Tag: shorter plays

Set in China, a long time ago, The Gatekeeper (2m) tells the story of Lao Tzu, an old man, knocking on a gate at the edge of the civilized world.  The Gatekeeper says he must pay a fee and when Lao Tzu says he has no money, the Gatekeeper says that nobody has ever wanted to go out the gate into barbarism and chaos.  Lao Tzu identifies himself and the Gatekeeper invites him into his lodge to warm himself by the fire and have something to drink.  The Gatekeeper says he remembers hearing Lao Tzu speak many years earlier.  Lao Tzu says he wants to go out the gate because he wants to die in a place where there is nothing.  The Gatekeeper pours more wine into Lao Tzu’s cup, saying that he had a dream in which he refused to let Lao Tzu through the gate until he wrote down his wisdom.  That, he says, is the fee.  Lao Tzu says his writing will be misconstrued and turned into dogma over which people will kill each other.  The Gatekeeper says his teachings make him happy and his words and images are beautiful, but Lao Tzu insists that there is nothing to be gained from writing, nothing to be gained from anything.  The Gatekeeper gets pen and ink and tells Lao Tzu he can go out the gate if he writes down his wisdom.  Lao Tzu refuses and the Gatekeeper pulls out a trumpet and blows it into Lao Tzu’s ear five times, but Lao Tzu still refuses.  They struggle over the trumpet and the Gatekeeper starts whacking Lao Tzu over the head with it until Lao Tzu collapses, dead.  The Gatekeeper says he will write down what he remembers of what Lao Tzu said and continues to write as the lights fade and we hear the sound of wind in the darkness.

     The Recollection of Green Rain, a short play for a man and a woman, is set in the kitchen of a small house by the woods in England in the late twelfth century.  Map, a writer, asks Agnes, a young woman, if she remembers the place she came from.  She speaks of caves and tunnels and of tending herds of animals like sheep, but different.  She says she and her brother, looking for strays, suddenly came up into a bright light and people found them and asked them questions in a language they didn’t understand.  Some people thought they were demons and wanted to burn them but others decided they should be baptized.  She says her brother died because he was different.  Like her, his skin was green.  Map says she isn’t green any more and she explains that at first they only ate a certain kind of raw beans but then learned to eat his food and now the only green left is in her eyes and they are changing color.  She says she remembers green rain and asks Map what he really thinks of her.  He tells her that he thinks she made up the story as a child and now believes it to be true.  He says he writes down the stories that people tell him and her story is fascinating.  She says she made a vow not to tell her secret name and if she breaks it she will be banished from the Green World forever.  She asks Map if he would like to come back with her.  When he asks if her husband would object she says that Sir Richard, who first found them in the Wolf Pit and who thought their language resembled Flemish, married her to a local man before she became pregnant by one of the village boys.  She asks Map if he wants to make love with her but he says he is a prebendary and can’t be running off with anybody’s wife.  She wants him to swear that, if he loves her, he will never write about her.  He swears and she says that for the rest of his life he will regret not running off with her.  She says Sir Richard desired her and she is still in his head.  Map says that around the time she and her brother were found there was a terrible massacre of Flemish immigrants that were taken to a dark place and slaughtered in the rain.  He says when a person is malnourished their skin can turn a sort of grayish color and perhaps hallucinations brought on by starvation and emotional trauma—She interrupts him, shouting that she is from the Green World under the earth and none of this is real.  She tells him not to touch her but says that when he is very old he will dream about her naked in green rain.  As they look at each other the light fades on them and goes out.

Piandello is a long one-act play for three men and four women set on the stage of a theatre late at night, with a table and chair where Pirandello sits writing and fragments of set and props and step units scattered haphazardly.  Il Duce looks into the darkness of the auditorium and asks Pirandello if he always stays after the play is over.  Il Duce wants more light so he can see himself posing in a mirror; Pirandello calls to Garibaldi and pools of light appear mixed with shadows and latticework patterns.  Il Duce says he keeps hearing owls and tells Pirandello that he has been selected to write the authorized biographical play about Il Duce’s life.  When Pirandello says that he may not be the best choice, Il Duce threatens to cut off his dick.  Il Duce then takes a prop violin and plays a bit of Pagliacci.  He says truth is about power and he wants to make fornication and ignorance great again.  Pirandello says his wife is seriously ill and Il Duce says that at least he has a mistress.  The Actress enters in a revealing nightgown hoping he doesn’t mind her coming to his room so late at night.  He says he loves his wife but she constantly accuses him of being unfaithful.  The Actress offers to comfort him but he says it would be better if they keep their relationship professional.  She leaves and when Il Duce asks him why he didn’t follow her back to her room Pirandello says that he couldn’t betray his wife.  The Wife calls from offstage and then enters, accusing him of fornicating with The Actress in the prop room.  She says that on their wedding night he just shook hands with her and went to sleep.  Il Duce asks what kind of Italian he is but The Wife says that he fathered their three children and that he is insatiable and can’t get enough of her.  He says he can’t let her go because she’s his wife and is not in her right mind.  She says that her father acted like a jealous maniac when Pirandello was courting her.  The Father-in-Law enters and tells her not to look Pirandello in the face.  He says the engagement was a terrible idea and thinks they should engage her to Mr. Pizzerelli’s grandson.  But she says she wants to marry Pirandello.  Il Duce pours wine into two glasses and gives one to The Father-in-Law.  The Wife calls Pirandello a fascist and accuses him of sleeping with his own daughter.  She says she is sending their daughter to Brazil and goes off screaming at Pirandello.  Il Duce says Pirandello wrote a play about a man who wanted to sleep with his daughter.  We hear the sound of dishes breaking.  Pirandello says it was the man’s step-daughter whom he didn’t recognize in the brothel.  The Father-in-Law wants to challenge Pirandello to a duel and Il Duce suggests salad forks as weapons but the Father-in-Law can only find dueling pistols.  Pirandello says that nobody knows what real means and Il Duce suggests that perhaps Pirandello did sleep with his daughter.  The Actress returns, dressed; when Pirandello says he needs her, she says he had his chance in the hotel.  She is startled to see Il Duce and Father-in-Law and Pirandello says he’s not sure they’re actually here.  Il Duce says that romantic love is an illusion, like a stage play, and tells The Actress that if she doesn’t want Pirandello he is available. The Father-in-Law asks Pirandello which pistol he wants and The Actress asks if the daughter was hiding under Pirandello’s bed in the hotel.  Pirandello says that if people keep mentioning her she is going to show up in this play.  The Daughter enters asking what her dead Grandfather, and that actress, and Mussolini are doing here.  Il Duce asks The Daughter if her father was able to keep his pants on.  Pirandello objects, saying he didn’t write this as part of the play, but Il Duce, “fierce and scary,” tells him to shut up.  He orders The Daughter to sit on his knee and asks her why she tried to poison herself.  She says her mother’s mental illness was part of it.  Pirandello tells Il Duce to let her go, but Il Duce asks her what really happened between her and her father.  The Mistress bursts in and tells The Daughter to get off Benito’s lap, calling her a filthy little slut.  The Daughter thinks The Mistress is Mrs. Mussolini, but Il Duce says that the Pope won’t let him get a divorce.  Pirandello tries to comfort The Daughter but The Wife runs in and pulls him away from her.  Il Duce tells The Father-in-Law he can shoot Pirandello after he finishes the play, and The Wife says the theatre is a brothel and everyone who works there is a prostitute.  She accuses The Father-in-Law of having his way with her when she was a child and now her husband has done the same thing to her daughter.  The Daughter tells all of them to stop and says she is going to Brazil.  The Mistress says she had a dream about bearded men with guns who caught her and Il Duce and shot them both.  The last word Il Duce said was, “Pirandello.”  Pirandello asks Il Duce if he ever read “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge,” suggesting that may be why he hears owls.  Pirandello says that perhaps while Il Duce thought he was writing his own play about Italy, he, Pirandello, was writing a play about him while an imaginary and/or dead God was writing a play about both of them, and these plays are part of an infinite number of plays playing on an infinite series of interconnected stages because time is everything happening at once.  The Wife accuses Pirandello of laying the groundwork for “this horrible man” to take power.  Il Duce tells The Daughter that death is the only truth.  The Daughter says she doesn’t know if her father molested her or if she just remembers her mother telling her that he did.  The Daughter speaks of coming out of the premiere of Six Characters that the audience hated and asks Pirandello if what she said was true.  When he says he knows what the truth is, she asks which truth, the one he wants to believe, her mother’s truth, or Il Duce’s truth?  Il Duce wonders what God’s final word will be when, so ashamed of the mess he’s created, he hangs himself off Owl Creek Bridge.  “Pirandello,” The Daughter says.

   Murder in the Red Barn is a longer one-act (2m, 2w) set inside a large old red barn with light shining through the broken slats, old pieces of furniture in the straw, and fragments of other locations.  The place is Suffolk, England, and the time is the late 1820s, “or perhaps a dream of that village in that time, dreamed in a more recent time.”  As the play begins we hear doves cooing and see Maria, 26, sitting in the straw, Will, 30, leaning on a post peeling a hard-boiled egg, Young Stepmother, 29, sitting on a wooden chair, and the Molecatcher, 50, drinking at a table.  Maria says all barns are haunted and that she is going to Ipswich to make a new life.  Young Stepmother relates a dream she has every night about something terrible happening in the barn and then asks Maria if she has been out again with Will, warning her that he cannot be trusted.  Maria says Young Stepmother loves her father’s money because she thinks he has found a bag of Roman coins, but her father is obsessed with moles.  The Molecatcher says that moles are tricky and philosophical and that his daughter is smart and imaginative.  Maria tells Will that she is pregnant and that he is the father.  Will says he took precautions by praying to the Lord before entering her “tabernacle.”  She says he will marry her or her father will kill him.

     Will tells the Molecatcher that Maria has gone to Ipswich, taken a job as a baker’s assistant, and is happy.  Young Stepmother says that she dreamed Maria was murdered  and put in a sack in the barn and buried in the straw.  She wants the Molecatcher to look in the barn.  Will asks Young Stepmother why she married the old man and she replies that he was kind to her.  Will thinks she would be happier in bed with him.  After the lights go to black the Molecatcher appears in the darkness with a lantern and Maria calls to him.  He puts the lantern down, looking at the straw, and asks if what he sees is a hand.

     We hear birds singing as lights come up on Maria telling Will that he was sent away for stealing pigs and the only reason he came back was because his brother Tom drowned.  Will says that being around her makes him happy.  The Molecatcher tells Young Stepmother that nobody except the killer knows how Maria died.  He says he knows that horrible unspeakable things are hidden under the earth.  Will tells us that he opened up a boarding house for young ladies in London where he does all the cooking.  He says that the Molecatcher and two policemen dragged him off to jail for killing Maria.  Will says that he and Maria argued and he remembers finding her in the barn, dead, and burying her.  He says thousands will come to see him hang and cut up his skin in pieces.  He says they are the subject of a penny dreadful, and Maria says her picture is on the cover.  Will picks up two dolls from the straw, identifying one as the Notorious Red Barn Murderer Doll and the other as the beautiful and tragic Maria doll.  Maria speaks of using milk as her beauty secret and dreaming she was drowning, while Will speaks his memories of making love to her.

     The Molecatcher talks to Young Stepmother about her dreaming that Maria was buried in the barn.  The Molecatcher says that Will is not in his right mind and Young Stepmother says that all men are murderers.  In an earlier time Will tells Young Stepmother that he is meeting Maria in the barn so they can run away to Ipswich or London.  Young Stepmother tells Maria that her children are dead and Maria describes how people came to the barn to collect souvenirs, leaving just a skeleton, and made up songs and plays about her.  She says she had three babies, one by Will’s brother Tom, one by the clockmaker who sent money, and one by Will, but all three babies died.  Maria says if you dig down far enough you come to the center of the darkness, that all God is, is darkness, but, she adds, he is famous.

     Set in China, a long time ago, The Gatekeeper (2m) tells the story of Lao Tzu, an old man, knocking on a gate at the edge of the civilized world.  The Gatekeeper says he must pay a fee and when Lao Tzu says he has no money, the Gatekeeper says that nobody has ever wanted to go out the gate into barbarism and chaos.  Lao Tzu identifies himself and the Gatekeeper invites him into his lodge to warm himself by the fire and have something to drink.  The Gatekeeper says he remembers hearing Lao Tzu speak many years earlier.  Lao Tzu says he wants to go out the gate because he wants to die in a place where there is nothing.  The Gatekeeper pours more wine into Lao Tzu’s cup, saying that he had a dream in which he refused to let Lao Tzu through the gate until he wrote down his wisdom.  That, he says, is the fee.  Lao Tzu says his writing will be misconstrued and turned into dogma over which people will kill each other.  The Gatekeeper says his teachings make him happy and his words and images are beautiful, but Lao Tzu insists that there is nothing to be gained from writing, nothing to be gained from anything.  The Gatekeeper gets pen and ink and tells Lao Tzu he can go out the gate if he writes down his wisdom.  Lao Tzu refuses and the Gatekeeper pulls out a trumpet and blows it into Lao Tzu’s ear five times, but Lao Tzu still refuses.  They struggle over the trumpet and the Gatekeeper starts whacking Lao Tzu over the head with it until Lao Tzu collapses, dead.  The Gatekeeper says he will write down what he remembers of what Lao Tzu said and continues to write as the lights fade and we hear the sound of wind in the darkness.

     In Relativity, an elderly Albert Einstein and a middle-aged Kurt Godel sit on a bench in Princeton, New Jersey, in the autumn of 1954 as Kurt wonders why, in the movie, there are seven dwarfs and why he can’t remember their names.  Kurt is convinced that mathematicians are trying to poison him and suggests that the Wicked Queen has given Snow White a radioactive apple that makes the castle glow.  He says there may be an infinite number of parallel variations of the fairy tale.  Albert wants to go to one where they are not having this conversation.  Kurt says there are time loops in Albert’s equations that make it theoretically possible to visit the past.  Kurt thinks it odd that Albert sat down on their walk, and Albert tells him he should find someone else to talk to because he, Albert, can’t live forever.  Kurt says that since time is an illusion, there is no death.  Kurt says he has always been looked at as if he were some sort of insect.  Albert, who has fallen asleep, wakes up and tells Kurt that he needs to make new friends so he will not be utterly alone.  Kurt replies that he happens to like the illusion of Albert’s company.  Albert says he has been trying to work out a grand unified theory but has failed.  He tells Kurt that he cannot start over because he will be dead in two months.  Kurt says that Albert is his friend and he loves him.  That, he says, is not an illusion.  Albert says the name of the last dwarf is Happy.  Kurt says he doesn’t think so and Albert suggests that they walk, but the light fades on them before they get up.

     In Borneo, Harry, a large man of 40 with a deep voice, and Rita, a woman in her 30s with beautiful long red hair, are sitting in bamboo chairs on a verandah at night.  We hear occasional faint jungle bird noises and the sound of a film running through an old projector.  Harry speaks of re-editing a film and Rita mentions that she has been learning about poisons, adding that perhaps “he” could be persuaded to walk on to the rotted wharf and fall through the boards, a nail piercing his carotid artery.  Harry comments that that has been done before and says he is on the edge of an abyss.  She says he sits in the dark watching the same scenes over and over, and she thinks he should cut the nude scenes, telling him that she didn’t want to do them.  He speaks of editing the scene in which a jealous husband murders his wife.  She tells him that all he cares about is the film, that he worships death.  He replies that he is making a movie about a man who lives in Borneo with his beautiful wife but every take seems to have something wrong with it.  He begins to wonder if he actually murdered his wife or if he only imagined it, like a scene in a script that was never shot or was left on the cutting room floor.  Rita says that everything is devoured in Borneo and he says he is keeping in the nude scenes.

  The unit set for Appledorn (1m playing two parts, 4w, but parts may be doubled), a part of the Pendragon cycle, consists of a few platforms, some steps, furniture, and a round wooden table DR.  The action takes place in Armitage, Ohio, from early to late 19^th century.  In darkness we hear French Annie singing “Au clair de la lune” as lights come up on Blossom Appledorn Wolf, 73, in 1883.  Blossom, who becomes younger and then old again in the course of the play, tells us that Appledorn was the name of a “wonderful village” her family came from before they moved to Ohio, but all she can remember is looking down a very steep staircase and her father warning her about falling.  She says that people called her simple-minded because of the fever that took her parents and because she was taken in as a five-year-old by French Annie to live in the Indian Caves out by Grim Lake.  French Annie continues singing softly as Blossom tells us that her stepfather, Jonas Grey Wolf, moved to the caves when he was old enough because he wasn’t comfortable about the half of him that was white.  When a trapper came by with Annie, she decided Jonas was the man she wanted and, after watching the trapper beat her, Jonas slit the trapper’s throat and took Annie to the caves.  Annie keeps singing softly in French as Blossom tells us she got along with their daughters but that the boy, John Paul, who was five years older than she was, wanted her.

     She tells us that when she was sixteen she went to pick blackberries on Ghost Hill and was struck by lightning.  We see a bright flash and then darkness and a huge thunderclap.  She says she had a vision of Appledorn but then realized she was back in the cave.  French Annie says she will not die but will live a long time and do wonderful things.  When Blossom began throwing up in the morning and began showing, Annie told her she was carrying a baby and so she married John Paul on whom she had taken pity once or twice, but she knew the child was not his but had been created by the thunderbolt.  Her narration is punctuated by Crow repeating the line, “Don’t fall down the steps.” She says John Paul didn’t want to marry her and never touched her again.

     She named her son James Jonas Wolf, and when he grew up he married Cally Murphy, and they had a son named John Arthur.  Blossom’s son was killed in the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864 and she grieved until she had a dream about the rain barrel.  Crow tells her to look in the rain barrel and when she does she sees her son being shot from behind by a man in a blue coat.  As she says she was visiting her son’s widow, lights come up on Cally.  T. H. Grim (played by the same actor who plays Crow) walks in and Blossom says she knew he was the man who killed her son.  Grim says that Cally’s husband died in his arms, making him swear to take care of her.  Blossom knows it was Grim’s face she saw in the rain barrel and realizes he shot his friend to get his wife.  When Grim leaves, Cally tells Blossom that he asked her to marry him.  Blossom tells Cally that she can’t marry Grim because he killed her husband.  Blossom says that the crow that whispers in her head since she was struck by lightning told her to look in the rain barrel.  Cally, angry, tells Blossom to get out of her house and stay away, telling her she should be locked up in a padded cell.

     Blossom tells us that Cally did not marry Grim and that he married Mary Louise Frost whose father had property that Grim wanted.  When the father threatened to disinherit Mary Louise if she married Grim, the father was found dead in a field with his neck broken.  When Grim started lusting after Mona, a cousin of Arthur’s, Blossom hears the crow whispering to her again to look in the rail barrel.  In the rain barrel, Blossom saw Grim doing things in the woods to Mona.  Blossom tells Mary Louise that her husband killed her father, her husband, probably his own parents, and plans to kill her.  Mary Louise doesn’t believe her and calls her a crazy old woman.  Blossom tells her to follow her husband to Witch Hollow where she will find Mona and Grim under the sumac tree.  Blossom tells us that Mary Louise did so and found them together.  We hear the sound of a ticking clock as Grim enters and Mary Louise appears with a large bowl of mashed potatoes containing her mother’s secret ingredient—love.  She puts gravy on the potatoes and agrees with Grim that she put rat poison in them.  She sits and eats some potatoes and then, as the light fades on them, Grim begins eating.  They remain in shadows as Blossom tells us they were found dead the next morning.  She says the whispering stopped but then started again, and we hear Crow warning her about falling and French Annie singing.  Blossom says she thought she saw Grim following her and she went to the top of the staircase and felt a cold hand push hard on her back and then she was falling.  Crow and French Annie repeat their refrain and Blossom says she was a young girl again in Appledore where everything smelled of apples.  French Annie sings the last quatrain of the song and the lights fade out.

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.

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.

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.

     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.