I splay my fingers, on the count of five
We mount to glory on a hand grenade.
WILL: That’s fine with me!
JOHN: Hold on, hold on!
WILL: I’ll get blown up as long as you do, too.
HT: I think we’re in agreement here. Let’s die!
BJ and JERRY enter.
HT: Don’t move, don’t anybody move! I swear to God!
…Hey, hey, Reverend Billy Jenks, did you
Imagine the trajectories would bang
Us face-to-face on execution day?
BILL JENKS: You get me believing in things like fate, HT.
HT: I know. It’s just too marvelous for words,
The crowning thing that sets it all aflame!
Actually, I heard it on the news
How you’d be here and all, that’s why I came.
BILL JENKS: Will Blaine.
WILL: Excuse me, Preacher, I’ve got business.
HT [to WILL]: O no you don’t! You don’t go back in there!
You do not press that button. No you don’t!
Not as long as you live! Right here. Right here!
Did I see your hand mashing on that button?
JOHN: Mom? Are you all right?
BESS: Who? Me?
JOHN: Talk to me. Don’t just lay there.
BESS: Blah blah blah.
How’s the weather? Blah blah blah your health.
How are they treating my Johnnie at the circus?
JOHN: When men go murdering murderers, they mock
God’s saving work and make a clown of Christ.
That’s the message. That’s the statement.
BESS: Well,
I’m glad I lived to hear the explanation.
JERRY: What are your demands?
HT: Uh-huh…Demands?
JERRY: Have we surprised you with the question?
HT: Yes,
I’d have to say you kind of did.
[Monitor sounds a flat reading: beeeeeeeee.]
You pressed the goddamn button, didn’t you?
JOHN: Why’d you press it, fool?
WILL: It’s what I do!
JOHN:…NO!…Don’t cover up my mother’s face!
JERRY: This woman is deceased.
JOHN: But—seven minutes!
Seven minutes! You said seven minutes!
JERRY: In general the process takes that long—
But often Phase One stops the heart, and then—
HT: And then they screw you out of five or six!
They gyp you!…Bring this woman back—
Dose her up with speed or something! [To WILL] You!
JOHN: That’s exactly what we came here for.
…Hostage Taker, this is the very thing
That brought us here. The Reverend Jenks is powered
To deal with demons and restore the sick,
I’ve seen him do it with a word, a breath,
Two years I’ve dogged his steps, I’ve watched him work—
Deafness, stammering, cancer, withered limbs—
I’ve seen him pinch their one last mustard seed
Of faith and scatter it into blossoms—
Blindness, palsy, lunatic torments—
And I believe this man can raise the dead.
BILL JENKS: With your permission—
HT: Do it to it.
WILL: She’s dead. This ain’t a coma.
JERRY: LET HIM TRY.
…Leave it alone, Will. Let this run its course
And you and me go get a drink at Mursky’s.
Country-western, and scotch in plastic cups.
WILL: I’m sick of cowboy music.
JERRY: Let him try.
…We’ve done a bunch of these.
WILL: A couple hundred,
Right around two hundred.
JERRY: Let him try.
BILL JENKS: No—leave the shroud.
HT:… Go on. Go on.
BILL JENKS:…One time, when Jesus healed, he said, “Who touched
My garment? Something just went out of me—”
He stood in a crowd pressing from all sides
But knew a particular touch had drawn his power,
Sensed a healing had gone out from him…
All I have is a knack for crossing paths
With people just about to heal themselves.
A gift for sticking in my head and smiling
Just when someone’s gonna snap the picture.
I’ve never healed one person of one thing
In all my lying life.
If I had, I’d feel it, wouldn’t I?
Wouldn’t it jump a little in my blood?
WILL: This gets me in my guts. Get up from there.
JERRY: Two hundred? Is it really as many as that?
You ever walk the rows at Joe Byrd Hill?
How many rows have we ourselves laid out?
I bet you’d hike a half a mile of graves
Fed by our work, Will Blaine, yours and mine,
And then you’d come to a couple of plywood boards
Hiding the hungry place that waits for this one.
BILL JENKS:…Lord, it’s all about that open mouth.
We don’t want to die and go in there.
They claw down with a green-and-yellow John Deere
Backhoe and scoop a darkness under the grass,
Takes six or seven seconds to produce
The only thing on earth that lasts forever.
God in Heaven, we beg you to widen your eyes.
Look here at this woman put to death
By bureaucrats. See her. Remember her.
You made this woman’s life—remember that.
Make her now, again. GOD, GIVE HER BREATH.
HT [speaks in BESS’s voice]:…Don’t raise me up! I want to stay in Hell!
JOHN: No! She’s not in Hell!
HT/BESS: I always was.
I lived my life in Hell. But now it’s simpler.
WILL: You’re channeling through the black guy, Mom.
JOHN: There’s no such thing as channeling. That’s Satan
Talking in my mother’s voice.
BESS: It always was.
JOHN: It’s just a trick of demons.
WILL: We have demons?
We don’t have mediums, but we do have demons?
JOHN: I just take it as it comes.
WILL: You do?
From where? You take it as it comes from where?
JOHN: From Genesis and Exodus. No channeling.
No mediums. No ha’nts. No clanky chains.
Men and women; devils; angels; God.
HT/BESS: Hell is full of music. Lonely music.
Hell is full of sadness. Full of truth,
Full of clarity. Hell is beautiful.
BILL JENKS: I know this son of a bitch. It’s you.
HT/DEMON: [facing BJ]: C’est moi! The one who really loves you!—
BILL JENKS: The blue dog of Huntsville.
HT/DEMON: The demon of Simon’s coma.
BILL JENKS: The demon of money.
HT/DEMON: The demon of your fame.
BILL JENKS: You’ve run me all my silly goddamn life—
Why?
HT/DEMON: I really can’t quite say; it’s just
There’s something about your style that pisses me off.
BILL JENKS: All my silly life.
HT/DEMON: And now no more.
I’m all through pimping you, Jenks—you’re on your own!
JOHN cries out, flings himself against the glass. All freeze.
HT/DEMON: Now my work of half a century
Culminates. Warden, blow the whistle!
Beloved William Jennings Bryan Jenks:
You’ve come to failure, and today you die.
Beloved, my most interesting project,
My signature, my sunny revelation:
Count your heartbeats. Today you die.
Your breath stops. Your sight
blackens, then burns
With visions since your birth, and you’ll be met
At every turning with the leering truth:
Not one prayer you’ve uttered ever prized
The slimmest chink in you, not one escaped
The maze. They suffocated in their coffins.
The start to finish of your life’s design
Tributes nothingness. And now the dark.
HT opens his fingers. Grenades fall.
BILL JENKS: Liar! Liar!—I never raised the dead.
BESS sits upright and the shroud falls away.
BESS: AMY?…Where’d she go? She was right here—
Silence. Blinding light.
BLACKOUT
Epilogue
Corner of Tenth and J, later that night.
STEVIE stands behind a microphone, JOHN’s cross nearby. Light from video crews, flashbulbs.
STEVIE: Can’t we get this monstrosity out of here?
People are tripping over it left and right.
This is blasphemy. This thing’s a scandal. [VOICES ad lib… ]
Quiet!—I’m sorry.—Goddamn you!—I’m sorry.
Here is the information we’ve got for you.
This evening, shortly after five p.m., an as-yet-unidentified prisoner overcame and stabbed to death a guard in the Walls Unit, who remains nameless until notification of family. Thereafter this prisoner gained access to the execution chamber in this corner of the unit, right behind me, and…
You have the statement. You have the statement…
[VOICES ad lib… ]
Now, Mrs. Blaine has asked to say a word, wife of William Blaine, who supervised our Teams in the unit there—She’s the wife of Will Blaine, a very special employee of, a very…
The wife of Will Blaine, the widow, the wife, the widow…President of the Texas Citizens for Victims’ Rights, Marsha Hollings Blaine.
MASHA comes up, well dressed, with well-coiffed, abundant hair.
VOICES ad lib…
MASHA: I say today an innocent has been killed!
Today is a Day of Judgment on us all!
[VOICES ad lib… ]
Look at you all!—like wasps on watermelon!
[VOICES ad lib… ]
Rahr! Rahr! Rahr!—like curs on carrion.
I LOST MY HUSBAND IN THAT PLACE TODAY.
…Maybe he’s in a better place. Who knows?
…Some people go around with this idea
The Milky Way is just some big machine,
And we’re being eaten alive by this machine,
Trodden down and gutted out and gobbled
And scattered out along beside the road
To fertilize the ditch, and that’s our fate:
And I say, God above, let it be so!
Let there be no Resurrection Day!
[VOICES ad lib… ]
LET THERE BE NO RESURRECTION DAY!
If Bill Jenks thinks that he can raise the dead—
Let him raise himself! WE’RE WAITING, BILL.
Let him raise someone, and then I’d say
That he was onto something—wouldn’t you?
[Of the cross] Look here, look where someone’s set up the means
Of execution in the gory Bible days.
Here they hung them after they’d been scourged.
You know what scourging was? They whipped the skin
Until it ripped, and then they whipped the muscles
Underneath, until their whips licked bone.
And then they hammered what was left up here,
And broke the legs of what was left, so that,
Without support, it slowly suffocated.
And that’s the boy the power of whose blood
You plead, an executed criminal…
[VOICES ad lib…]
LET MY HUSBAND ROT IN THE GROUND UNTIL HE’S MUSH,
Let him rot in the ground till he’s gravy,
Until he clarifies like honey in the heat
And dribbles into dirt that doesn’t feel
A thing or think a thought.
May the dirt I called my husband never wake,
May that dirt stay dead until the whole
Universe collapses into cinders,
May the weight of general emptiness
Strive and grind against itself and work
The cinders down to black, stupefied darkness,
May he be dead until the final thought of God,
As long as his assassins stay dead, too.
…When Texas trips the lever of the blade,
And that blade dives down through a killer’s neck,
And that neck pumps that evil blood six feet,
And that head goes rollin’ into the world,
What drives that blood is the beautiful heart of Texas,
And staring out of that head are the eyes of Texas.
The dead face of the killer we have killed—
This is the face of liberty and justice.
This is the beautiful face of liberty and justice!
Weeping, she makes a smile and strikes a pose.
BLACKOUT
- END -
Purvis
Purvis was developed by Campo Santo, the resident theater company for San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts (executive director Deborah Cullinan; founders Margo Hall, Luís Saguar, Sean San José, Michael Torres), and premiered at Intersection in February 2006, with the following cast:
Cully Fredrickson
Lyndon Johnson; Ohio State Patrolman
Catherine Castellanos
J. Edgar Hoover
Michael Shipley
Clyde Tolson; Pretty Boy Floyd
Daryl Luzopone
Melvin Purvis
Danny Wolohan
John Dillinger
Michael Torres
Job Interviewer
Vanessa Cota
Blanche; Captured Woman
Delia MacDougall
Baby Face Nelson
Collaborative Team: Nancy Benjamin (vocal director), Michael G. Cano (stage director), Jim Cave (lighting design), Valera Coble (costume design), James Faerron (set design), Jeff Fohl (video/photography), Dan Hamaguchi (graphic design), David Molina (sound design), Jennifer Orr (properties design).
Production Team: Nora Hailey (assistant stage manager), Vanessa Cota, Melyssa Jo Kelly, Courtney Luna, Lorrie Jean Marinas (production team), Kevin Heverin (research advisor), John Ingle (violin music), Adam Palafox (research).
Directed by Delia MacDougall
Melvin Purvis (1903–1960) began as a special agent in the U.S. Justice Department. In 1932, J. Edgar Hoover placed him in charge of the Chicago office of Hoover’s new Division of Investigation, which soon became the FBI.
Over a six-month period in 1934, Purvis’s pursuit of the nation’s most famous “Public Enemies” put him in the national spotlight. Apparently envious, Hoover drove him from the bureau the following year.
After leaving law enforcement, Purvis married and raised three children, making his living as a radio broadcaster and as the head of the “Junior G-man” public relations campaign for Post Toasties cereal.
Some important dates:
June 1933—Under the suspected direction of Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, gangsters ambush police and agents transferring a prisoner in Kansas City, killing three policemen and Special Agent Ray Caffrey, the first “G-man” to die in action.
March 1934—The bank robber John Dillinger escapes from jail in Indiana and crosses a state line, making himself a federal fugitive.
May 1934—Under Purvis’s direction, federal agents ambush Dillinger and Lester Gillis—aka “Baby Face Nelson”—at the Little Bohemia Inn on Little Star Lake, Wisconsin. Both criminals escape while two bystanders are killed. Later that night in a second gunfight Nelson kills one of Purvis’s agents before escaping again.
July 1934—Purvis heads a team of agents and local police who assassinate John Dillinger outside the Biograph Theat
er in Chicago.
October 1934—Purvis participates in the killing of Pretty Boy Floyd in a cornfield near Wellsville, Ohio.
November 1934—Baby Face Nelson dies in a shootout with federal agents on an Illinois roadside. Two agents also die.
February 29, 1960—Purvis dies of a bullet wound from a .45 he received as a gift from fellow agents when he resigned. The death is ruled a suicide, though some evidence suggests it may have been an accident.
In seven scenes, Purvis follows history backward from 1966 (six years after Purvis’s death) to the evening of the “Bohemia Inn Shootout” in 1934.
Characters
Lyndon Johnson
J. Edgar Hoover
Clyde Tolson
John Dillinger
Melvin Purvis
Job Interviewer
Pretty Boy Floyd
Ohio State Highway Patrolman
Baby Face Nelson
A lynched black man
An office secretary
A woman bound and gagged
Scene 1: October 1966
The White House Oval Office
Scene 2: March 1, 1960
The home of J. Edgar Hoover
Scene 3: February 29, 1960
A fathomless void
Scene 4: Spring 1959
An office at KSBC radio, Florence, South Carolina
Scene 5: January 1935
An office of the U.S. Division of Investigation, Chicago
Scene 6: October 22, 1934
A cornfield near Wellsville, Ohio
Scene 7: May 1934
A hotel suite on Little Star Lake, Wisconsin
An ellipsis […] beginning a line is meant to suggest a pause.
You may break your heart; but men will go on as before.
—Marcus Aurelius
Scene 1
Soul of a Whore and Purvis: Two Plays in Verse Page 10
