Above: a snapshot of a text exchange between myself (blue) and Adam Johnson (grey)
I had an idea for a play that I wanted to collaborate with poet Adam Johnson on. It has been languishing and I’m a bit bored before work so I thought I would send it out to all of you with some other tidbits.
Here’s the play synopsis. Maybe we’ll actually write the thing at some point. Keep the pens sharp.
THE PROVIDER
Act One. A man Frank in a waiting room with a receptionist. It’s not clear what the waiting room is for, a doctor, a therapist? A masseuse?
The receptionist is female and younger than Frank or appears so at least. She’s kind of dolled up. She answers the phone which rings a couple times and her monologue into the phone is sparing and doesn’t make it any clearer what the function of the office is. A lot of yeses and no’s and setting appointments. This happens a few times to make it clear it’s an office and some kind of appointments are being made.
After a phone call, Frank gets up and says to the receptionist that he’s been waiting a while and when can he be seen. She says they’re running late and apologizes and offers to reschedule. Frank refuses this and sits down reading a magazine.
Another man Peter comes in in a bluster and the environment changes. Peter says he has an appointment for 1:30 and the first man Frank raises his head to stare. The receptionist is uselessly looking around for the appointment book. Frank says “you can’t be for 1:30, I’m here for that time. I showed up early.”
The second man Peter sees this as an invitation to elliptically debate with the first man Frank. The dialogue has to be written not naturalistically but as if referring to some abstractions that are bizarre. I want Adam Johnson to write some of the dialogue, in the style of his poetry, floods of dialogue that are unsettling and menacing but also evoke two people being cordial and conventional and polite. Another world is being hinted at.
Act one ends with some flash as a Madwoman comes in and is muttering to herself about insane things. She sits down as if she’s been there many times. She’s talking to herself in the way crazy people do. The two men Frank and Peter stare and are sort of put on the same team by their opposition to her. The receptionist after a few minutes greets her with some familiarity and tells her to go right in. The two men who have been waiting are astounded. The lights go down.
Act Two. The men are still there but a different receptionist is there at the desk perhaps indicating a change of time. More phone calls answered, with humorous details but no more clarity about what the office is for. Maybe a therapist. The two men get to talking. This is the basis for the play. It’s mainly the dialogue between the men who are supposed to represent the search for values and beliefs. It’s frightening because they both indicate some desire to try to hold on to sanity and hope, but they’re faltering. It’s gallows humor. It’s elevated beyond therapy or medicine, what’s wrong with them. Quasi religious? Another woman comes in to wait. She doesn’t talk to herself in a crazy way but eventually she gets a call on her cellphone and is speaking to a person and it indicates that she’s unhappy with her marriage. She gets sent in to see the “doctor.” The men are pissed because again they are skipped over. Somehow the subject of marriage has come up and they talk about that and it’s clear that Frank is having serious trouble with his wife while Peter is content—or is he? Is it a charade? Could this be part of the search for happiness and hope that one man is cynical and the other has deluded himself? It’s all in the dialogue.
Frank: “You ever take a punch at your wife? I never did.”
Peter: “No, me either. But I probably emotionally abuse her when I’m not totally consciously aware of my actions.”
Frank: “You’re not consciously aware of your actions? When’s that?”
Peter: “You know, when I enter into childlike fugues around the house or when I’m happy and playful — I start degrading her ego, poking at her and having fun. But I can’t see in her eyes or can’t translate it correctly, that it hurts her. Or like the times I threatened to kill myself, that she’d come home from my daughter’s ballet lessons and they’d drive up the driveway and I’d be dead in the garage — I’d just casually mention it because life was hurting me and she was part of life so I hurt her back, put up emotional snares around her. I never hit her.”
Frank: “But this sounds like it could be worse…”
Peter: “It’s fine. She’s not fully aware of what’s happening and neither am I. We’ll go around and around on this whirligig for years without changing anything.”
Dialogue like this, not quite real, too much on the surface as if everyone has been given sodium Pentothal and is telling the truth. Because we in the play don’t have time to mask it and speak in codes like we do in real life. We have all the time in the world to cloak our words and our subconscious patterns when we speak to each other in real life. I wanted Adam Johnson to help me with this part because his poetry often exists at a similar “spoken/unspoken” level where people are confessing everything while saying nothing.
Act Two ends with the doctor coming out with the second woman patient who is crying and he’s walking out with her. The two men in the waiting room stand up, either concerned or angry with impatience. The doctor apologizes as he leaves and says “he’ll be right back.” The men are standing and the receptionist gets a phone call and the person on the other end is known to her and makes a joke to which the receptionist laughs, an awful chilling sound that disturbs the audience. Lights go down.
Act Three. Now it’s a third receptionist who is an effeminate man David. The two men are still waiting. They talk. It’s still really abstract what they talk about, dreamlike. David gets a phone call that he has to answer a lot of “yes” and “no” too, so it forms a background noise that the two men play a game. They ask questions to the “Oracle” or “magic eightball” to get humorous responses that the receptionist gives. This goes on for a few minutes and the questions the men ask of the Oracle are critical or showing animosity toward the doctor. The phone call ends and another woman comes in and is David’s girlfriend which astonishes the men because she’s so hot and desirable. The woman is visiting her boyfriend and they’re making dinner plans. The waiting men are observing and body language shows they can’t believe it. The woman perhaps heavy-handedly it is named Hope. She and David make their date and she leaves. The two men eventually come around to asking the receptionist questions to chip away at him. Again, it hints at something otherworldly and poetic that I haven’t nailed down yet. Something allegorical. David parries their questions. The men are full of despair and Frank says “that’s it, I can’t wait any more,” and Peter tries to encourage him to hold on. The one who says he has the good marriage earlier is the one who is most impatient and the unhappier man is trying to convince him to keep waiting. It gets to a climactic level. The doctor finally comes out and he’s carrying a box with his things in it and he tells the receptionist David that the building has been bought and will be turned into a parking lot. The receptionist isn’t fazed. The men are. “What about my case, my mind?” Peter asks. “You’ll be referred to another provider, David will handle it.” The doctor leaves. Peter angrily makes a short speech and thunders out. The originally unhappier man Frank who counseled waiting, goes to the receptionist and starts rescheduling the postponed appointment with “the new provider.”
Curtains.
This is just the bare bones of a plot. I needed dialogue that has voices and hints at higher realities and deeper meanings and funny bizarre modes of speech.
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I attended and participated in Mathias Mietzelfeld’s book launch party on 4/11/24 for his book of essays called Who Killed Mabel Frost? written under the pseudonym and nom-de-drag Miss Unity. I’ll write more on the evening elsewhere but for now let me say it was a really special evening, not least because two guys from NYC came up to Oneonta to see it and I hung out with them. Mark Blickley and John Padula. These guys knew Mathias from Misery Loves Company and elsewhere so the next day I invited them to my house where we talked (Blick ate a whole gallon of ice cream by himself) and I gave them some of my artwork as a going away present and sign of friendship.
Blick and John Padula.
“You muthafucka!” Blick said in his thick Bronx accent when he picked out some choice drawings that I backtracked and said he couldn’t take. I told him I’d send him copies later. He was interested in getting source material to inspire some of his writing (Blick is a playwright and author and a fascinating guy to those with eyes to see and ears to hear). I won’t show the art he got bc he may want to publish it himself later in art projects. But I will show the art that John P, “Johnny Hollywood” took. John is a great artist himself, I’ve seen his digital drawings in the publication The Staten Islander.
This is supposed to be Brigitte Bardot; I messed her face up worse than if I’d put her head through a vice. I would never do that. I wasn’t a good enough artist to really render her beauty.
Studies of Henri Pierre Picou’s Andromeda Chained to the Rock, and a hand. Andromeda is a fascination of mine as those who’ve read some of my new novel I See Prism Threads in excerpts know.
Rather cartoonish brush-pen studies of women and draperies. Padula seemed to want to take pictures of women. I draw women a lot. I had a few borderline pornographic drawings in there I won’t reproduce here that these two City-dwellers laughed off, unfazed.
It was a good time. Much mind-blowing conversation. It’s good to meet Zoom call denizens in 4-dimensions. Really reminds you that there’s a world out there, and maybe, just maybe, this will have broken the forbidding, moat-like spell that has been weaved around NYC that prevents me from going there, like this summer to meet up with others in the literary world.
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Been listening to a lot of jazz/bebop lately.