[Chicken picks up the jug and goes out on the kitchen stoop. He seems to be reflecting, with satisfaction. He speaks aloud to himself.]
CHICKEN: Spiritchel gates, you’re no where . . . .
[Myrtle comes downstairs.]
MYRTLE: Chicken! Oh, my God. Lot’s fighting to breathe!
CHICKEN [entering kitchen]: That lung must have broke down on him.
MYRTLE: My God, Chicken, what am I going to do?
CHICKEN: Well, you could call the doctor.
MYRTLE: Is there a doctor?
[Chicken crosses to kitchen table and turns up the lamp.]
MYRTLE: Where? Where is the doctor?
CHICKEN: Half a mile down the road.
MYRTLE: What’s his telephone number?
CHICKEN: It’s on the wall.
MYRTLE: Which, which wall?
CHICKEN: Which wall do you think it would be on? Don’t you think it would be on the wall which the phone is on?
LOT [weakly, from above]: Myrtle! Myrtle! Myrtle!
MYRTLE: What is the name of the doctor?
CHICKEN: His name is Stenson.
MYRTLE: Dr. Stenson?
CHICKEN: That’s right, Dr. Stenson.
MYRTLE: You don’t remember the number?
CHICKEN: It’s on the wall by the phone.
MYRTLE: I can’t see good. Turn the lamp up higher.
[He takes lamp off table and crosses leisurely toward her. She stares blindly at wall.]
Now! Now, where?
CHICKEN: Right in front of your nose.
MYRTLE: This wall is covered with numbers. Names and numbers. Gallaway! Is that it?
CHICKEN: Gallaway is the girl I laid last summer. That told them lies about me.
MYRTLE: What was the name, then? What was the name of that doctor?
LOT: Myrtle! Myrtle!
MYRTLE: Tell me the name again.
CHICKEN: The name is Stenson.
MYRTLE: Oh, yes, Doctor. Stenson. I don’t see no Stenson here.
CHICKEN: You must need glasses.
MYRTLE: Yes, I do, I’m near-sighted.
CHICKEN: I’ll help you out a little. Here is the number.
MYRTLE: Oh! Four-eight-two is the number!
CHICKEN: Four eighty two is the number.
[She picks up the receiver, panting and sobbing.]
MYRTLE: Give it to me again. I can’t get hold of myself.
CHICKEN: FOUR! EIGHTY! TWO!
MYRTLE [into the phone]: Four eighty two! [The phone is dead.] HEY! OPERATOR! OPER-A-TORR!—nobody answers me, I cain’t git no answer!
CHICKEN: Of course you can’t git no answer. That phone is deader than Lot, there’s no phone service in this county tonight. Did you think there was? Have you got any kind of a brain at all in your head?
MYRTLE: How can you be so mean? Your ha’f brother’s dying up those stairs and you, you don’t do a thing!
CHICKEN: Yeah, I do.
MYRTLE: What?
CHICKEN: Just what I’m doing. Standing here looking with love at the face of this kitchen clock and listening to its tick, ’cause the tick of this clock is like a song of angels ’cause each tick is the footstep of Lot’s death coming which makes me king of this place and everything on it.
LOT [weaker, more despairing]: Chicken!
CHICKEN: He’s given up calling you and’s calling for me.
MYRTLE: He might as well call to a rock. [Sounds from above.]
CHICKEN: Lissen, he’s out of his bed, he’s in the hall, crawling. Hear him up there crawling, as if there was somewhere to crawl to? He don’t know how to die no more’n he known how to live.
MYRTLE: Put him back on his bed!
CHICKEN: He wanted out of it, he’s out. —Crawling.
MYRTLE: I’m too weak to go up.
CHICKEN: A woman can be weak and not be disgusting. But Lot’s birth register calls him male, and he’s weak. I don’t mean just now but always. I got no respect for weak, inferior people.
MYRTLE: God, he’s—crawling downstairs! And I can’t go up to him! —CAN’T!
CHICKEN: He’s crawling down on his belly.
MYRTLE: Oh, God, help me! [She rushes toward the stairs, then cries out and rushes back into the kitchen.] —CAN’T!
CHICKEN [Catching hold of her]: You want a man living, not dying.
[Lot, crawling, appears on the lighted section of the stairs. He stops. The gasping continues.]
Natural. Human. Nothing to be ashamed of. [He kisses her. She falls sobbing to her knees.] —It’s stopped, the gasping’s quit! It’s finished! [He says this in a gravely triumphant way.] Get up!
MYRTLE: I can’t!
CHICKEN [dropping her to the floor]: Well, stay there while I— [He goes up the stairs and lifts the lifeless body of Lot and carries it above the lighted level.]
[Myrtle pulls herself up by the kitchen table, and staggers out onto the back stoop of the house. The moon breaks out of the clouds to light her.]
MYRTLE: Oh, God, have mercy on my—puzzled—soul, my lost, sinful, puzzled, soul!
[The flood murmur builds as Chicken comes back down stairs.]
CHICKEN: Myrtle?
MYRTLE: —Out here, couldn’t stay in.
CHICKEN: Well, come on in here, now, they’s things to take care of. Lot died on the stairs and I carried him up and put him in the hall. Now what I want you to do is go upstairs and make up the bed with clean sheets.
MYRTLE: Please. I can’t. You do it.
CHICKEN: No, you. You do it. I got something else to do. —I’m going outside now an’ have a look at my place.
MYRTLE: Just, just—go up there with me?
CHICKEN: Not right yet. Expect me up there later, after you’ve made up the bed. [He goes out on the stoop and looks triumphantly about him. The flood-murmur is still rising, but frogs and crickets can be heard above it.] That’s right, you frogs an’ crickets, sing it out! Chicken is king!
[The curtain starts slowly falling as Myrtle comes out beside him. There is the sound of a distant dynamite blast. Myrtle presses close to him like a scared child to a parent, as the curtain completes its descent.]
THE END
I NEVER GET DRESSED TILL AFTER DARK ON SUNDAYS
The first production of I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays opened at The Cock Tavern Theatre in London, England on March 4, 2011. It was directed by Hamish MacDougall; the set and costume designs were by Mike Lee; the lighting and sound designs were by Phil Hewitt; the production stage manager was Lee Andrew Davies; and it was produced by Adam Spreadbury-Mahar and Dominic Haddock. The cast was as follows:
JANE Shelley Lang
TYE Lewis Hayes
DIRECTOR Cameron Harris
PLAYWRIGHT Keith Myers
HILARY, the stage manager Graham Dickson
LADY TOURISTS Sarah-Jayne Butler
Rachael Hilton
PIANO PLAYER Georgina Philip
SINGER John Savournin
Scene: A one-room slave-quarters apartment in the Vieux Carré of New Orleans, floor to ceiling with a skylight in the tilted roof to show blue weather fading: shuttered doors ajar on a gallery. Offstage the voices of fatuous southern ladies are heard visiting a courtyard below that is a “tourist attraction.” These are used contrapuntally. A very attractive and nervous young woman, Jane, is trying to rouse a young man from an unnaturally deep sleep.]
JANE: Tye, Tye, Oh—Christ . . .
[Tye drops a bare arm off the disordered bed and groans slightly. She abruptly rushes to a sink to wet a towel, returns to the bed and slaps his face with it. He begins to wake—slowly.]
TYE: —Some men would beat a chick un for less’n that, y’ know— [His voice is a deep southern drawl.]
JANE: All right, get out of bed and beat me up.
TYE: Y’know that, babe? [Pause: the actor comes out of character. Then, in a cultivated voice.] May I speak?
DIRECTOR: Is that a line in the play?
TYE: It’s a requ
est to make a comment on a line in the play that always sticks in my craw, it’s pointlessly cheap and off hand it’s not what I’d ever say to a girl of her class that I cared for.
PLAYWRIGHT [aside to himself]: Should never have southern gentlemen in my plays.
DIRECTOR [calling out]: Sound, lights off! —Mr. Tysdale, I’m in total agreement. Your next line is one I’ve marked for a cut since I first read it. It’s—gratuitously—prurient.
PLAYWRIGHT: “Gratuitously prurient” is—egregiously—redundant. Either it’s prurient or not.
DIRECTOR [as if conducting a seminar]: What Mr. Tysdale means, if I may interpret him for you, is that there can be legitimate vulgarisms of speech in a play: They are vulgarisms which characterize; offensive to some people but still defensible. However in this script there are vulgarities which are prurient—gratuitously, whether that phrase suits you or not, it happens to state clearly our objection to it.
TYE: It’s the sort of line that loses you two or three critics: [Snaps his fingers.] like that.
DIRECTOR: Yes, precisely, and I think a five-word line is more expendable than a single notice.
PLAYWRIGHT: Considering the nature of the material, if we’re gonna lose notices on a line, we’ve already lost the ballgame and the ballpark and the home-team. Now, if I was being “gratuitously prurient,” he wouldn’t be wearing a slip, he’d be up there jay bird.
TYE: I will be up here stark naked opening night, no, Monday, at the first preview.
PLAYWRIGHT: In all but a few cases the public exposure of genitalia is gratuitously unattractive.
TYE: Since I respect honesty in a performance, I don’t intend to compromise with this flesh-colored cache-sexe before an audience.
PLAYWRIGHT: I reckon we better add Sunday matinees then. [He rises.] May I be excused to wash my hands while this matter of “gratuitous prurience” is being thrashed out amongst you? [Exits somewhat unevenly up aisle.]
TYE: Arrogant old mother.
DIRECTOR: Yes, quite. [He crosses to the foot of the scaffold to state.] Mr. Tysdale, of course you are playing the boy in the play, but you are not personally the boy and since the author’s still living—
PLAYWRIGHT [from the aisle]: Thanks.
DIRECTOR: I’m afraid that until the line is deleted by the author, it will have to be delivered by the actor.
PLAYWRIGHT [at the back of the house]: Hear, hear.
DIRECTOR: Regardless of our mutual distaste. [Then in a loud whisper.] Of course you might forget it opening night.
TYE: Right.
JANE: Which cuts my—
DIRECTOR: We can’t continue a script conference at this late moment so I suggest we—press on.
TYE [resuming his position on the cot]: Cue me, please.
JANE: Get up.
TYE: —Can’t you see I’m up?
JANE: I don’t mean that kind of up, and don’t bring strip-show lewdness in here this—late Sunday afternoon.
TYE [again out of the play]: Do you see what I mean, it’s right at the top of the play, a bit that creates a skin-flick atmosphere.
DIRECTOR: I see, I know. Perhaps to take the curse off it we can synchronize this bit with a blue bird fluttering in through the gallery shutters, heh, heh.
[The playwright comes out of the Gent’s stuffing a half pint in his pocket.]
DIRECTOR: Sorry, light, sound, continue.
[Tye assumes the attitude of Rodin’s “Thinker” a moment to get back into the part. The director waits respectfully as the “effects” come back on.]
TYE: Cue, Jane.
[Distant piano—blues fade in.]
JANE: No strip-show lewdness in here this—late Sunday afternoon.
TYE [suddenly grave]: Babe, don’t mention the show to me t’day.
JANE: I’d like to remind you that when we first stumbled into this—crazy—co-habitation, you promised me you’d quit the show in a week.
TYE: For what? Tight as work is for a dude with five grades of school and no skill training from the Mississippi sticks?
JANE: You could find something less—publicly embarrassing, like a—filling station attendant, a—male fashion model.
TYE: Model? Ha!
JANE: Don’t put it down, it’s a very lucrative occupation for a personable young man—but of course your choice of employment is no concern of mine now.
TYE: Why, Babe?
JANE: I’m not babe and not chick!
TYE: You say you’re not my chick?
JANE: I say I’m nobody’s chick.
TYE: Any chick I have in my pad is my chick, Babe.
JANE: This is my place, not your crash-pad. You just—moved in and stayed.
TYE: I been in seven months.
JANE: I still have priority here and receipts for the rent.
TYE: I paid the rent this month.
JANE: Half of it, for the first time: my savings being close to exhaustion as me.
[Sound: a funky piano and voice on the Bourbon Street corner. “I’ve Stayed Around and Played Around This Old Town Too Long.” Jane’s mood softens under its influence.]
What a hassle putting you to bed.
TYE: You put me to bed last night?
JANE: It wasn’t last night, it was late morning, near noon, and much too much exertion for someone in my—condition.
TYE [focusing on her more closely]: —Honey, are you pregnant?
JANE: No, Lord, no, who’d be fool enough to get pregnant by a Bourbon Street strip-show barker?
TYE: When a chick talks about her condition don’t it mean she’s pregnant?
JANE: All female conditions are not pregnancy, Tye. And no more Babe or chick to me, please, ‘cause I’m not. What I am is—a desperate young woman living with a young bum employed by gangsters and using my place as a depository for stolen goods. Well, they’re all packed. You’re packed, too. Get up and get rid of that—tumescent condition in the bathroom.
TYE [to the director]: Here’s another I hate.
DIRECTOR: This promises to be a very sticky run-through.
JANE: I understand Tye’s feeling. We’re supposed to bring some pathos to a play that’s—how’d you put it? Gratuitously prurient? And at the first reading you said it would be cleaned up.
PLAYWRIGHT [sitting up a few inches]: Have you ever been on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Jane?
JANE: I was at Mardi Gras once, but—
PLAYWRIGHT: But never heard or noticed anything—what’s the word? Prurient? Going on there in the Quarter?
DIRECTOR: This is our last run-through before previews, the fat is on the fire, and I have a luncheon engagement on Long Island.
PLAYWRIGHT: That’s—vital?
DIRECTOR: I know that you don’t care for the carriage trade but they do include backers. Now let’s go through what is written and possibly after the notices, if we survive them, the Maestro will discover a blue pencil. Tye, your cue is “Get rid of that tumescent condition in the bathroom.”
TYE: —This ain’t a piss hard-on. —Come back to bed.
JANE: No, thank you. Your face is smeared with lipstick; also other parts of you, I didn’t know lip-rouge ever covered so much—territory. Were several involved? The complete company of ladies?
TYE: I hones’ly don’ remember a’ fuckin’ thing after midnight.
JANE: That I do believe. Have some coffee. It’s not instant, it’s percolated.
TYE: —Aw? Whose birthday is it?
JANE: It’s—our day of—parting.
TYE: Aw, now, be sweet, Babe, please come back to bed, I need comfort, not—New Yawk langwidge or—coffee . . .
JANE: I’ve been betrayed by a—sensual streak in my nature, susceptibility to touch, and—you have skin like a child.
TYE: No shit.
JANE: Yes, I must be a—skin freak. I suppose it’s your rural Southern breeding that’s endowed you with that stuff you’re covered with, too fine to be called skin, more like some rare stuff woven by—who talks like that? br />
PLAYWRIGHT: Nobody I know but me. —Once I said, “Give me your tongue in my mouth like holy bread at communion.” Proceed from the skin bit, please.
DIRECTOR: Continue—your drowsy numbness, Maestro, please.
PLAYWRIGHT: Mmmm . . .
JANE: Rare stuff woven by—sanctified caterpillars!
[The director chuckles at her extension of the line.]
PLAYWRIGHT: No variation, please.
JANE: Is this real coffee?
DIRECTOR: Yes.
JANE: I’ll have a bit. [She pours a cup and sips.]
[Voices of lady tourists are heard from the courtyard below.]
FIRST LADY TOURIST: What’s this courtyard called?
SECOND LADY TOURIST: Just courtyard and the date: 1812.
FIRST LADY TOURIST: Imagine the antiquity of that!
THIRD LADY TOURIST: Yes, and it’s the last item on the tour.
TYE: Aw, Jane, come here and just hold me, I never had a rougher night in my life.
JANE: I—
TYE: You?
JANE: You returned here at daybreak and immediately fell on the floor. I somehow managed to haul you onto the bed and undress you, discovered the insatiable mouth prints on your, made an urgent phone call . . .
TYE: Call?
JANE: And then I packed your personal belongings and all that hot merchandise you’ve been holding here, put it all back in the boxes. I’d no idea how much has accumulated, this place has become like the storeroom of the Seven Thieves of Bagdad! Exertion of packing nearly blacked me out. Trembling, sweating—had to bathe and change and then get packed myself.
TYE: — You packed? —Babe?
JANE: Yes, this is moving-day for us both, we’re both evacuating the premises, separately, “Babe.” It’s after noon.
TYE: Look, if you’re knocked up, have the kid: I’m against abortion.
JANE: On moral principles?
TYE: Yeh, that’s it, you’re pregnant: don’t git an abortion: have the kid, Babe. I’d pull myself together for a kid.
JANE: You wouldn’t, you didn’t for me.