Beautiful Ruins (34 page)

Michael Deane ignores the translator, leans forward toward the front seat, and says, “Driver, anything you can tell us about this play we’re going to see?”

FRONT MAN

Part IV of the Seattle Cycle

A Play in Three Acts

by Lydia Parker

DRAMATIS PERSONAE:

PAT, an aging musician

LYDIA, a playwright and Pat’s girlfriend

MARLA, a young waitress

LYLE, Lydia’s stepfather

JOE, a British music promoter

UMI, a British club girl

LONDONER, a passing businessman

CAST:

PAT: Pat Bender

LYDIA: Bryn Pace

LYLE: Kevin Guest

MARLA/UMI: Shannon Curtis

JOE/LONDONER: Benny Giddons

The action takes place between 2005 and 2008, in Seattle, London, and Sandpoint, Idaho.

ACT I

Scene I

[
A bed in a cramped apartment. Two figures are entangled in the sheets, Pat, 43, and Marla, 22. It’s dimly lit; the audience can see the figures but can’t quite make out their faces.
]

Marla: Huh.

Pat: Mm. That was great. Thanks.

Marla: Oh. Yeah. Sure.

Pat: Look, I don’t mean to be an ass, but do you think we could get dressed and get out of here?

Marla: Oh. Then . . . that’s it?

Pat: What do you mean?

Marla: Nothing. It’s just—

Pat: [laughing] What?

Marla: Nothing.

Pat: Tell me.

Marla: It’s just . . . so many girls in the bar have talked about sleeping with you. I started to think there was something wrong with me that I hadn’t done it with the great Pat Bender. Then, when you came in alone tonight, I thought, well, here’s my chance. I guess I just expected it to be . . . I don’t know . . . different.

Pat: Different . . . than what?

Marla: I don’t know.

Pat: ’Cause that’s pretty much the way I’ve always done it.

Marla: No, it was fine.

Pat: Fine? This just gets better and better.

Marla: No, I guess I just bought into the whole womanizer thing. I assumed you knew things.

Pat: What . . . things?

Marla: I don’t know. Like . . . techniques.

Pat: Techniques? Like what? Levitation? Hypnosis?

Marla: No, it’s just that after all the talk I figured that I’d have . . . you know . . . four or five.

Pat: Four or five what?

Marla: [becomes shy] You know.

Pat: Oh. Well. How many did you have?

Marla: So far, none.

Pat: Well, I’ll tell you what: I owe you a couple. But for now, do you think we could get dressed before—

[
A door closes offstage. The whole scene has taken place in near darkness, the only light coming from an open doorway. Now, still in silhouette, Pat pulls the covers over Marla’s head.
]

Pat: Oh shit.

[
Lydia, 30s, short hair, army cargo pants, Lenin cap, ENTERS. She pauses in the doorway, her face lit by the light from the other room.
]

Pat: I thought you were at rehearsal.

Lydia: I left early. Pat, we need to talk.

[
She comes in, reaches toward the nightstand to turn on the light.
]

Pat: Uh, maybe leave the light off?

Lydia: Another migraine?

Pat: Bad one.

Lydia: Okay. Well, I just wanted to apologize for storming out of the restaurant tonight. You’re right. I do still try to change you sometimes.

Pat: Lydia—

Lydia: No, let me finish, Pat. This is important.

[
Lydia walks to the window, stares out, a streetlight casting a glow on her face.
]

Lydia: I’ve spent so long trying to “fix” you that I don’t always give you credit for how far we’ve come. Here you are, clean almost two years, and I’m so alert for trouble it’s all I see sometimes. Even when it isn’t there.

Pat: Lydia—

Lydia: [turning back] Please, Pat. Just listen. I’ve been thinking. We should move away. Get out of Seattle for good. Go to Idaho. Be near your mom. I know I said we can’t keep running from our problems, but maybe it makes sense now. Start fresh. Get away from our pasts . . . all this shit with your bands, my mom, and my stepdad.

Pat: Lydia—

Lydia: I know what you’re gonna say.

Pat: I’m not sure you do—

Lydia: You’re gonna say, what about New York? I know we screwed that up. But we were younger then, Pat. And you were still using. What chance did we have? That day I came back to the apartment and saw that you’d pawned all of our stuff it was almost a relief. Here I’d been waiting for the bottom to fall out. And finally it did.

[
Lydia turns to the window again.
]

Lydia: After that, I told your mom that if you could’ve controlled your addictions, you’d have been famous. She said something I’ll never forget: “But dear. That IS his addiction.”

Pat: Jesus, Lydia—

Lydia: Pat, I left rehearsal early tonight because your mom called from Idaho. I don’t know how to say this, so I’m just going to say it. Her cancer is back.

[
Lydia walks over to the bed, sits on Pat’s side.
]

Lydia: They don’t think it’s operable. She might have months, or years, but they can’t stop it. She’s going to try chemo again, but they’ve exhausted the radiation possibilities, so all they can do is manage it. But she sounded good, Pat. She wanted me to tell you. She couldn’t bear to tell you herself. She’s afraid you’ll start using again. I told her you were stronger now—

Pat: [whispering] Lydia, please . . .

Lydia: So let’s move, Pat. What do you say, just go? Please? I mean . . . we assume these cycles are endless . . . we fight, break up, make up, our lives circle around and around, but what if it’s not a circle. What if it’s a drain we’re going down? What if we look back and realize we never even tried to break out of it?

[
On the bedside, Lydia reaches into the tangle of covers for Pat’s hand. But she feels something, recoils, jumps from the bed, and turns on the light, throwing a harsh light across Pat and the other lump in the bed. She pulls the covers back. Only now do we see the actors in full light. Marla holds the sheet to her chest, gives a little wave. Lydia backs across the room. Pat just stares off.
]

Lydia: Oh.

[
Pat climbs slowly out of bed to get his clothes. But he stops. He stands there naked, as if noticing himself for the first time. He looks down, surprised that he’s grown so thick and middle-aged. Finally he turns to Lydia, standing in the doorway. The quiet seems to go on forever.
]

Pat: So . . . I guess a threesome’s out of the question.

CURTAIN

In the half-empty theater there is a collective gasp, followed by bursts of agitated, uncomfortable laughter. As the stage goes dark, Claire realizes she’s been holding her breath throughout the play’s short opening scene. Now she’s breathed out, and the whole audience with her, a sudden release of tense, guilty laughter at the sight of this cad standing naked on a stage—his crotch subtly and artfully covered by a blanket over the bed’s footboard.

In the darkness of a set change, ghosts linger in Claire’s eyes. She becomes aware of the scene’s clever staging: played mostly in half-light, forcing the audience to search the near-darkness for the figures, so that when the harsh lights finally come up, Lydia’s tortured face and Pat’s white softness are boned into their retinas like X-rays—that poor girl staring at her naked boyfriend, another woman in their bed, a strobe of betrayal and regret.

This wasn’t what Claire was expecting (community theater? in
Idaho
?) when they arrived in Sandpoint, a funky Old West ski town on the shores of this huge mountain lake. With no time to check into their hotel, the investigator took them straight to the Panida Theater, its lovely vertical descending sign marking a quaint storefront in the small L-shaped downtown, classic old box office opening into a Deco theater—too big for this small, personal play, but an impressive room nonetheless, carefully restored to its old 1920s movie-house past. The back of the theater was empty, but the front seats had a good spread of black-clad small-town hipsters, older Birkenstockers, and fake blondes in ski outfits, even older moneyed couples, which—if Claire knew her small-town theater—would be this theater group’s
patrons
. Settled in her hard-backed seat, Claire glanced at the photocopied cover of the playbill:
FRONT MAN • PREVIEW PERFORMANCE • THEATER ARTS GROUP OF NORTHERN IDAHO
. Here we go, she’d thought: amateur hour.

But then the thing starts and Claire is shocked. Shane, too: “Wow,” he whispers. Claire sneaks a glance at Pasquale Tursi, and he appears rapt, although it’s hard to read the look on his face—whether it’s admiration for the play or simple confusion about what that naked man is doing onstage.

Claire glances to her right, at Michael, and his waxen face seems somehow stricken, his hand on his chest. “My God, Claire. Did you see that? Did you see
him
?”

Yes. There is that, too. It’s undeniable. Pat Bender is some kind of force onstage. She’s not sure if it’s because she knows who his father is, or perhaps because he’s playing himself—but for one quick, delusional moment, she wonders if this might be the greatest actor she’s ever seen.

Then the lights come up again.

I
t’s a simple play. From that opening scene, the story follows Pat and Lydia out on their parallel journeys. In his, Pat spends three drunken years in the wilderness, trying to tame his demons. He performs a musical-comedy monologue about the bands he used to be in, and about failing Lydia—a show that eventually gets him dragged to London and Scotland by an exuberant young Irish music producer. For Pat the trip smacks of desperation, a misguided final attempt at becoming famous. And it all blows up when Pat betrays Joe by sleeping with Umi, the girl his young friend loves. Joe runs off with Pat’s money and he ends up stranded in London.

In Lydia’s parallel story, her mother dies suddenly and Lydia finds herself stuck caring for her senile stepfather, Lyle, a man she’s never gotten along with. Lyle provides daft comic relief, constantly forgetting that his wife has died, asking the thirty-five-year-old Lydia why she isn’t at school. Lydia wants to move him into a nursing home, but Lyle fights to stay with her, and Lydia can’t quite do it. In a storytelling device that works better than Claire expects, Lydia fills in the gaps and marks the passage of time by talking on the phone to Pat’s mother, Debra, in Idaho. She never appears onstage but is an unseen, unheard presence on the other end of the phone. “Lyle wet the bed today,” Lydia says, pausing for a response from the unseen Debra (or Dee, as she sometimes calls her). “Yes, Dee, it
would
be natural . . . except it was
my
bed! I looked up and he was standing on my bed, pissing a hot streak and shouting, ‘Where are the hand towels?’ ”

Finally, Lyle burns himself on the oven while Lydia is at work, and she has no choice but to move him into a nursing home. Lyle cries when she tells him about it. “You’ll be fine,” she insists. “I promise.”