Ghosts of New Orleans: Plays by Rosary Hartel O'neill Volume 2

© Copyright 2009 Rosary Hartel O’Neill

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword

Director’s Notes

Introduction/Vol 2

Degas In New Orleans

The Awakening Of Kate Chopin

Uncle Victor

John Singer Sargent And Madame X

Beckett At Greystones Bay

Property

APPENDICES

The Awakening Of Kate Chopin

Property

About The AuthoR

CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that all plays contained in GHOSTS OF NEW ORLEANS are subject to a royalty. They are fully protected under copyright laws of the Unites States of America, the British Commonwealth, including Canada, and all other countries of the Copyright Union. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio broadcasting, television and the rights of translation into foreign languages are strictly reserved. In their present form the plays are dedicated to the reading public only.

The amateur live stage performance right to all plays contained in GHOSTS OF NEW ORLEANS are controlled exclusively by Samuel French, Inc, and royalty arrangements and licenses must be secured well in advance of presentation. PLEASE NOTE that amateur royalty fees are set upon application in accordance with your producing circumstances. When applying for a royalty quotation and license please give us the number of performances intended, dates of production your seating capacity and admission fee. Royalties are payable one week before the opening performance of the play to Samuel French, Inc, at 45 West 25 th Street, New York, NY 10010 or at 7623 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, CA 90046 or to Samuel French (Canada), Ltd. 100 Lombard Street, Lower Level, Toronto Ontario Canada M5C 1MC or visit our website at www.samuelfrench.com

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Stock royalty quoted upon application to Samuel French, Inc.

For all other rights than those stipulated above, apply to The Marton Agency, 1 Union Square West, Suite 815, New York, NY 10003; Info@MartonAgency.com.

Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau) John Singer Sargent, 1856-1925, American, 1883-84 Oil on canvas, 82 1/8 x 43 1/4 in. (208.6 x 109.9 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Arthur Hoppock Hearn Fund, 1916 (16.53) Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Book Design: Karen Engelmann I www.karenengelmann.com

FOREWORD

Rosary O’Neill is a playwright of enormous talent and range who deservedly has a large audience. We have known this true Southern Belle for many years and have showcased her multiple prize-winning plays at The National Arts Club. Dr. O’Neill has a fertile mind that can conjure unique fictional characters with real flesh and blood. The dialogue is always memorable, and the plots are singular and magnetic. We have always been enriched by O’Neill plays and look forward to many, many more.

ALDON JAMES

President

National Arts Club, New York

DIRECTOR’S NOTES

I met Rosary through Susan Sandler the playwright and screenwriter of CROSSING DELANCY, who was also a supporter of Rosary’s work. I directed the reading of two scenes from Rosary’s WHITE SUITS IN SUMMER and THE AWAKENING OF KATE CHOPIN at the Uta Hagen/Herbert Berghof Playwright’s Theater. Rosary’s work is fascinating because it is variously romantic, historic and dramatic—reminiscent of the works of Flaubert, Chekhov, Tolstoy and Tennessee Williams. A variable trinity of dramatic spices, I’ve read and directed almost all of Rosary’s plays, many several times, and they are complex and fulfilling and you discover new treasures every time through. Rosary’s plays are a tremendous pleasure to see and work on, offering wonderful opportunities for the director, actor and designer.

TOM THORNTON

Director, New York

INTRODUCTION/VOL 2

Volume Two contains historical plays, mostly Victorian, with characters driven by stratified society and tradition. My interest in historical drama was triggered by my love of Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, and New Orleans architecture. Living in New Orleans, one finds constant reminders of a lost world: Creole cottages on the streetcar line, camelback houses facing the zoo, neoclassical mansions in the Garden District, plantations on the river. All New Orleanians have some fantasy house they want to restore or reclaim.

It is impossible to live in New Orleans and not have an interest in the past. New Orleans was not damaged by the Civil War. Most mansions, Creole cottages, and shotgun houses were spared because basically the war did not move that far South. So when you drive down and see these gracious manors in the Garden District, you think: Who lived in that house? Why? Who stays there now? You walk along the Mississippi River, you wonder: What ships are docked there? Who came to town or left?

My parents and grandmothers used to talk about New Orleans and New York being equally important ports and centers of culture before the Civil War. I couldn’t believe this, given how little legitimate theatre remained in New Orleans. There was a hard-working opera using rental space, a destitute symphony, and a few community theatres struggling for money. After the war, my folks said schools and theatres were stricken; only street music survived. The theatre world, which had been so vibrant, never truly recovered.

Fascinated by this disparity, I studied New Orleans theatre history at UCLA and wrote my PhD dissertation on New Orleans Carnival Organizations Theatre of Prestige, a study stratifying New Orleans society based on membership in carnival organizations. I visited different communities in the city and saw how generations clustered in the same neighborhood, married the same kind of people and were buried in the same cemetery. Similar birth-to-death experiences made each group feel safe. It also made for the bad parts of a stratified society.

There is a huge emphasis on beauty in New Orleans, on the past, on glamour. After the Civil War the Carnival balls and parades proliferated, encouraging extravagance and foolhardiness at Mardi Gras. Bands, flambeaux carriers, masked costumed riders with kings and queens, created the illusion that grandeur would return. People saved up all year to wear luxurious costumes and dance in ballrooms or with masked Indians on the street.

My family was totally involved in carnival organizations, with parades, balls, and dancing breakfasts till 4 am. From earliest post-war times, money has been squandered in New Orleans on lavishness. The queen’s gown alone, which resembles a renaissance monarch—hand-beaded and scrolled with velvet—costs a minimum of $10,000. My grandma liked to drive her Cadillac to the questionable parts of town and have her chauffeur hand out beers from the trunk and then watch the men costumed as Indians in feathers and beads from head to foot dance around the car. Not politically correct for sure.

It was very difficult when I ran Southern Rep Theatre in New Orleans to raise money for plays, because New Orleanians’ excess resources were all spent on Mardi Gras and themselves.

New Orleans was a city where people didn’t leave. Ways of behavior were inherited, and a sense of family, of tradition, of culture, prevailed. New Orleanians are European by nature; they love to cook, to eat, to sit and talk endlessly after dinner. They enjoy being friendly because practically everyone they know went to high school with them or somebody else in the family or neighborhood.

Also, among the upper classes, certain old patterns continue: people sitting around the table telling ghost stories, grandmothers passing on anecdotes about who did what, people playing games like charades, cards, hide and seek. People wearing costumes and sneaking around and surprising family members. This sense of carnival and having fun glued life together there.

Knowledge of New Orleans history made me want to adapt Uncle Vanya. Carson McCullers, the famous Southern novelist, once wrote an article comparing the fall of plantation life in 1900 Louisiana to the collapse of the aristocratic culture in the Russia of Vanya. I loved the play but felt its details were too Russian to be understood by Americans. I took the bones of Vanya and put it on a plantation called Waverly, the last sugarcane plantation in Louisiana, and called my play Uncle Victor.

That play won a number of awards and hooked me on historical drama. I decided every week to visit a famous site in New Orleans to inspire my writing. I went to the Degas house on Esplanade, now a bed and breakfast, but the only existing house where Degas lived in the world. At that time, all 24 paintings Degas had done in the house were being displayed for the first time in the New Orleans Museum of Art, and I was allowed to live and write at the Degas House, provided I moved my garbage bag of clothes from room to room as specific ones were booked.

I wrote a nine-cast show, so struck was I by all Degas’ relatives who had lived with him in 1872. Degas had tried to save his Uncle’s failing cotton business and create new roots in the city of his mother. He fell prey to scandal and decadence. Often the more important the character, the more critical the problems. This works well in drama, where the playwright’s job is to torture the hero.

Historical plays offer audiences a perspective on the human condition, the chance to see what is the same and what different over the years. Clothing and manners may change, but the desire to be somebody and give back to the community doesn’t. The historical play may provide audiences with more spectacle, gorgeous people framed in a luminous place. It’s like Carnival in New Orleans: we have kings, queens, maids, pomp, circumstance, and glamour onstage again. Certainly, one delight of historical drama may be the beautiful sets and costumes required.

My plays are historically accurate. Obviously, you take a scenario and expand the story but the main facts: the births, deaths, relationships are all to the best of my knowledge correct.

Places in New Orleans are so connected, full of history, full of pain. Some say they are still troubled by the ghosts that would like to come back and be celebrated again.

I visited a haunted sugar cane plantation, with its co-owner, a lead actor, and his blind dog. I and the cast of our then current show at Southern Rep (the company I founded in New Orleans) were served dinner and a fabulous cheese grits breakfast in the main dining room, by a kitchen staff still on call, who pointed out which of our bedrooms would probably have ghostly visitors.

I spent days visiting Kate Chopin’s house in Cloutierville, La., the bathroom of which was said to be so haunted; though I was offered quarters in the house for research, I was afraid to spend the night. I interviewed descendents of Chopin’s lover Albert Sanpite and town members about the scandals of her life. I read all available material on Chopin and talked with the leading experts on her (Barbara Ewell and Emily Toth). I researched in French and English all the books on Degas, both at the Tulane archives and at the Louvre in Paris. I did similar research in New York and Paris for Beckett at Greystones Bay and John Singer Sargent and Madame X, my newest plays, loosely tied to New Orleans.

We rehearsed and performed the Degas play both at the New Orleans Museum of Art (where I met Degas’ two great-nieces, and the play was declared the official play on Degas) and at the Degas House, where interested actors were encouraged to spend the night. One of the most interesting experiences we had at Southern Rep was performing Degas in that Degas House on Esplanade. We used the side parlors to stage the scenes where Degas must have painted, eaten or danced. We used the hall staircases for the actors to come down from bedrooms where the characters had lived.

Often the actors felt like ghosts reliving situations that had haunted the house. They were being compelled by the house to do certain things they weren’t even aware of. When it rained, the actors entered through the front gallery, ducking through the big windows dripping with rain and complaining about their fear the levee was breaking.

A major theme in my work is the struggle of the artist, the sacrifices made to maintain sanity. Degas’ father wanted him to be an attorney.

We are glad Degas did go back to Paris and paint and didn’t succumb to the temptations of New Orleans. We are pleased Sargent refused to change his scorned portrait of Madame X and that Kate Chopin forged a way to raise her six children and still write.

The Degas House, New Orleans Photo by Millicent Hand

Often, I focus on the Victorian period, one play leading to another, creating a tapestry of artists working simultaneously in New Orleans.

Kate Chopin’s husband was friendly with the Degas family, and his cotton office was next door to theirs. She is less known, although a very important American novelist. I wanted to know what it was like to be a woman artist in the same post Civil-War period. Apparently Chopin and Degas are rumored to have walked the streets together at night.

There are many antidotes in New Orleans, and people believe them more than facts, saying that the homes of the famous will remain haunted till a family member moves back in and lives there.

I have never been in a town where people liked to plume up more like peacocks. Used to be more ball gowns were sold in New Orleans than in any other city in the world. All that comes from the amazing sense of fantasy about carnival and about life, where people want to present themselves in a striking way. Of course before television, Internet and email, the idea of sitting in a parlor, presenting yourself, talking about something interesting was a big part of what life was about…that human interaction, that connection to family. My grandma, for instance, used to receive nephews, nieces, and friends on certain holidays like Thanksgiving and January first. Her mansion on the streetcar line was open for specified hours. During Mardi Gras, many New Orleanians have open houses several days a week.

Carnival was at the heart of locals’ hope: fantasy renewed belief that the good life would return. Prior to Katrina there was a ball or parade for fifty nights before Mardi Gras in every community. After the hurricane there was only one week. But without those few days of pleasure—eating, drinking, and celebrating—New Orleanians would have fallen apart.

Carnival creates that sense of suspended animation, the feeling that a marvelous, beautiful time will come back because all the glorious architecture, though distressed, is there waiting for the people to inhabit it, and traditions go on like the parade.

Now, with parts of the city destroyed, only certain areas will be able to sustain that legacy that created the melting pot, which New Orleans is.

One can only hope that the new composition of New Orleans will be as interesting as the old. Now with history jeopardized, New Orleans could become just another American city

On the downside, there was a great deal of poverty, crime, and illiteracy before Katrina, an increasing division between the haves and the haves nots. Louisiana was one of the poorest states in funding education and culture. Let’s hope the recent devastation may lead to an infusion of talent, money, and vision that brings New Orleans forward as one of the premier cities of the south. These plays are dedicated to the blossoming of New Orleans.

ROSARY HARTEL O’NEILL 

 NEW YORK, NEW YORK

CAST OF CHARACTERS

EDGAR DEGAS, 38, the famous painter

RENÉ DEGAS, 27, Edgar’s brother

ESTELLE (TELL) MUSSON BALFOUR DEGAS, 29, René’s wife

DESIREE (DIDI) MUSSON, 34, Tell’s sister

MATHILDE MUSSON BELL, 31, Tell’s sister

MICHEL MUSSON, 60, Tell’s father

JOSEPHINE (JO) BALFOUR, 10, Tell’s daughter

AMERICA DURRIVE OLIVIER, 24, a neighbor

EMILY CUCKOW RILLIEUX, 45, a cousin, of mixed race, brown skin

MAN #1: WILL BELL—husband of Mathilde, funeral collector, soldier

MAN #2: mendicant, servant, soldier

ACCENTS

Family members speak with a soft, gentle, urbane upper class New Orleans accent.

America has a harsher, nasal, lower class drawl.

Edgar speaks English with a pronounced accent.

René who has lived in New Orleans for six years has lost most of his accent.

SETTING

We are in a two-story rental house on 2306 Esplanade Avenue, New Orleans, Louisiana. It is 1872. A double parlor with the remnants of grandeur: a glittering chandelier, an elegant tattered sofa, a mahogany desk, and a high-back chair. To the right, two floor-to-ceiling windows open onto a galley; to the left, a door to the pantry. Upstage two matching parlor doors lead offstage to an unseen staircased grand hallway that connects the upstairs, and the front and rear of the house. Outside we hear the clanging of a random mule-drawn streetcar. One possibility, throughout the play is to have Degas’ paintings or the rapturous colors within them projected onto the rear wall, enriching the bleak setting with their transparent blues, pinks, and violets.

PROLOGUE: EDGAR

(Music playing softly)

(EDGAR stands outside the house on Esplanade at an easel painting. As he mentions his cousins and brother they enter and pose in a tableau of beautiful young people)

EDGAR: I have a picture in my mind of the best painting I never painted: three women and two men in untouched expectation. It’s October, 1872. I’ve come to New Orleans to find myself as a painter and close this hole in my soul. My brother René is there, the bloom of youth on his cheek. We’re dining at our uncle’s, our enthusiasm buoyed by the lightness of each other. My cousins are there, Didi and Mathilde. And Tell, beautiful Tell, a Civil War widow and already remarried. First time I’ve seen the girls since they rode out the Civil War with us in France. And oh, the sunlight and the, God knows why, laughter. We are young and dreams seem possible (Music fades out)

Slides—Degas’ face and then the Degas house on Esplanade Avenue in New Orleans. Throughout the play we hear music like the compositions of Erik Satie.

BLACKOUT

ACT I

October 25, 1872—5:30 a.m (Satie music and slides of the Degas House at the same time)

(JO BALFOUR, 10, is asleep on the floor, in a pink tutu and ballet slippers, her hair caught in a ribboned ponytail like Degas’ statue of La Fille de Quartorze Ans. JO rises dreamily and begins to dance. She lies back on the floor, returning to her sleeping state.)

(Music fades, slides out, lights up)

(TELL DEGAS, 29, crosses the stage. She is exquisite, fragile with a porcelain beauty. Now and then she pauses to stabilize herself. She trips on her daughter’s legs, and cries distraught)

TELL: Jo, You’re supposed to sleep on the sofa.

JO: (Gets up restlessly) Oh Mommy. I dreamed I was a bird and could fly high, but I flew into a clothesline—

TELL: Fold up your sheets.

JO: Why do I have to give my room to Uncle Edgar?

TELL: Are you listening to me?

JO: I want Uncle to paint you, Mama. You’re so beautiful. If he would have painted Papa, he’d have been with me always. I don’t know what he looked like. If Uncle paints you, you’ll be with me forever.

(TELL smiles, puts an arm around JO’s shoulder—coaxingly)

TELL:Get dressed—

(A burst of laughter comes from the hallway. JO hurries out, and TELL slips out. We see a pantomime of activity occurring in the house as the family awakens and prepares for Edgar.)

(MATHILDE, 31, an elegant but frazzled woman, walks in through the pantry with a tray with a coffee pot and cups and saucers. Pours her coffee expectantly and sits on the sofa. UNCLE MICHEL, 60, dressed in a Confederate Army uniform, barges in from the front hallway followed by DIDI, 34, an intense pretty lady with soft features. All move quickly, full of eager anticipation to greet EDGAR first.)

UNCLE MICHEL: No matter how early I get up, it’s never early enough. (Goes to the back parlor doorway and calls) Out, Jo, out.

DIDI: (Shocked but giggling) Shush, Papa. Take off that uniform. Someone’s going to shoot you.

UNCLE MICHEL: I need to greet my nephew in style.

MATHILDE: (Pats his shoulder playfully) Go back to sleep, Papa.

UNCLE MICHEL: I just want to have a quiet cup of coffee alone.

DIDI: I just wanted to have a quiet cup of coffee alone.

UNCLE MICHEL: (Indignantly) Jo, out. (Grumbling) The dressing room is always occupied in this house. God, I’ve got a headache.

JO: (From the rear hallway shouts) One minute.

MATHILDE: (With a warning look) You should stop drinking.

UNCLE MICHEL: Babies screaming through the night.

DIDI: Put some sherry on their lips.

UNCLE MICHEL: Or let me kill one of them. (Calls toward the back parlor doorway) Jo. Get out. (Shrugging his shoulders) Mathilde, I want you to help Didi fix up. Didi needs a husband. Edgar is her last chance. A girl’s life is like a ship. When she’s sixteen, you’ve got to launch her, deck her with flags and ribbons, sail her out. At twenty-three, the ship turns and starts back to port. Didi is at the dock.

MATHILDE: Good morning to you too.

UNCLE MICHEL: (To DIDI) Who’s going to care for you when I keel

over? Your sisters’ husbands? The church? Remember what your mother said about those spinsters, who spied on their married neighbor. They’d snicker when they heard her husband beating her or when they saw bruises on her arm. One day, that wife charged out of her house and screamed, You can laugh and you can hiss but on me tombstone won’t be, ‘Miss.’

MATHILDE: Just let us enjoy Edgar’s company as we did in Paris.

UNCLE MICHEL: Keep away from Edgar. You’ve got a husband.

JO: (Shouts from the dressing room) Finished.

UNCLE MICHEL: Excuse me, girls. (He leans over, kisses DIDI’s cheek, then adds with a constrained air) Mathilde, do Didi’s hair like yours. She looks like a gargoyle.

(UNCLE MICHEL exits.)

(Seconds later, in the hallway, RENÉ tosses back his dark hair as TELL goes to embrace him. Gorgeous, he wears a single-breasted coat reaching mid-thigh over his white night shirt.)

RENÉ: Did you already spoil your dress?

TELL: I stumbled—(Pause) Have you seen the children?

RENÉ: Yes, but they’re asking for you. Mind them inside. I don’t want to see grass stains on their outfits. Your son’s knickers are already split… I’m sleeping till noon. Don’t let the babies wake me.

(He turns to go, rubbing his sweaty forehead.)

RENÉ: Sorry about last night. The trip back from Paris was rough.

TELL: You fell right to sleep. I hoped to …-

RENÉ: I can’t seem to get romantic when first thing I spot is bills on my dresser. Didn’t you pay a thing while I was gone!

TELL: With what?

RENÉ: Maybe I’m exhausted from the overseas crossing. (He gives her a cold peck.) You’re the center of my universe. I dote on you like the sun rising.

(RENÉ slouches off. A horn from a lone ship howls in the distance. TELL enters the parlor.)

TELL: Sorry I couldn’t go up to the station. How did you find Edgar?

MATHILDE: Last night? (She chuckles—then with a pleased, relieved air) He seemed uncertain, tentative, as if he had some secret. He was all dressed the part of the painter/poet—so kind and so subdued. You