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    Love-Lies-Bleeding: A Play
    Love-Lies-Bleeding: A Play
    Love-Lies-Bleeding: A Play
    Ebook118 pages47 minutes

    Love-Lies-Bleeding: A Play

    By Don DeLillo

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    About this ebook

    Love-Lies-Bleeding, Don DeLillo's third play, is a daring, profoundly compassionate story about life, death, art and human connection.

    Three people gather to determine the fate of the man who sits in a straight-backed chair saying nothing. He is Alex Macklin, who gave up easel painting to do land art in the southwestern desert, and he is seventy now, helpless in the wake of a second stroke. The people around him are the bearers of a complicated love, his son, his young wife, the older woman -- his wife of years past -- who feels the emotional tenacity of a love long-ended.

    It is their question to answer. When does life end, and when should it end? In this remote setting, without seeking medical or legal guidance, they move unsteadily toward last things.

    Luminous, spare, unnervingly comic and always deeply moving, Love-Lies-Bleeding explores a number of perilous questions about the value of life and how we measure it.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateJan 10, 2006
    ISBN9780743281805
    Love-Lies-Bleeding: A Play
    Author

    Don DeLillo

    Don DeLillo is the author of many bestselling novels, including Point Omega, Falling Man, White Noise, Libra and Zero K, and has won many honours in America and abroad, including the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his novel Underworld. In 2010, he received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award. He has also written several plays.

    Read more from Don De Lillo

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    Reviews for Love-Lies-Bleeding

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    • 5/5
      This was a simple, straightforward, excellent play. I felt that it captured all the elements that are essential to make a thoroughly enjoyable drama and that it reflected its characters well in the dialogue that was assembled throughout the play's duration. It is study of relationships, of character, of the meaning of life before death and many other things. I don't want to spoil anything, but it was well worth the read. If you like DeLillo, or drama, don't miss out on this one.4.5 stars.
    • 4/5
      My first play.I've never read a play before (since Shakespeare at school) so this was a new experience and required a bit of adjustment. I can't say I'm a new convert from having read this though.It was very short, less than 100 pages, and fairly atmospheric, with the darkened ares of the room and the lifeless man in a wheelchair. Only three other characters play parts - the man's young wife, an older ex-wife and his estranged son. Each has their own reasons for being there but they are to do with love, not inheritance, which made a pleasant change.The central discussion revolves around euthanasia. The man is obviously terminally ill and I was rooting for them to put him out of his misery. The young wife, however, is against the idea, even though she is the one nursing him full time.There are also flash-backs to earlier times, when the man, an artist of some repute, spoke of his life and thoughts, and love of desert plants.All in all, rather abstract. Interesting.

    Book preview

    Love-Lies-Bleeding - Don DeLillo

    Act One

    Scene 1

    Alex and Lia, one year before the main action of the play.

    He is haggard, after a stroke, seated in a wheelchair, stage right, isolated from the room set, which is in near darkness. His speech is labored. Lia sits in close proximity, a food bowl within reach.

    Across the stage, in scant light, barely visible, there is the sitting figure of a man.

    Alex

    I saw a dead man on the subway once. I was ten or eleven, riding with my father. The man was in a corner seat, across the aisle. Only a few people in the car. A dead man sits there. This is the subway. You don’t know about this. Nobody looks at anybody else. He sits there, and I’m the only one that sees him. I see him so clearly now I could almost tell you things about his life. My father was reading the newspaper. He liked to follow the horses. He analyzed the charts. He studied the race results. There weren’t too many things he followed, my father. Horse races and prizefights. There was a column he always read. If I thought about it long enough, I could tell you the columnist’s name.

    Lia

    And the man. Across the aisle.

    Alex

    Nobody paid him the slightest mind. Another sleeping rider, by their dim lights. I watched him steadily. I examined him. I was fixated. When the train rocked. (Pause.) I’m thinking how he sat. He sat against the bulkhead, partly, at the end of the car. When the train rocked, he got bounced around a little and I thought he might topple to the floor. His mouth was open. His face, I swear, it was gray. There wasn’t any question in my mind. Dead. All life drained out of him. But in a way I can’t explain, it didn’t seem strange or forbidding. It seemed forbidding but not in a way that threatened me personally. I accepted what I saw. A rider on the train, going breakneck through the tunnel. It scared me to think he might topple to the floor. That was forbidding. He could have been riding all day. Gray like an animal. He belonged to a different order of nature. The first dead man I’d ever seen and there’s never been anyone since who has looked more finally and absolutely dead.

    Lia

    And your father. What did he do? Did he alert someone when the train reached the next station?

    Alex

    I don’t know. I don’t know if I told him. The memory ends here. I draw a total blank. This is the subway. He’s reading the sports pages. The column he’s reading is part boldface, part regular type, and I can see the face of the columnist in the little photo set into the type. He has a slick mustache. A racetrack mustache.

    Lia

    Can you tell me his name?

    Alex

    His name will come to me in a minute.

    Scene 2

    Present time. Lights up on the sitting figure. This is Alex, after a massive second stroke. The rest of the room remains dark.

    Alex is motionless in a straight-backed chair with arms. It is now possible to see that he is attached to hydration and feeding tubes that extend from a metal stand next to the chair. His eyes are open, mouth open slightly. His hair is cropped. He is clean shaven and neatly dressed—casual pants and shirt, new pair of running shoes.

    Lights up on entire room. Toinette and Sean are situated some distance from the sitting figure.

    Toinette

    I don’t like sharing a toilet.

    Sean

    Maybe I can use the shed.

    Toinette

    Nothing personal.

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