Before the performance.
The whole stage is used as the setting for the play, but at the front, in a widely angled V-shape, are two transparent, flat pieces of scenery which contain the incomplete interior of a living room in Southern summer. The stage-right flat contains a door, the other a large window looking out upon an untended patch of yard or garden dominated by a thick growth of tall sunflowers.
The furnishings of the interior are Victorian, including an old upright piano, and various tokens of the vocation of an astrologer, who apparently gave “readings” in this room. Perhaps the wallpaper is ornamented with signs of the Zodiac, the solar twelve-petaled lotus, and so on. (The designer should consult an astrologer about these tokens, which should give the interior an air of mystery. He might also find helpful a book called Esoteric Astrology).
About the stage enclosing this incomplete interior are scattered unassembled pieces of scenery for other plays than the play-within-a-play which will be “performed.” Perhaps this exterior setting is the more important of the two. It must not only suggest the disordered images of a mind approaching collapse but also, correspondingly, the phantasmagoria of the nightmarish world that all of us live in at present, not just the subjective but the true world with all its dismaying shapes and shadows . . .
When the interior is lighted, it should seem to be filled with the benign light of a late summer afternoon: the stage surrounding should have a dusky violet light deepening almost to blackness at its upstage limits.
Of the unassembled set pieces which clutter this backstage area, the most prominent is a (papier-mâché) statue of a giant, pedestaled, which has a sinister look.
At curtain rise, FELICE, the male star of an acting company on a tour which has been far more extensive than was expected, comes out of a shadowy area, hesitantly, as if fearful of the light. He has a quality of youth without being young. He is a playwright, as well as player, but you would be likely to take him for a poet with sensibilities perhaps a little deranged. His hair is almost shoulder length, he wears a great coat that hangs nearly to his ankles; it has a somewhat mangy fur collar. It is thrown over his shoulders. We see that he wears a bizarre shirt—figured with astrological signs— “period” trousers of soft-woven fabric in slightly varying shades of gray: the total effect is theatrical and a bit narcissan.
He draws a piano stool into the light, sits down to make notes for a monologue on a scratch pad.
FELICE [slowly, reflectively, writing]: To play with fear is to play with fire. [He looks up as if he were silently asking some question of enormous consequence.] —No, worse, much worse, than playing with fire. Fire has limits. It comes to a river or sea and there it stops, it comes to stone or bare earth that it can’t leap across and there is stopped, having nothing more to consume. But fear—
[There is the sound of a heavy door slamming off stage].
Fox? Is that you, Fox?
[The door slams again.]
Impossible! [He runs his hands through his long hair.] Fear! The fierce little man with the drum inside the rib cage. Yes, compared to fear grown to panic which has no—what?— limits, at least none short of consciousness blowing out and not reviving again, compared to that, no other emotion a living, feeling creature is capable of having, not even love or hate, is comparable in—what?—force?—magnitude?
CLARE [from off stage]: Felice!
FELICE: —There is the love and the—substitutions, the surrogate attachments, doomed to brief duration, no matter how—necessary . . .—You can’t, you must never catch hold of and cry out to a person, loved or needed as deeply as if loved —“Take care of me, I’m frightened, don’t know the next step!” The one so loved and needed would hold you in contempt. In the heart of this person—him-her—is a little automatic sound apparatus, and it whispers, “Demand! Blackmail! Despicable! Reject it! ”
CLARE [in the wings]: Felice!
FELICE: Clare! . . . What I have to do now is keep her from getting too panicky to give a good performance . . . but she’s not easy to fool in spite of her—condition.
[CLARE appears in the Gothic door to the backstage area. There is a ghostly spill of light in the doorway and she has an apparitional look about her. She has, like her brother, a quality of youth without being young, and also like FELICE an elegance, perhaps even arrogance, of bearing that seems related to a past theatre of actor-managers and imperious stars. But her condition when she appears is “stoned” and her grand theatre manner will alternate with something startlingly coarse, the change occurring as abruptly as if another personality seized hold of her at these moments. Both of these aspects, the grand and the vulgar, disappear entirely from the part of CLARE in “The Performance,” when she will have a childlike simplicity, the pure and sad precociousness of a little girl.
[A tiara, several stones missing, dangles from her fingers. She gives a slight startled laugh when she notices it, shrugs, and sets it crookedly on her somewhat disheveled and streaked blonde head. She starts to move forward, then gasps and loudly draws back.]
Now what?
CLARE [with an uncertain laugh]: I thought I saw—
FELICE: Apparitions this evening?
CLARE: No, it was just my—shadow, it scared me but it was just my shadow, that’s all. [She advances unsteadily from the doorway.] —A doctor once told me that you and I were the bravest people he knew. I said, “Why, that’s absurd, my brother and I are terrified of our shadows.” And he said, “Yes, I know that, and that’s why I admire your courage so much . . .”
[FELICE starts a taped recording of a guitar, then faces downstage.]
FELICE: Fear is a monster vast as night—
CLARE: And shadow casting as the sun.
FELICE: It is quicksilver, quick as light—
CLARE: It slides beneath the down-pressed thumb.
FELICE: Last night we locked it from the house.
CLARE: But caught a glimpse of it today.
FELICE: In a corner, like a mouse.
CLARE: Gnawing all four walls away.
[FELICE stops the tape.]
CLARE [straightening her tiara]: Well, where are they, the ladies and gentlemen of the press, I’m ready for them if they are ready for me.
FELICE: Fortunately we—
FELICE: —we don’t have to face the press before this evening’s performance.
CLARE: No press reception? Artists’ Management guaranteed, Magnus personally promised, no opening without maximum press coverage on this fucking junket into the boondocks.—Jesus, you know I’m wonderful with the press. . . [She laughs hoarsely.]
FELICE: You really think so, do you, on all occasions?
CLARE: Know so.
FELICE: Even when you rage against fascism to a honking gaggle of—crypto-fascists? . . . With all sheets to the wind?
CLARE: Yes, sir, especially then.—You’re terrible with the press, you go on and on about “total theatre” and, oh, do they turn off you and onto me . . . Cockroach! Huge! [She stamps her foot.] Go!—I read or heard somewhere that cockroaches are immune to radiation and so are destined to be the last organic survivors of the great “Amen”—after some centuries there’s going to be cockroach actors and actresses and cockroach playwrights and—Artists’ Management and—audiences . . . [She gestures toward the audience.]
FELICE: Have you got an “upper”?
CLARE: One for emergency, but—
FELICE: I think you’d better drop it.
CLARE: I never drop an upper before the interval. What I need now is just coffee. [She is struggling against her confusion.] —Tell Franz to get me a carton of steaming hot black coffee. I’m very annoyed with Franz. He didn’t call me . . . [She laughs a little.] —Had you forbidden him to?
[There is no response.]
So I’m left to while the long night away in an unheated dressing room in a state theatre of a state unknown—I have to be told when a performance is canceled!—or won’t perform! [Her tiara slips off. She crouches unsteadily to retrieve it.]
FELICE: The performance has not been canceled and I called you, Clare.
CLARE: After I’d called you.
FELICE: I have some new business to give you, so come here.
CLARE: I’ll not move another step without some—Oh, light, finally something almost related to daylight! But it’s not coming through a window, it’s coming through a—
FELICE [overlapping]:—There’s a small hole in the backstage wall. [He crosses to look out at the audience.] They’re coming in.
CLARE: Do they seem to be human?
FELICE: No.—Yes! It’s nearly curtain time, Clare.
CLARE: Felice! Where is everybody?—I said, “Where is everybody?”
FELICE: Everybody is somewhere, Clare.
CLARE: Get off your high horse, I’ve had it!—Will you answer my question?
FELICE: No cancelation!
CLARE: No show!
FELICE: What then?—In your contrary opinion?
CLARE: Restoration of—order!
FELICE: What order?
CLARE: Rational, rational! [Her tiara falls off again.]
FELICE: Stop wearing out your voice before the—
CLARE: Felice, I hear gunfire!
FELICE: I don’t!
CLARE [sadly]: We never hear the same thing at the same time any more, caro . . . [She notices a throne-chair, canopied, with gilded wooden lions on its arms: on the canopy, heraldic devices in gold thread.] Why, my God, old Aquitaine Eleanor’s throne! I’m going to usurp it a moment— [She mounts the two steps to the chair and sits down in a stately fashion, as if to hold court.]
FELICE [holding his head]: I swear I wouldn’t know my head was on me if it wasn’t aching like hell.
CLARE: What are you mumbling?
FELICE: An attack of migraine.
CLARE: You’d better take your codeine.
FELICE: I’ve never found that narcotics improve a performance, if you’ll forgive me for that heresy, Clare.
CLARE: —Is this tour nearly over?
FELICE: It could end tonight if we don’t give a brilliant performance, in spite of—
CLARE: Then it’s over, caro, all over . . . How long were we on the way here? All I remember is that it would be light and then it would be dark and then it would be light and then dark again, and mountains turned to prairies and back to mountains, and I tell you honestly I don’t have any idea or suspicion of where we are now.
FELICE: After the performance, Clare, I’ll answer any question you can think of, but I’m not going to hold up the curtain to answer a single one now!
CLARE [rising]: —Exhaustion has—symptoms . . .
FELICE: So do alcohol and other depressants less discretely mentioned.
CLARE: I’ve only had half a grain of—
FELICE: Washed down with liquor, the effect’s synergistic. Dr. Forrester told you that you could have heart arrest—on stage!
CLARE: Not because of anything in a bottle or box but—
FELICE [overlapping]: What I know is I play with a freaked out, staggering—
CLARE [overlapping]: Well, play with yourself, you long-haired son of a mother!
FELICE [overlapping]: Your voice is thick, slurred, you’ve picked up—vulgarisms of—gutters!
CLARE [overlapping]: What you pick up is stopped at the desk of any decent hotel.
FELICE [overlapping]: Stop it! I can’t take any more of your—
CLARE [overlapping]: Truth!
FELICE [overlapping]: Sick, sick—aberrations!
[There is a pause.]
CLARE [like a child]: When are we going home?
FELICE: —Clare, our home is a theatre anywhere that there is one.
CLARE: If this theatre is home, I’d burn it down over my head to be warm a few minutes . . . You know I’m so blind I can’t go on without crawling unless you—
FELICE: Wait a minute, a moment, I’m still checking props —bowl of soapwater but only one spool . . .
[CLARE encounters the Gothic, wood figure of a Madonna.]
CLARE: —You know, after last season’s disaster, and the one before last, we should have taken a long, meditative rest on some Riviera instead of touring these primitive, God-knows-where places.
FELICE: You couldn’t stop any more than I could, Clare.
CLARE: If you’d stopped with me, I could have.
FELICE: With no place to return to, we have to go on, you know.
CLARE: And on, till finally—here. I was so exhausted that I blacked out in a broken-back chair.
FELICE: I’m glad you got some rest.
CLARE [hoarsely]: The mirrors were blind with dust—my voice is going, my voice is practically gone!
FELICE: —Phone where? Piano top. No. Table.—Yes, you never come on stage before an opening night performance without giving me the comforting bit of news that your voice is gone and . . . [Imitaing her voice:] “I’ll have to perform in pantomime tonight.”
CLARE: Strike a lucifer for me.
[He strikes a match and she comes unsteadily into the interior set: he gives her a despairing look.]
FELICE: —Why the tiara?
CLARE [vaguely]: It was just in my hand, so I put it on my head.
[He gives a little hopeless laugh.]
I try like hell—how I try—to understand your confusions, so why don’t you make some effort to understand mine a little?
FELICE: Your variety’s too infinite for me, Clare.
CLARE: —You still can’t forgive me for my Cleopatra notices. Ran into columns of extravagance and your Anthony’s were condensed as canned milk.
FELICE: —Do you hate me, Clare?
CLARE: I think that’s a question I should be putting to you. The night we opened in . . . [She tries to remember the place, can’t.] —you turned on me like a spit-devil and shouted—Oh, I’d rather not quote you!
FELICE: Do. Please.
CLARE: —You called me a drunken slut and said “Fuck off!”
FELICE: —You can’t believe I said that.
CLARE: Oh, let it go, it’s gone . . . [She starts toward the proscenium.] Think I’ll have a look at the enemy forces.
FELICE [seizing her wrist]: You will not, you must never look at an audience before a performance. It makes you play self-consciously, you don’t get lost in the play.
CLARE: Never catch hold of my wrist like that, it leaves blue bruises! [She has struck his hand away.] Why are you so—wildly distracted, cher?
FELICE: I’m living on my nerves and they’re—I’ll probably dry up several times tonight but—[He quickly exits to light the interior set.]
CLARE [looking about]: Oh, God, this is the set for “The Two-Character Play,” but where’s the stairs and—?
FELICE [returning]: So far only parts of the set have arrived.
CLARE: What will I do when I’m supposed to go upstairs for parasol and gloves?
FELICE: Face upstage and I’ll say you’ve gone upstairs. Your parasol and gloves are on top of the piano.
CLARE: Are you serious? About playing it this way?
FELICE: Desperately.
CLARE: Are you going to throw new speeches at me tonight?
FELICE: Tonight there’ll have to be a lot of improvisation, but if we’re both lost in the play, the bits of improvisation won’t matter at all, in fact they may make the play better. [He smiles wryly.]
CLARE: I like to know what I’m playing and especially how a play ends.
FELICE: When the curtain is up and the lights are on, we’ll fly like birds through the play, and if we dry up, we’ll use it.
CLARE: Felice, do you have a fever?
[FELICE has crossed to the proscenium.]
There you go peeking out again, and you won’t let me.
FELICE: I have to see if they’re in or—
CLARE: We have no communication with the front of the house? [She coughs and spits.]
FELICE: None.
CLARE: You mean we’re—?
FELICE: Isolated. Completely.
CLARE: —I need a month at a little—Bavarian—spa.
FELICE: You know, that “high” you’re on is going to wear off in about half an hour and you’ll have the energy of a piece of seaweed at low tide . . . Immediately after this tour I suggest that you enter a clinic for withdrawal from—
CLARE [shouting]: After this tour is when? When will there be an end to it?
FELICE: Soon.
CLARE: Make it sooner! Cancel the rest and let’s—rest!
FELICE: Do you want to cross back over forty, fifty frontiers on wooden benches in third-class coaches?
CLARE: —You mean that—?
FELICE: I mean that’s the style we’d make our triumphant return in if we turned back now without playing a week in the black since—
CLARE: —How big a hole are we in?
FELICE: Big enough to bury an elephant team.
CLARE: Why haven’t you told me these things?
FELICE: It’s impossible to have a realistic discussion with someone who’s—[He holds up three fingers.] How many fingers am I holding up?
CLARE: You know I don’t have my—my God, yes, I do! [she fumblingly removes a pair of “granny” glasses from a pocket in her cloak-lining. She crosses directly to Felice, head tilted back to peer into his face.] Oh, Felice, you look so terribly tired!
FELICE: Those glasses make you look—
CLARE: Ancient? Well—they don’t subtract many years from you either.—Do you mind if I make one more comment on your appearance—if it’s tactfully worded?
FELICE: I’ve had no time to make up.
CLARE: This comment’s on your hair, why, it’s almost as long as mine.
FELICE: You know I wear a wig for the role of Felice.
CLARE: The part of Felice is not the only part that you play.
FELICE: From now on, it might be.
CLARE: Wouldn’t that please the Company! What would they be doing?
FELICE: I don’t have any idea or a particle of interest.
CLARE: Oh! How regal!
[FELICE pounds the stage floor three times with a staff.]
Listen to that!
FELICE: I hear it.
CLARE: It sounds like a house full of furious, unfed apes.
FELICE: Maybe it is.
CLARE: Felice—where is everybody?
[He pounds the stage floor again.]
I asked you where is everybody and I insist on an answer.
FELICE: Oh, you insist on an answer! You’re sure you want an answer?
CLARE: Yes, I do, right now!
FELICE: Perhaps you’ll find this more illuminating than I did. [He hands her a piece of paper.]
CLARE: Oh. A cablegram?
FELICE: Yes!
CLARE: I can’t make it out in this sepulchral—
FELICE: —Never mind, Clare, give it back.
CLARE: Not if it has to do with—strike a match!
[He does. She reads aloud, slowly, in a shocked voice.]
“Your sister and you are—insane!—Having received no pay since—”
[The match burns out.]
Strike another!
[He does.]
“We’ve borrowed and begged enough money to return to—”
FELICE: Signed: “The Company.” Charming? [He blows the match out.]
CLARE: My God! Well, as they say— [She turns to the piano and strikes a note.]
FELICE: What do they say?
CLARE: That sort of wraps things up!
FELICE: The Company’s left us, except for two stage hands who came in without a word and put up this piece of the set before they—
CLARE: Deserted us, too?
FELICE [again at the proscenium, looking out]: Now, then, they’re finally seated!
CLARE [retreating from the proscenium]: —Felice, I am going to the hotel, that’s where you’ll find me when you’ve recovered your senses, I am going straight there and collapse because I would rather collapse in my hotel room than on a stage before people stranger than strangers.
FELICE: What hotel did you think you were going to, Clare?
CLARE: —Whichever—hotel we—stay at . . .
FELICE: Do you recall checking into a hotel, Clare?
CLARE: —When?
FELICE: Yes, when? After we got off the train, before we came to the theatre, is that when?
CLARE: Are you telling me that Fox hasn’t made hotel reservations for us?
FELICE: Fox has done one thing. No, two: he demanded his salary—which I couldn’t pay him—and after that, disappeared.
[She gasps. FELICE holds out his hand toward her. Looking desolately into space, she places her hand in his.]
Clare, I was holding out my hand for your coat.
CLARE: Do you think I’m about to remove my coat in this ice-plant?
FELICE: We’re in our home, Clare, in the deep South and in summer.
CLARE [hugging her coat about her]: Let’s—synchronize—thermometers and—geographies.
[He suddenly tears the coat off her, and she cries out]
FELICE [pointing downstage at the supposed curtain]: Hush.
FELICE: Yes, if you wish. Take your place.
[She snatches up her coat, which he had flung onto the sofa.]
CLARE: I’ll wait in my dressing room till you’ve announced the performance is canceled. Where are you—?
[He is striding toward the wings.]
FELICE [turning to hiss at her furiously]: Will you take your place? I’m going to open the curtains!—Now, this instant!
CLARE: Are you serious?
FELICE: Desperately!
CLARE: Impossible!
FELICE: Necessary.
CLARE: Some necessary things are impossible.
FELICE: And some impossible things are necessary. We are performing tonight.
[She stares at him a moment: then strikes a sharp note on the piano.]
CLARE: I told you that I would not perform again in The Two-Character Play until you had cut it. Have you? Have you cut it?
FELICE: [evasively]: Where my work is concerned—
CLARE: I said have you cut it?
FELICE: You’re given cuts when I make them.
CLARE: I’m not going to be given cuts, I’m going to make them myself. Now can you hear this C-sharp on the piano? [She strikes a note on the piano.] Whenever you hear this C-sharp struck on the piano it means a cut’s coming at you, and don’t try to duck it or I’ll take a walk.
FELICE: This is—
CLARE: Sacrilege?
FELICE: —Idiocy!
CLARE: Total theatre is going to be total collaboration on this occasion, ducks.
FELICE: —Take your place.
CLARE: My place is here at the phone.
FELICE [pointing to the window frame]: Your place is—
CLARE: Here at the phone!
FELICE: You—mother!—May I have the tiara?
[She smiles with fierce mockery: removes the tiara from her head and places it crookedly on his. He hurls it away.]
You—castrating bitch, you—drunk—slut! Yes, I did call you that, I don’t look at you on stage because I can’t bear the sight of your—eyes, they’re eyes of an—old demented—whore! Yes, a water-front whore! Lewd, degenerate, leering!
CLARE: I see!
FELICE: No, no, no, you don’t see, you’re bl-i-i-nd!
[He stalks into the wings. She stands shocked motionless for a moment: then snatches up her cloak and throws it about her. She starts a few steps toward the opposite wings when the interior set is flooded with warm amber light and the curtains are heard jerking spasmodically open. She freezes. There are several guttural exclamations from the house: above them, a hoarse male laugh and the shrill laugh of a woman. CLARE’S eyes focus blazingly on the “house”: She suddenly flings her cloak to the floor as if challenging the audience to combat. FELICE returns to the stage. He inclines his head toward CLARE: then toward the house.]
The performance commences!
[The performance. Clare is at the phone.]
FELICE: Who are you calling, Clare?
[She seems not to hear him.]
Clare! Who are you calling?
CLARE: —Not a soul still existing in the world gone away . . .
FELICE: Then why did you pick up the phone?
CLARE: I just picked it up to see if it’s still connected.
FELICE: The telephone company would send us a notice before they turned off the phone.
CLARE [vaguely and sadly]: Sometimes notices aren’t— noticed.
FELICE: The house is—
CLARE: Still occupied but they might have the idea it wasn’t, since it’s not lighted at night and no one still comes and goes.
FELICE: We would have received a notice if one was sent.
CLARE: We can’t count on that.
FELICE: We mustn’t start counting things that can’t be counted on, Clare.
CLARE: We must trust in things—
FELICE: Continuing as they’ve—
CLARE: Continued?
FELICE: Yes, as they’ve continued, for such a long time that they seem—
CLARE: Dependable to us.
FELICE: Permanently dependable, yes, but we were—
CLARE: Shocked when the—
FELICE: Lights refused to turn on, and it was lucky the moon was so nearly full that, with the window shades raised, it lighted the downstairs rooms.
CLARE: But we collided with things in the upstairs hall.
FELICE: Now we could find our way around in it blind.
CLARE: We can, we do. Without even touching the walls.
FELICE: It’s a small house and we’ve lived in it always.
[CLARE strikes C-sharp: he glares at her; she strikes it repeatedly. In a fierce whisper:] I will not cut into texture!
CLARE: There’s more about night. You tell me that I was indulging in a bit of somnambulism, last night?
FELICE: Clare, you had a sleepless night.
CLARE: And you did, too.
FELICE: In a small house when one of the occupants has a sleepless night, it keeps the other awake.
CLARE [crying out]: Why do I have to sleep in that death chamber?
FELICE [controlled]: We agreed that their room was just a room now. Everything about them’s been removed.
CLARE: Except Father’s voice in the walls and his eyes in the ceiling.—That night of the accident night I had to force my way past you to the room where—Mother opened the door . . .
FELICE [cutting her off]: Stop repeating, repeating!
CLARE: No sign of recognizing me at the door, no greeting, a look of surprise, very slight, till she opened her mouth on a soundless fountain of blood, and Father said, “Not yet, Clare,” just as quietly, gently to me as that, before they went separate ways, she to the door of the bathroom where she fell and he to the window where he fired again looking out at—out . . .
[FELICE strikes his fist on the piano keys.]
And you tell me it isn’t their room any more?
FELICE: I said: “LET IT REST!”
CLARE: Not in that room at night!
FELICE [with forced quiet]: You weren’t in that room last night, you wandered about the house, upstairs and down, as if you were looking for something.
CLARE: Exploring the premises, yes . . .
FELICE: With a fine tooth comb as if you suspected there was a time bomb somewhere.
CLARE: I could almost hear it ticking.
FELICE: Well? Did you find it?
CLARE: No, but I did find something, this old memento, this token of—
FELICE [starting the tape recorder]: What?
CLARE [lifting her hand]: My ring with my birthstone, the opal.
FELICE: You haven’t worn it for so long that I thought it was lost.
CLARE: Mother told me that opals were unlucky.
FELICE: Frigid women are given to little fears and superstitions, and—
CLARE: Opals do have a sinister reputation. And it was a gift from Father.
FELICE: That was enough to prejudice her against it.
CLARE: Sleepless people love rummaging. I look through pockets that I know are empty. I found this ring in the pocket of an old mildewed corduroy coat which I’d forgotten I’d ever owned and didn’t care if the stone was unlucky or not.
FELICE: Nothing could be unlucky that looks so lovely . . .
[He turns the ring on her finger—a sort of lovemaking. She strikes the piano key.]
CLARE [regaining her composure somewhat]: Didn’t you tell me you went out today?
FELICE: Yes, you saw me come in.
CLARE: I didn’t see you go out.
FELICE: When you see somebody come in you know he’s been out.
CLARE [skeptically] How far outside did you go? Past the sunflowers, or—?
FELICE: I went to the gate, and do you know what I noticed?
CLARE: Something that scared you back in?
FELICE: No, what I saw didn’t scare me, but it, it—startled me, though. It was—
FELICE: Clare.
CLARE: What?
FELICE [in a stage whisper]: You know The Two-Character Play.
CLARE [in a loud stage whisper] The cablegram is still on the set.
FELICE: Clare, there wasn’t, there isn’t a cablegram in The Two-Character Play.
CLARE: Then take it off the sofa where I can see it. When you see a thing, you can’t think it doesn’t exist, unless you’re hallucinating and you know that you are.
[He picks up the cablegram, crumples it, and makes a gesture of throwing it out the window.]
FELICE: There now, it never existed, it was just a moment of panic.
CLARE: What a convenient way to dispose of a panicky moment!
FELICE: Dismissed completely, like that! [He snaps his fingers.] And now I’ll tell you what I saw in the yard when I went out.
CLARE: Yes, do that! Do, please.
FELICE: I saw a sunflower out there that’s grown as tall as the house.
CLARE: Felice, you know that’s not so!
FELICE: Go out and see for yourself.
[She tries to laugh.]
Or just look out the window, it’s in the front yard, on this side.
CLARE: Front yard?
[He nods but averts his face with a slight smile.]
Now I know you’re fooling.
FELICE: Oh, no, you don’t or you’d go look out the window for yourself, it’s shot up as quick as Jack’s beanstalk and it’s so gold, so brilliant that it—[He sits on the sofa and seems to be musing aloud.]—it seems to be shouting sensational things about us. [He gives her a quick, sly look.] Tourists will be attracted, botanists—you know botanists—will come to—marvel at this marvel, photograph it for the—the National Geographic, this marvel of nature, this two-headed sunflower taller than a two-story house which is still inhabited by a recluse brother and his sister.
CLARE: It would be a monster of nature, not marvel, if it existed at all, and I know that it doesn’t.
[She strikes a warning note on the piano. He snatches her hand off the keyboard and slams the piano lid shut; then sits on it, grinning at her mockingly.]
FELICE: You know, I wonder if nature, that vast being and producer of beings, is satisfied with so many of its beings being so much like so many others of that kind of being or would actually be better pleased with more little—prodigies? Monsters? Freaks? Mute relations?—What’s your opinion, Clare?
CLARE: No opinion, no comment, no recollection of lines!
FELICE: My opinion is that nature is tolerant of and sometimes favorable to these—differentiations if they’re—usable? Constructive?—But if you’re not, watch out you!
[She snatches up her cloak. He rises from the piano lid.]
FELICE: —Why don’t you go to the door? Don’t you hear them knocking?
CLARE: Who?
FELICE: I can’t see through the door.
CLARE: I don’t hear any knocking. [He drums the piano lid with his knuckles.] —Oh, yes, now, I do, but—
FELICE: See who’s there.
CLARE: I can’t imagine.
FELICE: You don’t have to imagine, you can go to the door and—
CLARE: You go.
[There are audible whispers.]
You’re closer to it than I am, and—
[He knocks the table harder.]
—They’re very—insistent, aren’t they?
FELICE: It must be something important, go on, see what it is.
CLARE: I’m—not dressed for callers.
FELICE: You’re prefectly dressed and look extremely well.
CLARE [retreating further from the door]: So do you aside from your hair.
FELICE: I don’t have a tie on, and this old shirt of father’s, I’ve sweated through it.
CLARE: That’s, uh, excusable on a—hot afternoon. You, uh, let them in and say you’ll call me down if it’s me they—want to see me.
FELICE: Have you reached the point where you’re scared to answer a door?
CLARE: Reached and—the knocking’s stopped.—I think they’ve gone away, now.—No! Look! They’re slipping a piece of paper under the door!
[They stare fearfully at the supposed piece of paper on the doorsill.]
FELICE: —They’ve left.
CLARE: Yes! Pick up the—
[He crosses to the door, and makes the gesture of picking up a card, then frowns at it.]
—What is—?
FELICE: A card from something called “Citizens’ Relief.”
CLARE: Then people know we’re still here?
FELICE: Naturally, yes, where would we be but still here? —“Citizens’ Relief”—I’ve never heard of it. Have you?
CLARE: No, and I think it’s wise to be cautious about things you’ve—
FELICE: Never heard of.
CLARE: It might be a trick of some kind.
FELICE: It might be an excuse to intrude on our—
CLARE: Privacy, yes. Shall we destroy the card or keep it in case of a desperate situation?
FELICE: The case of a desperate situation isn’t a thing we have to wait for, is it?
CLARE: Oh, but all the questions we’d have to—
FELICE: —Answer . . .
CLARE: Yes, there’d be interviews and questionnaires to fill out and—
FELICE: Organizations are such—
CLARE: Cold!
FELICE: Yes, impersonal things.
CLARE: I’ll put the card under grandmother’s wedding picture, just in case a desperate situation—
FELICE: Increases in desperation . . .
CLARE: Anyway, here it is, at least we—know where it is—What’s next on the agenda? Do I pick up the phone? No, no, I pick up this sea shell, hold it to my ear, and remember the time that Father took us to the sea coast.
FELICE: It was the Gulf coast. [He starts the tape again.]
CLARE: The Gulf connects with a sea, it has gulls, tides, dunes—
FELICE: Much against Mother’s objections, he took us there one summer when we were children, before we had started to school—
CLARE: Mother refused to stay at The Lorelei on the beach, we had to stay at the Hotel Commerce, back of the business district, and walk to the Municipal in bathing suits that hung down to our knees, and Mother never stopped nagging: “I checked with the cashier at the hotel. We can only afford a day more.”
FELICE: Father would grin up lazily from the sand but finally shout out furiously at her: “Go back to the Hotel Commerce, continue your mathematical talk with the cashier, subtract, divide if you can, but don’t multiply, and don’t stay here in the sun, it disagrees with you!”
CLARE: And he’d snatch us up and away we would race, away . . .
FELICE: —Away from the Municipal, past the lighthouse tower and into the sand dunes where he tore off his suit and looked so much more elegant without it that we tore off ours, and he carried me into the water on his smooth gold shoulders and I learned to swim as if I’d always known how to . . .
CLARE [pointing out toward, the audience]: Felice—someone’s talking out there with his back to the stage as if he were giving a lecture.
FELICE: That’s the interpreter.
CLARE: Oh, my God, he’s telling them what we’re saying!?
FELICE: Naturally, yes, and explaining our method. That’s what he’s here for.
CLARE [half sobbing]: I don’t know what to do next—I. . .
FELICE: —I know what to do.
CLARE: Oh, do you? What is it? To sit there staring all day at a threadbare rose in a carpet until it withers?
FELICE: Oh, and what do you do? What splendid activity are you engaged in, besides destroying the play?
CLARE: None, none, nothing, unless it’s something to pace about the house in a maze of amazement all day and sometimes in the night, too. Oh, I know why!
FELICE: Why?
CLARE: I want to go out! Out, out, human outcry, I want to go out!
FELICE: You want to go out calling?
CLARE: Yes, out calling!
FELICE: Go out!
CLARE: Alone?—Not alone!
FELICE: Ladies go calling alone on such nice afternoons.
CLARE: You come out calling with me.
FELICE: I can’t, I have to stay here.
CLARE: For what?
FELICE: —To guard the house against—
CLARE: What?
FELICE: Curious—trespassers! Somebody has to stay on the premises and it has to be me, but you go out calling, Clare. You must have known when you got up this morning that the day would be different for you, not a stay-at-home day, of which there’ve been so many, but a day for going out calling, smiling, talking. You’ve washed your hair, it’s yellow as corn silk, you’ve pinned it up nicely, you have on your blue-and-white print that you washed to go out in today and you have the face of an angel, Claire, you match the fair weather, so carry out your impulse, go out calling. You know what you could do? Everywhere you went calling you could say, “Oh, do you know how idiotic I am? I went out without cigarettes!” And they’d offer you one at each place and you could slip them into your purse, save them till you got home, and we could smoke them here, Clare. So! Go! [He opens the door for her.]
CLARE: Why have you opened the door?
FELICE: For you to go out calling.
CLARE: Oh, how thoughtful yes, that’s very gentlemanly of you to open the door for me to go outside without parasol or gloves, but not very imaginative of you to imagine that I’d go out alone.
[They stand a moment staring at each other near the open door: her hands and lips tremble; the slight smile, mocking and tender, twists his mouth.]
—Suppose I came home alone, and in front of the house there was a collection of people around an ambulance or police car or both? We’ve had that happen before . . . No. I won’t go out alone. [She slams the door shut.] My legs wouldn’t hold me up, and as for smiling and talking, I’d have on my face the grimace of a doll and my hair would stick to the sweat of my forehead. Oh, I’d hardly sit down for this friendly call on—what friends?—before I—staggered back up, that is, if, if—the colored girl had been allowed to admit me.
FELICE: It was your idea. You shouted: “Out!” Not me.
CLARE: I’d never dream of going out without you in your—disturbed—condition.
FELICE: And you in yours.
CLARE: Me, calling, a fire engine shrieks, a revolver— bang!—discharges! Would I sit there continuing with the smile and the talk? [She is sobbing a little: her trembling hand stretches toward him.] No, I’d spring up, run, run, and my heart would stop on the street!
FELICE [his smile fading out]: I never believed you’d go out calling.
CLARE: Right you were about that if you thought alone— but calling? Yes, I’ll do that! Phone calling is calling! [She rushes to the telephone and snatches up the receiver.]
FELICE: Calling, who are you—? Careful!
CLARE [into phone]: Operator, the Reverend Mr. Wiley! Urgent, very, please hurry!
[Felice tries to wrest the phone from her grasp: for a moment they struggle for it.]
FELICE: Clare!
CLARE: Reverend Wiley, this is Clare Devoto, yes, you remember, the daughter of—
FELICE: What are you? Out of your—?
CLARE: You’ll have to let me go on or he’ll think I’m— [into the phone again:] Excuse me, Riverend Wiley, there was—an interruption. My brother and I still live in our parents’ home after, after the—terrible accident in the house which was reported so maliciously falsely in The Press-Scimitar. Father did not kill Mother and himself but—
FELICE: Tell him we shot them why don’t you?
CLARE: The house was broken into by some—
FELICE: Favorite of nature?
CLARE: Housebreaker who murdered our parents, but I think we are suspected! My brother Felice and I are surrounded by so much suspicion and malice that we almost never, we hardly ever, dare to go out of the house. Oh, I can’t tell you how horrifying it’s been, why, the neighbor’s child has a slingshot and bombards the house with rocks, we heard his parents give the slingshot to him and tell him to— —Ha! Another rock struck just now!—It goes on all through the daytime, and in the nighttime people stop and linger on the sidewalk to whisper charges of—anomalous letters of obscenities are sent us, and in The Press-Scimitar—sly allusions to us as the deranged children of a father who was a false mystic and, Reverend Wiley, our father was a man who had true psychic, mystical powers, granted only to an Aries whose element is cardinal fire. [She is sobbing now.]—Why? We’re gentle people, never offending a soul, trying to still live only, but—
FELICE [wrests the phone from her hands.]
FELICE: Mr. Wiley, my sister has a fever.
CLARE: No, I—!
FELICE: She’s not herself today, forget what, excuse and— [He hangs up, wipes the sweat off his forehead with a trembling hand.] Wonderful, that does it! Our one chance is privacy and you babble away to a man who’ll think it his Christian duty to have us confined in—
[She gasps and stumbles to the piano.]
Clare!
[She strikes a treble note repeatedly on the piano. He snatches her hand from the keyboard and slams the lid down.]
CLARE: You shouldn’t have spoken that word! “Confined”! That word is not in the—
FELICE: Oh. A prohibited word. When a word can’t be used, when it’s prohibited its silence increases its size. It gets larger and larger till it’s so enormous that no house can hold it.
CLARE: Then say the word, over and over, you—perverse monster, you!
FELICE [turns away.]
Scared to? Afraid of a—?
FELICE: I won’t do lunatic things. I have to try to pretend there’s some sanity here.
CLARE: Oh, is that what you’re trying? I thought you were trying to go as far off as possible without going past all limits.
[He turns to face her, furiously. She smiles and forms the word “confined” with her lips; then she says it in a whisper. He snatches up a soft pillow.]
Confined, confined!
[He thrusts the pillow over her mouth, holding her by the shoulder. She struggles as if suffocating.]
FELICE: All right? O.K., now? Enough?
[She nods. He tosses the pillow away. They stare at each other silently for a moment. She has forgotten the next bit of business. He points to the piano. She turns and strikes a chord on it.]
An interval of five minutes.
CLARE: Fifteen!
FELICE [rushing into the wings to lower the curtain]: Ten!
CURTAIN INTERVAL