by Tony Kushner
HARPER: It’s late.
JOE: I had a lot to think about.
HARPER: I burned dinner.
JOE: Sorry.
HARPER: Not my dinner. My dinner was fine. Your dinner. I put it back in the oven and turned everything up as high as it could go and I watched till it burned black. It’s still hot. Very hot. Want it?
JOE: You didn’t have to do that.
HARPER: I know. It just seemed like the kind of thing a mentally deranged sex-starved pill-popping housewife would do.
JOE: Uh-huh.
HARPER: So I did it. Who knows anymore what I have to do?
JOE: How many pills?
HARPER: A bunch. Don’t change the subject.
JOE: I won’t talk to you when you—
HARPER: No. No. Don’t do that! I’m . . . I’m fine, pills are not the problem, not our problem. I WANT TO KNOW WHERE YOU’VE BEEN! I WANT TO KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON!
JOE: Going on with what? The job?
HARPER: Not the job.
JOE: I said I need more time.
HARPER: Not the job!
JOE: Mr. Cohn, I talked to him on the phone, he said I had to hurry—
HARPER: Not the—
JOE: But I can’t get you to talk sensibly about anything so—
HARPER: SHUT UP!
JOE: Then what?
HARPER: Stick to the subject.
JOE: I don’t know what that is. You have something you want to ask me? Ask me. Go.
HARPER: I . . . can’t. I’m scared of you.
JOE: I’m tired, I’m going to bed.
HARPER: Tell me without making me ask. Please.
JOE: This is crazy, I’m not—
HARPER: When you come through the door at night your face is never exactly the way I remembered it. I get surprised by something . . . mean and hard about the way you look. Even the weight of you in the bed at night, the way you breathe in your sleep seems unfamiliar.
You terrify me.
JOE: I know who you are.
HARPER: Yes. I’m the enemy. That’s easy. That doesn’t change.
You think you’re the only one who hates sex; I do; I hate it with you; I do. I dream that you batter away at me till all my joints come apart, like wax, and I fall into pieces. It’s like a punishment. It was wrong of me to marry you. I knew you—
(She stops herself)
It’s a sin, and it’s killing us both.
JOE: I can always tell when you’ve taken pills because it makes you red-faced and sweaty and frankly that’s very often why I don’t want to . . .
HARPER: Because . . .
JOE: Well you aren’t pretty. Not like this.
HARPER: I have something to ask you.
JOE: Then ASK! ASK! What in hell are you—
HARPER: Are you a homo?
(Pause)
Are you?
If you try to walk out right now I’ll put your dinner back in the oven and turn it up so high the whole building will fill with smoke and everyone in it will asphyxiate. So help me God I will.
Now answer the question.
JOE: What if I . . .
(Small pause.)
HARPER: Then tell me, please. And we’ll see.
JOE: No. I’m not.
I don’t see what difference it makes.
(Louis and Prior are lying on the bed, Prior’s head resting on Louis’s chest.)
LOUIS: Jews don’t have any clear textual guide to the afterlife; even that it exists. I don’t think much about it. I see it as a perpetual rainy Thursday afternoon in March. Dead leaves.
PRIOR: Eeeugh. Very Greco-Roman.
LOUIS: Well for us it’s not the verdict that counts, it’s the act of judgment. That’s why I could never be a lawyer. In court all that matters is the verdict.
PRIOR: You could never be a lawyer because you are oversexed. You’re too distracted.
LOUIS: Not distracted; abstracted. I’m trying to make a point:
PRIOR: Namely:
LOUIS: It’s the judge in his or her chambers, weighing, books open, pondering the evidence, ranging freely over categories: good, evil, innocent, guilty; the judge in the chamber of circumspection, not the judge on the bench with the gavel. The shaping of the law, not its execution.
PRIOR: The point, dear, the point . . .
LOUIS: That it should be the questions and shape of a life, its total complexity gathered, arranged and considered, which matters in the end, not some stamp of salvation or damnation which disperses all the complexity in some unsatisfying little decision—the balancing of the scales . . .
PRIOR: I like this; very zen; it’s . . . reassuringly incomprehensible and useless. We who are about to die thank you.
LOUIS: You are not about to die.
PRIOR: It’s not going well, really . . . Two new lesions. My leg hurts. There’s protein in my urine, the doctor says, but who knows what the fuck that portends. Anyway it shouldn’t be there, the protein. My butt is chapped from diarrhea and yesterday I shat blood.
LOUIS: I really hate this. You don’t tell me—
PRIOR: You get too upset, I wind up comforting you. It’s easier—
LOUIS: Oh thanks.
PRIOR: If it’s bad I’ll tell you.
LOUIS: Shitting blood sounds bad to me.
PRIOR: And I’m telling you.
LOUIS: And I’m handling it.
PRIOR: Tell me some more about justice.
LOUIS: I am handling it.
PRIOR: Well Louis you win Trooper of the Month.
(Louis starts to cry.)
PRIOR: I take it back. You aren’t Trooper of the Month.
This isn’t working.
Tell me some more about justice.
LOUIS: You are not about to die.
PRIOR: Justice . . .
LOUIS: . . . is an immensity, a . . . confusing vastness.
Justice is God.
(Little pause)
Prior?
PRIOR: Hmmm?
LOUIS: You love me.
PRIOR: Yes.
LOUIS: What if I walked out on this?
Would you hate me forever?
(Prior kisses Louis on the forehead.)
PRIOR: Yes.
(Prior sits at the foot of the bed, facing out, away from Louis.)
JOE: I think we ought to pray. Ask God for help. Ask him together.
HARPER: God won’t talk to me. I have to make up people to talk to me.
JOE: You have to keep asking.
HARPER: I forgot the question.
Oh yeah. God, is my husband a—
JOE (Scary): Stop it. Stop it. I’m warning you.
Does it make any difference? That I might be one thing deep within, no matter how wrong or ugly that thing is, so long as I have fought, with everything I have, to kill it. What do you want from me? What do you want from me, Harper? More than that? For God’s sake, there’s nothing left, I’m a shell. There’s nothing left to kill.
As long as my behavior is what I know it has to be. Decent. Correct. That alone in the eyes of God.
HARPER: No, no, not that, that’s Utah talk, Mormon talk, I hate it, Joe, tell me, say it.
JOE: All I will say is that I am a very good man who has worked very hard to become good and you want to destroy that. You want to destroy me, but I am not going to let you do that.
(Little pause.)
HARPER: I’m going to have a baby.
JOE: Liar.
HARPER: You liar.
A baby born addicted to pills. A baby who does not dream but who hallucinates, who stares up at us with big mirror eyes and who does not know who we are.
(Pause.)
JOE: Are you really . . .?
HARPER: No.
(He turns to go.)
HARPER: Yes.
(He stops. He believes her.)
HARPER: No.
Yes.
(He tries to approach her.)
HARPER: Get away from me.
Now we both have a secr
et.
(Joe leaves the room.)
PRIOR (Speaking to Louis but not looking at him): One of my ancestors was a ship’s captain who made money bringing whale oil to Europe and returning with immigrants—Irish mostly, packed in tight, so many dollars per head. The last ship he captained foundered off the coast of Nova Scotia in a winter tempest and sank to the bottom. He went down with the ship—La Grande Geste—but his crew took seventy women and kids in the ship’s only longboat, this big, open rowboat, and when the weather got too rough, and they thought the boat was overcrowded, the crew started lifting people up and hurling them into the sea. Until they got the ballast right. They walked up and down the longboat, eyes to the waterline, and when the boat rode low in the water they’d grab the nearest passenger and throw them into the sea. The boat was leaky, see; seventy people; they arrived in Halifax with nine people on board.
LOUIS: Jesus.
PRIOR: I think about that story a lot now. People in a boat, waiting, terrified, while implacable, unsmiling men, irresistibly strong, seize . . . maybe the person next to you, maybe you, and with no warning at all, with time only for a quick intake of air you are pitched into freezing, turbulent water and salt and darkness to drown.
I like your cosmology, baby. While time is running out I find myself drawn to anything that’s suspended, that lacks an ending. But it seems to me that it lets you off scot-free.
LOUIS: What do you mean?
PRIOR: No judgment, no guilt or responsibility.
LOUIS: For me.
PRIOR: For anyone. It was an editorial “you.”
LOUIS: Please get better. Please.
Please don’t get any sicker.
Scene 9
A week later. Roy and Henry, his doctor, in Henry’s office.
HENRY: Nobody knows what causes it. And nobody knows how to cure it. The best theory is that we blame a retrovirus, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. Its presence is made known to us by the useless antibodies which appear in reaction to its entrance into the bloodstream through a cut, or an orifice. The antibodies are powerless to protect the body against it. Why, we don’t know. The body’s immune system ceases to function. Sometimes the body even attacks itself. At any rate it’s left open to a whole horror house of infections from microbes which it usually defends against.
Like Kaposi’s sarcomas. These lesions. Or your throat problem. Or the glands.
We think it may also be able to slip past the blood-brain barrier into the brain. Which is of course very bad news.
And it’s fatal in we don’t know what percent of people with suppressed immune responses.
(Pause. Roy sits, brooding. Henry waits. Then:)
ROY: This is very interesting, Mr. Wizard, but why the fuck are you telling me this?
HENRY (Hesitating, confused, then): Well, I have just removed one of three lesions which biopsy results will probably tell us is a Kaposi’s sarcoma lesion. And you have a pronounced swelling of glands in your neck, groin, and armpits—lymphadenopathy is another sign. And you have oral candidiasis and maybe a little more fungus under the fingernails of two digits on your right hand. So that’s why—
ROY: This disease.
HENRY: Syndrome.
ROY: Whatever. It afflicts mostly homosexuals and drug addicts.
HENRY: Mostly. Hemophiliacs are also at risk.
ROY: Homosexuals and drug addicts. So why are you implying that I . . .
(Roy stares hard at Henry, who begins to feel nervous.)
ROY: What are you implying, Henry?
HENRY: I don’t . . .
ROY: I’m not a drug addict.
HENRY: Oh come on Roy.
ROY: What, what, come on Roy what? Do you think I’m a junkie, Henry, do you see tracks?
HENRY: This is absurd.
ROY: Say it.
HENRY: Say what?
ROY: Say: “Roy Cohn, you are a . . .”
HENRY: Roy? I don’t—
ROY: “You are a . . .” Go on. Not “Roy Cohn you are a drug fiend.” “Roy Marcus Cohn, you are a . . .”
Go on, Henry. It starts with an “H.”
HENRY: Oh I’m not going to—
ROY: With an “H,” Henry, and it isn’t “hemophiliac.” Come on . . .
HENRY: What are you doing, Roy?
ROY: No, say it. I mean it. Say: “Roy Cohn, you are a homosexual.”
(With deadly seriousness)
And I will proceed, systematically, to destroy your reputation and your practice and your career in New York State, Henry. Which you know I can do.
(Pause. Henry summons his courage.)
HENRY: Roy, you have been seeing me since 1958. Apart from the facelifts I have treated you for everything from syphilis—
ROY: From a whore in Dallas.
HENRY: From syphilis to venereal warts. In your rectum. Which you may have gotten from a whore in Dallas, but it wasn’t a female whore.
(A standoff. Then:)
ROY: So say it.
HENRY: Roy Cohn, you are . . .
(Roy’s too scary. He tries a different approach)
You have had sex with men, many many times, Roy, and one of them, or any number of them, has made you very sick. You have AIDS.
ROY (A beat, then): AIDS.
Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words, on labels, that you believe they mean what they seem to mean. AIDS. Homosexual. Gay. Lesbian. You think these are names that tell you who someone sleeps with, but they don’t tell you that.
HENRY: No?
ROY: No. Like all labels they tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit in the food chain, in the pecking order? Not ideology, or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call, who owes me favors. This is what a label refers to. Now to someone who does not understand this, homosexual is what I am because I have sex with men. But really this is wrong. Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who in fifteen years of trying cannot pass a pissant antidiscrimination bill through City Council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout. Does this sound like me, Henry?
HENRY: No.
ROY: No. I have clout. A lot. I can pick up this phone, punch fifteen numbers, and you know who will be on the other end in under five minutes, Henry?
HENRY: The president.
ROY: Even better, Henry. His wife.
HENRY: I’m impressed.
ROY: I don’t want you to be impressed. I want you to understand. This is not sophistry. And this is not hypocrisy. This is reality. I have sex with men. But unlike nearly every other man of whom this is true, I bring the guy I’m screwing to the White House and President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand. Because what I am is defined entirely by who I am. Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man, Henry, who fucks around with guys.
HENRY: OK, Roy.
ROY: And what is my diagnosis, Henry?
HENRY: You have AIDS, Roy.
ROY: No, Henry, no. AIDS is what homosexuals have. I have liver cancer.
(Little pause.)
HENRY: Well, whatever the fuck you have, Roy, it’s very serious, and I haven’t got a damn thing for you. The NIH in Bethesda has a new drug called AZT with a two-year waiting list that not even I can get you onto. So get on the phone, Roy, and dial the fifteen numbers, and tell the First Lady you need in on an experimental treatment for liver cancer, because you can call it any damn thing you want, Roy, but what it boils down to is very bad news.
ACT TWO:
In Vitro
December 1985
Scene 1
The first week in December. Night. Prior in his underwear alone on the floor in the hallway outside his bedroom; he is much worse.
PRIOR: Louis, Louis, please wake up, oh God.
(Louis runs in.)
PRIOR: I think something horrible is wrong with me I can’t breathe
. . .
LOUIS (Starting to exit): I’m calling the ambulance.
PRIOR: No, wait, I—
LOUIS: Wait? Are you fucking crazy? Oh God you’re on fire, your head is on fire.
PRIOR: It hurts, it hurts . . .
LOUIS: I’m calling the ambulance.
PRIOR: I don’t want to go to the hospital, I don’t want to go to the hospital please let me lie here, just—
LOUIS: No, no, God, Prior, stand up—
PRIOR: DON’T TOUCH MY LEG!
LOUIS: We have to . . . Oh God this is so crazy.
PRIOR: I’ll be OK if I just lie here Lou, really, if I can only sleep a little . . .
(Louis exits.)
PRIOR: Louis?
NO! NO! Don’t call, you’ll send me there and I won’t come back, please, please Louis I’m begging, baby, please.
(Screams) LOUIS!!
LOUIS (From off; hysterical): WILL YOU SHUT THE FUCK UP!
PRIOR (Trying to stand): Aaaah. I have . . . to go to the bathroom. Wait. Wait, just—Oh. Oh God. (He shits himself)
LOUIS (Entering): Prior? They’ll be here in—
Oh my God.
PRIOR: I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
LOUIS: What did . . .? What?
PRIOR: I had an accident.
(Louis goes to him.)
LOUIS: This is blood.
PRIOR: Maybe you shouldn’t touch it . . . me . . . I . . . (He faints)
LOUIS (Quietly): Oh help. Oh help. Oh God oh God oh God help me I can’t I can’t I can’t.
Scene 2
Night. Harper at home, sitting on the floor, all alone, with no lights on. We can barely see her. Joe enters, but he doesn’t turn on the lights.
JOE: Why are you sitting in the dark? Turn on the light.
HARPER: No. I heard the sounds in the bedroom again. I know someone was in there.
JOE: No one was.
HARPER: Maybe actually in the bed, under the covers with a knife.
Oh, boy. Joe. I, um, I’m thinking of going away. By which I mean: I think I’m going off again. You . . . you know what I mean?
JOE: Please don’t. Stay. We can fix it. I pray for that. This is my fault, but I can correct it. You have to try, too.
(Joe walks to a floor lamp and switches on the light, then sits next to her on the floor. As soon as he sits, Harper stands, goes to the lamp, turns off the light, and then returns to sit beside him. They sit quietly, close together, in the dark. Then:)
HARPER: When you pray, what do you pray for?
