Sotto Voce (TCG Edition)

Nilo Cruz

• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781559365062
• eBook ISBN: 9781559368346
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Drama
• Index: Literature

“Exquisite, dreamlike… The poetry of Cruz’s writing is what those who love his work cite most often about his style, and Sotto Voce has that… It also contains passages that are realistic, whimsical, sensual and heartbreaking. Cruz may be that rarity, a poet of the stage, but he is first and foremost a dramatist.”
—Christine Dolen, Miami Herald

The millennium, New York City. Bemadette Kahn, an eighty-year-old German-born writer, spends her days in her apartment, trying to forget the past. Until Saquiel Rafaeli, a young Jewish-Cuban researcher, appears on her doorstep, forcing her to confront those haunted memories. He’s eager to learn about Bemadette’s long-lost lover, Ariel Strauss, who set sail in 1939 aboard the St. Louis, never to be seen again. With layered lyrical language and vibrant intimacy, Sotto Voce is an imaginative exploration of the power of memory, love and human connection.

Nilo Cruz is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Anna in the Tropics, as well as Beauty of the Father, Two Sisters and a Piano, Lorca in a Green Dress, Dancing on Her Knees, Night Train to Bolina and other works.

Act One

As the lights begin to dim, we hear the cries of seagulls and the constant sound of a ship’s horn in a harbor. Then, in full darkness, we hear the sound of someone writing on a computer keyboard and the amplified recorded voice of a woman. The sounds become an echo.

Projected on the curtain is an image of the ocean.

BEMADETTE (Recorded voice): Ariel and Nina Strauss boarded the St. Louis ship, Saturday, May 13, 1939. They had left Hamburg with thoughts of starting a new life away from Germany and finding a new home in Havana.

(The lights reveal Bemadette.)

(Spoken voice) I wanted to be on the ship with them, but I clenched my toes inside my shoes to keep from running up the gangway, as I stood immobile on the dock, drenched in my coat with the desire to leave with Ariel, while the air around me became still.

(A phone rings. The lights reveal Saquiel, a young man dressed in a leather coat. Bemadette picks up the phone without speaking.)

SAQUIEL: Hello? Bemadette?

(No answer from Bemadette.)

Are you there?

BEMADETTE: Yes.

SAQUIEL: It’s me. Saquiel.

BEMADETTE: No, you’re not Saquiel. That’s not the name I gave you. You’re Ariel Strauss.

SAQUIEL: I’m leaving—

BEMADETTE: Do you have to remind me?

SAQUIEL: No. But from the beginning I told you my visit would be short.

BEMADETTE: Yes. It isn’t the first time you tell me this.

SAQUIEL: But you never believed me—

BEMADETTE: No. I thought I had dreamt it.

SAQUIEL: My visa expired—

BEMADETTE (Playfully): My dear young man, you could have lied to me—

SAQUIEL: Lied—?

BEMADETTE: Yes.

SAQUIEL: How?

BEMADETTE: By easing the moment.

SAQUIEL: Is that what you want me to do?

BEMADETTE: I thought you would know by now—

SAQUIEL: Know what—?

BEMADETTE: To lie to me.

SAQUIEL: If I knew how to lie to you I would.

BEMADETTE: It would help me forget that you’re leaving.

SAQUIEL: I think it’s too late now.

BEMADETTE: It’s never too late. Something is always beginning.

SAQUIEL: What could begin now?

BEMADETTE: What we have to say to each other one last time.

SAQUIEL: The sound of good-bye?

BEMADETTE: That’s also a beginning. You mustn’t forget to take a look at Central Park one last time.

SAQUIEL: With you?

BEMADETTE: No, by yourself. I’m not leaving. I don’t need to see it one last time.

SAQUIEL: I only know how to go there with you.

BEMADETTE (Her expression is childlike): In the end there’s nothing to it. We only have to close our eyes and enter Central Park.

SAQUIEL: Were my eyes to close now, I’d be waiting for you there.

BEMADETTE: In what part of the park?

SAQUIEL: Where I always like to sit.

BEMADETTE: By the statue of the Cuban poet, José Martí.

SAQUIEL: And we’d visit the park with the specter of the poet.

BEMADETTE: The three of us like ghosts.

SAQUIEL: Yes. And he’d show us the trees he used to know in the park.

BEMADETTE: The last trees to drop their leaves in the fall.

SAQUIEL: And the ones to bloom first . . .

BEMADETTE: Of course, he would’ve known all the trees.

SAQUIEL: And so did Walt Whitman . . .

BEMADETTE: And Edith Wharton . . .

SAQUIEL: Bemadette, I must go. I have to go.

BEMADETTE (Suddenly, desperately but quietly): Don’t go yet! Don’t go, Saquiel!

SAQUIEL: Do you realize that if I don’t leave I might not be allowed to come back?

(She doesn’t respond.)

Bemadette. Are you there? Would you read my letters when I write to you?

BEMADETTE: I’d much rather hear your voice—

SAQUIEL: That’s not what I asked you—

BEMADETTE: I know—

SAQUIEL: Good-bye then—

(Sound of a dial tone. Bemadette is unable to end the phone call. The lights go down on Saquiel.)

BEMADETTE: How did I spend these same hours the past years without his voice?

How did I get myself into this? How did it begin?

(Lights change. Bemadette takes us back to the initial conversation that occurred a month ago with Saquiel.

The telephone rings. The answering machine picks up the call. Lights up on Saquiel.)

SAQUIEL: Ms. Kahn . . . Ms. Kahn . . . it’s me, Saquiel, the student from Cuba. Don’t hang up. It doesn’t matter if you don’t talk to me. You don’t have to tell me a word. I want to tell you why I’ve come to see you. —Ms. Kahn, are you there?

(Not a word from her.)

I couldn’t keep from doing it. Are you listening to me?

(Not a word f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Production History
• Characters
• Set
• Author’s Note
• Act One
• Act Two
• About the Author