound of the ocean as lights come up on Murphy and Antonelli on the deck chairs wearing business suits.  They chat about the sun and rain and Ireland and money and lizards and pirates and about the man they have been sent to deal with.  Mary, in a bikini, sits in the middle chair, telling them that they have some very serious, potentially dangerous, business on their minds.  She says she knows they have been watching the man she is with.  Murphy, over Antonelli’s objections, explains his theory that God is Popeye the Sailor.  She asks them if they have been paid to kill somebody.  She wonders if one of them would kill the other if he were offered an obscene amount of money.  Antonelli puts a hand around Mary’s neck and asks what she wants.  Mary says that when she was in the mental hospital she met a girl named Mary who told her everything about her life, including two friends of hers who were tough guys.  Mary in the bathing suit says she knew about a man who had stolen large sums of money and put them in a private account in the Caribbean, and so she sent a check to hire the two tough guys to help her get her hands on the money.  She says the man they have been following wants to see them.  She says they are to make him tell where the money is and how to get it and then kill him and the three of them will split the money.  She takes the room key from her bikini bottom, gives it to Antonelli, and leaves.  The men are sure she is not in her right mind but agree that she looks like a Mary they used to know.

     As light fades on them we hear the sound of waves then a key turning in a lock.  An upstage door opens as dim light streams into the hotel room.  Leo tells the men, thinking they are room service bringing him clams, to come in and close the door.  Another door opens and Mary comes out in a bathrobe with her hair in a towel.  She turns on a lamp and we see Leo, half patrician, half gangster.  He tells Murphy and Antonelli that they are nothing, dog shit under his mucklucks.  Mary says that Leo is a very great writer and producer who writes under thirty-seven different pseudonyms and has suffered a stroke.  Leo asks the men if they came to kill him and says all they want is the seven billion dollars he has in the bank.  The three men drink and Leo offers Mary two million dollars to get naked.  She goes into the bathroom, slamming the door.  Leo offers Murphy and Antonelli seventy-eight thousand dollars to go in the bathroom and kill Mary.  Leo talks of Jack Kennedy and the effect of high-fructose corn syrup on the intelligence of children.  He says he has seven billion dollars in a tax-free account, but when he says he boinked Martha Washington in the rotunda, Antonelli wants to leave.  Leo tells them the story of a movie with two guys who come to a tropical island looking for an obscene amount of money without realizing they are in a trap.  Antonelli says that this is about Mary and Murphy, feeling dizzy, wonders what she put in their drinks.  Antonelli staggers into the door and asks Leo who he is, to which Leo responds, like Popeye, “I YAM WHAT I YAM,”  and orders the lights to be cut.  Blackout.

     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.