Death and Taxes: Hydriotaphia and Other Plays
Page 2
HAUTFLOTE John Leonard Thompson
ASPERA Jennifer Hubbard
BIFF Christopher Evan Welch
HAPPY Daniel Oreskes
OTTOLINE Fanni Green
FLATTY Fred Major
DING
Characters
HAUTFLOTE, a playwright in his late thirties. He writes beautiful plays that everyone admires; he has a following and little financial success. He was Ding’s best friend, and is the executor of his will and his wishes.
ASPERA, a playwright in her early thirties. She writes fierce, splendidly intelligent, challenging plays, frequently with lesbian characters, and cannot get an American theater to produce her for love or money. So she lives in London where she is acclaimed. She is cool and is beginning to sound British.
BIFF, a playwright in his late thirties. Scruffy, bisexual, one success, several subsequent failures, cannot stay away from political themes though his analysis is not rigorous. He is overdue; he should be home writing; he should not be here.
HAPPY, a playwright in his late thirties. His early plays were widely admired, then one big success and he’s become a Hollywood writer, TV mostly, rich now, a little bored, but very happy. He plans to go back to writing for the theater someday.
OTTOLINE, a playwright in her fifties. African-American, genuinely great, hugely influential experimentalist whom everyone adores but who is now languishing in relative obscurity and neglect, though she continues to write prolifically. She is the best writer of the bunch and the least well remunerated. Her’s is a deep bitterness; the surface is immensely gracious. She teaches playwrights and has a zoological fascination, watching them. Ding was her protégé, sort of. She is an old friend of Flatty’s.
FLATTY, a playwright in his late forties. Colossally rich. An easy target for negativity of all kinds, though he is in fact a good writer, hugely prolific, very hard-working and generous to his fellow playwrights.
DING, a dead playwright wrapped in a winding-sheet. A very talented writer, whom everyone admired for wildly different reasons.
Setting
The play takes place in Abel’s Hill cemetery on Abel’s Hill, Martha’s Vineyard, in December, near midnight. Abel’s Hill is a real place, a spectacularly beautiful, mostly nineteenth century Yankee graveyard; it’s way too expensive for any mortal to get a plot in now. Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett are buried there. So is John Belushi, whose tombstone kept getting stolen by fans till Dan Ackroyd put a gigantic boulder on Belushi’s grave, too huge for anyone to lift. From the crest of the hill you can see the ocean.
The night is beautiful and very cold.
Everyone has shovels, and several have bottles of various liquors.
They are writers so they love words. Their speech is precise, easy, articulate; they are showing off a little. They are at that stage of drunk, right before sloppy, where you are eloquent, impressing yourself. They are making pronouncements, aware of their wit; this mustn’t be pinched, crabbed, dour, effortful. They are having fun on this mad adventure; they relish its drama. Underneath is a very deep grief.
They all really loved Ding.
High atop Abel’s Hill, a cemetery on Martha’s Vineyard. Just athwart the crest. Tombstones all around. The voice of the playwright is heard on tape, with an accompanying obligato of a typewriter’s clattering.
THE VOICE OF THE PLAYWRIGHT
Dramatis personae: seven characters, all playwrights. Biff: (Biff enters) scruffy, bisexual, one success, several subsequent failures, cannot stay away from political themes though his analysis is not rigorous. He is overdue; he should be home writing; he should not be here. Happy: (Happy enters) his early plays were widely admired, then one big success and he’s become a Hollywood writer, TV mostly, rich now, a little bored, but very happy. He plans to go back to writing for the theater someday. Aspera: (Aspera enters) writes fierce, splendidly intelligent, challenging plays, frequently with lesbian characters, and cannot get an American theater to produce her for love or money. So she lives in London where she is acclaimed. Ottoline: (Ottoline enters) African-American, genuinely great, hugely influential experimentalist whom everyone adores but who is now languishing in relative obscurity and neglect. She is the best writer of the bunch and the least well remunerated. She is an old friend of Flatty: (Flatty enters) colossally successful, colossally rich. An easy target for negativity of all kinds, though he is in fact a good writer, hugely prolific. Hautflote: (Hautflote enters carrying the shrouded body of Ding) writes beautiful, experimental plays; he has a small, loyal following and little financial success. He was the best friend, and is the executor of the estate of Ding: (Hautflote places Ding’s body on the ground) a dead playwright wrapped in a winding-sheet. A very talented writer, whom everyone admired for wildly different reasons.
(Hautflote exits. The other playwrights look about uneasily, and then sit. They have come to bury Ding illegally. It’s nearly midnight) Seven characters are too many for a ten-minute play. It’ll be twenty minutes long! Fuck it. One of them is dead and the others can all talk fast.
(Hautflote returns with six shovels)
The play takes place in Abel’s Hill cemetery, a spectacularly beautiful, mostly nineteenth century Yankee graveyard; it’s way too expensive for any mortal to get a plot in now. On Abel’s Hill, Martha’s Vineyard, in December, near midnight.
(When the voice is finished, Hautflote goes to a nearby headstone, on the side of which is a light switch. He flicks it on; a full moon appears in the sky.)
HAUTFLOTE
Ah!
(The play begins.)
HAUTFLOTE
Here. We should start digging.
ASPERA
Athwart the crest. Facing the sea. As Ding demanded.
OTTOLINE
Isn’t this massively illegal?
FLATTY
Trespass, destruction of private property, destruction of an historical landmark, I shouldn’t wonder, conveyance of tissue, i.e., poor Ding, in an advanced state of morbidity, on public transportation—
HAUTFLOTE
He’s been preserved. He’s hazardous to no one’s health. He traveled here in a steamer trunk. The porters helped.
BIFF
(Apostrophizing) O please come to me short sweet simple perfect idea. A seed, a plot.
HAUTFLOTE
He’s under a deadline.
BIFF
I’m doomed.
HAUTFLOTE
Now shoulder your shovels . . .
BIFF
There’s no dignity, have you noticed? In being this. An American playwright. What is that?
OTTOLINE
Well, we drink.
HAPPY
No one really drinks now. None of us, at least not publicly.
FLATTY
I can’t remember something.
HAPPY
We’re . . . (Looking for the word)
FLATTY
A name.
HAPPY
Healthier!
HAUTFLOTE
What name?
FLATTY
The name of the country that makes me despair.
HAPPY
But tonight we are drunk.
BIFF
In honor of Ding.
HAUTFLOTE
What letter does it begin with?
BIFF
Poor Ding.
(They all look at Ding. Little pause.)
ASPERA
“And Poor Ding Who Is Dead.”
(Little pause. They all look at Ding.)
FLATTY
R.
HAUTFLOTE
Rwanda.
FLATTY
That’s it.
OTTOLINE
How could you forget, Flatty? Rwanda?
FLATTY
I’ve never had a head for names. Not in the news much anymore, Rwanda.
OTTOLINE
We are afraid to stick the shovel in.
HAUTFLOTE
Yes.
OTTOLINE
Believing it to be a desecration.
HAUTFLOTE
Of this holy earth.
OTTOLINE
Not holy: pure. Authentic.
HAPPY
Yankee.
OTTOLINE
Pilgrim.
HAPPY
Puritan.
OTTOLINE
Forefatherly. Originary.
ASPERA
Oh fuck me, “originary”; John Belushi’s buried here!
FLATTY
And he had enough drugs in him when he died to poison all the waters from here to Nantucket.
OTTOLINE
And the people steal his tombstone.
FLATTY
No!
OTTOLINE
Or the hill keeps swallowing it up. It doesn’t rest in peace. A pretender, you see.
ASPERA
Lillian Hellman’s buried here. She’s a playwright.
HAUTFLOTE
Appropriate or no, it’s what Ding wanted.
OTTOLINE
And that’s another thing. It cost two hundred thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents for a round trip ticket. From New York. This is an island. Martha’s Vineyard is an island! Did Ding realize that? One has to ferry across. Fucking Ding. Maybe you all have money. For ferry passage. I don’t have money. I’ve got no money.
FLATTY
I told you I’d pay for you.
OTTOLINE
Well we all know you’ve got money.
BIFF
O come to me short sweet simple idea!
FLATTY
I want something magical to happen.
BIFF
A plot. The horseleech hath two daughters. It’s a start. And these daughters . . . Do . . . What?
HAPPY
They cry!
OTTOLINE
Give, give!
BIFF
Brecht in exile circumnavigated the globe. Berlin. Skovsbo-strand. Stockholm. Helsinki. Leningrad. Moscow. Vladivostock. Manila. L.A. Quick stop in D.C. to visit the HUAC. New York. Paris. Zurich. Salzburg. Prague. Berlin. An American playwright, what is that? Never in exile, always in extremis. The list of cities: AIDS, loss, fear of infection, unsafe sex, he says gazing upon the corpse of a fallen comrade. I fuck men and women. I dream my favorite actor has been shot by the police, I dream I shoot Jesse Helms in the head and it doesn’t kill him . . .
FLATTY
Eeewww, politics.
BIFF
I dream we are intervening in Bosnia merely to give Germany hegemony over Eastern Europe. Why, I dream myself in my dream asking myself, Do you dream that? You do not dream a play, you write a play. And this play is due, and there’s (Pointing to Ding’s corpse) the deadline. I write in my notebook that I am glad we are sending troops to former Yugoslavia but I (He makes the “in quotes”gesture with his fingers) “inadvertently” spell troops “T-R-O-U-P-E-S” as in troupes as in theatrical troupes, traveling players, we are sending troupes to former Yugoslavia.
HAUTFLOTE
I don’t think we can avoid it any longer. The digging.
FLATTY
I imagine it’s worth serious jail time for us all.
HAPPY
Incarcerated playwrights. Now that has dignity. Until it’s learned what for.
BIFF
I repulse myself, I am not of this earth, if I were more serious I would be an essayist if I were more observant a novelist more articulate more intelligent a poet more . . . succinct more ballsy a screenwriter and then I could buy an apartment.
HAUTFLOTE
Fuck the public. It’s all Ding asked for. He never got his own, alive.
ASPERA
Poor poor Ding.
HAUTFLOTE
He grew obsessed with this cemetery, in his final months. We visited it years ago. On a day trip, we could never afford . . . to stay here. Or anywhere. Or anything. Health insurance. “Bury me on Abel’s Hill.” His final words.
I think he thought this place would give him a retroactive pedigree.
OTTOLINE
That’s it, pedigree, not holiness. Blood, genes. Of which we playwrights are envious. We’re mutts. Amphibians.
ASPERA
Not of the land nor of the sea. Not of the page nor of the moment.
HAPPY
Perdurable page. Fleeting moment.
FLATTY
Something magical should happen now.
HAUTFLOTE
Ding wanted to belong. Or rather, he never wanted not to. Or rather he never didn’t want to, he wanted to not want to, but did. In his final months he grew finical.
ASPERA
When I saw him he wasn’t finical, he was horrible. He looked horrible and he screamed at everyone all day and all night and there was no way he could get warm, ever. It was quite a change. I hadn’t seen him in months, I was visiting from London—WHERE I LIVE, IN EXILE, PRODUCED, APPLAUDED, LAUDED EVEN and NO ONE IN AMERICA WILL TOUCH MY WORK—but anyway he was somehow very very angry but not bitter. One felt envied, but not blamed. At Ding’s deathbed.
HAUTFLOTE
Ding Bat. Der Dingle. Ding-An-Sich.
HAPPY
I remember being impressed when I learned that the HIV virus, which has robbed us of our Ding, reads and writes its genetic alphabets backwards, RNA transcribing DNA transcribing RNA, hence retrovirus, reverse transcription. I’m not gay but I am a Jew and so of course I, too, “read backwards, write backwards”; I think of Hebrew.
FLATTY
You’re not gay?
HAPPY
No.
FLATTY
You’re not?
HAPPY
No.
FLATTY
Everyone thinks you are. Everyone wants to sleep with you. Everyone. Everyone.
Oops.
You were saying?
HAPPY
I was saying that in my grief I thought . . . Well here I attempt a metaphor doomed to fail . . . I mean here we are, playwrights in a graveyard, here to dig, right? So, digging, I think: HIV, reverse transcribing, dust to dust, writing backwards, Hebrew and the Great and Terrible magic of that backwards alphabet, which runs against the grain, counter to the current of European tradition, heritage, thought: a language of fiery, consuming revelation, of refusal, the proper way, so I was taught, to address oneself to God . . . (He puts his hands on Ding’s body) Perhaps, maybe, this backwards-writing viral nightmare is keeping some secret, subterraneanly affianced to a principle of . . . Reversals: good reversals and also very bad, where good meets bad, perhaps, the place of mystery where back meets forth, where our sorrow’s not the point, where the forward flow of life brutally throws itself into reverse, to reveal . . . (He lies alongside the body, curls up to it, head on Ding’s shoulder, listening) What? Hebrew always looked to me like zipper teeth unzipped. What awesome thing is it we’re zipping open? To what do we return when we write in reverse? What’s relinquished, what’s released? What does it sound like I’m doing here?
ASPERA
It sounds like you’re equating Hebrew and AIDS.
HAPPY
I’m—
ASPERA
I’m not Jewish but I am a dyke and I think either way, AIDS equals Hebrew or the reverse, you’re in BIG trouble. I’m going to beat you up.
HAPPY
Not equals, I . . . I’m lonely. I’m among playwrights. Back East for the first time in months. So I get to talk. And none of you listen anyway. In Culver City everyone listens, they listen listen listen. They take notes. They take you at your word. You are playwrights. So be inattentive. If you paid attention you’d be novelists.
FLATTY
Aspera has spent five years in London. She’s acquired the listening disease.
OTTOLINE