Goodnight Children Everywhere and Other Plays Read online

  Goodnight Children Everywhere and Other Plays is copyright © 2004 by Richard Nelson

  Some Americans Abroad, copyright © 1989, 1999, 2004 by Richard Nelson

  Two Shakespearean Actors, copyright © 1997, 1999, 2004 by Richard Nelson

  New England, copyright © 1994, 1999, 2004 by Richard Nelson

  Goodnight Children Everywhere, copyright © 1997, 2004 by Richard Nelson

  Franny’s Way, copyright © 2002, 2003, 2004 by Richard Nelson

  Goodnight Children Everywhere and Other Plays is published by

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  This publication is made possible in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency.

  Lyrics from “Goodnight Children Everywhere,” written by Harry Phillips and Gaby Rogers, published by Cecil Lennox Ltd., a Kassner Group Company, Exmouth House, 11 Pine Street, London EC1R 0JH. Lyrics from “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” written by A. Emmett Adams and Douglas Furber, published by Chappell & Co. Inc., c/o Warner Chappell Music Inc., 10585 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90025. Lyrics from “Hernando’s Hideaway,” from The Pajama Game, written by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, Lakshmi Puja Music Ltd. and The Songwriters Guild, 1500 Harbor Boulevard, Weehawken, NJ 07087. All rights reserved.

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Nelson, Richard, 1950-

  Goodnight children everywhere and other plays / by Richard Nelson.

  p. cm.

  EISBN 978-1-55936-244-3

  I. Title.

  PS3564.E4747G663 2004

  812’.54—dc22

  2004023864

  Cover photo by Leslie Williamson

  Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

  Text design and composition by Lisa Govan

  First Edition, December 2004

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  by Janice Paran

  SOME AMERICANS ABROAD

  TWO SHAKESPEAREAN ACTORS

  NEW ENGLAND

  GOODNIGHT CHILDREN EVERYWHERE

  FRANNY’S WAY

  INTRODUCTION

  THERE’S A CHARACTER in a Steven Dietz play, a Vietnam vet still retailing anecdotes from the sixties, who travels the world in pursuit of the Rolling Stones. He shows up at every concert venue with a hand-lettered sign and a mission: to make his way to the edge of the stage and hold up his sign, which bears the following legend: JUST STOP.

  Richard Nelson, it should be hoped, has received no such injunction. For more than twenty-five years he has written conscientiously, prolifically and importantly for the American theatre and, when his own country’s stages have proved inhospitable, for British ones. With more than two dozen titles (comprising original plays, libretti and adaptations) to his credit, and new ones appearing at regular intervals, he has become a kind of cottage industry within the profession, a reliable purveyor of quality theatrical goods. Nowadays that sounds suspect; most contemporary playwrights are lucky to claim half a dozen really good plays, and many fizzle out, or move on, after two or three. Nelson has managed to stay in the game with distinction, and though talent, luck and perseverance have contributed to his longevity, they don’t explain it. He has lasted because he takes the theatre seriously; he treats it as a complex, reflective and illuminating art that enriches the discourse of a healthy culture, and he writes for it accordingly. That is his vocation. Never one to tailor his subject matter or style to prevailing theatrical fashions or industry norms, he has consistently put craft over career. A good move, as it turns out.

  His first professionally produced plays, dubbed his “reporter plays” because journalists feature prominently in them, introduced him as a writer singularly engaged by the moral and political failings of a post-Watergate era, and eager to frame those failings from a variety of perspectives. In Yablonski at the Mark Taper Forum in 1975, and again in Jungle Coup and Conjuring an Event (first seen in New York in the late 1970s), he raised tantalizing questions about how a story is told and who is telling it, musings that characterize much of his subsequent work in one way or another.

  Over the course of the next decade, Nelson served a kind of extended apprenticeship in the American not-for-profit theatre, filling artistic posts at various regional theatres, immersing himself in the classical repertoire, and exploring new directions in his writing through a bevy of new plays (The Vienna Notes, Bal, The Return of Pinocchio, to name just three) and adaptations (including Don Juan, The Suicide, The Marriage of Figaro, Three Sisters and Accidental Death of an Anarchist). Those catch-as-catch-can years were a valuable prelude to what came later; they trained him to move with ease between the past and the present, the epic and the familiar in his writing, and they intimated a major talent in the making, but wide-scale recognition eluded him, and his itinerant professional life took its toll.

  Principia Scriptoriae, produced at Manhattan Theatre Club in 1986, was a turning point. The play, a coolly provocative tale of two writers imprisoned in Latin America, caught the eye of the British director David Jones, who lobbied hard to stage it at England’s Royal Shakespeare Company. Nelson was soon embraced by the RSC, which provided him the one thing he had not yet found: a theatrical home. He spent the better part of the next ten years as an Honorary Artistic Associate there, soaking up the contradictions of cultural identity and drawing inspiration from them. With the exception of Franny’s Way, all the plays in this volume were commissioned and first produced by the RSC.

  Some Americans Abroad, Nelson’s first RSC commission, tackles a subject that a “foreigner” writing for an English company might safely undertake: the behavior of a group of American academics on an English theatre tour. Nelson had gone on one such trip himself as an undergraduate and had spent a year in Manchester after graduation, so presumably he had some personal experience to draw from, but his chosen theme was a shrewd one, nonetheless, since it allowed him—an upstart American playwright—to write for an English audience without writing about the English.

  Exploiting his insider/outsider status to wicked effect, Nelson depicts an egregiously self-deluded crowd of penny-pinching Anglophiles as they dash from play to play, showcasing their cultural sophistication and congratulating themselves on their superiority to garden-variety American tourists, all the while turning a blind eye to their own craven conduct. While English audiences surely appreciated Nelson’s ability to sk
ewer American pretensions in the play’s original outing, Americans may have the last rueful laugh, caught as we are in the play’s mischievous double bind, guilty of the squirm-inducing behavior we readily denigrate. Still, Nelson’s purpose is ironic, not satiric; he is less interested in sending up American affectation (though he does so with deadly and hilarious accuracy) than he is in examining its roots.

  For the principal characters in Some Americans Abroad, most of whom are approaching middle age, England is sustenance, if more in fancy than in practice; it opens up horizons that have begun to shrink. Rather than face their diminishing prospects, the limits of their imaginations or their own pusillanimity, Nelson’s tourists busy themselves with petty academic rivalries and political perorations, resurrect tales of their youthful rebellion, and cling to their notion of England as a cultural restorative, badly managed, to be sure, and spoiled by commercialism, but rich in provenance. England is the vessel into which they pour their sublimated yearnings, and when they gather at dawn on Westminster Bridge to recite from Wordsworth and sing “God Save the Queen,” it’s hard to miss the desolation, and the envy, in their bathos.

  In 1849, the English actor William Charles Macready brought his touring production of Macbeth to New York’s Astor Place Opera House. The American actor Edwin Forrest, meanwhile, staged a rival production at the Broadway Theatre. Tensions between the two companies escalated, and on May 9th of that year, thousands of Forrest supporters amassed outside the Opera House to disrupt Macready’s performance. A violent scuffle broke out between stone-wielding hotheads and the unarmed policemen on patrol. The militia, called in to restore order, fired into the crowd, and twenty-three people were killed. The Astor Place Riot, as it became known, was the springboard for Nelson’s next play, Two Shakespearean Actors, which imagines the events that led up to that fateful evening.

  Nelson frequently sets plays against a backdrop of social and political upheaval, and he could hardly have chosen a more combustible scenario in which to consider the relation between the artist and the larger world. It is a matter of historical record that Forrest, a fiercely patriotic performer and the first American actor to gain international acclaim, provoked Macready on more than one occasion; that Macready’s choice of venue, the upscale Astor Place Opera House, was viewed as elitist by Forrest’s mostly working-class supporters, and that a chauvinistic New York press further inflamed anti-British sentiment. But Two Shakespearean Actors is, more than anything else, a rough-and-tumble backstage drama about the egos, anxieties and aesthetics of two charismatic nineteenth-century actors—differently gifted—caught in the crossfire of a class and culture skirmish for which they’re only partly to blame. Nelson, who knows and loves his theatre history, treats us to tasty chunks of their dueling Macbeths, their antithetical approaches to acting (a nineteenth-century version of the form vs. feeling debate), their backbiting and their brio. Theirs is a worthy contest, for all of their boorishness and bad manners, and they circle each other like pros, wary and grudging in their mutual curiosity. In the play’s great final scene, where Nelson does history one better, Forrest gives temporary sanctuary to his rival, and as the world outside collapses into chaos, they talk shop, movingly, not in denial of their circumstances, but in tacit acknowledgment of them.

  It is the drama around the drama that frequently captures Nelson’s attention, which explains why the Astor Place Riot itself gets second billing in Two Shakespearean Actors and why New England begins, rather than ends, with a suicide. It makes for a stunning coup de théâtre—barely five minutes into the action, an onstage character puts a bullet through his brain—but it’s almost as if, having dispensed with that grand gesture, Nelson can settle down to his real business, which is to observe the fallout. He writes about effects, not causes.

  On the surface, New England might be seen as the inverse of Some Americans Abroad. A beautifully modulated drama about expatriate Brits living at loose ends in the United States, it turns the tables on the English/American cultural divide that gave Nelson his conceit for the earlier play. This time it’s the English who find themselves alternately seduced and dismayed by their surroundings, and they’re just as quick to disassociate themselves from their embarrassing countrymen as their counterparts in Some Americans Abroad are. (“The funny thing about living in America as a foreigner is the way you see other foreigners act,” says one of them.) But for the characters in New England (the irony of the title speaks for itself), displacement is a condition, not a circumstance, and it defines them in complicated, often unspoken, ways.

  The soon-to-be dead man is a music professor who moved to the U.S. twenty years earlier. He shares his comfortable Connecticut home with his girlfriend of two years, and it is she, along with a hapless weekend houseguest, who must play host to her dead lover’s grown children and his twin brother when they all descend upon the house—a house that is home to none of them—in the hours after the suicide. The gathering is manic-depressive in the extreme, as reunions occasioned by sudden death tend to be, enlivened by trivial turf warfare, untempered eruptions of the id, ever-shifting familial alliances and periodic displays of America-bashing. Nelson astutely maps the underlying psychic territory, nudging us toward an awareness of how the father’s life, of which we learn very little, has in fact cast its unhappy shadow on his children’s fates. Their family diaspora, propelled by a certain self-destructive streak, has yielded scant comfort, and nobody seems to belong anywhere.

  Nelson made several trips to Russia in the two years before writing the play, and it seems reasonable to suppose that it is a deliberate homage to Chekhov, and to Three Sisters in particular. So many echoes of the Prozorovs—a dead father, siblings who have lost their way, a sense of entitlement gone awry—can be heard in the hush and hubbub of New England. There are notable variations as well, including not one but two interlopers (the much-resented girlfriend and a diabolical French daughter-in-law who out-Natashas Natasha), along with the presence of the houseguest who—like similar “outsider” characters in other Nelson plays—serves as adjudicator and onlooker. Nevertheless, the two plays share an essentially existentialist outlook; both create an experience of life lived while waiting for deliverance. If Three Sisters is, as the critic Richard Gilman has argued, a play about characters who do not go to Moscow, New England is a play about characters who already went. Except that Moscow is called America, and once they got there, they discovered that nothing had really changed.

  It should be clear by now that the idea of home is central to Nelson, and nowhere is it more poignant than in Goodnight Children Everywhere. The time is 1945, the setting is a flat in South London, and the occasion is the homecoming of a seventeen-year-old boy, who was evacuated to Canada at the beginning of World War II. His parents have since died, and his three doting sisters—barely older than he is, though one is pregnant and married to a man more than twice her age—are on hand for his arrival, eager to resume their interrupted family life.

  The play takes its title from a 1940 Vera Lynn recording whose nursery reassurances provided wartime comfort to a generation of Brits and whose sentimentality gave shape to emotional need. For the siblings in Goodnight Children Everywhere, the song has a private significance, one they invented as means of connecting to the memory of their parents, and Nelson’s repetition of the tune underscores their vulnerability. Deprived of the solace that shared trauma can supply, they are children still, headstrong and homesick, learning all over again how the world works. Left to navigate the passage into adulthood without proper guidance, they wear their grown-up roles like dress-up clothes, and their long-awaited reunion, with its confusing reminders of long-ago rhythms and the heedless passage of time, discombobulates them all.

  Goodnight Children Everywhere marked Nelson’s transition to a newly invigorated American career. The play won London’s Olivier Award for Best New Play in 2000, but by that time Nelson was already turning his attention homeward, and, increasingly, to his own directing. He mounted the
play’s American premiere at New York’s Playwrights’ Horizons in 1999, and at the same theatre later that year, he took over the direction of James Joyce’s The Dead, his ravishing musical meditation (co-written with Shaun Davey) on Joyce’s masterful short story. The musical moved to Broadway and to theatres around the country, winning Nelson new admirers and a new level of visibility on American stages.

  Nelson wrote Franny’s Way knowing he would direct it. Like all of his work, it has a specific milieu, and the incidents it touches upon are intimately related to time and place—in this case, Greenwich Village in the summer of 1957. Two teenage girls and their grandmother have made a trip from upstate New York to visit a young relative and her husband, who are still mourning the recent death of their infant daughter. The visit lasts a couple of days, during which time quietly momentous truths in their respective personal lives, agitated, it seems, by the sweet hot syncopation of New York City streets, burble to the surface in life-defining ways. Or so it seems to Franny. Not the teenaged Franny of 1957, who has shortened her given name in earnest homage to J. D. Salinger and who suffers her first heartbreak during that New York stay, but the Franny she will become decades later, the one who remembers thinking that Sullivan Street was “the very soul and center of the goddamn universe”—the one Nelson has inserted as a narrator. He uses her sparingly; she neither opens the play nor closes it, and though she recounts a few details of what happens to the characters later, she in no way provides an epilogue. There is nothing conclusive about her; she is an intermediary between the fiction of the play and the fact of the audience, an agreed-upon convention, creating a context that gives texture and consequence to events as they unfold and reminds us of the mitigating hand of time.

  She also reminds us, obliquely, of Nelson’s hand. It is no accident that James Joyce’s The Dead and the works that have followed it (Madame Melville, Franny’s Way, My Life with Albertine and Rodney’s Wife) all make use of narrators. Nelson’s writing of late demonstrates his growing attentiveness to the myriad perplexities of everyday living and his shift to a style of dramaturgy that is more glancing in its reference to them; that leaves more and more to the imagination and to the actor’s craft. His decision to direct his own work has probably contributed to an increased reticence on the page—he can fill in the blanks in the rehearsal hall, if necessary—but beyond that, there is a sense that he is impatient, at this point in his career, to find new forms for the impulses, perceptions and discoveries that make up his created worlds. Those worlds aren’t abstract; they are character-based renderings of recognizable human experience, but they are distillations, refractions, as he is careful to suggest. It’s hard to imagine him moving in a symbolist direction—he’s too much of a humanist and an empiricist for that—but in these most recent works, realism, in the conventional sense, has given way to a more self-conscious theatricality. Franny, as narrator, makes explicit the questions posed by his earliest work: What is a story? How is it told? Who is telling it? She is there for her reasons, which are also his, persistently: to orient us to a view of the world, to locate—or devise—a path through its uncertainties. That is his vocation.