Best Monologues from The Best American Short Plays

Copyright © 2015 by William W. Demastes

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

Published in 2015 by Applause Theatre & Cinema Books

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Credits and permissions can be found in Credits and Permissions, which constitute an extension of this copyright page.

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Book design by Lynn Bergesen

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Best Monologues from The Best American Short Plays / edited by William W. Demastes. volumes cm. — (The Applause Acting Series)

ISBN 978-1-4803-3155-6 (volume 1) — ISBN 978-1-4803-8548-1 (volume 2) — ISBN 978-1-4803-9740-8 (volume 3)

1. Monologues, American. 2. American drama—20th century. 3. American drama—21st century. I. Demastes, William W., editor of compilation.

PS627.M63B47 2014

812'.04508—dc23

2013041949

www.applausebooks.com

contents

Introduction: Speech Acts by William W. Demastes

Part I: Monologues for Men

Kimberly La Force Excerpt from A Marriage Proposal

Douglas Soderberg Excerpt from The Root of Chaos

Michael Ross Albert Excerpt from Starfishes

Shel Silverstein Excerpt from The Trio

Darren Canady Excerpt from You’re Invited!

Mac Wellman Excerpt from The Sandalwood Box

Brent Englar Excerpt from Snowbound

Lisa Soland Excerpt from Spatial Disorientation

James Armstrong Excerpts from The Rainbow

Murray Schisgal Excerpt from The Hysterical Misogynist

Craig Pospisil Excerpt from Dissonance

David Rusiecki Excerpt from Kid Gloves

Cary Pepper Excerpts from Come Again, Another Day

John Guare Blue Monologue

Murray Schisgal Naked Old Man

John Guare What It Was Like

Lawrence Thelen Ichabod Crane Tells All

Murray Schisgal Queenie

Shel Silverstein The Devil and Billy Markham

A. K. Abeille and David Manos Morris A Little Haunting

Jean-Claude van Itallie and Joseph Chaikin Struck Dumb

Part II: Monologues for Women

Mac Wellman Excerpts from The Sandalwood Box

Darren Canady Excerpt from You’re Invited!

Kyle John Schmidt Excerpt from St. Matilde’s Malady

John Bolen Excerpt from A Song for Me, or Getting the Oscar

Gabriel Rivas Gomez Excerpt from Scar Tissue

Craig Pospisil Excerpts from Dissonance

Lisa Soland Excerpt from Spatial Disorientation

Jonathan Fitts Excerpt from White or the Muskox Play

Patrick Holland Excerpt from The Cowboy

Angela C. Hall Excerpt from Wife Shop

Andrea Sloan Pink Excerpts from Warner Bros.

Crystal Skillman Excerpt from Rise

Edith Freni Excerpt from Flare

Janet Allard Creatures

Leslie Ayvazian Deaf Day

Susan Miller Excerpts from It’s Our Town, Too

Credits and Permissions

introduction

Speech Acts

You’re fired. I baptize you in the name of . . . Give me two snow cones. Those are ugly shoes. Oh, that this too, too, solid flesh would melt, thaw, resolve itself into a dew. Language is a funny thing, serving humanity in any number of ways by helping us as we struggle to find common cause and establish community in an increasingly crowded but ever alienating world.

Renowned philosopher of language J. L. Austin (1911–1960) spent a career trying to do what most philosophers of language try to do: make sense of human language. He famously popularized the term speech act, identifying language as something that has performance qualities even though speech doesn’t actually act in any way that we typically describe as action. It doesn’t move things, or touch things, or do much of anything like that. Stop talking and do something is a typical response to the perennial advice giver. There’s a line between doing and talking that we all pretty much understand. The problem with that common perception, and one that Austin recognized, is that some forms of speech do do things that can be called acts.

Telling someone they’re fired certainly has an impact almost as stunning as being hit by a hammer. Declaring someone baptized, or married, or divorced are pretty significant transformative pronouncements, literally converting someone from one kind of person into another. Asking for a snow cone is a gesture that one hopes will lead to a refreshing response, especially on a hot summer day. Criticizing someone’s shoes may actually encourage the person to change into something more appealing. These words interact with the physical world and actually have some sort of influence on our surroundings. They’re speech acts.

But what about wishing our too, too imperfect bodies would just dissolve and somehow leave nothing behind but the perfection of our souls (in a perfectly idealized world where nothing corrupts or decays)? Is it possible that these opening lines to Hamlet’s famous first monologue/soliloquy may actually do something? Perhaps it’s a perfectly worded sentiment that summarizes exactly how you sometimes feel about this mixed-up, jumbled-up, shook-up world, and it speaks to exactly how you want to deal with it: by simply fading away. Or maybe you never thought about the world in that way at all. Maybe you’ve been living with some queasy feeling about the world for some time now, but never quite knew what it was you were feeling. Maybe you didn’t quite know what it was you were feeling because you never quite knew how to put it into words. Now, however, you’ve seen your thought perfectly expressed (though Shakespeare’s poetic phrasing might not be how you would have said this), and now you move forward in life with greater focus because now you know with precision what vague, queasy sentiments had previously been coursing through your veins. Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt has become for you a transformative speech that gains the name of action by actually altering or focusing what you believe and therefore who you are.

Speech acts. I’m using Shakespeare here because he helps me show what a great phrase speech acts is when it comes to describing what happens onstage when actors arrive and find an audience willing to attend to what they have to say. The stage is the space that relies on speech to carry out action. Physical stage actions do occur, of course. People do get into each other’s space; they do move about in a choreography of significance. Props are used, and people do interact with them. Physical gestures can make or break an acting style. People touch, gesture, exit. But in the theater it is the language that carries the day. We go for the words.

And when we go to the theater, we go to hear those words spoken by someone, bringing language into direct contact with the physical and engaging the physical before our very eyes. Novels, poetry, the newspaper all have speech acts embedded in them, of course. And the streets, our offices, shopping centers, our homes—they are all full of speech acts. But the theater gives us pause to think about these words, words, words.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Really? Words can break spirits, destroy confidence. They can also build hope and incite great acts of heroism. Playwrights know this, and so do theater audiences. Otherwise, why go? How about what’s in a name? Call a rose skunk weed and maybe it really won’t smell as sweet. How easy was it for Romeo to deny his name (or his father)? Romeo he was, and a Montague he remained, despite his naive teenage decision to get out from under the curse of that name. Consequences follow. Words matter and carry clout every bit as dangerous as a hammer or crowbar. This too playwrights know.

The theater, in short, is the laboratory for speech acts. Authors string words together with the complex goal of pulling together disparate audience members into a single attentive community. Even if the goal is to bring everyone together for one single moment of unified laughter, or perhaps a gasp of surprise—even if that small effect is the goal, then the playwright has taken on a pretty daunting and very complex task.

Sometimes playwrights have a political or personal agenda in mind and use the theater to transform an audience’s beliefs and attitudes. Is it possible to eliminate or at least minimize such destructive forces as racism, sexism, or nationalism by changing people’s beliefs and attendant actions? If so, then speech acts have had their impact.

When it comes to thinking about these transformations, it is generally very difficult to distinguish between conscious and unconscious behavioral shifts. There is little doubt, however, that unconscious shifts have more profound and longer lasting effect. And they are harder to generate as well. So, for instance, walking out of a theater and realizing that Native Americans are a nearly forgotten but still mistreated minority may result in immediate corrective action of one sort or another. We could call that a soft-wiring alteration. But to be exposed in subtle but visceral ways to the persistent, grinding dehumanization that generates discrimination, and to have it somehow sink beneath our consciousness and into our unconscious beings, that’s a hard-wire change. How to do these things?

The monologues in this volume are full of speech acts. Some will generate direct action in the form of joyful laughter or the chill of surprise. Others will usher us into worlds we’ve never experienced, or perhaps into worlds experienced long ago but linger at the furthest edges of memory. Still others may help us alter the way we see certain things, people, or beliefs. I find two works particularly intriguing in this volume. Deaf Day by Leslie Ayvazian is a vignette covering a troubling day in the life of a mother dealing with her deaf child. Struck Dumb by Jean-Claude van Itallie and Joseph Chaikin presents an aphasic character struggling to regain his control over language. Both remind us of the gift of language. They remind us, in particular, of what we see in all the monologues in this volume: the power and grit of speech acts found in even the slightest of pieces. We are reminded by these two works also that speech acts require interaction: speaker and recipient are of equal importance. So do enjoy your read, imagining in your mind’s eye exactly how the staged performance might appear.

Best Monologues from The Best American Short Plays, Volume Three, is a collection of monologues drawn from the popular Best American Short Plays series, an archive of works from many of the best playwrights active today. Long or short, serious or not, excerpts or otherwise, this collection abounds in speech acts that may trigger physical reactions and almost certainly will transform an attitude or two, drawing out lost memories, creating new ones, and definitely entertaining, engaging, and amusing us all along the way.

—William W. Demastes

Louisiana State University

Part I

Monologues for Men

Kimberly La Force

excerpt from

A Marriage Proposal

from

The Best American Short Plays 2010–2011

Matt Well, let me start from the beginning. I have been a farmer for years; never too smart but always good with my hands. At first I was a banana farmer in St. Lucia. I had a wife and two young boys and we made good money back then, but the banana industry collapsed when free trade was introduced. [. . .] Imagine if someone had said that during your testimony, imagine how you would feel. It’s okay to listen in church, but then the message goes right out when you leave the church doors. So the demand for our bananas dropped and we were put out of business. Funny thing is that when my money was gone, so was my wife, and I was left with nothing but a field of weeds. I traveled to Texas in 2000 and got small jobs farming there. It was very peaceful, and I harvested for a small canola seed farmer. One day a major company threatened to tell the authorities that my boss was housing illegal immigrants. I was fired and hitchhiked all the way to Florida. [. . .] So I became invisible, always looking over my shoulder and avoiding the law. I no longer wanted to live life in that way, constantly suspicious of others and always on the move, so I started exploring options. I looked for any loopholes in the law. [. . .] I tried it all, the temporary visa program, community colleges, lawyers, army recruitments, and churches. They all told me they could help and took my money but gave no results. I even went under an assumed name and worked under the Social Security number of a dead man. For three years I was known as Michael Jones until I was suspected by authorities. I did so much but to no avail, and now I see that the only option for me is to find a wife and her only qualification is that she is a U.S. citizen. [. . .] I came to you only because after hearing your story, I sensed that you had the maturity to see that marriage is an economic arrangement, not an emotional one. I don’t need love from you and I did not come empty-handed. In Texas, the asking price for marriage is about $15,000. I came to you because your problem is financial, and mine is legal. Together we can help each other.

Douglas Soderberg

excerpt from

The Root of Chaos

from

The Best American Short Plays 1986

scene

The kitchen and dining area of the Cernikowski house in central Pennsylvania.

JOE [Father, forty.] Did it look like a giant woman? [. . .] It’s a family catchphrase. Goes back to your mother’s and my courtship. On our first date, I took her to see this movie called The Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman. It was our first date, see, and we were both a little nervous to begin with. We weren’t terribly involved in the