Tag: shorter plays

In Funhouse (2m, 2w), we hear in darkness the sound of a train whistle and the train coming to a stop as lights come up on “a wilderness of funhouse mirrors,” with tables and chairs as if parts of a rather nice house had been blended with a small restaurant and the ruins of a funhouse.  Julie tells Trista as they sit at a table C that she must have dozed off on a train ride from Long Island into the city and woke up when the train stopped.  People were saying that a girl had fallen between the cars and onto the track.  She walked away from the crowd toward what looked like a derelict carnival with a funhouse.  Standing, looking downstage, seeing the funhouse around her, she says she had an eerie half memory of her father taking her to a labyrinth of funhouse mirrors that smelled of damp old wood, cherry drink, and popcorn.  Roman says a 16^th century Kabbalist described the ten Sephiroth reflecting light back and forth like a house of mirrors and Paul moves to stand behind Julie as she describes seeing a girl in the mirror that she could almost remember being in another life.  She realizes that a man is standing just behind her, but cannot see his reflection.  Paul explains that a section of the mirror is missing and that is why he has no reflection.  We hear the train whistle and Julie says she needs to go, but Paul says they will get something to eat and wait for the next train.  Julie says they found a quiet restaurant and she woke up naked in bed in a little motel.

     When Trista reminds her that she is to be married in two weeks, Julie says she knew she had made a mistake and wrote a short note begging the man never to try to contact her.  She walked to the next station and caught the next train home.  She did not tell her fiancée Roman because her mother told her that, with men, the best course of action is to behave as if nothing has happened.  Besides, Roman’s head is full of “quantum philosophical bric-a-brac.”  She and Trista agree that Roman is not “normal,” and Roman speaks of places in a nut garden that might be portals to other dimensions, to inter- penetrating realities.  He says that some people might be able to enter those portals and see a multiplicity of universes which have always been around us.

     Julie says that when she got back to the house she saw Roman and Paul, the man she had slept with, in the library.  Roman introduces Paul as a squash-playing Princeton classmate, and Trista wonders how Julie could leave while the man she slept with was taking a shower, go right home, and find him talking with her fiancée.  Julie says she knows it doesn’t make any sense and asks Trista to unbutton her blouse to attract Roman so that she can talk alone with Paul.  Roman is talking to Paul about the possibility that, in parallel universes, fictional characters are real.  When Trista distracts him, Julie asks Paul to stay away from Roman, saying that what happened between them was an aberration and meant nothing.  Paul asks her what she is talking about and moves away to have a drink with Trista.  Questioning Roman, Julie learns that at Princeton he slept with Paul’s fiancée.  Julie tells Trista to talk with Roman and accuses Paul of sleeping with her to get revenge on Roman for sleeping with his fiancée.  Paul says he doesn’t know what she is talking about and Roman and Trista join them.  Roman says that a funhouse is “an apt metaphorical representation of the multiverse,” finite from the outside but infinite inside, an exact mirror reversal of the infinity of infinities where all possible worlds exist.  He argues that the fictional world and characters of Great Expectations must exist and that, paradoxically, to tell a lie is to make it true, “in some part of the funhouse.”

     Julie tells Roman that she slept with Paul; Roman asks Paul; he denies it.  Roman says that physically she could not have slept with Paul because he was at his house all day and never out of Roman’s sight except to urinate.  Roman says that memory is unreliable and that imagining and remembering are the same thing.  He says that since fictional characters exist, God, in whom he does not believe, exists as much as Hamlet or Krazy Kat.  Tracy says there is a newspaper article about a girl who fell between the cars of a train.  She says the picture of the girl looks exactly like Julie.  Julie says she has to get back to the funhouse and figure this thing out.  Roman says she can’t go back to the funhouse because “this” is the funhouse.  We hear eerie calliope music as the lights fade out.

 The setting for The Red Ettin (2m, 2w) is “somewhere or other,” represented by a unit set with a bed, table, chairs, and a hat rack.  “The actors move.  The set doesn’t.  Engrave these words onto your eyeballs.”  We hear ravens as lights come up on Jack and Widow.  Widow tells Jack that his two dead brothers were also named Jack and that he had a sister who was eaten by a big red thing.  Jack starts again to tell the story of a Widow who lived on a small bit of ground which she rented from a farmer.  She interrupts, asking which Jack he is talking about, and then continues the story about her asking Jack to bring her a bucket of water, but the bucket had a hole in it and so she could only make him a small cake to take with him on his adventure.  She says that if he gives her half the cake she will bless him;  if he takes the whole cake she will curse him.  He took the whole cake, she says, and she hasn’t seen him since.  Jack says his brother gave him a knife to keep until he came back.  If the knife became rusty, then something terrible had happened to his brother.  Each morning Jack would unwrap the knife from the red engineer’s kerchief (his father, according to Widow, was cut into three pieces by a locomotive when he was lying on the tracks thinking of her beautiful, naked body).  One morning the knife was brown with rust and Jack knew it was time to find his brother.

      Jack continues his narration of the story as we hear sounds of sheep, and Shepherd appears saying that the sheep belong to The Red Ettin who, according to a song, stole the King of Scotland’s pretty daughter and tied her up naked in his big brass bed.  Shepherd says a young man who looked like Jack, hearing the story, decided to rescue the girl, but he’s dead because The Red Ettin has three heads and eats young fellows like Jack with fried potatoes and ketchup.  Shepherd gives Jack directions to The Red Ettin’s castle, hands him a pig’s eyeball to give to the old woman in the castle, and leaves.  Jack narrates his following of Shepherd’s directions, coming to a field full of two-headed bulls, noting that, “You’ll need to use your imagination for that.  We have a limited budget here.  We only had enough for the sound effects.”  We hear the sound of enraged two-headed bulls charging, the sound of a door slamming, and see firelight come up on Old Woman (played by the actor who played Widow).  After he gives her the eyeball, she tells him the daughter of the King of Scotland is tied up in the tower but that it’s a trap and he must remember three things—a ball bat, roller skates, and meat tenderizer.  When Jack says she looks remarkably like his mother, she says she’s not getting cast as the Princess any more and must leave to put the eyeball in a pickle jar, explaining that the “greater part of dramaturgy is just figuring out how to get people in and out of doors.”  She says if he needs to save money on the corkscrew staircase he can just turn out the lights.  In the blackout we hear the daughter moaning.

     Jack turns up a lamp and we see King of Scotland’s Daughter tied on the bed, a blanket barely covering her.  Jack says he has come to save her and cuts the ropes with his knife.  She wants him to give her his clothes, telling him he can wear the blanket.  She wants him to get pizza for her before The Red Ettin kills him as he has killed all the Jacks before him.  She says if he does kill the three-headed bull he can do whatever he wants with her.  He says he wants a girl who loves him for himself.  She says the story always wins and he is just another character.  She offers him a baseball bat as he leaves for the barn and then finds roller skates under her bed as the light fades on her and comes up on The Red Ettin, a large older man (played by the actor who played Shepherd) drinking at a table.  He tells Jack that his three-headed bull costume is on the hat rack and says that Jack would eat those who came to kill him because we play the role we’re cast in.  “Lines make the man.”  He offers Jack a drink and Jack sits at the table with him.  Red tells Jack that his name is Albert and that he killed The Red Ettin and took over the business.  He says he is Jack’s father and tells him he feels dizzy because of the muscle relaxer he put in the wine that also acts as a meat tenderizer.  When Jack falls to the floor, Red takes an ax and gets ready to cut off Jack’s head.  With a war cry, King of Scotland’s Daughter zooms in on roller skates and hits Red three times in the head with the baseball bat.  She kisses Jack as Widow walks in holding a pair of galoshes and introduces King of Scotland’s Daughter to Jack as Ethel, his sister.  After Widow leaves, King of Scotland’s Daughter asks Jack if he wants to start in on the sexual intercourse.  When he says they can’t because she’s his sister, she replies that she is royalty and “we do that sort of thing all the time.”  She suggests that they cut Albert up in three pieces so he will fit on the grill and tells Jack that he could take over, inheriting the family business, becoming The Red Ettin.  The Jacks will come to save her, he’ll kill them, they’ll barbecue them.  She says that with the barbecue sauce and the wine and the meat tenderizer they could pull in pretty good money, perhaps start franchising fast food barbecue places.  She says that sometimes you’re offered a role you can’t say no to, and, when Jack hesitates, she says she will let him tie her up.

In a circle of light surrounded by darkness, Lil, a woman in her thirties, is on a couch, and Doc, a man in his fifties, sits in a chair by the head of the couch in the two-character play Orchard Hill.  Lil says that she is God’s wife, that there has been a lot of sexual intercourse, that they were married on Orchard Hill, although God said the marriage was never legal and so she married his son, Adam, instead.  Eve, she says, was his second wife.  She says God was already married to Ashtaroth who went mad “living with that gigantic control freak” and was put in the attic.  When Doc asks about her childhood, Lil says she remembers walking at night on a deserted road in the rain where God picked her up.  When Doc says he is there to help her, she wonders what sort of deep neurosis would lead anybody to want to pretend they actually derived pleasure from helping anybody.  Lil says when God wanted to get rid of her she went to another son, Lucifer, and persuaded him to seduce Eve on Orchard Hill.  Lil says God threw Eve and Adam out because sooner or later everybody disappoints him and he rejects them.  When Doc asks Lil what would make her happy, she says she wants Orchard Hill.  When Doc says it’s just down the road she says she can’t go back because Orchard Hill is a portal to another dimension, another existence.  When she tells Doc that he desires her he says that her compulsive sexualizing of her experience is evidence of some terrible trauma in her past.  She says the trauma is God who created this nightmare of cannibalism and horror.  Existence is a crime, she says, and God is the criminal.  Doc says he has a folder with information about a Lillian Knight, who is an assistant professor of literature at the University of Massachusetts.  The photograph, he says, looks suspiciously like her.  Lil says she has had to assume false identities and that the Lillian Knight who teaches a course on the Brontes and another on the Book of Genesis is a character, but that she, Lil, is real.  She says that maybe Doc is God in disguise, trying to persuade her that she is not who she is.  She says he cannot kill her because he still desires her.  When Doc says that time is up and they will have to continue this discussion in their next session, she tells him to come and touch her, worship her as he wants to.  God, she says, is love.

There are five actors (3m, 2w) in Le Fanu’s Dream (pronounced LEFF-anew) who enter and disappear on a dark set representing a park and rooms in a house on Merrion Square in Dublin from the 1840s to the 1870s.  We hear clocks ticking as lights come up on Susanna, a young woman dressed in white.  She tells us that towards the end of his life Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, “celebrated author of ghost and mystery stories,” suffered from nightmares in which he found himself walking in ruins in Phoenix Park.  Le Fanu walks on as ravens caw and, facing downstage, looks up at something we can’t see.  Susanna says that he hears an ominous creaking noise and sees that the house is going to collapse on him, but he cannot move.  We hear the sound of a wall crashing down as the lights go out and ravens caw in the darkness.

     In moonlight we see Carmilla, in white, sobbing on a park bench in front of a hedge.  Le Fanu asks if he can help, and she says she has been abandoned by a company of actors.  He says she can stay in his house and act as his secretary.  When she asks if his wife will object, he says his wife is dead, and Susanna appears in the empty oval mirror frame, looking at them.  Carmilla introduces herself as Miss Smith and she and Le Fanu walk into the darkness.  Susanna tells us from the oval frame that the young woman proved to be “surprisingly efficient,” but Le Fanu still had bad dreams.  Susanna sits on the park bench, describing a dream in which two hands come through the hedge and slowly pull a young girl through the hedge, an action that happens to Susanna as the lights fade out.

     We hear birds singing and see Carmilla reading theatrical reviews in a newspaper.  She tells Le Fanu she loves the house because, like an old theatre, it is full of ghosts.  She says she thinks our life on earth is a performance watched by ghosts.  Le Fanu tells her of a dream he had about finding a dead girl lying at the foot of a low brick wall and seeing two red eyes staring at him.  Carmilla says that a dead girl was found murdered in Phoenix Park at the foot of a low brick wall and all the blood had been drained from her body.  When Carmilla asks how his wife died, Le Fanusays that her problems began on their wedding night.

     We hear owls and see Susanna sitting on the bed, speaking of “the unspeakable mad violation in hell,” and telling Le Fanu that someone with red eyes is looking at her in the dark.  Carmilla moves into the empty oval frame and speaks to Susanna from it.  Susanna wants Le Fanu to cover the mirrors and sleep in another room.  Carmilla steps out of the frame and Le Fanu remarks on how similar she is to his wife’s sister.  As they sit at the table with Brother and Susanna, Carmilla transforms into the sister, “bright, bubbly, flirtatious, a little reckless, and a bit wicked.”  Sister asks how Susanna and Le Fanu slept on their wedding night and assumes that “a successful hymeneal execution has been accomplished.”  Susanna  is upset to learn that Le Fanu and Sister were writing letters to each other before the marriage, referring to Susanna as Miss Smith Bluebeard.  Susanna tells Le Fanu that his mind is full of puppets, peopled by a grotesque collection of Swedenborgian doppelgangers.  After she storms out, Le Fanu says he can’t find her, and Sister says that she and Susanna grew up in the house and know all its secret places.

     In the next scene, the sisters are sitting on the park bench, and Susanna says she feels as if something is watching her, something that lives in the mirror. She says Le Fanu talks to imaginary people as he writes, as if his entire life was one great hallucination.  She asks if Sister thinks of their father, and Sister says she stole Papa’s razor from his corpse and Susanna may borrow it if she decides to cut her husband’s throat as he sleeps.  The light fades on them and comes up on Le Fanu writing late at night, saying he is sometimes visited by his dead great-uncle, the playwright Richard Brindsley Sheridan.  Sheridan appears “in all his decayed and cobweb covered late 18^th century glory,” telling Le Fanu that he disapproves of his unhappiness over his wife’s death and asserting his conviction that we are put on this earth to engage in as much copulation as is humanly possible.  He says the secret of life is to jump on a willing woman before she changes her mind.  Sheridan thinks he hears someone calling him to rehearse a play in Hell because there’s always something wrong with the second act.  He goes into the darkness as Susanna enters asking Le Fanu why he stays up so late writing and talking to imaginary people. She says that there have been moments when she has not been entirely horrified by his nocturnal violations, but she thinks that he intends to murder her.  Le Fanu says her dark fantasies are brought on by loneliness and fear and are not real.

     Talking with Brother, Le Fanu asks him what he and Susanna talked about when they walked in the garden.  Le Fanu then watches as Susanna tells Brother that when her husband touches her she feels the “rough, filthy digits of the Evil One.”  Sister and Le Fanu appear, congratulating Brother on the upcoming birth of his child.  Susanna says that her three children are goblins and she doesn’t want her husband playing with her teats in bed.  Then, at night, we hear a ticking clock, wind, and owls, and see Le Fanu asleep at his desk.  Susanna appears in the mirror frame, saying that he has been reading Swedenborg on the multitude of intersecting worlds.  Swedenborg, played by the actor who did Sheridan and will later play Papa, crawls out from under the bed and speaks with a Swedish accent about the inner eye that can see oceans of spirits, worlds within worlds. Le Fanu wakes and when Swedenborg asks him what one thing he wants to know above all others, Le Fanu says he wants to know why his wife sobs uncontrollably when he touches her.  Swedenborg munches on a meatball, says his wife is dead, and crawls back under the bed.

     We hear a creaking sound and the ticking of clocks as Carmilla, in a white nightgown, steps into the light.  She says she keeps hearing voices and wonders if she could be of any assistance to Le Fanu.  They look at each other as Susanna watches from the frame and, after Le Fanu moves into the shadows, goes to the bed.  We hear voices whispering as Carmilla appears in the frame, talks with Susanna, and gets into bed with her.  Le Fanu moves into the light, apparently not seeing Carmilla, and Susanna tells him that a young woman got into bed with her and held her.  Carmillasmiles at Le Fanu as she cuddles with Susanna and when Le Fanu says that the only thing he is certain of if his love for Susanna, she tells him everything he is certain of is a lie.

      Brother tells Le Fanu, walking in the park with thunder and lightning, that he must come in out of the storm.  Le Fanu says that Susanna caught doubt from him and it drove her mad and killed her.  Lights come up on Susanna in bed speaking the letter she is writing to God.  She says she knows God is insane and is really Satan who lives in the mirror and copulates with the vampire girl.  She says there is no love, no salvation, only darkness and fear and something pressing against her in the night.  She says she felt a hand clutching her throat until she could not breathe and her senses left her.  We hear ticking clocks and see Susanna on the bed, then a door creaking open, and Papa going to the bed.  Susanna says she has missed Papa since he died and he says there is room for her to cuddle in his coffin.  He asks why her sister was in bed with her.  She says her sister was comforting her the way Papa comforted her.  He starts climbing onto the bed and she screams “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO,” as the light goes out on them.

     Le Fanu awakens at his desk from a nightmare and is told by Carmilla that his wife was disgusted and horrified by his touch not because of anything terrible her father did to her.  She asks how his wife died and light fades on her and comes up on Susanna in bed screaming.  Le Fanu is where Papa was and Susanna says some monstrous, pawing creature was on top of her so that she couldn’t breathe.  She says Le Fanu writes about men murdering women and he shakes her, saying he does not want to kill her, but she says sex, death, and writing are all the same thing.  Carmilla says he put his hands over her face and raped and smothered her.  Le Fanu denies it, but Carmilla says she saw it from inside the mirror.  She thinks Le Fanu should cut his throat with a razor.

     Le Fanu wanders in the dark as ravens caw and we hear the voices of Susanna and Carmilla reprising the opening lines of the play about Le Fanu’s nightmares and the collapse of a debilitated mansion.  Le Fanu says there is no house, no wall; he says he is innocent and is not responsible for his wife’s death.  He sits on the bench, saying he has conquered the nightmare and no longer has anything to fear.  Two hands come out of the hedge and wrap around his neck.  He screams and is pulled through the hedge as lights come up on Carmilla and Susanna sitting on the bed.  They say they have the house to themselves and can be alone together, forever.  Carmilla kisses Susanna’s lips, then her neck, then her breasts as the light fades and goes out.

The set for Captain Rockets versus the Intergalactic Brain-eaters (3m, 1w) is a primitive television studio decorated as the control room of a space ship.  The walls of the rocket are made of very old and floppy theatrical flats; the control panel has knobs that seem to be a combination of old radio dials and jar lids; and the chairs are worn leather desk chairs.  We hear the Overture to Wagner’s Flying Dutchman as lights come up on Captain Rockets working on his lines.  Luna, “his beautiful companion,” tells him that their show has been cancelled by network executives and this will be their last show.  He asks how she can bother him with trivial matters when Brain-eaters from Uranus are taking over the bodies of innocent people.  Luna tells him that Bobby the Space Boy has already left to work on a new western and his part will be played by Irving Kurtzman who used to play the janitor on Mr. Peepers.  When Captain takes a swig of his Venetian Polyp Juice, Luna identifies it as vodka and suggests that she and Captain can do a production of Romeo and Juliet in Hoboken.  Kurtzman enters in a space suit that doesn’t fit, telling Captain and Luna that he is the new Space Boy.  Ed, the stage manager, starts a countdown to begin the show and we hear the Overture again as Ed, in an old-time radio announcer voice, tells the audience that Captain Rockets has gone to Uranus in his rocket ship to defeat the Betelgeusean Squid People before they can eat any more brains.  Luna says they have eaten Dr. Philco and, when Kurtzman enters as Bobby the Space Boy, Captains says he is a brain-slurping squid.  Kurtzman, confused, says he is from New Jersey and assumes that they are not live on national television but rehearsing.  Captain throttles him until he falls unconscious, and Luna tries to cover by asking Ed to tell the viewers at home about Spacies, the breakfast cereal of space cadets.  Ed appears at the edge of the light and announces a brief intermission.  Luna tries to tell Captain that he is an actor playing a part but Captain, thinking Ed is Zordak, the Grand Klapfrick of the Squid People of Betelgeuse, strangles him until he drops to the floor on top of Kurtzman.  Captain tells Luna to trust no one and speaks to the Children of Earth, telling them that the world is not a safe and happy place, that their parents have been taken over by insidious Brain Slurpers, and the children should slit their parents’ throats as they sleep.  Luna says they are off the air.  Captain says the rocket ship is made of cardboard, the set from theatrical flats from the twenties, the control knobs of bottle caps.  He knocks down the flats revealing the back wall of the studio, saying it’s all rubbish, that everything, his life included, is illusion and garbage.  He collapses in tears and Luna kneels, taking his head in her arms.  He says she is his only friend and she strokes his hair and tells him to relax.  She puts her mouth over his ear and we hear “a loud, horrendously surreal slurping sound.”  Captain screams, the sound of the Overture is heard, the lights flicker and then abruptly go out.

Sleigh Ride is a short play for two actors, identified as Lady and Gentleman, dressed in “winter Dickensian,” sitting in a Victorian sleigh.  We hear music fading into the sound of sleigh bells as lights come up on them, and we can perhaps glimpse a snowing landscape in the background.  It is late on a dark winter’s day and Lady wonders why it isn’t colder and asks where they are going.  Gentleman tells her they are going over the river and through the woods to their grandmother’s house.  He says that he and Lady are kissing cousins.  She asks what happened yesterday and points out that the horse is not moving.  She says it only snows after an earthquake, that the snow lies on the ground and then suddenly everything shakes and seems to turn upside down and it’s snowing.  She says that they seem to be surrounded by glass.  She has a memory of being a child shaking a glass ball inside of which is a woman who looks very much like her riding in a sleigh.  The woman also has a memory of being a child shaking a glass ball.  Lady says the child outside the glass ball is a memory inside the head of another lady who is in the glass ball of another child.  Gentleman admits that he had seen a glass ball when he was a child but insists that he is sane and is not living inside a glass ball.  He says he is driving a sleigh, that his horse’s name is Dobbin, that they are going over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house.  When they get there, he says, she will see that this has all been some sort of hallucination on her part.  He says they will find a glass ball on the table and shake it.  Suddenly, the lights move back and forth and up and down and the actors shake as if in an earthquake.  The shaking stops and Gentleman asks Lady if she is all right.  “Look,” she says, “it’s snowing.”  They look up into the falling snow as the light fades and goes out.  We hear the sound of sleigh bells in the darkness.

     The unit set for Machiavelli (4m, 4w with one actor playing two roles and one actress playing two roles) has two sets of curved steps leading to an upper level.  The time of the action is early in the 1500s.  We hear birds singing and see Machiavelli and Siro, his servant, looking over the audience at an invisible stand of trees.  Machiavelli wants Siro to cut the trees down and then feed the chickens.  Siro thinks the trees are part of a sacred grove, says he is terrified of chickens, and tells Machiavelli that the shirts he gave to the washerwoman are not yet ready.  He says the butcher thinks the washerwoman is a witch and warns Machiavelli not to go into her basement.  The lights fade and come up on Machiavelli and Strega, an old woman, as they come down the steps hidden by shirts hanging on a clothes line that stretches from the SR stairs to the UC arch.  The Strega gathers the shirts and the clothes line into a large ball as she goes down the stairs and under the arch.  When she pulls the last shirt off the line we see Clizia wearing only a man’s shirt.  The Strega goes back up the stairs and Clizia explains that the old woman is her grandmother with whom she came to live after Calfucci started chasing her all over his house.  Learning that she loves chickens, Machiavelli offers to let her live in his cottage.  She disappears through the arch and Machiavelli sits at his desk DR, writing.  His wife Marietta says that he treats her as if she were invisible and threatens to cut Clizia’s throat.  As they leave, Clizia and Siro enter.  He compliments her on her control over the chickens and is surprised when she says that Machiavelli has never touched her.  He tells her that Machiavelli was once a very important man in Florence but was thrown into prison and tortured.  We hear a pounding on the door.  Machiavelli tells Siro to answer it and he returns with Calfucci.  Clizia says she would rather die than go back, and Machiavelli says that Calfucci has no legal claim on the girl.  Calfucci explains that Lucrezia, his second wife, won’t sleep with him.  Machiavelli offers to act as an intermediary and Calfucci invites him to dinner.  After Calfucci leaves, Clizia says that Machiavelli is trying to get Lucrezia naked.  She says Lucrezia is a demoness and warns him.

     On the balcony, Machiavelli learns that Lucrezia would welcome someone climbing up her trellis at midnight.  She says the lover would have to be discreet because Calfucci is dangerous.  Machiavelli moves to the DL table to play chess with himself and Clizia sits with him.  He tells her that his books help him see and understand the patterns of human behavior.  He says he is honest about not being honest and is surprised when Clizia beats him at chess.  On the balcony Lucrezia waits for Machiavelli to climb over the railing.  Calfucci knocks and calls for his wife and she tells Machiavelli to climb part way down the trellis while she runs down the steps, lets in Calfucci, and says she wants to be alone.  She goes back up, Calfucci knocks again, and Machiavelli, descending the trellis again, falls screaming.  Calfucci says he is going to release the dogs and we hear barking and snarling as Machiavelli screams and staggers into his study, helped by Siro and Clizia.  Machiavelli tells Clizia, as she pulls thorns from his butt, that he was paying a visit to Lucrezia but the rose trellis broke and he was then chased by dogs.  She says he deserved it but that it is funny and he should write a play about it.  When Machiavelli goes to take a bath, Clizia tells Marietta that she is her husband’s friend, but Marietta calls Machiavelli a monster of selfishness who will rip out her soul. Marietta leaves as Machiavelli returns and Clizia says she wants to learn how to read and write.  She berates him for wanting to cut down the beautiful, ancient grove of trees and says he is very, very angry most of the time.  He agrees, and, after he leaves, Siro tells Clizia to give Machiavelli a break because he was tortured and still has nightmares.

     We hear screaming as lights come up on Machiavelli and Ligurio being tortured under the UC arch.  The Torturer asks questions and turns the lever on the rack when he doesn’t like the answers.  When Torturer leaves for lunch, Machiavelli and Ligurio talk about their predicament, but Torturer comes back to take Ligurio off the rack, half dragging, half carrying him off stage.  Machiavelli calls on the Muse of Poetry and she appears, saying that he is a common criminal.  He says she is a hallucination caused by hunger and dehydration.  She slaps his face, twice, and, when Ligurio’s head is thrown in, she picks it up and works the mouth like a puppet, speaking in a high squeaky voice.  She suggests that Machiavelli give up politics and start writing plays.  As she leaves, Torturer returns to tell Machavelli that he is being released as part of the Medici’s general amnesty.  Machiavelli walks to his study and Clizia tells him he doesn’t believe in anything and doesn’t trust anybody.  He replies that trust, like faith or love, is for children.  Siro comes in with his head bleeding, claiming that the Bortugno brothers, who were to help him cut down the trees, hit him in the head with a saw.  Clizia cleans his wound, saying that only a heartless monster would cut down the beautiful trees.  Siro says that Calfucci told him that the Medici have been driven out of Florence and the Republic has returned to power.  Machiavelli starts putting books in a satchel, certain that the Republic will need him.  When Clizia asks to go with him, he says she can stay and be the caretaker.  He leaves, followed by a woozy Siro, then Clizia.

     Marietta brings in a crate and puts books into it as Calfucci follows her around until she leaves and Machiavelli enters.  Calfucci says he hopes Machiavelli will invite him and his wife to Florence, but, as Machiavelli learns from a letter brought in by Siro, they will not be returning to Florence.  Machiavelli orders Siro to cut down the trees and throws Calfucci out, saying he is sorry he wasn’t able to impregnate his wife.  When Machiavelli tells Marietta that the Republic doesn’t want him, she says she doesn’t want him touching her, ever.  She tells Clizia that they will never leave and shows her a letter she says Machiavelli wrote.  Clizia asks Machiavelli if the letter calls her an ugly whore he fucked in a basement.  He apologizes and explains that he was just trying to amuse his friends.  He explains why the Republic doesn’t trust him and Clizia says she is crying because he has lost the last thing he was capable of caring about.  Machiavelli tells Siro not to cut down the trees and tells Clizia that he may write a play and is going to teach her to read and write.  He writes and pronounces the letters of the alphabet as she sits beside him and the lights fade to darkness.

Mata Hari, for one man and one woman, was first presented as a companion piece for Marina.  In darkness we hear the sounds of insects in a jungle and an Indonesian gamelan playing softly.  Lights come up on Mata Hari, in jail, wearing a dark dress.  She says she was terrified of the rats at first but has become rather fond of them.  She wants to communicate with Vadime, her Russian lover, but the authorities intercept her letters.  We hear the sound of a door creaking open and Macleod, a man in his sixties with a large black satchel, steps into the light.  He says as her husband he has a right to see her even if she is a traitor and a prostitute.  He says she answered the advertisement he had put in the paper looking for a wife.  She says he tried to pimp her out to his friends and gave her syphilis.  She starts naming the people she has slept with until he stops her.  She accuses him of beating her with a buggy whip but he says it was a cat-o-nine-tails and that she lost all rights to her children when she ran off to Paris to become a whore.  She says a servant girl, his mistress, poisoned their son.  She says that in Paris, alone and starving, she reinvented herself as Mata Hari which means sunrise, the edge of the day.  He says a friend put the advertisement for a wife in the paper as a joke.  He says she had the look of a half-caste girl which he was unable to resist and they agree they had some good times together.  She pleads with him to help her get out of jail, saying that she spied for the French, not the Germans, and that the French betrayed her.  She says that he let the military system define him, and he says that she danced in various stages of undress and told a pack of lies about herself.  She explains that she turned her own flesh and blood into a work of art and that people loved her.  She says she took money from some Germans because she had lost her luggage and needed clothes, but she has no idea why the French have put her in prison.  She asks Macleod to ask Vadime to help her, but Macleod says Vadime, blinded in the war, has already betrayed her.  Macleod says he brought her a present and she takes the jeweled bra, her costume, out of the satchel.  He wants her to dance for him and she goes into the upstage darkness to change.  He reads aloud from a paper that she is to be executed.  She appears in costume and we hear gamelon music as she dances, saying that she removes the veils signifying cast-off illusions.  She describes what she is doing as she dances and drops six of the veils.  Maclead says, “Ready . . . Aim . . . Fire” as she is about to drop the last veil and we hear the sound of a firing squad, very loud.  She falls; the music stops; we hear a few faint jungle sounds.  Macleod takes out his revolver and points it down at her head, saying, “one final act of love.”  Lights go to black as we hear the sound of the shot.

There are three characters in Pentecost, Egg Rooks, 29, Jack Pentecost, 33, and Dorry Shay, 19.  We hear the sounds of wind and rain and a creaking old windmill as lights come up on Jack sitting before the flickering light of an invisible downstage fire in a deserted windmill.  Egg comes in with an old brown rucksack saying he doesn’t know where he is.  He knows who Jack is and says he is glad he started a fire.  Egg says he remembers going with an unusual sort of girl to hear Jack preach.  From the upstage shadows, from another time and place, barefoot, in an old wedding dress, Dorry enters, saying that in her dream she was riding a train and reading the Bible when she felt two strong hands reaching around her neck from behind.  She puts her hands on Jack’s shoulders near his neck and he covers her hands with his as Egg talks about being raised in the dump by his aunt and uncle after his father broke his neck.  Egg talks about a “fey” girl with eyes like a blue-eyed snake who worked as a waitress at the bowling alley.  In counterpoint, Dorry speaks of how she came to the town by train and then she pulls her hands away from Jack’s and sits between the two men in front of the fire.  Dorry says her mother went berserk, fell on the railroad track, and was cut into three pieces by a locomotive.  All she left Dorry was her wedding dress.  Egg says he came every night to eat at the bowling alley and then took Dorry to see Jack speak in tongues.  Jack and Dorry speak gibberish to each other and Egg suggests that Jack has known a lot of women and can give Egg some spiritual guidance about the girl.  The three speak of different but related experiences and Egg says he saw Jack violating Dorry against the piano above the bowling alley.  Egg says he told Dorry he would marry her even after he saw her sin but he didn’t say it very well and she told him not to touch her.  But he says he brought his uncle’s hand ax that he used to cut off the heads of the chickens and a voice told him what to do.  He says he is glad he found Jack because he has brought him in his rucksack a real pretty present that he can talk to when he gets lonesome, but it ain’t no bowling ball.  Light fades and goes out as we hear the sounds of wind, rain, and the creaking windmill.

A short play for a man and a woman, Lamp Post is set in an upstairs apartment in a Midwestern college town in the late 1970s.  Ben is awakened by Brittany pounding on his door asking for the Crisis Center.  Ben tells her the Center is in the building next door but Brittany says she is scared because somebody is after her and Ben opens the door.  Ben asks her if he should call the police and Brittany tells him that when she was walking home from the library a street lamp went out as she got close to it and then came back on after she passed.  She says it only happens with her and thinks it means that psychic energy is streaming out of her head and turning the light off.  Ben says she is finding a pattern in random meaningless data.  She asks if he’s a writer because she hates writers and thinks the writer’s workshop is like a black hole that swallows up talent and shits mediocrity.  Ben insists that she is imagining a relationship between two completely unrelated things.  Brittany says she has so much stuff inside her brain that her head is going to explode.  Ben opens the door but she slams it shut.  When he puts his hands on her shoulders she pulls away and says she has a gun—in Pennsylvania.  She sits on the bed, saying that nothing means anything, that it’s all just random.  “This isn’t the Crisis Center, is it?” she says.  “I don’t know,”  Ben says.  “Maybe.”  Light fades on them and goes out.