Illyria (TCG Edition), page 9
BERNIE: Like in the play. He’s been rehearsing too hard, Merle. He needs a break.
MERLE: I agree. And fortunately, now he has one …
JOE: Looked just like this.
BERNIE (Looking off): I really liked—what was that place called where we worked?
MERLE: When?
BERNIE: The three of us. With the O’Casey—the one Joe still owes me the money for. It was in the west forties. What was it called? I was trying to remember.
JOE AND MERLE (They work it out together): Yugoslav-American Center, or culture or something or other—
JOE: Not the forties. It was higher than that.
BERNIE: I don’t hear anybody doing anything there anymore.
MERLE: It got knocked down, Bernie. They knocked it down.
JOE: Oh, that’s a shame. You can do plays in a place like that. It felt nice. Like people had lived there. It felt like people. You weren’t putting things on some pedestal. Just life.
BERNIE: Like a park.
JOE: Like a park. Full of people. I sometimes wonder if this is what the parks people are afraid of. And their rich friends. Of us sitting in the dark together. Maybe they just want to keep us apart. Keep us in ‘our place.’
BERNIE (Sings quietly):
Bellow goodbye to the buggerin’ lot come out
To bow down the head ’n’ bend down the knee to the bee …
JOE (To Bernie): You have a terrible Irish accent, Bernie ….
MERLE: That wasn’t his Irish accent, that’s his singing voice.
BERNIE: You know we’re probably really lucky, Merle. Imagine what Joe would be like, if they hadn’t kept him in his place.
JOE: What do you mean by that?
BERNIE: There’d be no living with him. Wouldn’t be just ‘Joe Papp presents.’
MERLE (Laughing): Oh no!
JOE: Come on. Come on.
MERLE: It’d be ‘Joe Papp presents the world!’
BERNIE: Presents the sun! And the moon!
JOE (Over their laughter): I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think I’m like that all.
MERLE (To ‘Bernie’): You know Joe always hates it when I refer to the festival and say ‘we.’
JOE: That is not true, Merle. And what would be wrong with that anyway? (To Bernie) He’s just a goddamn press rep.
MERLE: Who works for free …
JOE: Even that’s more than you’re worth.
MERLE: Maybe I should be paying you, Joe. Like his ‘students’! (Smiles)
JOE: That was a good idea. Why didn’t I think of that?
BERNIE (Over this): What students? What??
JOE: Kids need to learn—
MERLE: You don’t know about this? Bernie doesn’t know about—?
JOE: It’s nothing—an experiment.
MERLE: Joe made a deal with NYU for some students—work for us and they get credit. We charged them $195—
BERNIE: To work for you? You got them to pay you?
JOE (Defensive): They got credits, Bernie.
BERNIE: $195??
MERLE: We limited it to thirty.
JOE: So they’d get enough attention.
BERNIE: How many signed up—?
MERLE: Four.
JOE: It wasn’t worth it … More trouble than it was worth.
(Merle takes a swig from the flask.)
MERLE: Bernie, he’s got me to write a release. About next season.
JOE: A draft. It’s a draft. Everything’s not set yet.
MERLE (Over this): ‘Everything’? All the wonderful shows we’re going to do. Excuse me, that ‘Joe Papp’ is going to present. (To Joe) I hadn’t known about Antony and Cleopatra. I’ll have to add that in … Have you asked Colleen and George? Should I announce it as a full production or just a reading?
JOE (Again): I’m not going to waste my time with just a reading, Merle.
MERLE (Shrugs): I’ll add it in.
(About the press release:)
‘James Cagney in Comedy of Errors.’ ‘Katherine Hepburn in Taming of the Shrew.’
BERNIE: I’d like to see that. I’ve worked with her. She’d be good as Kate. Except for the ending. I don’t think she’d do that.
MERLE: It’s just to get people’s attention. And then, Joe says, once you’ve got them interested and maybe they start to give you a little money then—‘Oh, I’m sorry, Miss Hepburn’s got a movie, Jimmy’s changed his mind, he can’t learn lines and so you end up with I don’t know—Staats Cotsworth, he’s just as good.’ ‘Even better.’ ‘More stage experience.’
BERNIE (Joining in): ‘Why didn’t we think of him first?’
(Laughter.)
MERLE: And then damn it—
BERNIE, MERLE AND JOE (The punch line): ‘Then he gets a movie!’
(Laughter.
Silence.
They drink.)
BERNIE: Should we go to the girls’ party? We could.
JOE: I think tonight should be about sitting with two friends, on a stage, in the park. A castle behind us. And even a lake.
(Looks up.)
And it’s not even raining. Not yet.
BERNIE: I think any minute.
MERLE: I think I felt a drop. These seats are really uncomfortable. Your poor actors.
BERNIE: What did they build on what was our Yugoslav-American whatever center? Or culture … Whatever it was called. Do we know?
MERLE: You don’t know?
BERNIE: No.
JOE: I don’t know. What?
BERNIE: What did they build?
MERLE: They knocked down that whole goddamn neighborhood. Everything else around it. A jazz club I loved. Restaurants. One day they just called it a ‘slum,’ named it ‘a slum,’ and then just tore it all down.
BERNIE: For what?
MERLE: Joe knows.
JOE: Is that where that was? It was there? We were there?
BERNIE: What?
JOE: Shit. They’re building it now. Right?
(Merle nods.)
Their ‘Palace of Art,’ Bernie. The Palace of Art. (To Merle) Everything about that phrase is wrong. Including the ‘of.’
MERLE (To Joe): You know I didn’t know that it’s not even named for Abraham Lincoln—some other Lincoln.
JOE: I didn’t know that either.
MERLE: Probably some rich guy, ‘Lincoln.’
BERNIE: Makes sense.
JOE (To Bernie): Did you happen to see this week’s Time magazine?
BERNIE: No. What?
JOE: Don’t people read in Connecticut, Merle?
MERLE: They’re going to knock down Carnegie too—‘oh we don’t need that anymore.’ ‘Not with … our new palace …’
JOE: Because of the palace.
MERLE (To Joe): Did you see the picture of what they’re going to build there?
JOE: In Life. (Nods) All red, Bernie. Looks like a giant cheese scraper. I’ll show you. You won’t believe it. It’ll make you sick.
MERLE: And it’ll sit three, four stories off the goddamn sidewalk. So—far away from ‘the scary’ street …
BERNIE: We need more mothers with fucking strollers …
MERLE: Yeah. We do … We do. Good idea.
BERNIE (Over this): They haven’t carved up Washington Square yet.
MERLE: Not yet.
JOE (Suddenly shouts): It’s our fucking city too!!
(It starts to rain.)
BERNIE (Quietly): Hear that, rich people?
MERLE: It’s raining. (To Joe) That’s your fault, Joe. Moses must have heard you.
BERNIE: And Moses makes it rain?
JOE: That’s what he seems to think …
MERLE: It’s raining.
JOE: I’m not going anywhere.
(Then:)
(Sings)
When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain …
I didn’t like what David did with this. He’s a good composer, but …
BERNIE: Good and cheap.
JOE: No. He’s good. But this should be simple …
(Sings)
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.
BERNIE (Sings quietly):
But when I came to man’s estate,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
MERLE: You know the words.
JOE (Explaining why): He’s a stage manager.
BERNIE: We did Twelfth Night last season too.
JOE: Remember? They wouldn’t give us their damn costumes either?
MERLE: I remember …
BERNIE (Sings):
’Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.
(Merle who doesn’t know it, joins in with the refrains.)
JOE AND BERNIE:
But when I came, alas, to wive.
ALL THREE:
With hey, ho the wind and the rain.
(Roll of thunder.)
MERLE: And goodnight to you, Mr. Moses …
JOE AND BERNIE:
By swaggering could I never thrive,
ALL THREE:
For the rain it raineth every day.
BERNIE: Should we go?
(Thunder.)
JOE: I don’t want to go anywhere. I just want to stay here.
(Sings)
But when I came unto my beds,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
JOE AND BERNIE:
With tosspots still had drunken heads,
ALL THREE:
For the rain it raineth every day …
END OF PLAY
AUTHOR’S NOTES
In researching the play, I consulted numerous books, archives, newspapers, etc. These are the most important books: Stuart W. Little’s Enter Joseph Papp; Helen Epstein’s superb Joe Papp: An American Life; Kenneth Turan and Joseph Papp’s Free For All: Joe Papp, The Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told; Arthur Gelb’s City Room; Stuart Vaughan’s A Possible Theatre; Robert Simonson’s The Gentleman Press Agent: Fifty Years in the Theatrical Trenches with Merle Debuskey; Robert A. Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York; Anthony Flint’s Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City; Alice Sparberg Alexiou’s Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary; three books by Jane Jacobs, her masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Economy of Cities and Dark Age Ahead.
Articles included: J. M. Flagler’s “Gentles All” (“Onward and Upward with the Arts,” New Yorker, August 31, 1957); Leticia Kent’s “Jane Jacobs, An Oral History Interview” (Toronto, October 1997) and numerous reviews and articles from the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune and the Village Voice.
The press releases for 1958 of the New York City Parks Department proved helpful. The archives of the New York Shakespeare Festival (Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts) proved essential.
The song Bernie and Joe sing at the beginning of Scene 2 is from Within the Gates by Sean O’Casey.
Richard Nelson
Rhinebeck, New York
RICHARD NELSON’s other plays include the three-play series The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family (Hungry, What Did You Expect? and Women of a Certain Age), the four-play series The Apple Family: Scenes from Life in the Country (That Hopey Changey Thing, Sweet and Sad, Sorry and Regular Singing), Nikolai and the Others, Farewell to the Theatre, Conversations in Tusculum, How Shakespeare Won the West, Frank’s Home, Rodney’s Wife, Franny’s Way, Madame Melville, Goodnight Children Everywhere, New England, The General from America, Misha’s Party (with Alexander Gelman), Two Shakespearean Actors and Some Americans Abroad. He has written the musicals James Joyce’s The Dead (with Shaun Davey) and My Life with Albertine (with Ricky Ian Gordon), and the screenplays for the films Hyde Park-on-Hudson and Ethan Frome. He has received numerous awards, including a Tony (Best Book of a Musical for James Joyce’s The Dead), an Olivier (Best Play for Goodnight Children Everywhere) and two New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards (James Joyce’s The Dead and The Apple Family). He is the recipient of the PEN/Laura Pels Master Playwright Award, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; he is an Honorary Associate Artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He lives in upstate New York.
Richard Nelson, Illyria (TCG Edition)
