Three Hotels

Plays and Monologues

Jon Robin Baitz

• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781559360852
• eBook ISBN: 9781559368209
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: American Drama

“One of the Ten Best Plays of the Year! ‘No longer merely promising, Jon Robin Baitz is now a major playwright.’” – Time Magazine

"Jon Robin Baitz is the American theatre's most fascinating playwright of conscience. Three Hotels packs an emotional punch that lingers."--Michael Kuchwara, Associated Press

Dazzling audiences with the linguistic artistry, keen insights and comprehensive vision of Three Hotels, Jon Robin Baitz enhances his reputation as one of America’s most important playwrights. In three dramatic monologues that progress from intellectual cynicism to heartbreaking honesty, he reveals the emotional and physical wounds sustained by the foot soldiers of the conglomerates operating in Third World countries and, by extension, by all Americans adrift in the seas of international commerce and politics.
Also included are several shorter works (Four Monologues, Coq au Vin, It Changes Every Year and Recipe for One, or A Handbook for Travelers), each of which, like Three Hotels, “is the fervent prayer that there will be something in this wrecked world to salvage.”

Jon Robin Baitz is the author of The Film Society, Other Desert Cities, The End of the Day, and The Substance of Fire, which he adapted into a major motion picture. He was the showrunner on ABC’s Brothers & Sisters. He also wrote the screenplay for the upcoming film Stonewall directed by Roland Emmerich. He lives in New York.

THREE HOTELS

This play is dedicated to Joe Mantello,

who brought it and its author to life.

PART ONE:

THE HALT & THE LAME

TANGIER, MOROCCO

A hotel suite. An air of faded Edwardian quietude hangs heavy in the air. Kenneth Hoyle stands for a moment in thought. He has on a rather exquisite summer suit. There are manila files, papers, old copies of the London Financial Times, etc., scattered about the room.

HOYLE: The first thing I want to say is, this is an interesting market. This little corner of Africa here. And it’s been a particularly bloody morning here in Morocco, let me tell you. Because one of the interesting things about this market is we lose more money here than anywhere else in the world. Which believe me, is saying a lot. Because we lose money everywhere.

So this entire morning has been about cutting away the deadwood, and when I say deadwood, think of a petrified forest, okay? Letting people go. That sort of thing. And gruesome work it is. I mean, to fly in and check into some hotel and tell people it’s over is not exactly . . . a joyride.

Markets. At World Headquarters in Los Angeles, we have a sort of War Room. And there is a map. A lucite map of the world, upon which our competition appears as a sort of huge orange cancer encroaching. This is the same orange as the drink Fanta which is popular in my markets.

(Beat)

Third World Markets. (They like us to say “Developing Nations” which is slightly laughable given just how little development occurs.)

(He goes to drinks tray and takes his time mixing a martini)

I sometimes think that if we could color our product, which is powdered baby supplement, a powdered-milk formula, if we could just color our product orange like this drink Fanta, a fun color, appealing to the natives, we might increase our sales threefold overnight.

“Five’ll get ya ten,” I say at our meetings in the War Room, that if this baby formula were bright orange, fizzy and sweet, we’d knock ’em dead in Lagos. Gets a bit of a laugh out of Mulcahey and Kroener who begrudge me not at all my little bits of gallows jokery so long as I perform for them. Gotta perform. This has come to mean, it appears, that “I let people go.” This morning I’ve had, well, today is a sort of a red-letter day when it comes to unemployment for many. Fraiser, Conclon, Truitt, DeWitt, and just now, Varney.

(He takes a long drink from his martini)

Who had come up through the International Division with me. I mean we started at the same time. Twenty some years ago. They handed him this entire market. All of North Africa. Handed it to him. And he blew it. His little thing? Little boys. Loved the little native boys. But it was not that which stalled his progress through the International Division. No.

(He sighs)

I did warn him. We had dinner last month in Nairobi. I said “Kroener and Mulcahey are going to want to see something soon.” A clear, clear bloody flat-out warning to this buffoon, and I did it as a favor to him because we came up together. But he kept going on and on about the little salesgirls he found, “nut-brown little milkmaid-gals,” he called them. And implied a number of them were willing. And one sits there mortified, knowing, wanting to just get up and say, “Hey pal, nobody gives a fuck if your cock is twisted, just so long as the fourth-quarter profits are flyers.”

(He wipes his brow. The heat of the room)

That is how we speak at World Headquarters. And you’ve gotta learn fast. What’s funny to me is that they perceive me as some sort of gentleman farmer tending his little garden. “Oh call Kenneth Hoyle, he’ll know how to handle Varney. He’s marvelous at that sort of work.” I’m good at firing people is what they’re saying.

My first year of this particular assignment consisted almost exclusively of getting off of prop planes and doing “that sort of work.” Because by the time Mulcahey and Kroener finally decided to let me have a shot at it, the orange bits on the lucite map had pretty much occluded our blue. And I was a sort of last-ditch-try-anything-what-about-Hoyle sort of thing.

The result has been a bit of a bloodbath. People who used to want to have a drink . . . they shy away a bit now. Do I blame them? You can’t. Even though I don’t make a game of it or take the slightest bit of pleasure out of the task. What sort of person would? But the thing to do is do it quickly. Because when you linger it’s sheer hell.

In less than an hour the next batch starts trudging in. Less than an hour, next batch.

(Another martini is mixed)

This is how it’s done. “Varney. It’s no accident that I’m stopping off here in Tangier.” And he looks at me. At first there is this moment of denial. The raw animal response—the instinct—“Do I run, do I hide?”

(He is quiet for a moment)

And I’ll just sit very quietly. Because I want him to understand the thing that is happening and to create an atmosphere of dignity. Which is up to them. Before I have to utter the unfortunate words, “I’m here because we have to make a change.” It’s so much better when the words are not actually spoken.

But Varney, he gets it, he’s an old hand. You know when it’s over. So we sit here quietly. And then he asks me, “Doesn’t it feel odd, Ken?”

“What?” I say.

And he says, “Your rise to power, Ken.” And then he goes. Quietly goes. They go quietly when I do it.

And afterwards, when one is sitting by oneself here in one’s room, it is not hard to think of the railroads to the ovens.

You do not want to talk about the ovens at World Headquarters. One time in the War Room, I made one of my little asides. I said I hoped that our baby-formula marketing policy in the Third World would not be looked upon as some sort of horrifying mercantile . . . Final Solution in twenty years. And Kroener looked at me over this huge table we have and said in his Havanaesque accent, “Well I hardly see the comparison between baby formula and Zyklon-B gas, do you?” Barks out a laugh. Which shuts me up. Quickly. Let me tell you.

(Pause)

When I told my wife that story, she said, “What I’d like to do is hang a big dead cow from one of the palm trees.” At World Headquarters we have two giant palm trees in front of the building flanking the neon Iris and Rose sign that lights up Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica. So sometimes I think, “Well, why tell her these stories if she’s going to be so hypersensitive?” But who else is there. To discuss this with. If not your mate? I mean, if not her, then . . .

(Pause)

Yeah, well. . . . Oh well. I will say this. I shocked her last winter in London. A young man who—well let me preface this—a lefty Brit with money. And when I say lefty y...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• A Note from the Playwright
• Three Hotels
• Four Monologues
• Coq au Vin
• It Changes Every Year
• Recipe for One, or A Handbook for Travelers