by Tony Kushner
ATTORNEY FOR THE CITY OF NEW YORK
Dear Mr. Martinez, Mr. Austin, Mr. Yow, Mr. Shabaka, Officer Vanuzzi, Officer Vasquez, Sergeant McGuire, Miss Lefkowitz, Detective Pentangelo, Captain Russlowski, Mrs. Nguyen ...
(Cut to:)
A DETECTIVE, HOUSING POLICE
Uh, Dear Leonard . . .
(Screen message:)
THIS WEB SITE IS TEMPORARILY UNAVAILABLE.
(Cut to:)
CITY SOCIAL WORKER
Dear City of New York, Dear State of New York, Dear Treasury Department:
I do not recognize your letter. I do not recognize you. I am not a person nor an individual nor a taxpayer. You have no jurisdiction over me. Paying taxes is voluntary. Had I realized this before I would never have paid any taxes, and I have been paying taxes, before this year of my dawning realization that I could not legally be compelled, I have paid taxes for seventeen years: I am not in arrears—YOU OWE ME MONEY!
Interior—Teenage Girl’s Bedroom, Bensonhurst
THE HOUSING DETECTIVE’S DAUGHTER
So like H-T-T-P-slash-slash-W-W-W-dot-TEAPARTY-DOT-COM was like permanently fried, so we went back to Hyper-Vigilance, the online ’zine, and they had this whole article about how Leonard had been busted in Cincinnati for crossing state lines with a suitcase fulla Uzis, and some bullets, and also he wrote some letter to a U.S. Marshall saying he was gonna whack him or something.
Interior—Maximum Security Prison Cell, Federal Penitentiary, Toledo, Ohio
LEONARD “HAP” DUTCHMAN
(Singing:)
To dream the impossible dream
To love pure and chaste from afar
To strive when your arms are too weary . . .
(Prison bars slam across the screen*, Leonard behind them)
To reach the Unreachable STAR!
THIS IS MY QUEST!
TO FOLLOW THAT STAR
NO MATTER HOW HOPELESS . . .
*Slides again, or a sound effect.
(Under song dissolve to:)
Interior—U.S. Attorney’s Office, Briefing Room
A press conference, mikes at a podium, the U.S. Attorney, a forty-year-old woman in a power suit.
UNITED STATES ATTORNEY
Our preliminary computer check indicates that as few as five hundred and as many as a thousand city workers have been involved in this tax evasion scheme, some for as long as five years. Scores of law enforcement officers seem to be involved ...
Interior—Manhattan Courtroom
The Housing Detective in a suit and tie, looking haggard. A gavel is banging.
DETECTIVE, HOUSING POLICE
I have no quarrel with this court, Your Honor. I am here against my wishes. I have no standing in this court. And the court has no jurisdiction over me.
Exterior—Steps of City Hall, Manhattan
An out-of-doors press conference, mikes and a podium. The mayor, a shifty-looking, snaggle-toothed guy with furtive close-set eyes, a bellicose speaking style and a bad comb-over.
MAYOR, CITY OF NEW YORK
This isn’t uh ideological. This is pure out-and-out cheating. This is a way of cheating and not paying your taxes by people who are sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States. If they were ideologically concerned, uh, political, uh, that is to say, making some sort of statement, they, uh, well they could have quit their jobs, rather than try to cheat the United States and the state out of taxes. They should have just quit!
Interior Shot—A Classroom for Smart Kids, Bensonhurst Public School
THE SUPREMELY SCARY GIRL WHO KNOWS PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING
(Giving a report) The Social Contract. The Social Contract is a theory propounded (Big smile, she’s proud of that word) by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who were French philosophers. Um, part of the deal is, like, the people agree to surrender their power to the state. Some of their power. But it’s like, how much? And it’s like, say you the state and I’m the people, did I “lend” you my power and can I fire you if I don’t like what you doing with my power, or am I just born as a citizen alienated from my power, did I somehow give up my power at birth and now I just got to hope for the best from you, and um, oh yeah: like, is this a contract between authority and each individual or is it, like, a collective expression of a general will towards civilization?
Interior—A Plush Law Firm Conference Room
Set up to meet the press. A weary Irish-American man in his sixties. Rumpled, expensive suit, glasses.
THE DEFENSE ATTORNEY FOR THE HOUSING DETECTIVES
But no, no, it’s really not ideological, I wouldn’t call what my clients did ideological, I . . . What’s that? Uh, well. I would call it more like . . . Uh, well, idiocy. Or lunacy. Take your pick.
Interior—Payroll Office at One Police Plaza
THE WOMAN IN THE PAYROLL DEPARTMENT
The day they announced they’d commenced to arrest those people was the day that TWA plane blew up and fell from the sky. I’m not a superstitious woman, but sometimes there are signs, you know, warnings, you know what I mean, writing on the wall. Not that anybody knows how to read anymore, not that anyone’s looking up at the wall to read the writing, but, you know . . . Signs. Trouble ahead. Oh, and Wall Street had a REAL bad day that day because the unemployment rate had gone down. That’s what it said: the price of stocks fell ’cause there was too many people who had jobs. So I suppose that means stocks will go back up when enough people get fired? My supervisor got fired, for gross incompetence, and I’m thinking of going for his job. Get my own cubicle, that way. Privacy. Maybe I’ll start to drink.
Death and taxes. Baby . . .
I don’t know what they’re gonna do to those poor stupid people. You could draw some bad inferences from all this. Things coming unglued. Can’t blame the little criminals too much. Things coming unglued, that’s how it seems to me. Don’t it seem like that to you?
Everything’s just coming apart at the seams. And nobody understands.
(President Clinton delivering the punchline of his 1996 State of the Union Speech before both houses of Congress.)
PRESIDENT CLINTON
So I join with Congress and my fellow Americans in declaring: The Era of Big Government Is Over!
(Cheers as the screen fades to black.)
THE END
TONY KUSHNER’s plays include A Bright Room Called Day, Angels in America (Parts One and Two) and Slavs!; as well as adaptations of Corneille’s The Illusion, Ansky’s The Dybbuk, Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechuan and Goethe’s Stella. Current projects include two plays: Homebody/Kabul and Henry Box Brown or The Mirror of Slavery; and two musical plays: St. Cecilia or The Power of Music and Caroline or Change. He is collaborating with Maurice Sendak on an American version of the children’s opera, Brundibar. Mr. Kushner has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, two Tony Awards, the Evening Standard Award, an OBIE, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and a Whiting Writers Fellowship, among other awards; recently he received a Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fellowship and a medal for Cultural Achievement from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. He grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and he lives in New York.
Death & Taxes: Hydriotaphia & Other Plays is copyright © 2000 by Tony Kushner
Introduction is copyright © 2000 by Tony Kushner; Reverse Transcription: Six Playwrights Bury a Seventh, A Ten-Minute Play That’s Nearly Twenty Minutes Long is copyright © 1996, 2000 by Tony Kushner; Hydriotaphia or The Death of Dr. Browne: An Epic Farce about Death and Primitive Capital Accumulation is copyright © 1987, 1997, 1998, 2000 by Tony Kushner; G. David Schine in Hell is copyright ©1996, 2000 by Tony Kushner; Notes on Akiba is copyright © 1995, 2000 by Tony Kushner; Terminating or Sonnet LXXV or “Lass mein Schmerzen nicht verloren sein” or Ambivalence is copyright © 1998, 2000 by Tony Kushner; East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis: A Little Teleplay in Tiny Monologues is copyright © 1996, 1998, 2000 by Tony Kushner
>
Death & Taxes: Hydriotaphia & Other Plays is published by
Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 520 Eighth Avenue, 24th Floor,
New York, NY 10018–4156.
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that this material, being fully protected under the Copyright Laws of the United States of America and all other countries of the Berne and Universal Copyright Conventions, is subject to a royalty. All rights including, but not limited to, professional, amateur, recording, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages are expressly reserved. Particular emphasis is placed on the question of readings and all uses of this book by educational institutions, permission for which must be secured from the author’s representative: Joyce Ketay, The Gersh Agency, 41 Madison Avenue, 33rd Floor, New York, NY 10010, (212) 997-1818.
“Ars Poetica?” is copyright © 1988 by Czeslaw Milosz Royalties, Inc., and is from The Collected Poems 1931-1987, The Ecco Press, Hopewell, NJ.
This publication is made possible in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency.
TCG books are exclusively distributed to the book trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Kushner, Tony.
eISBN : 978-1-559-36640-3
I. Title.
PS3561.U778 D4 1998
812’.54—dc21 98-49486
CIP
