Plays for The Public

Richard Foreman

• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781559365550
• eBook ISBN:
  9781559368759
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Drama
• Index: Literature

“There’s an irresistible joy to reading these plays…examining them at leisure without the urgent propulsive forward movement of the theater, reveals beauties and resonances uniquely literary.” —Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director, The Public Theater, from his foreword

Plays for The Public includes:

The Gods Are Pounding My Head! (AKA Lumberjack Messiah)

“Richard Foreman is the ultimate theater auteur and mind-roiling warlock of avant-garde drama… Gods is an extravaganza of tightly orchestrated hallucinogenic visual effects, bruising slapstick and intense, cryptic lines… It is majestically mad and funny.” —New York Times

Idiot Savant

“Vintage Foreman: ravishing, perplexing, scary, a sensual and intellectual message for those weary of causality and psychology.” —Time Out New York

Old-Fashioned Prostitutes

“What makes Mr. Foreman’s work so entertaining is his ability to turn these classic, head-scratching concerns into phantasmagorical vaudevilles in which all the world’s a stage that keeps changing shape on you… Mr. Foreman is a grandmaster.” —New York Times

This volume features the two plays sumptuously produced at The Public Theater in New York City that mark the culmination of Richard Foreman’s unstintingly inventive, astonishing career in theater, just as he was beginning to devote his creative energies entirely to filmmaking.

Old-Fashioned Prostitutes:
A True Romance

PRODUCTION HISTORY

Old-Fashioned Prostitutes: A True Romance. Co-produced by the Ontological-Hysteric Theater (Richard Foreman, Founding Artistic Director; Mimi Johnson, Managing Director) and The Public Theater (Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director; Patrick Willingham, Executive Director). Presented at The Public Theater, New York City. April 30–June 2, 2013. Written, directed and designed by Richard Foreman.

SUZIE	Alenka Kraigher
GABRIELLA	Stephanie Hayes
SAMUEL	Rocco Sisto
ALFREDO	David Skeist

A large paneled room with banquette.

GABRIELLA: Número One.

(All enter. Alfredo goes to mirror, shines it.)

VOICE: End of play.

ALFREDO: OK. When looking into a mirror

What one sees—goddammit.

GABRIELLA: Is this true?

Why does one feel

one is falling towards the center

of the earth?

ALFREDO: Like this. (Falls)

GABRIELLA: The entire earth—

I force myself to say that.

SUZIE: No no no and no.

ALFREDO: Oh yes, I now say.

SAMUEL: During my leisurely promenade

Through the dark streets

of the city of the dead and the almost

dead

It comes to my mind …

But perhaps, ladies and gentlemen,

it is best never to speak openly about

such things.

But it did happen

That traveling these streets

in bright sunlight

An old man with white hair

Shabbily dressed, trudging slowly

in the direction opposite to the one

in which I was traveling

carrying a large, soiled cardboard box

holding what personal belongings

I could not guess

But—whispered hoarsely under his breath

“Go to Berkeley, make film.”

I did not respond.

But I frowned

And a few seconds later

turned to watch him proceed, slowly

down the street.

(Girls giggle.)

Later in the day

Lying on the bed in my hotel room

I wondered—

SUZIE AND GABRIELLA: Ooo …

SAMUEL: I wondered should I have approached him

to ask for clarification.

Was he speaking to me

or to himself?

—yet it seemed appropriate to my concerns—

And my possible

Future.

GABRIELLA: Go to Berkeley, my friend,

make film.

SUZIE: Well, why not?

GABRIELLA: Which could have meant, not the city in sundrenched California—

SUZIE: But possibly the long-dead Irish philosopher of idealism, Bishop George Berkeley—

GABRIELLA: Oooo …

SUZIE: —himself,

whose view of reality might be poetically reimagined

as a vision of the world in which experience

itself was but a thin film, spread in illusionary fashion

upon human consciousness.

SAMUEL: So that

“Go to Berkeley, make film,” could have meant, “Go

deeper into the notion of the world as

a transparent surface only”—

depending upon the impress of a mental apparatus—

snapping the world into apparent being only—

And this, then Walt Whitman-like figure—vision

or reality—or serendipitous coincidence

of the moment—this was the message—

the gift to me on such a sun–drenched afternoon.

But of course I said nothing to him—

Too shy perhaps.

SUZIE AND GABRIELLA (Singing):

Shy shy shy, terribly terribly shy.

SAMUEL: Avoiding my destiny perhaps.

SUZIE AND GABRIELLA: Shy shy shy.

SAMUEL: Yet another time, another place

Visiting the city of attractive women

—Feeling my soul as if—activated

And t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Old-Fashioned Prostitutes: A True Romance
• The Gods Are Pounding My Head! (AKA Lumberjack Messiah)
• Idiot Savant