Pinball

Alison Lyssa

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781921428715
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Arte dramático

Pinball is a prescient, detailed and funny work that explores queer and lesbian sexual politics, the structures of the legal system, homophobia and childhood trauma. This remarkable play is about a young lesbian woman, Theenie, forced into a custody battle for her son, when she and her ex-husband Sylvester can't convince the other members of their families to live and let live. The child, poignantly invisible and voiceless in the play, is bounced back and forth through the personal politics and prejudices of more and more people as they try to get onto the bandwagon, using Theenie and her male child Alabaster, as a political football. 'Alison Lyssa's words are powerful and devastating [...] her depiction of misogyny and homophobia in Western and Christian societal structures remains accurate, scathing and raw.' SUZY GOES SEE

PROLOGUE

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Pinball machines lit. Electronic firing. Organ music to suit Old Testament drowns pinball machines. Pinball machines go out. Stained glass window lit.

SOLOMON enters wearing biblical robes.

SOLOMON: [reading from 1 Kings 3, v 9–28] ‘… and God said to Solomon … “Behold I give you a wise and discerning mind, so that none like you has been before you and none like you shall arise after you. I give you also what you have not asked, both riches and honour …”

‘And Solomon awoke and behold, it was a dream …

‘Then two harlots came to the king … The one woman said, “Oh, my lord, this woman and I dwell in the same house: and I gave birth to a child … Then on the third day after I was delivered, this woman also gave birth; and we were alone; there was no one else with us in the house; only we two were in the house. And this woman’s son died in the night, because she lay on it. And she arose at midnight and took my son from beside me … and laid it in her bosom, and laid her dead son in my bosom. When I rose in the morning to nurse my child, behold it was dead, but when I looked at it closely in the morning, behold it was not the child that I had borne”. But the other woman said, “No, the living child is mine and the dead child is yours”.

Then the king said, “Bring me a sword”. So a sword was brought before the king, and the king said, “Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other”.’

Organ music. ALABASTAR’s voice, making a sound of firing, builds up to a sound battle with the organ music. The organ music, defeated, fades. Stained glass window fades. Blackout.

ACT ONE

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SCENE ONE

Pinball parlour. VANDELOPE enters. Sound of pinball machines.

SOLOMON: The child, Alabastar, here in a pinball parlour?

He introduces himself to the audience.

Solomon’s the name.

He looks with disdain at a machine.

Caveman’s the game? Sometimes one needs an audience while collecting evidence. Thirteen boys, three girls and you have to look in the dictionary before you know what that one is.

VANDELOPE: Piss off!

She plays a video game.

Jeep! Blll! Loooop!

She makes electronic firing noises.

Score two hundred!

SOLOMON: I prefer the old-fashioned kind with flippers. One can see where the balls go.

VANDELOPE [making firing noises] Bluumm! Tank! You beauty. Score five hundred! Brrip! United Nations truck.

She swears.

Soya beans. Lose three seconds.

SOLOMON ‘And the voice of the turtle dove

Is heard in our land.’

VANDELOPE: Ooops, Vandelope, there goes El Salvador.

SOLOMON: This is the space age. Why aren’t they home playing cowboys and indians like we did?

VANDELOPE: They send kids here to school. Teaches them how to talk to coloured lights bipping, face to face.

SOLOMON: Where is the boy? He must be somebody’s son.

Madam! I’m looking for the owner of a son.

VANDELOPE: I’m not into that. I’m an anarcho-lesbian bicyclist.

SOLOMON: He was last seen with a pile of coins, asking for a cigarette, and he must be all of ten.

VANDELOPE: See if he’ll lend me twenty cents.

SOLOMON: This little boy has potential.

VANDELOPE: If men had to give birth to children they’d pop out of their skulls just like that—fully clothed and brainwashed, drooling ‘Co...