Prayer for My Enemy

Craig Lucas

• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781559363440
• eBook ISBN: 9781559368094
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Drama
• Index: Literature

“America the addicted. America the numb. America the war weary. America the lonely. All these countries compose the jagged terrain of this viscerally potent new play.”—The Seattle Times

“The very best we can hope for is to show the mess of life in such a way as to perhaps awaken our shared capacity for embracing it, in all its beauty and terror.”—Craig Lucas

Craig Lucas “can masterfully distill a world of hurt and perplexity into complicated relations and single, pithy lines” (The Seattle Times), which is never more evident than in his latest play of public and private turmoil in today’s America. Here we find the Noone family: son Billy returns from Iraq, his pregnant sister Marianne marries Billy’s friend and former lover Tad, his mother Karen tries to keep her husband Austin from falling off the wagon—all while the Red Sox and Yankees battle for the 2004 pennant. With Prayer for My Enemy, Lucas returns to the dark territory he has explored with earlier works, “bringing light and craft to previously unlit corners,” and illuminating the ways he is “one of the American theater’s best writers” (Variety).

Craig Lucas is a playwright, screenwriter, and director of both theater and film. His plays include Prelude to a Kiss, The Dying Gaul, Small Tragedy, Blue Window, God’s Heart, The Singing Forest, and the book for the Tony Award–winning musical The Light in the Piazza. He is currently associate artistic director at the Intiman Theatre in Seattle.

Scene 1

Tad and Billy are both filling their gas tanks.

BILLY: Hey. (Pause) Hey.

TAD (A silent?): Huh?

BILLY: How’re you doin’? . . . I’m the guy you were tailgating. (Pause) Why’d you do that?

TAD: You were going really slow, / look, I—

BILLY: I was driving the speed limit.

TAD: Billy?

BILLY: Tad!? How long?! Remember? I didn’t know you were alive, remember all you did for me, how we talked about Being and Nowhere and the universe and what God might be and how you helped me make it through those years of grade school when I was such a geek getting straight A’s and everybody called me a faggot when I wasn’t and you said what’s wrong with playing with each other until we can get girls and so we did until you started crying that one time and you said you were turning us both gay you couldn’t do that to someone so nice, and then your dad got transferred and we said we’d be best friends for life but we weren’t, we both kept moving apart and I just assumed somehow you’d gone with guys and I went with women but still there was something so romantic about what happened and I’ve never told anybody especially with the shit my dad’s put me through he went kind of off the deep end or maybe he was always there but anyway wow—

TAD: You still call me Tad!

BILLY: What do they call you now? Theodore?

TAD: Fuck you! Man, I would’ve recognized you anywhere, what the fuck’s that guy’s problem, I thought, better not look him in the eye, that’s the only reason it took me so long! You probably think I just like guys from all that shit back then but I don’t I’ve been married oh it’s a long story you’re not gonna want to hear, that’s why I’ve moved back.

BILLY: Where are you living now?

TAD: I’ve moved back, can you believe it?

BILLY: Your parents? / You—?

TAD: No, I’ve been married, I got married in high school!

BILLY: You’re straight?

TAD: Long story.

BILLY: I feel like I’m gonna cry.

TAD: Long fuckin’ sob story.

        (A honk.)

BILLY (To unseen driver): What? We’re utilizing the fuckin’ services!

TAD: Dude, pull around!

BILLY: Come on, let’s both check our oil and drive the fucker crazy.

TAD: No, he’s gonna drive around.

BILLY: You look so the fuck the same, what sob story?

TAD: Oh, man.

BILLY: No, come on, I’ll buy you a drink.

Scene 2

Tad and Billy are in a bar.

TAD: She was pregnant, you know, I was sure the baby was mine though now, I don’t know, we decided to go for it, got married, then she started getting cold feet, you know, adoption, abortion, you sure you want to hear this? So she aborts the baby, I start getting all wigged-out about not maybe going to college, how are we gonna do this, I go on one of those antidepressants, can’t practically get it up, she suddenly one day says she has a crush on this other guy, can we try polyamory, you know what that is?

BILLY: Threesomes.

TAD: Bingo, well, she wanted this guy to herself, me to herself, so she goes, starts going back and forth, I get more depressed, more pills, now I can’t come even if I could get it up, she leaves me for him, I decide to try a different approach, you know, so I decide to go to one of those retreats, like health yoga in the mountains kind of place where they teach you to let go let, god, I’m drinking like a fish, too, which you’re not supposed to do when you’re on the other pills, so I give up the pills, but I do it too quick, start hearing voices in my head, back on the pills, go to the retreat, it turns out tantric does not mean learning to medicate, meditate, Jesus, on the breath, it means learn to take the energy you use ejaculating to lighten and I mean would have used, ’cause you stop doing that, you can learn how to not shoot, right?, so that’s what I do, I can be really enlightened and energized and concentrated on another person now without, I mean, I can come, I can come like crazy, I can have multiple orgasms, and this drives women wild, but it also makes them kind of nervous about settling down, so I’ve got this little bevy of beauties, my wife then sues me for mental and emotional cruelty, wins, she wants half the house, my dad bought us the house, she never worked a day in her life, so I sold the house and ran, here I am. What’s going on with you?

BILLY: I’m going . . . tomorrow I’m leaving for Iraq.

TAD: Iraq?

BILLY: I’m stationed in Baghdad.

TAD: What the fuck are you doing in the military? I thought you’d have a Ph.D. in particle fuckin’ physics.

BILLY: Yeah, no, I mean, I decided, you know, I joined the reserves that’s all. I’m not gay!

TAD: The reserves.

BILLY: Yeah, I don’t know. I didn’t want to take any more dough from my father, though . . . well, I’m still living at home, but I’m paying rent with the cash from the, anyway, they called us all up, I’m infantry. He started calling me “Missy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Production History
• Characters
• Scene 1
• Scene 2
• Scene 3
• Scene 4
• Scene 5
• Scene 6
• Scene 7
• Scene 8
• Scene 9
• Scene 10
• Scene 11
• Scene 12
• Scene 13
• Scene 14
• About the Author