Tales of the Lost Formicans and Other Plays Read online

  Tales of the Lost Formicans and Other Plays copyright © 1994 by Constance Congdon

  Introduction copyright © 1994 by Tony Kushner

  Tales of the Lost Formicans copyright © 1989 by Constance Congdon

  No Mercy copyright © 1985, 1986 by Constance Congdon

  Casanova copyright © 1991, 1994 by Constance Congdon

  Losing Father’s Body copyright © 1993, 1994 by Constance Congdon

  Tales of the Lost Formicans and Other Plays is published by Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 355 Lexington Ave., New York, NY 10017.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that this material, being fully protected under the Copyright Laws of the United States of America and all other countries of the Berne and Universal Copyright Conventions, is subject to a royalty. All rights including, but not limited to, professional, amateur, recording, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages are expressly reserved. Particular emphasis is placed on the question of readings and all uses of these plays by educational institutions, permission for which must be secured from the author’s agent: Peter Franklin, William Morris Agency, 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019, (212) 586-5100.

  Cover design by Susan Mitchell.

  Congdon, Constance.

  Tales of the lost formicans and other plays / Constance Congdon. — 1st ed.

  ISBN 978-1-55936-823-0

  I. Title

  PS3553.048776T34 1994

  812’.54—dc20

  93–51495

  CIP

  Book design and composition by The Sarabande Press

  First Edition, December 1994

  Second Printing, December 2000

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  by Tony Kushner

  TALES OF THE LOST FORMICANS

  CHARACTERS

  PRODUCTION NOTES

  ACT ONE

  ACT TWO

  NO MERCY

  CHARACTERS

  PRODUCTION NOTES

  CASANOVA

  CHARACTERS

  PRODUCTION NOTES

  ACT ONE

  ACT TWO

  LOSING FATHER’S BODY

  CHARACTERS

  ACT ONE

  Scene One

  Scene Two

  Scene Three

  Scene Four

  Scene Five

  ACT TWO

  Scene One

  Scene Two

  Scene Three

  Scene Four

  Scene Five

  Scene Six

  Scene Seven

  Scene Eight

  To my husband, Glenn Johnson

  INTRODUCTION

  By Tony Kushner

  This is an introduction, so allow me the pleasure of introducing you to the plays of Constance Congdon, one of the best playwrights our country, and our language, has produced.

  Reexamining these texts, I realize with an embarrassed shock how deeply indebted to this writer I am. When I was working on Angels in America, Part One, and having a lot of difficulty figuring out how to proceed, I saw Tales of the Lost Formicans in a marvelous staged reading, directed by Gordon Edelstein at New Dramatists. I left the reading sunk deep in that delirious mix of emotions—a destabilizing cocktail of elation, depression, excitement, envy and admiration—that a writer almost always feels at having encountered, in the work of a peer, an unmistakably impressive achievement; at having encountered, unexpectedly, the real thing—not mere entertainment (though that is rare enough), but art.

  I sometimes worry that I am more than ordinarily possessed of what most writers have, a magpie memory: it is clear to me now that the Apocalypsis in Suburbia of Formicans impacted powerfully on the development of my own teleological tale. Connie, I believe, is a genuine pioneer, a truly original writer who first arrived at a new theatrical space, from whence a number of plays and playwrights, myself included, have emerged. I do not mean by this that all her fellow playwrights are the children of Connie Congdon. But in the early years of the previous decade a discovery was waiting to be made, namely that the theatre’s peculiarities made it a particularly resonant space for the staging of the kind of postmodern, collective nervous breakdown American society has been having. Connie, among those of us working within the tradition of narrative dramatic realism, and with all due credit to her forebears, got there first. The discovery was too important to disregard, leaving many of us who adopted her innovations feeling, as Brecht writes in his journals, like the person who wrote the second sonnet.

  Connie possesses all the virtues a playwright should possess, and she wears them in a pure, almost classical style. Her plays are entirely, unapologetically theatrical, by which I mean that they play the contradictions of the theatre for all they’re worth, and it is in the playing of these contradictions that her work derives both dramatic life and meaning. The paradox that an object onstage both is and isn’t real; the dialectic of tragedy and comedy, of tackiness and grandeur; the simultaneous elusiveness and the imponderable, unavoidable weighty presence of both Time and Place—so fearfully restrictive, so effortlessly manipulated in the theatre; the tension between the script as literature, as poetry, and the script as score for a pretend-spontaneous, kinetic event: this is what theatricality is. The distilled essence of this art is seeing double, pondering and experiencing conundrums, the tension and clash of opposites. You will find this essence in these plays.

  You will also find writing that transposes with breathtaking ease from wonderful, mordant comedy to heartbreak, from real poetry to real vulgarity, from beauty to kitsch and back to beauty again. Connie’s visions imprint themselves indelibly on the memory: horrifying moments, such as the young woman trying to breathe life into her umbilically attached baby in Casanova; tender, elegiac moments, such as the child sleeping on mattresses piled under the first atomic bomb in No Mercy; or, my favorite, the hapless paranoiac Jerry falling asleep, a suicide’s pistol in his mouth.

  This image incorporates in a single instant Connie’s sharp humor, abundant empathy, and her great, galvanizing fear for the survival of our species. Our days are more and more frequently, ominously illumined by a long-shadowed, constantly waning, comfortless “dinosaur light.” Connie’s search, through the rapidly falling “crocodile night” is for escape, salvation, futurity.

  American playwrights of my generation are looking for hope. We seem to accept this search—for real hope, not for Reagan-hope, but rather for what Ernst Bloch calls “concrete, knowing hope”—as our moral, civic responsibility. The generation of American playwrights immediately preceding us did not feel this way. Their absurdism is fraught with a vital, exuberant disgust and despair. And there are younger writers now, some only a few years younger, who are quite exciting, thoroughgoing nihilists. These predecessors and antecessors occasionally make me think of myself and my contemporaries as weak sentimentalists, or at best as cowards who can’t face up to the ineluctable truth: Armageddon is upon us, and when it comes it will most likely lack even an ameliorative Michelangelan grandeur.

  These older and younger dramatists, with their bleak, at times incredibly funny, plays—hopelessness can be very funny, so can pain—may be expressing hope indirectly, through the Beckettian trope: the fact that this work exi
sts at all is all the reason for hope there is. Or, as Heiner Müller, the great German playwright, said in an interview, “The utopian feature is in the form, and not in the content.” Or, perhaps, announcing volubly that we’re in Hell may be the best way finally to awaken all of us damned to the facts of our appalling predicament.

  Those of us who lived on the periphery of the Sixties, witnesses to but not, by reasons of age or geography or upbringing, the battle-scarred participants in a nearly successful cultural and political revolution, have taken from that decade of rage, loss, struggle and astonishment a belief in social resurrection and redemption. The radical possibilities of this country were revealed then, momentarily, before the prevailing counterforces of Nixon and Reagan swept triumphally, calamitously to power. Perhaps one of the worst crimes of the criminals we have established as our leaders is that they have sealed up the borders of Utopia, and convinced far too many of us that our dreams were mere fantasies, and that maundering, cynical, senile nostalgia, rather than dreaming, is what adults do.

  But here is a writer who has not lost the understanding we all once had of the awesome power of dreams, a writer who remembers her dreams, and her nightmares, and who possesses great skills in bringing what she learns in the night to life. Even if it is only stage-life, we are privileged to witness it; it gives us hope and power. To spend time with these plays is to spend time with the splendid woman who wrote them; and she’s all the reason anybody needs to want to try to save our species, if saving it is possible. Connie thinks it is possible; and I believe her.

  TALES OF THE LOST FORMICANS

  For my father, Ned Congdon

  TALES OF THE LOST FORMICANS was workshopped first at River Arts Repertory, under the direction of Gordon Edelstein, and then received its first production there, directed by Roberta Levitow, after a second workshop at the Sundance Institute, directed by Mary B. Robinson.

  It was then produced by Actors Theatre of Louisville, starting on March 19, 1989, with the following cast and creative contributors:

  CATHY

  Lizbeth Mackay

  ERIC

  Jason O’Neill

  JIM

  Edward Seamon

  EVELYN

  Mary Bouchet

  JUDY

  Jan Leslie Harding

  JERRY

  Bob Morrisey

  ACTOR

  Jonathan Fried

  DIRECTOR

  Roberta Levitow

  SETS

  Paul Owen

  LIGHTS

  Ralph Dressler

  COSTUMES

  Lewis D. Rampino

  SOUND

  Mark Hendren

  This production was chosen as the U.S. entry in the International Theater Festival in Helsinki, Finland.

  TALES OF THE LOST FORMICANS was produced by The Women’s Project & Productions, New York City, opening on April 17, 1990. The cast and creative contributors were as follows:

  CATHY

  Lizbeth Mackay

  ERIC

  Noel Derecki

  JIM

  Edward Seamon

  EVELYN

  Rosemary Prinz

  JUDY

  Deidre O’Connell

  JERRY

  Michael Countryman

  ACTOR

  Fred Sanders

  DIRECTOR

  Gordon Edelstein

  SETS

  James Youmans

  LIGHTS

  Anne Militello

  COSTUMES

  Daniele Hollywood

  SOUND

  John Gromada

  CHARACTERS

  CATHY (nee MCKISSICK), early thirties

  ERIC (her son), 15

  JIM MCKISSICK (her father), late fifties

  EVELYN MCKISSICK (her mother), early fifties

  JUDY, early thirties

  JERRY, early thirties

  ACTOR #7, male, younger than JIM, who plays the following roles; HANK, TRUCKER, ALIEN TRUCKER, B-MOVIE ALIEN and JACK

  All ALIENS are played by the human cast members

  TIME

  The present

  PLACE

  A New York apartment (briefly)

  A large middle-class subdivision somewhere in Colorado

  PRODUCTION NOTES

  The staging should be relatively seamless, with the stage space shared by all the characters. Furniture and other objects in the world are minimal because they are artifacts.

  With the exception of the actor who plays Jerry, the Aliens are played by the human cast members wearing matching sunglasses. They are human in their demeanor, except that they seem overly pleasant and solicitous. (The character of Jim is only effective as an Alien in Act One.)

  The Voiceover speeches can be shared by the actors as Aliens (with the exception of the actor who plays Jerry). They need not be hidden while they do the Voiceovers, although sometimes it might be interesting if they were. The play works best, however, when Actor #7 does most of the Voiceovers.

  Jerry’s “squeak” is a manifestation of his effort to sigh with a throat constricted by tension.

  ACT ONE

  As the audience files in, Jerry lies on the stage, in darkness, lit only by a hand-held fluorescent lamp beside him. He is looking at the night sky with binoculars. He’s lying on a sleeping bag. The chair and table for the next scene are pre-set nearby. After the audience gets settled, the lights bump all the way up and three Aliens enter. They are the actor playing Evelyn, the actor playing Cathy, and the actor playing Jim. Two of the Aliens unfold a star map and the Cathy/Alien finds, with difficulty, a small dot at the periphery and points to it.

  CATHY/ALIEN (To audience): You are here.

  (As they roll up the map, Jerry gets up and exits, discouraged, crossing near them, dragging his sleeping bag and carrying his fluorescent lamp—he doesn’t see them, but they see him. One of the Aliens cues the music and Muzak-like “elevator music” is piped in. Aliens exit, leaving the stage bare except for a chair and table, part of a kitchen ensemble, typical in suburbia but dated by a decade or so. The chair is upholstered with plastic and the legs of both chair and table are of bent chrome. The chair has a hole in the backrest—a design element common to chairs of this type)

  VOICEOVER: First item. A situpon. (Aside, softly) What? (Back to mike) Chair. Chair. For sitting. Sitting and eating or some other ritual. Goes with table . . . which we’ll see in a minute. Note the construction. Forward legs (Aside)—they call them legs? (Back to mike) Forward legs are made as one unit, curving up to provide the rear of the chair. Rear legs are constructed in a smaller curve unit which fits under the seat and inside the forward leg unit, providing a very strong system for the body pads—cushions—and then the body itself. The wobble that some of these chairs exhibit we attribute to climate changes . . . or some other entropic reality.

  (An Alien enters and “shows” the chair—sort of like Vanna White on “Wheel of Fortune”)

  Care was taken in beautifying the chair. The sleek surface of the legs reflects light except, of course, where there are spots of oxidation. And this surface is the substance chrome. We have several other examples of that substance—evidently a precious metal used as a surface to apportion many religious objects, specifically the numerous wheeled sarcaphogae used to carry spirits to the next world.

  (Alien holds up a small model of an automobile)

  The cushions of the chair are covered in a substance made to mimic the epidermis of the sitter, but treated to hold a sheen which is kept polished by friction of the buttocks against the surface. The significance of the hole in the backrest is unknown to us at this time. It was, perhaps, symbolic. A breathing hole for the spirit of the sitter, or even the ever-present eye of god.

  (Alien exits. Jim enters, a middle-aged man in work clothes. He is wearing lipstick and has a bandage on his right index finger)

  Next, the table. Four legs—the hard surface covered with geometric shapes—decoration or, perhaps, a code?

  (Jim lower
s head, face down, staring until it slowly touches the table surface, stays there. After a beat, the table wobbles)

  JIM: Hmmmm. (Rests the side of his head on the table—pressing it gently against the cool of the surface) Ahhh.

  VOICEOVER: The table legs also wobble—this leading us to theorize that perhaps both examples of the wobble phenomenon are not random but conscious built-in representations of the unreliable nature of existence for this particular . . . species.

  JIM (To someone offstage): I’m gonna finally fix the goddam toaster. Evelyn?

  VOICEOVER: Wait. Reverse it, please. (Pause) Please reverse it—it’s too early—something else goes here—

  JIM: Nilaveh? Retsote moddag ath skif eelanaif annog mai. (Reverses his movements very fast and exits)

  VOICEOVER: There.

  CATHY (To audience): Why would I move back home?

  VOICEOVER: This is right.

  CATHY (To audience): I mean, I have a perfectly nice home of my—wait a minute—(Stops to listen to something offstage, then back to audience)—anyway, it’s a two-bedroom apartment, rent-controlled—(Stops again) Excuse me—(To someone offstage) Honey? Mike? Is that you? (Exiting to check on “Mike”) Mike? Are you throwing up? (Sticking her head back in to talk to the audience) He’s in the bathroom. (Offstage, to “Mike”) I’m coming in. (A beat. Sticking her head back in to talk to the audience) Bad news. Excuse me. . . . (Offstage, to “Mike”) What? You what??!! And she’s what???!!! (Reenters fully, talks to audience) Life’s funny. One minute you’re married. The next minute, you’re not. One of his students, eighteen years old, “Kimberly,” plays the oboe, the baby is his. (Exits)