Next in my Daily Book Excerpt:
Next on the script shelf:
Next Tennessee Williams play on the shelf is Small Craft Warnings, included in Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. 5: The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore / Kingdom of Earth (The Seven Descents of Myrtle) / Small Craft Warnings / The Two-Character Play
Another one of his plays from the early 70s. I think it’s his best title as well. There’s something about it that is just so evocative, so symbolically perfect once you read the play … Small Craft Warnings. Those words are said in the play only once, and in a real throwaway moment … it’s not a big pointed-out thing … but the more you think about it, the more levels you see to that title. This is a play about those who live on the utter fringe of society – those who have either checked out of life, because they are alcoholics – or those who couldn’t adjust to normal life, whether clean and sober or not. All of them: small craft. It’s just a perfect title.
It takes place in a bar on the southern California coast. The bar is right on the beach. It’s a dive. Maybe it’s right off a highway or something – because occasionally, drifters come in – and the owner has a real problem with people who have nowhere to go, and show up at the bar expecting handouts.
The play is not meant to be totally realistic. Each character (and there are only 7, I think) has a moment when all the action around him or her stops – a spotlight falls on them – and they have a monologue spoken directly to the audience. So we see who they are, socially – we see their interactions – we judge who they are, of course, on how they behave – as we judge all people – but then, in a moment of revelation, each one gets to describe what is REALLY going on – and not only that – but what it is LIKE to be them. There’s no real plot, only a bare bones of one.
The people in the bar are: Monk, the owner, who lives upstairs. Doc, a raging alcoholic who was kicked out of the medical profession for doing surgeries while drunk. He still practices, though – only now he has to do it in secret. He’s a pathetic character. There’s Leona and Bill – a “couple” – but really only out of convenience. Leona is a beautician who lives in a trailer – and Bill, a hustler, who pretty much has sex with people for money, has been shacking up with her. Bill is on the verge of losing his looks – he’s not able to really sell himself anymore – he’s another pathetic character. He is all about his penis. He is obsessed with his penis – Leona describes his relationship to his genitals as “his religion” to someone else during the play – Bill basically expects that everyone else will be obsessed with his penis, too. He is a rapidly fading hustler. Pathetic. He’s the male equivalent of the older female floozy. The woman who is a bit too old to be wearing bright red lipstick, and a bit too old to be out flirting with strangers at 3 in the morning. It’s okay when you’re 22, 23, but … 50? It starts to get ikky. That’s Bill. Leona, during the course of the play, breaks up with Bill – he’s a free-loader. Then there’s Violet – a slut, basically. But a slut, Tennessee Williams style. She pretty much can’t stop crying throughout the entire play. Leona, at one point, refers to her as a ‘water plant’ – also ‘an amorphous creature’ – unable to ever put down a root. Violet lives out of her suitcase, and rents a room above an amusement arcade – She hangs out at the arcade and picks up sailors. She’s a very very very weird woman. Men walk by her and she literally can’t stop herself – she reaches out and grabs their crotch. It’s a compulsion – she can’t stop herself. It drives Leona insane, especially because Violet knows no boundaries and is always going after Bill’s crotch as well. Violet is a MESS. All she does is drink, and cry. She never eats. Then there’s Steve – the short-order cook. Another pathetic dude who thinks that he is Violet’s boyfriend. It embarrasses him, though – that he is at a point in his life when VIOLET is the best he can do for himself. These people are always in the bar.
During the course of the play, two strangers come in: Quentin and Bobby. Quentin is an older gay man (but Tennessee says that he should not give off an “effeminate” vibe, but more of a “sexless” vibe) – who has picked up the young gorgeous Bobby, who was riding his bike along the highway. Bobby is from Iowa, I believe – and is the only “innocent” one in the play. Quentin is such a jaded old queen – that any real human feeling or real human warmth is not possible for him. He is the epitome of “over it”. He has been there, done that, in a COSMIC sense. (I know people like that. They are colossal bores.) But there he is with Bobby, a fresh-faced free-spirited kid – Quentin has picked Bobby up for the express purpose of having sex with him. Bobby is kind of laid-back, and complies. But Quentin has this whole weird older-gay-man psychodrama going on … and Bobby eventually realizes this and gets the hell away from him. He doesn’t want to become a sad old queen. That’s really his only option, and he doesn’t want to be anything like Quentin. He doesn’t even want to be “gay” because of the entire WORLD that inevitably comes along with that label – a world that he sees as sad, lonely, and pathetic.
Meanwhile: Leona once had a brother – a beloved brother – who died of TB. This younger brother was gay – and the second Bobby walks into the place, Leona is stunned at the resemblance. She becomes attached to Bobby. She follows him around. She asks him to live in her trailer with her. She wants to be “a gay man’s moll”. Bobby resists – he is young – he is not yet at the end of the road, like everybody else in the bar. You only live with Leona in her trailer when you are at the end of the road. Leona basically never recovered from losing her brother. In her mind, he was all that was good and pure and perfect -and when he died, he took the possibility of goodness with him.
I’ll post a bit from an exchange between Quentin and Leona – which then leads into Quentin’s inner-monologue moment. Just so you can see how the structure of the play works.
And man. What a title. Small Craft Warnings.
EXCERPT FROM Small Craft Warnings
LEONA. Name?
QUENTIN. Quentin … Miss?
LEONA. Leona. Dawson. And he’s?
QUENTIN. Bobby.
LEONA. Bobby, come back to the party. I want you back here, love. Resume your seat. [Resting a hand on the boy’s stiff shoulder] You’re a literary gent with the suede shit-kickers and a brass-button blazer and a … [flicks his scarf]
BILL. [leering from bar] Ask him if he’s got change for a three-dollar bill.
QUENTIN. Yes, if you have the bill.
LEONA. Ignore the peasants. I don’t think that monkey-faced mother will serve us that bourbon … I never left his bar without leaving a dollar tip on the table, and this is what thanks I get for it, just because it’s the death-day of my brother and I showed a little human emotion about it. Now, what’s the trouble between you and this kid from Iowa where the tall corn blows, I mean grows?
QUENTIN. I only go for straight trade. But this boy … look at him! Would you guess he was gay? … I didn’t, I thought he was straight. But I had an unpleasant surprise when he responded to my hand on his knee by putting his hand on mine.
BOBBY. I don’t dig the word “gay”. To me they mean nothing, those words.
LEONA. Aw, you’ve got plenty of time to learn the meanings of words and cynical attitudes. Why he’s got eyes like my brother’s! Have you paid him?
QUENTIN. For disappointment?
LEONA. Don’t be a mean-minded mother. Give him a five, a ten. If you picked up what you don’t want, it’s your mistake and pay for it.
BOBBY. I don’t want money from him. I thought he was nice, I liked him.
LEONA. Your mistake, too. [She turns to Quentin] Gimme your wallet.
[Quentin hands her his wallet]
BOBBY. He’s disappointed. I don’t want anything from him.
LEONA. Don’t be a fool. Fools aren’t respected, you fool. [She removes a bill from the wallet and stuffs it in the pocket of Bobby’s shirt. Bobby starts to return it] Okay, I’ll hold it for you till he cuts out of here to make another pickup and remind me to give it back to you when he goes. He wants to pay you, it’s part of his sad routine. It’s like doing penance … penitence.
BILL. [loudly] Monk, where’s the head?
MONK. None of that here, Bill.
QUENTIN. [with a twist of smile toward Bill] Pity.
LEONA. [turning to Quentin] Do you like being alone except for vicious pickups? The kind you go for? If I understood you correctly? … Christ, you have terrible eyes, the expression in them! What are you looking at?
QUENTIN. The fish over the bar …
LEONA. You’re changing the subject.
QUENTIN. No, I’m not, not a bit … Now suppose some night I woke up and I found that fantastic fish … what is it?
LEONA. Sailfish. What about it?
QUENTIN. Suppose I woke up some midnight and found that peculiar thing swimming around in my bedroom? Up the Canyon?
LEONA. In a fish bowl? Aquarium?
QUENTIN. No, not in a bowl or aquarium: free, unconfined.
LEONA. Impossible.
QUENTIN. Granted. It’s impossible. But suppose it occurred just the same, as so many impossible things do occur just the same. Suppose I woke up and discovered it there, swimming round and round in the darkness over my bed, with a faint phosphorescent glow in its big goggle-eyes and its gorgeously iridescent fins and tail making a swishing sound as it circles aorund and about and around and bout right over my head in my bed.
LEONA. Hah!
QUENTIN. Now suppose this admittedly preposterous thing did occur. What do you think I would say?
LEONA. To the fish?
QUENTIN. To myself and the fish.
LEONA. … I’ll be raped by an ape if I can imagine what a person would say in a situation like that.
QUENTIN. I’ll tell you what I would say, I would say, “Oh, well …”
LEONA. … Just “Oh, well”?
QUENTIN. “Oh, well!” is all I would say before I went back to sleep.
LEONA. What I would say is: “Get the hell out of here, you goggle-eyed monstrosity of a mother,” that’s what I’d say to it.
MONK. Leona, let’s lighten it up.
QUENTIN. You don’t see the point of my story?
LEONA. Nope.
QUENTIN. [to Bobby] Do you see the point of my story? [Bobby shakes his head] Well, maybe I don’t either.
LEONA. Then why’d you tell it?
QUENTIN. What is the thing that you mustn’t lose in this world before you’re ready to leave it? The one thing you mustn’t lose ever?
LEONA. … Love?
[Quentin laughs]
BOBBY. Interest?
QUENTIN. That’s closer, much closer. Yes, that’s almost it. The word that I had in mind is surprise, though. The capacity for being surprised. I’ve lost the capacity for being surprised, so completely lost it, that if I woke up in my bedroom late some night and saw that fantastic fish swimming right over my head I wouldn’t be really surprised.
LEONA. You mean you’d think you were dreaming?
QUENTIN. Oh, no. Wide awake. But not really surprised. [The special spotlight concentrates on him. The bar dims, but an eerie glow should remain on the sailfish over the bar] There’s a coarseness, a deadening coarseness, in the experience of most homosexuals. The experiences are quick, and hard, and brutal, and the pattern of them is particularly unchanging. Their act of love is like the jabbing of a hypodermic needle to which they’re addicted but which is more and more empty of real interest and surprise. This lack of variation and surprise in their … “love life” … [He smiles harshly] … spreads into other areas of … “sensibility” … Yes, once, quite a long while ago, I was often startled by the sense of being alive, of being myself, living! Present on earth, in the flesh, yes, for some completely mysterious reason, a single, separate, intensely conscious being, myself: living! … Whenever I would feel this … feeling, this … shock of … what? … self-realization? … I would be stunned, I would be thunderstruck by it. And by the existence of everything that exists, I’d be lighning-struck with astonishment … it would do more than astound me, it would give me a feeling of panic, this sudden sense of … I suppose it was like an epileptic seizure, except that I didn’t fall to the ground in convusions; no, I’d be more apt to try to lose myself in a crowd on a street until the seizure was finished … They were dangerous seizures. One time I drove into the mountains and smashed the car into a tree, and I’m not sure if I meant to do that, or … In a forest, you’ll sometimes see a giant tree, several hundred years old, that’s scarred, that’s blazed by lightning, and the wound is almost obscured by the obstinately still living and growing bark. I wonder if such a tree has learned the same lesson that I have, not to feel astonishment any more but just go on, continue for two or three hundred years more? … This boy I picked up tonight, the kid from the tall corn country, still has the capacity for being surprised by what he sees, hears and feels in this kingdom of earth. All the way up the canyon to my place, he kept saying, I can’t believe it, I’m here, I’ve come to the Pacific, the world’s greatest ocean! … as if nobody, Magellan or Balboa or even the Indians had ever seen it before him, yes, like he’d discovered this ocean, the largest on earth, and so now, because he’d found it himself, it existed, now, for the first time, never before … And this excitement of his reminded me of my having lost the ability to say: “My God!” instead of just: “Oh, well.” I’ve asked all the questions, shouted them at deaf heaven, till I was hoarse in the voice box and blue in the face, and gotten no answer, not the whisper of one, nothing at all, you see, but the sun coming up each morning and going down that night, and the galaxies of the night sky trooping onstage like chorines, robot chorines: one, two, three, kick, one, two, three, kick … Repeat any question too often and what do you get, what’s given? … A big carved rock by a desert, a … monumental symbol of wornout passion and bewilderment in you, a stupid stone paralyzed sphinx that knows no answers that you don’t but comes on like the oracle of all time, waiting on her belly to give out some outcries of universal wisom, and if she woke up some midnight at the edge of the desert and saw that fantastic fish swimming over her head … y’know what she’d say, too? She’d say: “Oh, well” … and go back to sleep for another five thousand years. [He turns back; and the bar is relighted. He returns to the table.]
Beautiful. (I’ve played Doc.)