The Assembled Parties is copyright © 2014 by Richard Greenberg
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Greenberg, Richard, 1958– author.
The assembled parties / Richard Greenberg.—First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-55936-788-2 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS3557.R3789A862014
812’.54—dc232014019207
Book design and composition by Lisa Govan
Cover design by Mark Melnick
First Edition, November 2014
The Assembled Parties was written for Jessica Hecht, Judith Light, and Lynne Meadow
Contents
How Theater Is Like a Hostage Situation
Production History
Characters
Place
Time
Notes
Act One
Act Two
How Theater Is Like a Hostage Situation
By Richard Greenberg
Years ago, I saw a play that was beautifully written, superbly acted and hell to sit through.
It started with a character announcing that nothing was going to happen. Then she rattled off a list of examples of what wouldn’t be happening; they were the sorts of interesting-sounding things that typically happen in plays in which things happen.
It was easy enough for me to figure out why I was having such a terrible time: Nothing was happening. But to keep from hyperventilating, I started to wonder about things other than the play, as it was refusing to unfold. One of these was whether, given the fine acting and beautiful writing—by this I mean beautiful sentences; it was a parade of lovely, inert sentences—were there conditions under which I could watch this play without wanting to kill myself?
The answer was yes and came quite easily: I would be fine if I could walk around.
Maria Irene Fornes’s Fefu and Her Friends came to mind, though not perhaps aptly, as things happen in Fefu and Her Friends. Still, it seemed to me that if these scenes to which I was being subjected were enacted in, say, a house that I could wander through, pausing and listening at will, I might have been having a tolerable, even a delightful experience.
This made me ponder (because, trust me, there was still a lot of time to kill) the conditions under which we traditionally watch plays: crammed into uncomfortable seats, plunged into darkness, enjoined to remain silent, and suffering censure if we protest in any way.
Clearly, what going to the theater most closely resembled was a hostage situation, and this explained the extremity of my reaction. The enforced stillness of my role as an audience member created in me an anxiety for action. It seemed plausible to posit this as a law: Because the audience cannot move, the play must.
I believe this is why when we hate a play, we hate it so much more desperately than we do a movie or a novel or a painting. When we watch a play under the standard circumstances, we’ve lost volition and time is passing. A stalled play feels like an existential threat. Arguably, the story under the story of every play is just that: Time is passing. The master playwrights of the twentieth century—Chekhov, Strindberg, Beckett, add your favorite—were superb at exploiting the theater’s potential to excruciate time.
In a way, the bad evening at the play that traveled at the speed of stop helped me understand why I write plays: I’ve always been obsessed with time—not in a profound way, but with what it feels like. There’s a game I play with myself—or maybe it’s a disorder. This is how it goes:
I think: “When as much time passes as has passed since (some year that I remember well), I will be (_____) years old.” It’s been especially interesting since the answer started to come up “dead.”
The Assembled Parties, is set on two Christmases in 1980 and 2000. It’s anti-Aristotelian, reveling in disunities of time and action—though it’s pretty good about place. The idea of a rupture between acts occurs in a number of my plays. It’s a method I can trace back to the event that had a formative influence on my sensibility: a PBS pledge drive. I’ll explain.
When I was a little kid, there was a black-and-white, video-taped miniseries from England based on John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga. Shown here, it was a sensation, the event that turned PBS into Britain’s last colonial outpost in the U.S.
I liked it at the time. It was filled with chuffy English acting and the young Susan Hampshire, and I was an annoying premature Anglophile (that faded). What was not to like?
A decade or so later, in an effort to drum up money, the series was rerun as a marathon. I think it went a solid day. I was visiting home from one university or another and I found myself checking in at irregular intervals. A baby would be born. I’d rake some leaves. When I returned, twenty years had gone by and that baby had just been killed in The Great War. I watched the whole series in that stertorous way.
It was devastating.
Accelerated and gapped, it accorded precisely with my newly kindled (I was in my early twenties) sense of reality: Time was implacable, events whizzed by, and I didn’t have all the information.
In the first act of The Assembled Parties, Santo Loquasto’s set—a vast apartment on the Upper West Side—spins from room-to-room. In each room, something happens that is or isn’t or sort-of-is related to what happens in the other rooms. Families of good will (they exist) are failed attempts at a common pursuit. I’ve written the play so that the audience possesses the necessary facts, the characters don’t completely. Twenty years pass in the blink of an intermission and all the wisdom, care and anxiety of the first act seem to have been misapplied; what’s been prepared for is not what’s happened. Everyone tries to adjust.
And time remains implacable.
This essay was previously published by Broadway.com on March 26, 2013.
PRODUCTION HISTORY
The world premiere of The Assembled Parties was presented on Broadway at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre by Manhattan Theatre Club (Lynne Meadow, Artistic Director; Barry Grove, Executive Director) on April 17, 2013. It was directed by Lynne Meadow; the set design was by Santo Loquasto, the costume design was by Jane Greenwood, the lighting design was by Peter Kaczorowski, the sound design and original music were by Obadiah Eaves; the production sta
ge manager was Barclay Stiff. The cast was:
JULIE
Jessica Hecht
FAYE
Judith Light
JEFF
Jeremy Shamos
MORT
Mark Blum
SHELLEY
Lauren Blumenfeld
TIMMY
Alex Dreier
SCOTTY/TIM
Jake Silbermann
BEN
Jonathan Walker
VOICE OF HECTOR
Gabriel Sloyer
CHARACTERS
JULIE
FAYE
JEFF
MORT
SHELLEY
TIMMY/TIM
SCOTTY
BEN
VOICE OF HECTOR
Scotty and Tim are played by the same actor.
PLACE
A fourteen-room apartment on Central Park West.
TIME
Act One: Christmas Day, 1980.
Act Two: Christmas Day, 2000.
NOTES
The first act moves swiftly among suggestions of rooms.
The second act resolves into a detailed box set, inert, depicting the living room and, recessed, the dining room.
A slash ( / ) in dialogue indicates when the next actor starts speaking.
Act One
Christmas Day, 1980
The kitchen. Food. Julie and Jeff.
JULIE: Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!
Oh lovely!
That would be so lovely!
JEFF: Good.
JULIE: Are you sophisticated at this sort of thing?
JEFF: I have no skills
JULIE: None needed—are you safe with a chef’s knife?
JEFF: I love to cut things
JULIE: These vegetables
JEFF (Continuous): I don’t mean in a Norman Bates sort of way—I like being a sous chef—
JULIE: Cut them crosswise—medium and then toss them in that bowl of water so they don’t get mange, okay?
JEFF: What is this going to be
JULIE: Oh that’s part crudité—part mirepoix—and this is going to be rumaki— Rumaki? Like from eons ago? The sixties
JEFF: That’s liver?
JULIE: Yes, and for the main we’re having a goose!
JEFF: I’ve never had a goose
JULIE: Oh! You coat the potatoes in semolina, then fry them in the drippings—it’s medieval, there should be vassals and broadswords and a maypole
JEFF: Ha!
JULIE: How is your room; are you settled? Do you like it?
JEFF: After the dorm, it’s pretty amazing
JULIE: Stay if you want, it’s so remote you can hole up there for decades we won’t even know.
JEFF: Tempting but . . .
JULIE: Obligations obligations
JEFF: Yes
JULIE: The Pressure to Become Something; Scotty, too
JEFF: Scotty espec / ially
JULIE: Graduation, I cried and cried; touching so touching, all of you—so witty, so oblique, so overeducated, so utterly ignorant of absolutely everything.
(Beat.)
JEFF: I guess.
JULIE: It’s so lovely Christmas.
Though you find that all the dying tends to accelerate around now.
And of course there’s Bing Crosby.
JEFF: Bing Crosby?
JULIE: He’s a tribulation, don’t you find?
And you can’t escape him!
To the Optimo Cigar Store for a five-cent stamp
and he’s dreaming of a white Christmas.
It’s like a tiny acoustic rape every time you leave the apartment.
But other than Bing Crosby and all that dying, it’s a lovely, lovely season.
JEFF: Yes.
(He chops.)
Is someone dying?
JULIE: My husband’s mother, most likely
JEFF: She’s dying.
JULIE: We can’t get a timetable on it—she might linger even years—but, the smart money says kaput.
JEFF: I’m sorry.
Is she very old?
JULIE: Only eighty-seven.
JEFF: Oh!
JULIE: But she’s an old eighty-seven.
JEFF: Is there such a thing as a young
JULIE: Come around when I’m eighty-seven; I’m going to be practically prepubes / cent.
JEFF: I bet.
But should I be here?
JULIE: Certainly. Why not?
JEFF: Things you need to do and . . . I’ll be in the way?
(Beat.)
JULIE: You haven’t had a lot of people die, have you?
JEFF: None.
JULIE: That changes.
You get to a point there’s always somebody.
You have to be hardheaded about it, you have to go about your business. A cheerful nature is an utterly ruthless thing.
JEFF: You’re not ruthless.
JULIE: I’m the most ruthless woman you’ll ever meet.
I’m diabolical. (She smiles)
JEFF: I’m so glad I’m here!
JULIE: Oh, you’re lovely, aren’t you? Just lovely.
JEFF (Bursting): Thank you.
JULIE: Scotty’s friends are all so nice.
JEFF (Disappointed): Oh.
(Ben enters.)
BEN: Why aren’t you drinking?
JEFF: It’s still kind of / early
JULIE: How is Timmy? Did you
BEN: Subsiding
JULIE: Oh my! I don’t think I like the sound of
BEN: The fever, sweetie, the fever; sleeping like a
JULIE: Is he still flushed
BEN: He’s four; they’re always flushed
JULIE: You’re useless—useless man!
BEN: Scotty’s still in the / shower?
JULIE: Still in the / shower
BEN: Christ! The Rappaports haven’t called / have they?
JULIE: Slightly larger cuts, sweetheart—I’m sure they’re on the road by now
BEN: You know Faye—if traffic’s bad, they’ll pull off and phone from, I don’t know, the Fiorello LaGuardia Memorial Rest Stop—how would you like to have a rest stop named after you? I mean, do we think that’s actually an honor—
JEFF: I doubt I’ll ever be distinguished enough to have a rest stop named after me.
BEN: That’s always seemed a backhanded compliment
JEFF: I’m trying for a urinal, you know, if I step things up—
BEN: HA! That’s funny.
JEFF: . . . Oh.
BEN: You’re funny.
You should come visit us this summer.
In Nantucket.
JEFF: I would love to.
BEN: So now: Let’s talk to you—are there nuts, by the
JULIE (Slides bowl to him): Don’t eat them / all
BEN: So then: the Law.
JEFF: Yes. Well . . . yes.
BEN: Do you love the Law in a . . . an Oliver Wendell
JEFF: No. Absolutely not.
BEN: I see. Then what do you
JEFF: It’s a delaying tactic
BEN: Ah! So.
JEFF: Also it’s a good basis.
Like for anything.
Everything’s still a little
um
scintillating?
And this is a way to have whatever skills I may
need when I finally
. . . whatever.
JULIE: When you find your heart’s desire.
JEFF: . . . My heart’s desire. Yes.
(They smile at each other.)
BEN: You like Boston?
JEFF: It’s Cambridge, really,
I like Cambridge.
Cambridge is fun; you keep thinking
something might happen in Cambridge.
Also, you’re walking from Torts to . . . lunch
and it hits you:
This is where Howells fought with James and—
JULIE: You’re literary?
Do you want to write?
Ultimately? Lawyer-writer?
Like Louis Auchincloss.
JEFF: No I’m just a reader
JULIE: All writers are readers; you sell yourself short.
JEFF: I don’t
JULIE: You do
JEFF (Beaming because she’s interested in him): I have absolutely no abilities
BEN: I was expecting Scotty’d be there with you
JEFF: Oh.
Yes.
Well, deferred.
BEN: I was really counting on that.
JEFF: You’re not . . . worried, about him are you?
JULIE: No.
BEN: To a degree.
JULIE: No of course not.
BEN: The question with Scotty has always been: Has he inherited his mother’s aleatory qualities?
JEFF: Aleatory?
BEN: Haphazard, windblown, fortuitous
JULIE: Thank you for the endorsement, / darling
JEFF: I don’t think so.
Scott’s very steady?
Anyway I don’t think you have to worry about, you know, his electability—the presidency is safe.
(Pause.)
BEN: Are you making fun?
JEFF: . . . No.
BEN: I think you are.
JEFF: Truly, I
BEN: Okay, you can forget about the summer—
JEFF: I
JULIE: He’s joking, pay no attention; it’s just that he’s the most wretched man who ever drew breath
BEN: Every boy’s parents want him to be president.
What? Don’t yours?
JEFF: I . . . doubt it.
BEN: No? What do they want you to be?
JEFF: . . . Solvent?
BEN: So they’re: Whatever makes him happy.
JEFF: Um? I think they’d be fine with me being happy?
But I’m not like—
I don’t give off the sense that I’m destined to be
the first Jew on paper currency since Lincoln. Ha, ha.
BEN: What, you think in twenty-five years we won’t be ready?
That’s a hangover from my parents’ generation.
Trust me in a quarter-century he won’t be the first.
The Assembled Parties Page 1
