JAMES DEAN IS DEAD!

(LONG LIVE JAMES DEAN)

by Jackie Skarvellis

from Hollywood Legends: ‘Live’ on Stage

This one-man play was first performed at Above the Stag Theatre, London on 4 June 2009.

The actor, JAMES DEAN, died in a fatal car crash in 1955 at the age of 24. He is best remembered for the films East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, which made him into a Hollywood star. In this one-man play, DEAN is resurrected from the dead to talk about sex, love, acting, stardom and his final days. He speaks directly to the audience. The following monologue occurs just after he has explained how his supposed-girlfriend, the Italian actress Pier Angeli, ended up marrying somebody else.

JAMES DEAN

The loneliness – I scream inside my skin, inside my skull. There’s nowhere so lonely as the big city. Busy people, coming and going. All of them, all day long, with their busy little lives. ‘We’re busy doing nothing, but buzzing around like flies!’ Sweet fuck nothings. I try and keep myself busy too: I take lessons in dancing with Eartha Kitt; I take classes – anything to keep the void at bay. The city never sleeps and neither do I. I haunt the bars, I hunt in the bars. You meet some strange insomniacs like yourself, hag-ridden, hollow-eyed, sleepwalkers in the twilight world, that in-between world. Sometimes I fuck ’em, sometimes I send ’em home. Alien encounters in the dead of night, but the neon is always bright, relentless, even in the dead of night. I walk the dark side of my inner soul. Close encounters of an intimate kind that mean nothing. Sometimes, I watch two people fucking, I play the voyeur. I don’t do anything. It’s all part of my training, I tell myself, to break new ground with my acting technique. I tell myself it’s all good experience. (Laughs.) All sortsa people get caught in my net: human detritus! Most of ’em I throw away with the dawn, but it stops the loneliness…sometimes…