Vernon God Little

DBC Pierre, adapted by Tanya Ronder

WHO    Vernon, fifteen, a schoolboy from Texas.

TO WHOM    His mother.

WHERE    Somewhere between a courtroom and a cell on death row.

WHEN    Present day.

WHAT HAS JUST HAPPENED    Set in a small town in Texas, the play tells the story of fifteen-year-old schoolboy Vernon Little. At the time his best friend Jesus Navarro went on the rampage, massacring sixteen of their classmates before turning the gun on himself, Vernon, who suffers from unpredictable bowel movements, was outside the school grounds involuntarily defecating. However, when he is later found with Jesus’s bag of ammunition in his hands, he is wrongly assumed to have been the accomplice. The town want someone to pay for the shootings, and Vernon becomes the scapegoat. He is accused of the murders. He goes on the run, and, in a crazed sequence of events that leads Vernon to Mexico, he is finally captured and found guilty of a crime he did not commit. Here, alone, somewhere between the courtroom and a cell on death row, Vernon talks to his mother. Although on stage with him, she is at home singing ‘Please Help Me, I’m Falling’ by Hank Locklin, so she does not hear him.

WHAT TO CONSIDER

•	The action is fast-paced. It has many twists and turns. Vernon encounters at least forty-five other characters during the course of the play. Read it to understand fully all that Vernon describes.
•	This is the first time in the play that he is prepared to speak out. Up until now his embarrassment over his bowel movements has prevented him from doing so. However, here, nobody is listening.
•	Vernon’s mother is more concerned about the arrival of her new refrigerator than the plight of her son.
•	The play’s dark humour and absurd satirical nature.
•	The play’s heightened theatricality. Its use of music, song and dance.
•	The kind of American culture that seeks to turn any event into a source of entertainment. Later in the play, a TV show asks viewers to vote for which criminal on death row they want to see exterminated first.
•	The play is an adaptation of DBC Pierre’s Booker Prizewinning novel.
•	‘Jesus’ is a Mexican/Spanish name and pronounced ‘Hey-zoos’, rather than the English ‘Je-zus’.

WHAT HE WANTS

•	To prove his innocence.
•	To confront his mother.
•	To reveal the truth about the way in which his father died.
•	His mother’s love.
•	Justice.

KEYWORDS  storm  breaking  wired  jackknifed  shit  innocent

Vernon

The way he ran from class, I knew the storm was breaking in Jesus. He’d been wired for weeks, more ditzy than usual, calling it love but not saying who with… If you’d come to Houston, Mom, and been in court you’d have heard about the photo on the Doctor’s website. That morning in math, this picture of Jesus in these stupid panties, was on every computer in the room. ‘Bambi Boy Butt Bazaar’? He had no idea. He jackknifed. I asked Lori to cover for me because I knew where he was headed. I raced to Keeter’s on my bike, to the den, where both our daddy’s guns were. He wasn’t there. The den was locked, my key at home. I saw through the crack in the door, Daddy’s rifle was there, not moved since the day we left it, but his daddy’s had gone. My turn to jackknife. Back on the bike, my insides cramped, what a surprise. Gastro-enteritis fuckin’ Little. I squatted, emptied my lower tracts like rats from an airplane, right beside the den. ‘Tell them about the poo-poos!’ says my attorney, and he’s right. They’d know I wasn’t in school, then. You’d know I wasn’t in school too, but what am I supposed to say? ‘Sure, there’s the shit, right beside my papa’s grave where me an’ Mom buried him in the middle of the fucking night after she shot him dead. And in case you’re interested, the gun’s right behind that corrugated door. The key? Sure – little box in my room – anything else I can help with?’ My shit makes me innocent but it sure as hell would put you away. Seventeen children? How could you think I did that?

By the time I cleaned myself up, Jesus was at school with his pop’s loaded rifle. I didn’t get there in time. I found his bag outside the classroom, picked it up, held on to it. Inside was another round of ammunition beside his lunch – shrimp-paste on white. I looked through the door and there they all were – shot to pieces, and there was my goofy friend Jesus, with the gun pointing deep inside his mouth.