CURTAIN
WILL MR. MERRIWETHER
RETURN FROM MEMPHIS?
“And we have seen night lifted in thine arms”
—Hart Crane
Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis? was first performed on January 24, 1980 at the Tennessee Williams Fine Arts Center of the Florida Keys Community College. It was directed by William Prosser; the set and costume designs were by Peggy Kellner; the lighting design was by Michael Orris Watson; the choreography was by Mimi McDonald; original music was composed by Ronald Maltai; and the production stage manager was Laura Balboni. The cast was as follows:
LOUISE: Roxana Stuart
NORA: Naomi Riseman
GLORIA: Melissa Leo
THE APPARITION OF VINCENT VAN GOGH: Jim Adams
MISS CALHOUN, a librarian: Jill McEnerney
A “ROMANTICALLY HANDSOME” YOUTH: Arnie Burton
MISS YORKE, an English teacher: Janice White
THE EUMENIDES ONE, TWO, AND THREE: Ruth Parker, Rona Paris, Barbara Robison
THE INSTRUCTOR AT LA CERCLE: George Gugleotti
MRS. BIDDLE: Tanya Duffy
THE APPARATION OF ARTHUR RIMBAUD: Sam Weman
THE APPARATION OF ISABELLE RIMBAUD, his sister: Cecelia Bierwirth
MRS. ELDRIDGE: Marion Stevens
MR. MERRIWETHER: David Williams
THE DANCERS: Mimi McDonald, Kerry Garrett, Gary Gonzalez, Tony Barnes, Bettye Harris, Mercedes Valdez
THE BANJO PLAYER: Dennis Kellog
THE APPARITION OF CORNELIUS WADDLES: Barney Barnett
A VOICE FROM THE WINGS: Jeff Nacht
***
AUTHOR’S PRODUCTION NOTE:
At carefully spaced—not too frequent—intervals in the play a scrim should mask the white room and two or three Negro couples should dance out of the wings and perform a cakewalk to the ragtime music of the banjo. Of course, the banjo should be louder than during the dramatic scenes.
Perhaps a couple should sing, perhaps not. Underlying the gaiety of the dancing should be something of a different nature and I don’t know how to define it except by saying it should correspond to Louise’s comment—about the iridescent fan removed from her table— “The word for the fan is savage.”
PROLOGUE
The principals, or perhaps the entire cast, are assembled on stage. A voice speaks to them.
VOICE: What is this?
PLAYERS: An entertainment.
VOICE: And what am I?
[A whispered, argumentative conference takes place among the players.]
VOICE: I ask you “What am I?”
GLORIA: A tiresome old man.
[Her pretty young mother gives her a look of sharp reproval.]
GLORIA: And probably dead.
LOUISE [the mother]: Gloria! You’re being—
GLORIA: Impertinent? What of it? If he’s dead he hears nothing and sees nothing and feels nothing.
LOUISE: He was living when he wrote the lines.
GLORIA: Yes, including mine. But isn’t now. And I’m tired. We’ve been rehearsing all day and this is opening night. Face it, mother. He’s just another one of your apparitions.
LOUISE: His.
GLORIA: Yours in the play which he calls an entertainment, and I would say the craziest, most improbable of the lot and, if this is an entertainment, why don’t we get on with it?
LOUISE: I did not bring you up to be uppity like this, an uppity little—hussy!
GLORIA: A lovely example you set me with your “Mr. Merriwether.”
[Louise looks down, closing her eyes.]
GLORIA: You have no answer to that.
VOICE: About one thing you were right: let’s get on with the entertainment. Pick it up, keep it up. Remember: if it drags, I’ll bring on the dancers and drown you out with music.
GLORIA: Who gives a damn, you dirty old—apparition! [She has sprung up, staring defiantly into space.] I think we’re asked to excuse dead people too much!
[Louise seizes her wrist. She wrenches free and starts off. Lights blink wildly, ragtime music strikes up, and the dancers sweep on.]
ACT ONE
SCENE ONE
The action takes place in Bethesda, Maryland‚ early in the twentieth century. Scene: for all interior scenes of the play the setting is a white room with two enormous windows that look out upon clear evenings in spring. Illogically, between the two windows, is a curtained doorway. The curtain is purple-dark with little glints of silver and gold thread woven into it.
The set also includes a crescent-shaped runway or thrust, which can retract under the main stage when not in use, and it is outlined with light bulbs when in use. The actors sometimes walk or dance out on it. Globes of light above the runway should spell out “Tiger Town.”
When the white room represents the home of Louise and her daughter, Gloria, there is a long table parallel to the proscenium. It has a cover which is delicately checkered in pastel colors, and it bears a collection of articles, selected and arranged as if for a painter’s still-life. There are chairs at either end of the table, one pale yellow and the other pale blue.
Louise and Gloria sit as silent and motionless as figures in a tableau for several moments. Then a banjo begins to play a ragtime piece—as if at a distance. The banjo player remains on stage at all times, moving closer, or farther back, sometimes into the dark, as the stage directions indicate. Louise rises and carefully lifts from the arrangement of articles on the table a black lace fan which is sprinkled with bits of iridescent metal. Simultaneously the runway is projected from under the set. Along the runway are frosted globes that light up. Louise steps out upon the runway. Behind her, a scrim falls. The scrim is designed and colored with an abstraction of wild roses and clover.
Louise moves to the center of the runway. At the runway’s center, she stops and inclines her head slightly to the audience. The banjo is softer. Louise begins to speak as if continuing a reverie.
LOUISE: Today I prepared his room for his return.
[The banjo player plays “Waiting on the Levee.”]
LOUISE: And today an old Gypsy woman came to the door.
[The banjo fades.]
LOUISE: “Ask me the question most important to you,” she said, and I said to the Gypsy: “Can I expect Mr. Merriwether to return from Memphis tonight or tomorrow or—?” The Gypsy said—it wasn’t exactly an answer—
[The distant banjo is heard playing a gypsy tune.]
LOUISE: “He will never forget you.” No, not an adequate answer. His life was mine, mine his. I bought some little sachets of dried flowers and herbs from the old Gypsy woman and put them in the back corners of Mr. Merriwether’s chiffonier.
[The scrim is lifted. Louise lifts the hem of her lace dress and returns to the room.]
GLORIA: You’re still dreaming that Mr. Merriwether is going to come back from Memphis?
LOUISE [angry]: Did I forget to tell you that he called me, telephoned me from Memphis, last night?
GLORIA: Has he given up his promotion?
LOUISE: There’s no such thing as a promotion that takes you away from the woman you love.
GLORIA: Were you asleep when you received this telephone call?
LOUISE: What you mean is that I dreamed that he called me.
GLORIA: He seemed so pleased and proud of being made the sales manager of the—
LOUISE: Yes, at first, but—I won’t discuss it with you. I suppose you’re going to the library again tonight.
GLORIA: Yes, that’s where I’m going. I’m going to the public library to write my theme for English.
LOUISE: Then dress yourself properly for a public place.
GLORIA: I’m properly dressed for a warm night.
LOUISE: For a warm night on the equator, that’s what you’re
dressed for, and can you explain to me why—never mind! Never mind!
GLORIA: I need the big dictionary and the reference books at the—
LOUISE: I said never mind.
GLORIA: I always tell Mrs. Waddles that you’ll be alone for a while and she comes right over.
LOUISE: Mrs. Waddles! A creature with a more appropriate name I’ve never encountered, and the scandal of your appearance in these, these—dresses for the equator, it’s me that’s blamed. Never mind. Go to the library or the, the—excursion steamer with ten or twelve boys to escort you to the dark upper deck.
[Gloria picks up a notebook. There is a slight pause.]
GLORIA: Mother, I think it’s a little too late to pretend that we’re conventional people.
[There is a slight pause.]
LOUISE: For some reason, when you’re not well for some reason, you say things in a way you hadn’t meant to say them. Of course I know that you’re a girl whose feelings, whose sensibilities—you see, I know long words, too—and I know you’re a beautiful girl, but Gloria, dear, watch out for early fire. You could—
GLORIA: I could?
LOUISE: Burn! In early fire! [She descends the two steps from the stage apron.] At a dance, once, the dance floor was outdoors—a storm came up suddenly. A lantern, a paper lantern, was blown from—tumbled across the—flamed up as it touched my dress, burned the hem of my dress, burned my ankles. I screamed, started to run. A man caught hold of me. “Stop! Stand still!” —He put the fire out with a bowl of punch! [She laughs.] I still screamed. He picked me up in his arms and carried me into the house. There were slices of orange on my burned, wet dress. The room, I think it was dark. He picked the orange slices off my dress that I had been, oh, so proud of, and then he rubbed an ointment, a salve, on my ankles. The room, it was his bedroom. It was light, first. “Quiet, quiet!” he kept whispering. He locked the door of the room. He turned the lamp down. The man—dead, now—was your father. Be careful of early fire! [She returns to the stage apron. Gloria has left the stage.] Perhaps I—dreamed that Mr. Merriwether telephoned me last night . . . . [She returns to the white room as her neighbor, Mrs. Nora Waddles, enters through the curtain.]
NORA: Louise!
LOUISE: Nora.
[Nora is a plump little woman of fifty. She wears a frilly apron over an equally frilly lemon-colored frock.]
NORA: How’re you feeling, your daughter let me in, looks more like your sister, I swear on the balls of himself—excuse me. I brought a bowl of strawberries and cream for you. Your weight’s fallen off like you was disturbed over something. Here, now, eat ’em, there’s powdered sugar on ’em. Delicious. I had two bowls so I know.
LOUISE: I’ll save them for a bedtime treat. Excuse me while I put them in the icebox. [She exits for a few moments through the dark door.]
NORA: I guess I can’t mention it to her, but she’s grieving about that young Mr. Merriwether that boarded here. His company transferred him to the office in Memphis. If she misses him that much, why don’t she go up to Memphis and—
[Louise re-enters the room.]
LOUISE: I had a scene that upset me this evening.
NORA: With who? Who with?
LOUISE: With Gloria. She doesn’t dress properly and she walks half a mile through the dark before the gaslights begin. Oh, I—I’m very upset this evening. I suppose I should tell somebody, but who would I tell?
NORA [softly]: In late Spring—wildflowers.
LOUISE: Naturally, I am worried sick and—
NORA: Don’t let it—
LOUISE: I’m not a competent mother. Do you know I’ve been told that high school boys wait on the steps of the library where she goes every night on the pretext of writing themes, they wait there for her and when she gets there, oh, it’s disgraceful, they all get up and follow her inside like male dogs taggling after a female dog in heat. Since the death of Craig—I, I—just can’t cope anymore with—And life does have to be handled or it gets out of hand.
NORA: Forget about it tonight. How about an apparition to distract you, honey? Last night I received one, an’ what a one she was!
LOUISE: Anyone that I’d know?
NORA: I took down her name for my records. [She produces a slip of paper.]
LOUISE: Oh. Mme. du Barry. Could she speak in English?
NORA: A little but not clearly.
LOUISE: Mme. du Barry was a mistress of King Louis Fifteenth of France.
NORA: Ow. An apparition of importance.
LOUISE: Yes, some, Nora. Her head was chopped off in the French Revolution.
NORA: But it was back on her last night.
LOUISE: I’ve never exactly admired her. When she was carted to the guillotine, she said to the executioner, “Give me just one moment more.”
NORA: Who could blame her for that? Havin’ your head chopped off you is no agreeable thing.
LOUISE: One night I received the apparition of Marie Antoinette. When she went to the guillotine she tripped a little on the top step and she said to the executioner, “Sir, please excuse me.”
NORA: Well, both of ’em had their heads chopped off ’em. Six of one and—
LOUISE: The queen had dignity.
NORA: That didn’t keep her head on her. Tonight, ow, they’re moving tonight. There’s a fresh wind blowin’ too. We’ll receive one, huh?
LOUISE: Do you hear a banjo? It must be imagination but every night it seems to be playing a little bit closer and I—
NORA: And you what?
LOUISE: Sometimes I—it—makes me feel like—crying! For no reason at all. I’m almost desperate tonight. You see, since my husband was, was—taken away, I haven’t seemed able to handle life anymore, oh, I know, I—excuse me, I’ll talk no more about that.
NORA: No, dear, don’t work yourself up. Let’s turn the lamp down a moment and see if there’s a sign of an apparition about. [She turns down the lamp, the room is dusky blue. she peers out one of the large windows.] Yep, tonight it’s so gusty you’d think you was at the seashore. Hmmm. Yes. I see a patch of mist that’s spinning about. That’s how they solidify to make an appearance, y’know.
LOUISE: An apparition does not solidify for more than a moment or two before it makes an appearance.
NORA: I know their ways.
LOUISE: So do I.
NORA: You haven’t been receiving ’em long as I have.
LOUISE: Well, be that as it may, I’ve observed their habits.
NORA’: The wind is bending the wildflowers in the fields. That’ll move ’em, give ’em some locomotion. Oh, this evening, by the balls of Himself—excuse me! —they’ll be on the move. Clover’s whisperin’ as it bends in the wind, oh, and the moon vines have a, a—lumination! They’re almost phosphorescent, and the ladies’ handkerchiefs, they’re unnaturally white, oh, the apparitions are moving tonight! This is a good night for them to wander about the world, we’ll have at least one, maybe more.
LOUISE: They rarely appear in pairs.
NORA: Oh, no, not in pairs, in pairs very rarely, but one after the other.
LOUISE: One after the other tires me out and I’m already tired.
NORA: I think it’s a pity the apparitions don’t move about more in pairs. Now the little song of invitation?
LOUISE: Yes. The song.
[They sit at opposite ends of the table and sing.]
LOUISE AND NORA:
TURN NOT BACK, GO ON, GO ON,
ALL THE WORLD IS YOURS TO ROAM.
NORA: A little bit louder, dear. We’ll sing it again from the start.
LOUISE AND NORA:
TURN NOT BACK, GO ON, GO ON
ALL THE WORLD IS YOURS TO ROAM.
IT ISN’T STRANGE AND SINGULAR TO SEEK
AND FIND NO FINAL HOME.
LOUISE: Better?
NOR
A: Much.
[The Apparition of Vincent Van Gogh enters through the curtains.]
APPARITION OF VAN GOGH [quietly, shyly]: Ladies?
NORA: Well, now who is—
APPARITION OF VAN GOGH: I am the apparition of the painter Vincent Van Gogh. I am not alive, I have no existence at all in present time so don’t be disturbed by my appearance . . .
LOUISE: We’re not disturbed. Is there anything we can do for you?
APPARITION OF VAN GOGH: Thank you, but there’s nothing a living person can do for an apparition except to receive him.
LOUISE: Would you like a bowl of strawberries and cream?
APPARITION OF VAN GOGH: Thank you for your kind offer but an apparition has no need to be fed.
NORA: I could have told you that. I’ve been visited by them so many times that I could have told you, Louise, that an apparition eats nothing and doesn’t wish to. Never.
LOUISE: Who did he say he was?
NORA: He said a painter. The name sounded foreign to me.
APPARITION OF VAN GOGH: The only thing that I want is light again and paints and brushes.
LOUISE: Yes, he’s the apparition of a painter.
APPARITION OF VAN GOGH: Yes. Even in my last few days in a madhouse, I went on with my painting, on, on, on, till something possessed me to hang myself from a tree. [He touches his throat.]
LOUISE [rising]: Won’t you sit down and rest for a while, you look tired.
APPARITION OF VAN GOGH: Tired, I always looked tired. To be demented is tiring to the person demented and—all who know him—knew him. —Is there light in the room?
LOUISE: Yes.
NORA: Oh, yes.
APPARITION OF VAN GOGH: It’s foolish of me to suppose that my apparition could see anything but dark, but—could you, would you hold the lamp directly in front of my eyes?
LOUISE: I am holding a lamp right in front of your eyes.
APPARITION OF VAN GOGH: Thank you.
LOUISE: Do you see light now?
APPARITION OF VAN GOGH: No. The usual dark of an apparition’s—vision. Thank you for receiving me. Remember that light is a treasure of incalculable value. Whether you paint or not. Now I— [He turns back to the curtains.] Thank you. Good night . . . [He exits.]
The Traveling Companion & Other Plays Page 21
