University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository
Graduate Studies The Vault: Electronic Theses and Dissertations
2020-07-23 Us: Identity, Queer Romance, and Dramatic Writing
Scalzo, Zachary
Scalzo, Z. (2020). Us: Identity, Queer Romance, and Dramatic Writing (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/112337 master thesis
University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission. Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY
Us: Identity, Queer Romance, and Dramatic Writing
by
Zachary Scalzo
A THESIS
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES
IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE
DEGREE OF MASTER OF FINE ARTS
GRADUATE PROGRAM IN DRAMA
CALGARY, ALBERTA
JULY, 2020
© Zachary Scalzo 2020
Scalzo ii
ABSTRACT
The following dramatic text and artist statement examine the process of developing, writing, and editing Us. It explores themes of identity, generationality, and self-definition, and the stakes of representing such complex themes onstage.
Scalzo iii
PREFACE
This thesis is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Zachary Scalzo.
Scalzo iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank my advisor, Professor Clem Martini, for his guidance throughout the process of writing this play and artist statement. Thank you for reminding me that “[l]ife can, and does, place road blocks in front of artists. Art finds a way.”
Us would not be what it is and I would not be who I am today without my friend, director, and dramaturg Jenna Rodgers. Thank you for your support, and for insisting I think, write, drink a smoothie, or play with Bramble.
I am forever indebted to everyone who has given Us and Taking Shelter a home in their inboxes, their mouths, and their minds. Thank you to Arthur, Beth, Brittany, Craig, David, Dean,
Jacqueline, Jennifer, John, Marissa, Nathan, Rachael, Sean, and I’m sure countless others who helped Us make its way from my mind to the page. Thank you to Liam, Mackenzie, Noah, and
Rianne for bringing it to life in the form that we could. Thank you to my other Playwriting half in the MFA, Czarina, for being Us’ biggest advocate in times when I felt like its biggest detractor.
Scalzo v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ...... II
PREFACE ...... III
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... IV
TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... V
EPIGRAPH ...... 1
INTRODUCTION ...... 2
CHAPTER TWO: WHY NOW? WHY THEN? INTERGENERATIONAL QUEER ROMANCE
ON STAGE AND SCREEN ...... 7
1. QUEER THEATRE ...... 7
2. IDENTITY, POLYAMORY, AND INTERGENERATIONAL QUEERNESS ...... 13
CHAPTER THREE: WRITING FOR AN AUDIENCE BEYOND THE CHARACTERS ...... 18
1. AUDIENCE, IDENTITY, AND EMPATHY ...... 18
2. TAKING SHELTER ...... 22
CHAPTER FOUR: “THE PLAY HAS GOT TO COME HOME:” LISTENING TO A PLAY,
AND LEADING IT ...... 27
1. BEGINNINGS: GOING HOME ...... 27
2. REVISIONS AND REHEARSAL: US ...... 31
3. AUDITIONS AND REHEARSALS ...... 37
CONCLUSION ...... 43
Scalzo vi
WORKS CITED ...... 47
US ...... 49
Scalzo 1
EPIGRAPH
“Perhaps every time is a period of learning.”
Jenna Rodgers
“I wanna cut to the feeling.”
Carly Rae Jepsen
Scalzo 2
INTRODUCTION
I’m staring into her eyes, just beyond her glasses. I know I’ve seen her before, but I don’t really know where. She smiles and, as her shoulders slope, I feel my already-too-shaky breath catch. I feel a hand on my shoulder—holding me down, thank God, to the small couch I’m sharing with a man I have no business being on a date with and, honestly? Thank God for that, too. (Later, I will be lucky enough to learn the following: Making out with a guy in a clown nose? Not that hard.)
I don’t know if every coming out is a rambling. But mine was.
“Thank you.” The woman in front of me smiles, again. (Maybe she never stopped?)
“Thank you for sharing that with us.”
I know that not every coming out is in front of a room full of strangers, and I know that not every coming out is on a blind date with a clown. But mine was.
***
In January 2020, I was selected as the audience participant in Queer Blind Date, a show presented as part of the High Performance Rodeo in Calgary, AB. A “spontaneous theatre creation,” Queer Blind Date is adapted from a heterosexually-oriented predecessor that involves a lead clown-performer and one audience participant performing a blind date. Among many other stylistic influences, it is a long-form exercise in structured improvisation and, in my experience, a similar exercise in trust and exploration. The performance traced my improvised relationship with the clown-performer (a man in the version I attended), from our first date to the birth of our (first?) son, each step fraught with our conversations around what it felt like to exist as a queer person—as queer men, specifically—both growing up and today.
Scalzo 3
What proved to be a particularly interesting moment for me—as writer, performer, and creator—occurred shortly after the narrative anecdote shared earlier. I had come out onstage to his neighbours, roles filled by incredibly thoughtful and generous actors who (I hope) didn’t usually have to deal with someone rambling and nearly on the verge of tears. The performer and
I took a quick break to step out of the show and move to a previously-established safe space to discuss how we felt and our comfort levels with how the show was progressing. Both aware that the moment was powerful, and almost surprisingly so for how readily we both agreed in-scene to stage my sole public coming out, we spoke about how affected we felt and the performer encouraged the house lights to be brought up so we—actors and audience—could take a deep breath together. This moment would be brought up repeatedly to me in the lobby after the show as a moment of connection that many (myself included) didn’t anticipate, but that they were grateful for. The ability to connect with an audience through performance, a relationship I had been unable to pursue for a number of years before this experience, proved instructive for me as an emerging theatre artist, still unsure of the impact of the staging of my words, my body, and my stories.
As the audience participant in Queer Blind Date I found myself in a rare and exciting position. Drawing on my interests as a writer and thinker, I was able to directly comment on a relative dearth of “queer narratives,” which we explicitly did from the outset of the show.
Alongside the Queer Blind Date performer’s thoughtful questioning and the sharing of our own anecdotes from our lives, I was able to give voice to the tension I felt as someone who didn’t identify easily with a number of available stories about queer people. I could explore my own hesitancies around claiming and creating these narratives while I was simultaneously embodying a new one through my offers in performance. And, as far as I could tell, it was good. Through
Scalzo 4 my experience with Queer Blind Date—from my selection to the improvised performance to the feedback I received from those affiliated with and attending the performance—I was reminded of and encouraged by the potency of staging non-normative identities and relationships, those that cut across dominant narratives or at least curve around them.
This artist statement accompanies my thesis play, Us, a work of theatre that stages a queer narrative and that was completed as the culminating creative project during my work in the
University of Calgary’s MFA in Drama. (It is also appended in its entirety, as I will make reference to it throughout this artist statement.) Us explores the relationship between Bernie and his estranged partner, Henry, who returns home after living abroad with a lover for two years.
After insisting he wishes to recommit to a life with Bernie, Henry invites his lover, Christoph, to an anniversary dinner. The play then stages that dinner, Henry’s coming out as polyamorous, and each man’s exploration of love, relationships, and identity as queer men.
Though a more in-depth breakdown of this thesis appears later in this introduction, it is of use to draw some general impressions to frame my exploration within this document. Naturally, in writing this artist statement, the definition of some terms is in order for ease of understanding.
When discussing queer identity, I mean to refer to identities of persons who do not identify as entirely heterosexual in their romantic, amorous, or sexual identities (unless, of course, otherwise noted in more specific cases). Queer narratives, for the purpose of this thesis, are narratives that feature protagonists that are of these queer identities. Generally, by virtue of these narratives following queer protagonists, these narratives have historically dealt with plots about queer interpersonal and romantic relationships.
Queer theatre, a fraught term, requires a bit more discussion in its application in this artist statement. For the purposes of this artist statement, I am inclined to draw on the work of J. Paul
Scalzo 5
Halferty in “Queer and Now: The Queer Signifier at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre” (collected in Queer Theatre in Canada [ed. Rosalind Kerr]), not only in its reading the polysemic term
“queer” through touchstone Canadian theatre company Buddies in Bad Times, but also in its interest in tracking the semiotic and cultural shifts the term has undergone as a work of intellectual history (a theme also explored in Us). Halferty recognizes the evolution of the queer signifier to culminate in “Buddies’ current, bifurcated definition of queer” which “appeals to, and celebrates, stable conceptions of marginalized sexual identities, while it also de-sexualizes queer to articulate it as an aesthetic that is,” as he quotes from Buddies’ mandate in 2004,
“‘different, outside the mainstream, challenging in both content and form’” (Halferty “Queer and
Now” 239-40). Queer theatre, then, can be read as theatre that explores queer narratives, as outlined above, but also as work that operates outside of prescriptive conceptions and presentations of theatre performance (247)—a queer theatre that is (in an essentialist sense that deals with queer characters), versus a queer theatre that does (in that its function or structure cuts across traditional theatrical convention). In this work, I will aim to maintain a clarity around my use of queer theatre through the use of these verbs.
I recognize, too, the importance of situating myself as an artist and thinker within this statement and my work. I recognize my space of privilege as a white cis queer man writing in the tradition of exploring the multifaceted term “queer identity” and, in discussing both my pre- thesis and thesis scripts, the space of privileged visibility that narratives around white cis gay men have flourished in. Both my identity and those of the characters I have created will necessarily be a source of influence in my work, and I do not mean for my exposition or creative work to be singular, but a contribution to an ever-evolving and expansive project of exploring queer work.
Scalzo 6
This artist statement, accompanying my thesis play Us, is meant to explore issues around identity, representation, and dramatic narrative. Focused through my process as a playwright, this statement puts Us’ drafting timeline against my involvement with research, structure, and script development. Chapter Two, “Why Now? Why Then?: Intergenerational Queer Romance on
Stage and Screen,” explores extant writing around identity and embodiment in theatre and media arts, as well as offers a partial overview of recent trends in theatre, film, television, and other popular media as they pertain to explorations of intergenerational queer romance. I note the influence this cultural moment, defined by a partially cleared visibility to healthy intergenerational queer romance, had in my proposal and development of Us.
In Chapter Three, “Writing For an Audience Beyond the Characters,” I discuss my experience with presenting my pre-thesis production, Taking Shelter, and the conversations I had with straight men around their empathizing with the gay male characters in the show. Through these experiences, I frame a lesson learned about intended audience and explore its applicability to writing drama around explicitly queer identities.
Then, I devote Chapter Four, “‘The Play Has Got to Come Home:’ Listening to a Play, and Leading It” to an in-depth investigation of my writing process for Us, as it moved from an idea-centric research project to narrative and character exploration and, eventually, to a balance of the two. This chapter explores not only the process between written drafts, but also touches on what can be learned from a process cut short by global health concerns.
Lastly, I conclude with a fuller reflection on my writing process throughout this MFA program. I will speak to what I learned about myself and the play through its drafting and rehearsal processes, as well as reflect on my experience of writing during the COVID-19 global health crisis.
Scalzo 7
CHAPTER TWO: WHY NOW? WHY THEN? INTERGENERATIONAL QUEER ROMANCE
ON STAGE AND SCREEN
The genesis of Us came, as I imagine many plays do, from a variety of sources. Early in its conception, I found myself concerned about my identity as a writer, struggling with definitions of myself as playwright and as a “queer writer.” I also found myself wondering about the definition of my work, about what constituted “queer” work. I was thinking through themes that might similarly be defined as queer, starting to take particular notice when they might appear
(however briefly) in the media I would consume. As is the case with many writers, I found my work and my life speaking to each other in ways that I felt compelled to delve into more completely. This chapter aims to relate those initial impulses and explorations, as well as the context (personally, historically, and artistically) that brought about the beginnings of Us.
1. Queer Theatre
Though treated more explicitly and fully in Chapter Three, I should lay out a few major assumptions made here regarding performance, the body, and identity as they relate to queer performance. I learned early on in my generative process that a particular strength of writing drama stemmed not only from the narratives staged, but the people on that stage as well.
Informed by my casting experience as a performer, an experience that I thought was often marked by a relative inability to pass as straight and that no doubt led to my circuitous route away from and back to theatre, I wanted to write plays that allowed queer people to embody queer narratives onstage. I began to seek texts that helped me think through the implications of what it meant to do so.
Scalzo 8
I initially turned to Paul Woodruff’s The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and
Being Watched (a title that, perhaps, is even more apt as I write this artist statement in Spring
2020, amidst a global health crisis that necessarily prevents the gathering and closeness on which theatre can often depend). In his introduction, Woodruff draws attention to the similarities between embodied human experience and the experience of watching live theatre. Because of the similarities between theatrical stagings and embodied ‘real life’ ceremonies and interactions,
“[t]heater is immediate” in a way that is also immediately interpretable and “its actions are present to participants and audience” (17). Woodruff underlines the importance of its immediacy, presentness (in that it happens in a specific time, and has a physical presence as well), and its framing of its message via human bodies (what we also use to interpret our lived realities outside of the theatre). Thus, he insists that the similarities between life and theatre also engender “an ethical reason to practice the art of watching” (20). As an audience engages in watching, they necessarily weigh the narrative against their lived experience, and their feelings about the (often fictional) narrative are applied to real-life situations. One’s responses to staged narratives are adjacent to the ones they experience when interacting with other people outside the theatre because they use the same interpretive code.
This ethics of watching is even more explicitly linked to the watching of queer narratives in another article I would find inspirational to my own work, Giovanni Porfido’s “Queering the
Small Screen: Homosexuality and Televisual Citizenship in Spectacular Societies.” In this article, Porfido explores the development of the evolving representation of queer characters in
British television, the titular “Small Screen,” focusing again on the role of the audience. He argues that images, or “visual regimes of ‘truth,’” lend legitimacy to identities via their representation. Drawing on Judith Butler and Charles Taylor, Porfido insists that “all cultural
Scalzo 9 representations,” including those on screen (and, I’d argue, onstage, as well), “offer crucial opportunities of identification and/or dis-identification, which are vital processes in the articulation of subjectivity and personhood” (167). I found this particularly resonant when considering the creation of my own work. The hypothetical game of “what if” an audience is encouraged to play at while watching a dramatic narrative on stage or screen allows for a negotiation of and testing at their personal identities and, potentially, even an acknowledgment of and empathy with others. In writing works that deal openly and explicitly with personal identity and queer communities, I couldn’t deny the potential of live theatre to generate empathy.
What is crucial for both Porfido and Woodruff—and, by extension, what became important for my writing—is that the audience views dramatic narrative via human bodies. The means of understanding media like theatre, film, and television draws upon the same ways we narrativize and make sense of our lives lived outside of artistic narrative. I wondered if the immediacy and importance of live theatre, as well as the ability for a body unmediated by a screen and the confrontation of that body with, often, only an imagined fourth wall between audience and character, holds even stronger resonances for queer narratives. There was something powerful in seeing queer bodies tackle queer issues, their existence literally “in the flesh,” in a culture that largely prescribed and delimited their physical and narrative presence. I couldn’t help but remember my own experience as a young queer person, the feeling of being seen and, maybe, understood when encountering queer content in diverse media, both written and performed. (And, of course, I am sure those encounters contributed to my becoming a writer, if they didn’t directly inspire it.)
Queer theatre’s immediacy, and the stakes I naturally invested in attempting to make space for underrepresented queer identities, drew me to writing plays. And yet, they also frame
Scalzo 10 some of the tensions between definitions of queer theatre that I encountered as I set out to become a queer creator myself. In a written version of a talk she gave at the 1995 Queer Theatre
Conference in New York City, Jill Dolan notes how “slipper[y]” the term “queer” is:
"Queer" opens spaces for people who embrace all manner of sexual practices and
identities, which gives old-fashioned gays and lesbians a lot more company on the
political frontlines, as well as in capital consumption, and, of course, in bed. That's the
beauty and the flaw of "queer," depending on how you look at it. (6)
Queer, then, provides a broader community for a variety of creators. However, Dolan also recognizes a generational tension between the terms, noting “occasional clashes of old-style rhetoric with the presumptions of new-style queer” and that, even further, these generations of queer people “gathered by the way they positioned themselves around ‘queer,’ its history, and their own experience” (11). In reading Dolan’s words, I found an echo of my own anxiety around the term “queer” (a term I longed for, given its gesture towards community, and feared for its openness). The same worries I gave voice to in Queer Blind Date about not fitting into a queer narrative, of not ‘positioning myself’ around queer in the same way as many others I knew, seemed similar to these generational divides.
Now, over twenty years after Dolan’s address, the broader context surrounding defining
“queer theatre” or “queer performance” or “queer performance practice” still remains fraught.
Amidst a list of a number of questions that guided the Q2Q conference hosted at Simon Fraser
University and the frank theatre company in 2016, Peter Dickinson offers a particularly prescient one for my exploration here, and for my practice as a writer: “What is the relationship between identity and aesthetics in accounting for what makes queer theatre ‘queer’?” (105). Many of the works included in Canadian Theatre Review’s Summer 2017 Views and Reviews section
Scalzo 11
(dedicated entirely to reflections on and from the Q2Q conference) explore that question directly.
It was from these works that I began to conceptualize a definition of queer theatre that seemed practical, if not entirely romantic.
Of particular interest to me was the primary difference of orientation between two applications of “queer,” as explained in my introduction. While some scholars, theorists, and practitioners see queer theatre as something that “is,” others seem to position queer theatre as active—as something that “does” a specific thing. More to provide context rather than belaboring a point, we can look at cited or proposed definitions of “queer” and “queerness,” turning again to
J. Paul Halferty. He calls on José Esteban Muñoz’s definition of queerness as “a thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing” (qtd. in Halferty,
“Editorial” 100) and reorients it as something that “allow[s] a glimpse of potential, more progressive futures, but do[es] not ignore the material realities of our contemporary social contexts” (Halferty, “Editorial” 100). Brendan Healy, then-Artistic Director of Buddies in Bad
Times, provides seven action-driven definitions of what queer theatre does (among them, it
“breaks down barriers” [84], “gives voice to our dead” [85], and “creates alternative communities” [86]). The tension inherent in this two-part definition (queerness as something that
“is” and as something that “does”) might also be underlined in another of Dickinson’s guiding questions, in which he asks how we advocate for works that are “avowedly activist” in “a climate of increasing ‘homonormativity’” (Dickinson 105), echoing his co-organizer C. E. Gatchalian’s concerns around complacency and anger in activist queer theatre (Gatchalian 102-3).
And this tension is certainly underlined in Moynan King’s “Twenty-Six Observations on a Queer Theatre Conference,” a single page listing “what [she] learned” (120) over the course of attending every panel that was part of the conference. The definition (or, now, definitions) of
Scalzo 12 queer theatre are no less slippery than the one Dolan gestured towards. The list is filled with contradictions (“13 — A platform is sometimes used to say one has no platform,” “15 — Plays are queer theatre. Plays are not queer theatre,” and “21 — Devising is queer theatre. Devising is not queer theatre” [120, her emphasis] are of particular note.) But three very useful concepts around which queerness seems to gravitate are synthesized here. Queerness is not a collective identity; it is a “contentious concept;” and creates a “context” for “contact” (120). In this way,
King’s list, though contradictory, seems to suggest the definition of queer theatre must be interested in identity, but not confined by it. It should be aware and adaptable, considering its own context (historically, locally, and otherwise). And its particular strength comes from it being theatre, from it being a story. “Stories,” King notes, “are theories” (120) and the creation of queer theatre, thus, is something that proposes a theory. Like Muñoz’s queerness that yearns for something missing and Halferty’s recontextualization that insists that queerness looks for potential while recognizing material realities, queer theatre allows a literal visioning of a theory, of something missing that is now present via the body (or, likely, bodies).
As a writer, this landed me in a strange place. I found myself interested in defining my work as queer theatre, myself as a queer writer, but unsure of what that might mean. In exploring definitions of queer theatre and in considering how I might constellate into it, I decided that, in addition to working categories of extant definitions that could be usefully grouped into a queer theatre that “is” and that “does,” it would be of use to also define what my practice around queer theatre might also involve. In addition to viewing the work I produce through those two lenses
(that is, considering what it is and what it does), I wanted to ensure that my work was also sensitive to its context, in the way King and Halferty position it conceptually, and that questioned its yearning. What did this play want to stage that was beyond its current context, and
Scalzo 13 how could it do that? And what were the impulses within me that led this piece from conception through creation?
2. Identity, Polyamory, and Intergenerational Queerness
Having arrived at a working understanding of queer theatre and having begun to situate my practice within the context of that understanding, I was more easily able to interrogate some of the initial impulses around what would grow to become Us. Though my thoughts around the play’s form and my creation process were informed primarily by my reading around queer theatre, I found the content drawing on a mix of personal impulses engaged in a response to some contemporary trends in various forms of media I was consuming.
As a brief contextualization, Us’ thematic foci came, unsurprisingly, from some questions arising from my embodied experience as a queer man in North America. Not only had I found myself interested in the various overlaps and divergences between my identity and others, but I had found myself in a string of various long-distance amorous encounters that had led me to begin to think through relationship models that I had been a part of, and had ideated. I had found myself the sexual partner of people in open relationships, which brought intricacies that felt comparably complex to those I had encountered in my past, as well as a friend to many people who were pursuing their first relationships with polyamorous partners (or as openly polyamorous people themselves). I have always found myself both emotionally and intellectually drawn to themes around interpersonal and romantic relationships, and have similarly always found myself conflicted in most emotional and intellectual stances I’ve considered. The nascent idea of a new play seemed to be in synthesis.
Part of my impulse to pursue this play—which, through a rather circuitous drafting
Scalzo 14 process, would become Us—was rooted in the fact that I found myself searching for models of these relationships in plays I was reading without much luck. Of course, I could find works about love triangles (and just about any other geometric figure I could want), but finding information around polyamory was proving difficult, especially in a queer male context, where many of these relationships seemed to contribute to an argument for queer palatability and dismissing these relationships as infidelity, emotionally immaturity, or something similarly unsuitable for adults.
(The closest I would come, perhaps, is Noel Coward’s Design for Living which, though instructive in playing with polyamory and audience expectation, still seemed to occupy a space adjacent to what I searched for.) I continued my search in fits, often turning cursory Google searches into elaborate garden paths I’d follow through thinkpieces, forum postings, news articles, and, eventually, archived websites. This last category, in particular, provided an unexpectedly great amount of creative inspiration.
I found myself in the FAQ section of a website called alt.polyamory. This site, “a
USENET newsgroup more or less full of people interested in talking about polyamory and related topics” (alt.polyamory, “FAQs”) was founded in 1992, and, to my knowledge, had existed in an archived state long before I found it. (The “last updated” date noted at the time of writing is March 2010 [alt.polyamory, “Home Page”].) It was in this archive that I was able to start to develop a sensitivity in my understanding and lexicon that felt akin to my discovery of my own queerness. It was something I had explored on my own—also often in furtive glances to bookshelves or internet chatrooms and fora—and found a community with its own language and geometry, but one that is “fairly roomy to fit the wide range of,” in this case, “poly arrangements out there” (alt.polyamory, “FAQs”).
Perhaps the most inspiring discovery I made through alt.polyamory was, in fact, that it
Scalzo 15 was founded in 1992. Polyamorous relationships, and a discussion of them that was so open and sensitive, seemed so new to me—something that had distant historical or cultural precedence, but which always seemed to be framed as a new frontier in contemporary discussion. This felt particularly astounding when I compared it to the relative (though contentious) contemporary visibility of queer polyamorous relationships. Here, of course, I focus on relationships between men, as that served as the basis of Us as well as the inciting research interest from personal influences, and, as I planned to write a play for a wide audience base, I tried to see what the most visible and accessible forms of media dissemination might provide, in particular. Even an initial survey of what seemed accessible that explored queer men’s polyamory seemed to relegate that narrative to a B-plot or source of conflict and tension to be overcome (and here, I think of biopics like Milk, which explores Harvey Milk’s queerness and positions his partnership with
Scott Smith against the backdrop of Milk’s interest in non-monogamous romance and sex).
Even the three most useful reference points for Us through its genesis and drafting were
B-plots of various importance in TV and online writing. These narratives, accessible and clear in their presentation of polyamorous relationships, further cemented where I saw the personal and artistic intersection of Us’ generative interests: queer intergenerational romance. This would allow me to explore questions of identity and self-definition through my writing, as well as potential conflict inherent in putting generational definitions of identities against each other dramatically.
The first, and very well-received, reference point was the Netflix adaptation of Armistead
Maupin’s Tales of the City. In addition to providing visibility for intergenerational queer romance, discussions of Tales of the City also expanded to include discussions of queer intergenerationality more broadly. Thinkpieces discussed not only how the show explored
Scalzo 16 intergenerational romance, but by nature of the show explicitly placed it in its own intergenerational tradition: the adapted text, previous adaptations, and this newest one. Features soon ran that encouraged considering the implications of intergenerational identities and how they influenced one another, also allowing for companies and online projects to help bolster the visibility of their own projects focusing on intergenerationality and queerness (a movement that
Buddies in Bad Times itself provides a useful touchstone for with its Youth/Elders Project, a
“living experiment in form, content, theatre practice, community building, and creating space” where “queer- and trans-identified people under the age of twenty-five and over the age of fifty- five … meet and dialogue” [Parry]). In its creation and reception, Netflix’s Tales of the City served as a reminder that the queer work I wanted to produce engaged in conversation with other works and creators.
The other two examples that proved surprisingly foundational to Us came from serialized television programs that focused on musical comedy (another personal bias of my own). The first was a short arc in the television series Glee, long after the show had, according to most critical and popular reception, jumped the proverbial shark. In a late season of the show, Kurt, a young gay man, becomes estranged from his partner for the majority of the show. During this estrangement and breakup, Kurt begins online dating and finds himself on a date with a man easily thirty years his senior, Walter. What interested me was the balance the show tried to strike in this relationship between attraction, feasibility, and palatability. Although Walter did initially misrepresent his photos online, the actors still played the relationship with no shortage of in- person chemistry. But eventually, Walter and Kurt were still deemed an unfeasible relationship.
Though there was a kind of mutual attraction, Walter was too old for Kurt, and, thus, an unsustainable romantic choice (and, of course, the show sought to capitalize on the payoff of an
Scalzo 17 eventual reunion between Kurt and Blaine, already firmly established with their ship name
“Klaine.”)
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, on the other hand, provided an extended arc that explored the romance between bisexual Darryl Whitefeather, already a divorcé and father, and his younger, gay partner Josh Wilson. Whereas Glee’s relationship between Kurt and Walter was deemed unrealistic due to the age difference (and, I’d further suggest, perhaps because that seemed unpalatable in a show that was written with a younger age demographic in mind), Darryl and
Josh Wilson have a relationship that leads to mutual growth. Their relationship is eventually unsustainable not because of their age difference, and not because of a lack of chemistry. Instead, their breakup is the result of Josh Wilson not wanting children and Darryl wanting them to have a baby together. In Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, played alongside the sometimes-madcap antics of
Rebecca Bunch, the titular “crazy” ex-girlfriend, there is a story of tender intergenerational queer romance which is allowed to blossom and change, eventually leading to a sustainable and healthy friendship between the two.
Amidst a relative lack of clear models for polyamory, and arguably a similar one of accessible intergenerational queer male romance, I found a place for Us. At its genesis, I knew that the piece of queer theatre I meant to create was an exploration of an intergenerational romance with the potential to move from a couple to a polyamorous geometry. What it meant to do was create a conversation around polyamory and queer romance, and it meant to expand the conversations that had been happening in internet fora and in creative subplots. (An assessment of both what Us is and does, at this stage, will come later in this statement.) The next question, however, was how to curate the participants in that conversation.
Scalzo 18
CHAPTER THREE: WRITING FOR AN AUDIENCE BEYOND THE CHARACTERS
During the course of my MFA playwriting workshops at the University of Calgary, I found my readings and drafting to benefit from a number of unanticipated questions around the contents of my work. Being the only openly self-identified queer person in my workshops, I received a number of questions around certain terminology and cultural references that I had written into my scripts. (Both scripts I was workshopping during my MFA focused on relationships of various kinds between queer men.) I am not the first, and am sure not to be the last, to write on the subject of audience reception and queer creation, but it was through these workshop experiences that I found myself primed as a writer to question not only who I was writing for, but how I was going to present my work and its themes. Who else might be consuming it, and how transparently or opaquely did I want certain plot points, characters, and themes to be explored? What could be the possible benefits and detriments to each approach?
Reading academic works and interviews with playwrights that spoke to decipherability onstage, as well as its potential consequences, as well as my own experience with my one-act play Taking
Shelter, proved useful explorations.
1. Audience, Identity, and Empathy
One of the most foundational texts for my process, by luck, came to me early in my MFA process. Having left a PhD program with research focused on examining onstage narratives, I had engaged with some texts that considered the relationship between audiences and dramatic narratives, and now that I was pursuing my MFA, I was afforded the opportunity to explore these works anew with an eye towards creation. One of these works I revisited was the aforementioned
Scalzo 19
The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched by Paul Woodruff.
In addition to his arguments about theatre’s immediacy, Woodruff discusses the potentiality of theatre by drawing attention to its parallels with other forms of ritualized gathering. Both American football games and Ancient Greek theatre, in their presentation of bodily action and interaction before a group of spectators (that, it should be noted, is comprised of a group of bodies) are both “powerful centers for community” (12). Similarly, both forms of entertainment use the same component in their creation that is used in experiencing non- narrativized human existence: the body. It is because of this gathering, this creation and maintenance of community for the however-many-hours traffic upon stages where we see dramas played out in the same code as reality, that there is a “psychological necessity … to engage in the art of theatre” because “[p]art of being human is to practice the art, to aim at being worth watching” (Woodruff 22). Though, of course, Woodruff’s book seems to establish proscenium theatre as a ritual distinct from other embodied rituals that could be argued to have closer parallels to performance than his text may explicitly admit (marriages, grand openings, etc.), this setup already drew on a number of facets of creation that I found my work interested in exploring. My works that aimed to explore queer identity often explored embodiment, too. For me, the body was not only the physical means of representing my characters onstage, but it was also something on the forefront of their own minds. I found myself acutely aware of the fact that not only were my works’ form and content tightly bound together, but their means of interpretation—the audience—were also defined by that same medium.
This awareness of the audience as present in dramatic presentations took on a new resonance when exploring playwrights’ interviews around their practice. I found myself drawn into Marsha Norman’s contribution in Jeffrey Sweet’s What Playwrights Talk About When They
Scalzo 20
Talk About Writing. Though I’ll return to this interview later, when discussing my drafting history of Us, the influence of this interview proved to speak to my work and process early in my
MFA career. In her interview, Norman also underlines the importance of gathering and the communal aspect of playwatching, what she defines as “the great gift that the theater can give to an audience.” To her, “what the theater can do best is make people feel not so alone” (Norman).
In the same way that Woodruff underlines the psychological aspect of engaging with theatre,
Norman points to the importance of playwatching as a communal act, even going so far as to insist on its ability to foster empathy as the primary “gift” it can provide.
Norman offers even a further contribution to my writing process in her interview when she takes great care to define how she sees the relationship between writer and audience. She establishes that not only should a writer be aware of their audience as they write, but insists that awareness must be “constant[]”: “You’re not writing for them. You’re not writing at them. But they’re out there” (Norman, her emphasis). This seemed to further prove that my awareness of audience members as bodies, as I wrote about bodies “with” bodies, that it made sense “be aware
… that their mass is affecting what’s going on in the room.” It was in this expansion of the audience’s role that I realized a fundamental tenet that I hadn’t put concrete words to. In my initial writing process, especially in my more character-driven pieces, I had been so invested in the representation of character that I had shied away from the recognition of the audience member as a co-producer of meaning, or, as Norman puts it, that there is “an essential collaboration between a great writer and a great audience” (Norman). Just as an audience’s attendance of a ritual or performance endows it with importance and recognition in Woodruff’s theory, the audience also endows the work with meaning, whether it is an intended meaning intrinsic to the performance or otherwise. My work, it became clear, would have to recognize
Scalzo 21 both of these concepts and would have to examine how they worked together as I wrote.
Putting what I learned from Marsha Norman’s interview in conversation with Paul
Woodruff’s writing proved even more interesting than I had initially expected. Woodruff goes further with this, exploring the ethical implications of theatre: “And there is an ethical reason to practice the art of watching. Part of our need to watch theater grows from our need to care about other people” (20). I found myself wondering if Woodruff’s ethics of watching might speak to
Norman’s awareness of “essential collaboration between a great writer and a great audience”
(Norman). In the context of theatre creation, they both seemed to speak to the importance of recognizing theatre as a common space, something that is curated by both creators and audiences. Even further, I found them both to be adaptable to underlying tenets of queer creation that are often cited by queer creators: an interest in representation, in visibility, in community.
(Here, of course, it’s almost impossible not to think of the earlier discussion of Porfido’s concepts regarding televisual spectatorship and queer representation.) Perhaps, I thought, theatre creation allowed a way for a creator and audience to collaboratively consider an issue as fraught as identity. Perhaps I could write something that facilitates or reinforces a similar caring.
Woodruff also speaks indirectly to the underlying tensions between communities in drawing our attention to theatre’s immediacy and to the communities that theatrical works aim to speak to. Drawing on a queer text itself, Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theatre Project’s The
Laramie Project, he goes on to say that “[t]he larger community is not only the people of
Laramie; those real people whose voices sound in the play stand for all of us, except that they are closer to this crime. The play gives them a voice—gives all of us a voice—and calls all of us to witness” (Woodruff 27). It was in rereading this, now focused on the text as a queer playwright and not holding that lens to the side as I was often wont to do in my earlier academic work, that I
Scalzo 22 was able to put words to the contexts of my work. In writing, I would be sure to think of not only the immediate audience—whether I defined it as a queer one that would easily get my shorthand in writing, or one that was location-based, etc.—but also of which voices were empowered, and which were implicated, within it. And, thanks to Norman, I would write with an eye to that collaboration between audience and writer.
2. Taking Shelter
The application of my theoretical understandings of the relationship between creator, audience, and work can be seen in the development and presentation of my pre-thesis work in my first year of the MFA. The culmination of my first year of coursework was a staged reading of a one-act play, written by me over the course of that year. This play, titled Taking Shelter, is set in Brett’s bathroom just after he has asked Marcus, whom he’s been making out with, to leave without having sex on their hookup. Between the thematic elements of sexuality, queer sexual orientations, and hookup and app culture, it soon became clear to me that how this play related its plot to the audience would be particularly instructive for writing queer drama.
As early as the first submitted pages read aloud in our workshop—comprised of my supervisor, one other playwriting student, and myself—questions were raised about how clearly I was relating queer content to an audience that might not be familiar with it. Questions were raised around the various apps named in the script (limited to what I had thought were the most well-known of the spectrum of hookup apps: Grindr, Scruff, and Growlr) as well as terminology related to sex (top, bottom, vers). I was torn. On one hand, I didn’t necessarily mind the fact that the work catered to queer audiences and that it made a space that felt like it was made with them in mind. It was a work in their language, and others might have to work a bit harder to
Scalzo 23 understand it. On the other, I didn’t want the work to feel inaccessible to the point where it might feel unduly risky to produce because it felt like it held a larger audience at a distance. I was, after all, writing this play to be performed and not to be placed in a drawer after a single staged reading presentation. I decided that, at this point, I would mark moments in my script that elicited these questions. I would try to reframe or rewrite portions that felt completely obscure to both readers in the workshop. (And this is perhaps a good point to note that, thanks to my writing drafts on a computer, I was able to maintain an archive of past versions of the script, in the event
I wanted to reincorporate any writing from previous drafts.)
As Taking Shelter’s drafting process moved from a course-based workshop to an audition process to a staged reading, I was matched with a gay man older than myself to direct the reading. Well-known in the community, both as an artist and as an openly gay man, and also known for his work with comedies, which Taking Shelter had turned out to be, he seemed like an ideal fit for the project. I was excited to have another openly queer person in the room as the script continued to develop, and our project’s stage manager was also a queer person. For the first time (to my knowledge), the play was to be read and developed in a space where the three queer participants outnumbered the two that identified as straight. I, unthinkingly, had thought a common lexicon would be completely transparent to the other queer members of the creative team.
Instead, Taking Shelter’s rehearsal process provided a new facet of interaction between my written work and those experiencing it. Though my stage manager and I shared a great amount of cultural referents and a pretty common lexicon, the director asked me questions reminiscent of those I had experienced in workshop. I was confronted with the unexpected result that my work was of an age. It wasn’t just an exploration of queer identity, but it was a queer
Scalzo 24 identity of a specific time and, some might say, of a certain generation of queer person. My director, as well as my actors, asked for a brief orientation around the differences between
Grindr, Scruff, and Growlr, which inspired me to suggest that we incorporate a practice of non- judgmental definition in our rehearsals. I actively encouraged the creative team to ask questions if things seemed unclear (something they had been more comfortable with around the plot than they had been around references that seemed to speak to queer culture), and the practice was adopted early and easily into our process. It wasn’t until the second or third rehearsal on its feet that it occurred to me that I didn’t share a complete lexicon with the younger queer person in the room, as the director continued to be the one person who laughed at a half-hidden and oblique reference to a Whitney Houston song late in the show. These observations, and the implications they held for a multifaceted queer audience (not to mention one that also extended to non-queer people), further reinforced my interest in intergenerational queerness, which I was actively exploring in Us, still in the process of generating its first draft.
It was through the eventual presentation of the staged reading that I was finally able to directly confront my concerns around writing queer drama for both queer and non-queer audience members. Going into Taking Shelter’s performances, I felt relatively confident that the play was clear. At the very least, the trajectory we follow of Brett and Marcus’s burgeoning possible friendship (or, as I’d hear from some audience members, potential romantic relationship) seemed easy to track without being too predictable, and I had an excuse to put a tornado on stage, so the stakes seemed appropriately high. Queer audience members (who spoke to me in person and, ironically, on the very app Brett and Marcus met on) gave me feedback about how the characters were relatable and the story felt real, like it could potentially have happened. On the whole, it felt like a more-than-moderate success, and even if it needed a trim or
Scalzo 25 two, the show felt surprisingly solid and affective in ways I hadn’t allowed myself to experience yet.
Where I found unexpected concern, however, was in how non-queer audience members interfaced with the work. The first initial response I received from a straight man who had seen the show, and not known anything about it previously, was a simple handshake and congratulations on completing the project. The second asked me if I felt like the work was finished, and if I was proud of what we had watched on stage. Though neither comment was meant, I’m positive, maliciously, it was a strange initial response I hadn’t prepared myself for. I asked myself if I had, in fact, still created a work that proved inaccessible for a pretty large audience base. (I later asked myself if that mattered. I determined, for this project, it did.)
Luckily, an answer to that came unprompted, and quickly. While sitting in the office of a colleague, a straight man of almost forty years old, he began to relate to me how much he found he could empathize with the characters in Taking Shelter. In particular, he found himself interested in Marcus, whose background and storyline explores, among other things, concerns around body image in the queer community and as a part of app culture. He was surprised at his empathy for Marcus, as was I. Through further discussion, we talked about something I hadn’t fully admitted to in my process, and something that I think Taking Shelter, as a project, is stronger for. Whereas I had considered rewrites framed in a context of providing clarity and transparency for non-queer audience members as concessions and potential losses in the script, this colleague and I were able to share a moment of thoughtful exploration and mutual recognition of each other’s embodied experience. His experience as a straight man involved in sports and acting allowed him to engage with Marcus and recognize in him aspects of other men
(and other straight men) he knew through those parts of his life. Though I don’t believe it’s
Scalzo 26 necessarily the right choice for every piece, nor even every piece I write, I felt that Taking
Shelter benefitted from more transparency than I had initially intended to allow the play. It fostered a conversation bigger than the play, and one that required an understanding of the play and its context to be sensitively expressed.
Through the process of exploring audience, my attachment to it as a writer generally and for this piece specifically, I found myself constantly returning to these questions of representation. I had no clean answers to questions around how accessible or transparent one
“should” make queer narratives, nor even one to how accessible or transparent I had intended to make mine. I did, however, find a quote from Woodruff’s exploration particularly useful as a guiding principle, and one I believe in as an audience member myself: “You do not understand a piece of theater unless you see how it bears on you, until you bring it home to your own life”
(Woodruff 199). To me, this sentiment not only provided a useful synthesis of my understanding of being a writer and an audience member, helping bridge a mental divide I find myself often encouraged to delimit, but it also contributed to my understanding of why I was interested in creating these queer works—Taking Shelter and Us—specifically. I was no longer looking to explore these subjects in ways that kept them at a distance. I wanted to allow myself, and my audience, the freedom, discomfort, and excitement of exploring them from within—of bringing these concepts home to our own lives. Us provided a challenge to that, for the initial audience I conceived of, but also, and more immediately, for myself.
Scalzo 27
CHAPTER FOUR: “THE PLAY HAS GOT TO COME HOME:” LISTENING TO A PLAY,
AND LEADING IT
1. Beginnings: Going Home
As previously indicated, Us is a play that came out of a variety of sources, both influenced by my personal history and my intellectual exploration. I was interested in queer representation via the media I had been consuming and that interest, set against my recent personal experience around non-monogamous relationships (which, at the time of proposing Us,
I hadn’t realized was as direct an influence as it ended up becoming), began to coalesce into an idea around queer families.
Us initially took shape as a play about two generations in a queer family. Initially titled
Going Home, this iteration of the play followed two stories set in two times. The present timeline focused on a queer woman in her 20s, Jo, returning to her childhood home to help her chronically-ill father, Bernie, pack after his husband Henry’s death, all the while avoiding questions around her current relationship which, unbeknownst to her father, is polyamorous. The past timeline, interspersed as separate scenes amongst the present timeline, began about thirty years in the past with Henry’s return from having lived abroad with a lover for three years. (This, of course, would provide the basis for Us’ beginning.) The primary dramatic tension, and what was so compelling about this idea for me, was setting these two potential comings-out regarding polyamory against each other—Bernie’s response framing Henry’s absence exclusively as infidelity and allowing Jo’s relationship to eventually challenge his view of monogamy in a way that would cause him to reflect on his response to Henry’s return.
In outlining and beginning to draft, Going Home quickly became unwieldy in the way I
Scalzo 28 had articulated its concept. Being able to devote enough time to sensitively represent a variety of important concepts while also dividing attention between two protagonists seemed unsustainable for this play. I found that establishing so many characters and their complex relationships across time might be too taxing on an audience and would prove distancing in a way I didn’t intend for this narrative to be. This provided a moment where I could challenge my play and my intent in deciding how close I wanted the audience to feel to the narrative. Like Taking Shelter, I thought
Going Home derived strength from it being a new perspective, but one that could relatively easily be connected to by a general public. I would later find words that spoke to a strength I perceived in Going Home. Richard Rose articulates a strength that drama has in particular: “The drama gives a warning that is at once visceral and at a distance” (234). I wanted the plot and characters of Going Home to feel unfamiliar and new—that is, at a distance—but I didn’t want to give up a visceral empathy that I felt with them, and hoped my audience might, too.
Going Home’s first act, then, quickly began to shift. The present timeline would fall away, as would the characters of Jo, her brother, and Bernie’s neighbor Antonia. It was now to be a two-hander, exploring Bernie and Henry’s relationship after Henry’s return and still temporally situated in the past. Thematic explorations that had been so embedded in my initial proposal seemed to shift as well. Bernie’s chronic illness was not so transparently onset in his youth in ways his older self would have embodied onstage and the question of generationality seemed harder to get at. Instead of having a family structure and clear family-defined generations, Going Home began to rely on an audience’s recognition of a generational difference between a “then” onstage and a “now” in the audience. The form of the play took a new shape, as well. Instead of shifting in time, the play now shifted in presentation and each scene in Bernie and Henry’s reality was punctuated by an extended monologue under the conceit of Bernie
Scalzo 29 mentally writing letters to Christoph, allowing him to transparently address the audience.
By the end of drafting a first act, I knew something felt off about the play, but I couldn’t tell quite what. Shifting to one timeline seemed to make sense, but I found most of the people who read the draft had questions around why Bernie might stay, what Henry had to offer that would compel Bernie to stay, and who Christoph was and how that relationship might have resolved upon Henry’s leaving. I realized that Going Home was becoming a more complex and nuanced exploration than I’d initially perceived. What had begun as an exploration of infidelity, agency, and self-advocacy was more invested in the gestures towards polyamory in the initial proposal than its concerns around betrayal. On top of that, I knew that I needed a compelling hook to bring the audience back into Act Two, and I knew I wanted it to be a radical shift, both for the audience watching and for myself in writing it. The draft felt thematically unclear, the first act’s conflicts felt stagnant, and the play began to plateau.
My answer to a compelling start to the second act, my logical first step in completing coursework and potentially righting the ship I felt I was, at best, aimlessly steering, would come from a writing exercise we had used early in workshop. My professor suggested a method of fleshing out an outline that proposed three ways forward for protagonists, ranging from a “safe” choice to the “worst” choice they could make. I had explored this choice for Jo early on, but looking back at my notes compelled me to explore what would be the “worst” choices for both
Bernie and Henry in this situation. For Bernie, it seemed that he could lean into the destructive streak that had so quickly become evident in my drafting and burn everything to the ground literally, as opposed to the figurative way he already was. Henry’s “worst” choice—bring
Christoph back with him—proved to be not only more easily stageable, but a way to make explicit that the play was interested in exploring polyamorous identity and would allow the
Scalzo 30 audience to see a potential polyamorous relationship onstage. Additionally, making Christoph a younger partner would allow me to explore a different kind of generational structure than the unintentionally heterosexist one I had initially written when establishing a family. Now, the play could explore generations within the queer community, ones that push against the traditional constraints of biological procreation.
The decision to introduce Christoph’s onstage presence into the play became a very instructive moment for me in my writing process. Though the idea had initially come to me in an exercise of what the worst possible move for a character would be, it became apparent that
Christoph insisted on being more than a plot device, and more than the prop that I had initially allowed him to be for Henry’s reveal at the end of the first act. Encouraged by my workshop group, I found myself, rightfully, questioning who this third body belonged to, what he knew about the situation before he arrived that evening, and how his perspective on the situation could contribute to the complex drama unfolding in Us. Christoph brought me an unexpected gift as a writer: permission to distance myself from my characters’ martyrdom or the pressures of perceiving my work as the “only” perspective on these complex themes. By introducing a third party and rendering all three characters’ wants even more distinct from each other, I found myself naturally distancing from more facile pro-and-con arguments that Henry and Bernie had resorted to when they were alone, as well as undermining Bernie’s relative power to call the shots in the first act. I was reminded that I was writing a play about characters, and not a chronicle of a historical relationship that had to remain tied to research in the same way my previous academic work might. Introducing Christoph permitted me to let the research inform my writing, instead of becoming my writing.
By introducing Christoph and his desires into the play, the radical shift I wanted between
Scalzo 31 acts came in the form of one continuous scene in the second act, an emotionally charged revelation and confrontation with an ambiguous resolution. Though I still had questions of what remained in the play, especially after such a radical shift mid-draft, Going Home’s second act provided me a way to map a trajectory to the play’s climax and resolution.
2. Revisions and Rehearsal: Us
Presented with the prospect of reexamining and rewriting the first act of Going Home, I felt relatively daunted. I felt myself distancing from the play and its characters. I felt tired. Most of my conversations around my play revolved around my desire to put it away and questioning my choice to make this my thesis project. I began to examine why I was so resistant to continue working on Going Home. I identified my concerns about being unsure what the play was
“doing”—not only in terms of its plot and characters, but now also in what the play aimed to communicate more broadly to an audience.
I was lucky to be able to speak to a variety of people during this time, all of whom allowed me various ways to externalize what worried me about my play and my work in general.
In addition to entertaining my own monologues about the difficulties I found in my work, various friends provided unintentional dramaturgical support. One friend, whom I’d met just as I moved to Calgary, offered me his take on how he might relate to the play’s style, not having a wide breadth of experience attending theatre performances. I reached out to another friend about my concerns around the definitions of queer theatre and performance, and she offered me a list
(and, sometimes, physical copies) of plays that felt to her like touchstone works. A third friend, who has known me since the early stages of the play, provided feedback that was useful in its bluntness. I had talked her through my pitch for the play and highlighted what I perceived of as
Scalzo 32 its shortcomings. She turned to me and asked if my criticisms were of the play, or if they came from the fact that it was a play that I was writing. She asked me to avoid the broad generalities of my complaints and to outline what, exactly and specifically, was bothering me about the play.
One thing that quickly rose to the surface was a realization that a good amount of my discontentment with my play had to deal with ways that I’d internalized my confusion around definitions of queer theatre and what it meant to be a queer writer, calling to mind not only reading I had been doing as part of my coursework around queer work but conversations I had been having regarding my creative work for a while. I was reminded of a moment very early in my writing career, where I was speaking to one of my classmates, a gay man, about our work and he had asked me if all of my work was, to only mildly paraphrase his articulation, “gay relationship drama.” He wondered if my persistent focus on queer relationships would prove limiting to myself as a writer (positioning it, as some writers tend to, as something he would never do but that I was welcome to, as long as I was sure to have thought about it). When I was talking about my writing process for Going Home, I recognized some of my complaints as ventriloquisms of those views. Did I really have to be writing about queer characters and “queer issues” in order to feel validated and seen as a queer writer? Or was I using that as a way to justify the work’s existence, even if it felt like it might not have deserved that existence otherwise?
Of course, with the gift of looking back on this experience after having seen a version of
Going Home brought to completion, I am able to say with a certain level of confidence that these were primarily internalizations of anxieties and criticisms that were levied at me and my work in my earlier formative years as a writer. I even found validation, later, in Marsha Norman’s interview where she discusses the importance of writing honestly, where she insists that each
Scalzo 33 writer has their own “stuff” (citing Jessica Goldberg for the invention of the term in this context) that they are compelled to write about:
That’s the problem with knowing what your stuff is, is that you can start to feel trapped
by it or you can feel that you’re in a cubbyhole or you’ve become a cliché of your own
making or any of those things. And yet, the truth is that if your thing is to write about
flawed fathers, then that is what you have to write and write and write and write and
write. (Norman)
Though I felt more confident and justified in continued and varied explorations of queer relationships, what I believe to be “my stuff” (at least for now), this opportunity for self- reflection also brought to my attention a larger phenomenon that had been in the back of my head as I wrote. Another, and a very strong, reason I had felt compelled to distance myself from my work was a concern that my single play about polyamorous queer relationships might be seen as representative of all perspectives on the topic and taken as a singular, all-encompassing work.
I think this is an anxiety I’ve felt often in my writing and in my scholarship. As powerful as it can be to claim my perspective as a queer writer, it comes with an implicit danger to be taken as an authority where I might not be, about things that I’m not as well-versed in. I found myself afraid to write my characters as multifaceted and flawed, afraid that it might come off as an attack against polyamorous people or a certain generation of gay man or any other intersection of identity this play presented (national identity, class or financial stability, etc.). This made for what I had rightfully diagnosed as a very boring drama.
In the same way I looked to other playwrights to see how they responded to similar criticisms of retreading the same material, I continued to read interviews with playwrights to see if any might offer me some guidance around my reticence to write imperfect characters. In the
Scalzo 34 same collection where I’d read Marsha Norman’s interview, I found some quotes from Lynn
Nottage that I felt spoke to my concerns. Speaking in the context of her own observations and writing advice that seems to be passed around almost by osmosis in the general consciousness, she responded to a claim that speaking directly to a subject is the death of drama by noting a contemporary trend where “very obtuse and precious plays … don’t say anything for fear of offering up a strong opinion or arousing an untidy emotion.” She talks about her experience writing Ruined, taping a reminder over her computer—“Sustain the complexity”—and reminding herself that “[t]here are going to be characters that we don’t like or who we find questionable.
But [she tries] to go inside and understand why they’re making the choices that they make”
(Nottage). I wondered if Going Home, too, sought to explore its themes more directly than I’d allowed it to, and if it also sought my characters’ humanity despite, and thanks to, their complexities. Later drafts would continue to refine the play’s dramatic core and would allow for more transparent, though still character-guided, discussion on polyamory, relationships, and identity.
Feeling more assured that I could represent complicated characters without the play coming off as an unmitigated attack on non-monogamous relationships, and reminding myself that my play did not have to bear the weight of the entirety of discourse around the themes that influenced it, I decided the play had outgrown its initial title. Whereas my first proposal was concerned with a number of ways one could “go home,” the current draft, focusing first on
Henry’s recommitment to his relationship with Bernie and then on the revelation that he was coming out as polyamorous to different levels of surprise for each partner, no longer seemed to be served by the title. Instead, I started to think of a title that would gesture towards the definitions of identities and relationships that the play was now more directly invested in. I
Scalzo 35 settled on Us, a title that not only provided a new orientation for me to view the play through and reinvest in, but also one that would speak to both the plot-level relationship strains between
Bernie, Henry, and Christoph, while speaking more broadly to the audience viewing the play.
This new thematic focus confirmed my initial impulse to reveal Christoph at the end of the first act, though risky, felt right. The audience, alongside Bernie, would have to re-evaluate the meaning of “us” when Henry opened the door. However, the play still needed to be effective in setting up this reveal at the end of the act. Additionally, now that I’d articulated the ways in which I wanted the audience to empathize with Bernie, I had to turn my attention to the ways the play could facilitate that. A relatively simple solution could be to steer the play away from its moments of more “theatrical” presentation, allowing it more grounding in reality and, hopefully, making it easier for an audience to process and think on. I decided to forego Bernie’s letter- monologues, as they had the potential to confuse the narrative and complicate Christoph’s entrance, which needed to feel more forward-looking. I didn’t want to distract from the fundamental question of why Henry was motivated to bring Bernie and Christoph together by introducing a question of Bernie and Christoph’s correspondence. I did, however, want to keep the potential of evidence of Henry and Bernie’s relationship—initially in disclosures that Bernie would provide to his imagined Christoph—as it helped show Bernie’s continued investment in the relationship. The monologues soon became physical letters Henry had sent, and later turned into the photographs present in Us. Similarly, I made the decision to present the first act as traditionally as possible, adhering to realism and more traditional scene distinctions.
I was uncompromising, however, in my belief that the second act had to feel related to, but very distinct from, the first. I had not been able to provide a satisfactory explanation as to why I felt this way until I was discussing Us in generalities with the woman who would later be
Scalzo 36 solicited to direct its staged reading. After some persistent, gentle prodding, and after providing me some external empowerment to follow that impulse to its extreme to see where it might lead,
I would finally be able to put words to my motivations. For me, the extreme came in a series of drafts where, instead of presenting the uninterrupted realism of the dinner scene that now comprises Act Two, I began to return to playing with time and reality like I had planned to in
Going Home. One draft interrupted the dinner at crucial points, replaying memories from Bernie and Henry’s past as Bernie thought of them and coordinating those memories with entrances and exits in the dinner scene. Then, I tried a draft where I incorporated another actor to play a younger Bernie who acted as an onstage representation of Bernie’s thoughts about the various developments throughout the act, complete with the ability to freeze and unfreeze Henry and
Christoph or pull all of them into a mental space in-between Bernie’s mind and reality to have imagined discussions, confrontations, and interactions.
By allowing myself to explore a distinction between the two acts more extreme than a change in pacing, I realized I intended to complement the queer content of the play with a queering of form, as defined in the readings I had been doing. The previously unnamed impulse to shift something between the acts resulted from me wanting to show that Bernie, whose perspective filters the audience’s perception of the play, is having his worldview challenged. In introducing Bernie to Christoph, and later in coming out as polyamorous, Henry challenges what
Bernie knows about his partner and his relationship, and implicitly relationships in general. I wanted the audience to experience something similarly marked by a “before” and “after” state.
However, I wanted to make sure the second act didn’t feel so different that the audience was taken out of the play’s emotional core. I decided that maintaining Us’ level of realism but changing its pacing in the second act would provide that balance of “visceral” and “at a distance”
Scalzo 37
(Rose 234) that I hoped to encourage.
3. Auditions and Rehearsals
Upon entering auditions for Us, I was still unsure of the shape the play was taking. I was still unsure of the shift between the first and second acts and I was still playing with the levels of realism I wanted represented on the stage. A rehearsal process could, and would, offer me the benefit of needing to make choices and to stand by them. The script would need to be written and presented by early April, and I knew that I wanted the presentation to be affecting, well- reasoned, and coherent. Since I wasn’t yet actively shopping the script around anywhere, the staged reading gave me a finish line to aim for.
The audition process had already been a topic of long consideration. I had already been speaking with my advisor about our mutual casting concerns for the show. As Us deals with, and stages, an intergenerational relationship, exclusively auditioning actors from the university’s student population seemed like a potential drawback. It felt important to me to know how the piece spoke to different queer generations, and having actors comparably aged to the characters felt like a way to have voices in the room that could speak to the experience of the diverse ages in the show. However, I lacked both the resources and connections, having relocated to Calgary as I started the MFA program. Another potential option seemed to be running an interview to collect feedback from various readers I could solicit, but I felt that seeking ethics approval, soliciting readers, and conducting interviews this late in the process was unwieldy while maintaining my enrolment and other responsibilities. After discussing this concern at length with my advisor and the staged reading’s director, we decided that the first step would be to hold auditions within the university and address concerns around the actors’ ages after, if needed.
Scalzo 38
Luckily, the auditions yielded three actors well-suited to the piece who seemed like they would be able to work well individually, as well as off of one another.
I had two versions of Us’ second act drafted before the first day of rehearsals. As I discussed previously, I was unsure of the kind of difference I wanted represented between the acts, so I had arrived at a version where the second act did not deviate from physical realism and one version that shifted within time from the present dinner to past pivotal moments in Bernie and Henry’s relationship and even jumping forward at the end to show Christoph and Bernie mourning the loss of Henry together. Again, I found myself preoccupied with how the play was and did queer work, and I found myself unmoored in the multiple possibilities the work could offer.
The more-realist version seemed easily approachable. It wouldn’t distance a more general audience as readily in its form, but it felt like a dangerous move to present a scene that ran an entire act after an act of traditionally-beated scenes and I wondered if an audience would mentally disengage from the material at that shift. The less-realist version, on the other hand, allowed a physical manifestation of the shift in Bernie’s mind after Christoph’s reveal. The audience would be able to directly access Bernie’s memories and a potential future onstage, but I worried it could shock an audience into disengaging as easily, if not more easily, than the more- realist version. I decided that I would print out the more-realist version for our first read-through, as it felt more stable and, to ventriloquize a friend whose advice became a useful guide in this process, the harder sell for me. If I could hear potential in the realist version, there might be something there after all.
Hearing the first read-through provided some much-needed perspective on the show, in both the positive and negative aspects it revealed. A read-through allowed me the simple
Scalzo 39 feedback of what was and wasn’t easy for the actors to parse (understanding, of course, it was a relative cold read so I could also gauge their initial reactions to the material). It also allowed me to track the changes and turns in each character’s motivation, tactic, and way they interface during the dinner. This aspect had become particularly confused in working through multiple versions of the second draft, as some discoveries were only located in one version but its result might have found its way into both. As an example, the less-realist version allowed me to write a brief flashback of the first time Bernie and Henry met, and that became fundamental in understanding some of the objects Bernie chose to get rid of. Hearing which actions seemed unmotivated or which ones didn’t have the same resonance without their backstory explored onstage were very instructional in the development of Us.
Through hearing it read, I also learned just how attached I was to Us’ presentation of physical intimacy. As Us’ characters grapple with concerns around language and definition and the tensions between self-identification and communication, physical intimacy proved a possible way to allow characters to express things they could not say. One of the most important moments of physical intimacy, to me, was the kiss Bernie initiates at the end of the first act, a sign that he is finally ready to be transparent about his investment in Henry’s return and his excitement for it.
It felt necessary, both for character development and as an action. One of Bernie’s struggles throughout the play is his inability or lack of desire to be emotionally transparent, turning to sarcasm or silence instead. The kiss is impulsive and immediate in a way that Bernie doesn’t allow himself to be throughout the majority of the play, and even in a staged reading, reflecting that intimacy and staging that gesture felt important. After talking though the play’s physical intimacy with the director, she agreed that finding a way to show it, ideally through the action I had scripted, could be very powerful for the work and we would encourage (as we had through
Scalzo 40 audition and the first rehearsal) transparency around comfort and consent and would be unwilling to compromise anyone’s safety to stage that action.
There were, however, two discoveries that were both unexpected and positive. The first came out of a discussion the director facilitated after the reading (a conversation that, still, informs a great amount of my exploration of Us and for which I’m incredibly grateful). The first unexpected discovery related to my concerns around intergenerationality when a queer person in the production remarked that they were able to relate to each of the characters to varying degrees. The play felt real and they hoped for each character to get what they wanted, even when those wants were in conflict. Though it wasn’t the kind of cross-generational perspective I had intended to cultivate, I found that the play did speak to multiple ages—at least mine and that of the other person in the room. They said the play felt “real” and that they particularly empathized with protagonist Bernie. (This person would also provide what might be the most accurate character description for Bernie, “Man, 37, still does not know how to compromise,” and if my personal ties to the material hadn’t been evident to me before, they would have been made so in that moment.)
The second discovery put words to the concern that had inspired me to write two versions of Act Two. I realized in receiving post-read-through feedback that the reason I had been so tied to the flashback and flash-forward structure was because it allowed me to stage moments of joy for Bernie and I had been afraid the play lacked those, especially in the second act. But the conversation with our actors and stage manager after the first read-through indicated otherwise.
When asked for particular positives they noted as they read the script, the first two that were brought up were its tenderness and humor, even in the script’s heavier moments. In hearing the script aloud and in receiving this feedback, I felt more assured of presenting Us as a drama
Scalzo 41 rooted in realism. To me, it felt that Us was a work that would benefit from being more structurally approachable than not, and I felt that the shift to an extended scene in the second act would allow for enough reorientation for the audience to understand its gravity. With renewed dedication, I began rewrites and found a joy in writing the script that was equally served by the feedback and the distance I had earlier allowed myself from the script. The second rehearsal, a read-through of a version of the script I went through to address some questions from and discrepancies I’d noticed in our first rehearsal, only served to further encourage that investment.
It would be shortly after this second rehearsal that news of the spread of COVID-19, now a global health crisis, would reach us in ways that required quick and decisive action.
Performances were cancelled, including Us’ staged reading, and, soon after, it became clear that the rehearsals that might have helped facilitate further script development were also unsafe. I will highlight some lessons I’ve learned from that experience in particular in this statement’s conclusion, but I want to offer an anecdote that I found, only in writing this statement, to be informative of my own working process.
In writing this statement, I found myself often thinking back to a conversation I’d had with another playwright, a visiting instructor at the University of Calgary during my enrolment in the MFA. I had been sharing my experience of writing Us, including my concerns about its seemingly ever-changing nature, its expanding and contracting list of themes, and my concerns around when I would know if I had arrived at the story that both I and the play meant to tell.
Responding to that moment in my process, one that involved a great deal of exploratory writing, this playwright offered me a very useful metaphor, insisting that the play can go out for a walk, but by the time the curtain falls, it has to come home. The playwright must know where the play
Scalzo 42 lives—a theme, a character study, its purpose—and must know it well enough to guide the play back there by its ending. It is my hope that in the process of drafting Us, a work that has yet to receive a public showing at the time of writing this artist statement, I have been able to identify the play’s primary focuses, walked with it around the neighborhood, and, despite cutting its walk a little shorter than I expected, I hope to have brought it home, too.
Scalzo 43
CONCLUSION
At the time of writing this, Us, like a number of other works in Canada and abroad, has no plans for any public showing. To say this news is disappointing, though of course incredibly necessary, is an understatement, but I hope to conclude by considering the script in its current form and the process by which I came to it. I also aim to provide some things I’ve learned in the context of writing during a global health crisis, as this, too, has come to impact the way I view my own generative creative process, both in developing Us and as it might continue to affect my work moving forward.
Throughout the process of drafting the play, I learned a great deal from Us. I found that as strong and as compelling the idea that generated the play can be, its characters can often lead to something more engaging and exciting. I’ve also learned that the same analytical eye that inspires me in the (intended and unintended) research of my work can lend itself well to the development of needs, wants, and desires when I allow my work to be a play, and not a synthesis of researched materials. I’ve been afforded the unintentional, but incredibly appreciated, opportunity to speak to people outside of the audiences I had ‘meant to’ write for, and I am now able to move forward with a more nuanced understanding of what my audiences’ and my own attachments to my work might be. And, thanks to Christoph, I’ve learned that I have to listen and respond to a play as much as it listens and responds to me.
But, by virtue of having had to cancel what was essentially a developmental script workshop for Us and despite my confidence that I have led the play home, the play still feels incomplete to me. I have continued to make edits as best I can on my own, while still referring to feedback I’d received in those two rehearsals, but I found it particularly difficult to see the play
Scalzo 44 as moving towards a state of “completeness.” As I gain distance from the cancellation of Us’ staged reading, I feel more assured of the play being complete, though, like all plays before an initial public showing, ready for a next step. Ideally, I would like the script to be able to gain exposure, in workshop and/or performance, to a variety of queer men of different ages as well as both polyamorous and monogamous people, so I can see how they interface with the work. The drafting process for Us has been arduous and rewarding (sometimes even both at the same time), but it feels ready to grow into a public presentation.
The timeline for such a public presentation, however, is a complicated question, both for myself as an artist and for live performance in general. The global health crisis has required a rethinking of theatre and live performance and has, already, inspired a notable development of digital and distanced presentation styles. A variety of bake-off style writing contests, masterclasses, Zoom video readings, and recorded performances have made widely-accessible and relatively low-cost performance available to a breadth of creators, performers, and audiences. To see the dedication of a community of creators during a time of crisis, insisting on performer and audience safety and seeing the value of exciting exploration of new forms, has been a gift, even amidst the new forms’ growing pains.
It also makes me aware that an option at my disposal during this time of physical distancing is to host a digital reading (and were the readers, and director and dramaturg amenable to it, workshop) of Us. This would allow for the work to have a public showing, and could also be complemented with more direct interaction between myself and audience members. (Many companies have also been hosting artist talks affiliated with online performances, either with creators or with creators of similar work.) However, I’m hesitant to organize an online presentation of Us, in particular. Throughout the drafting and rehearsal process, I found that the
Scalzo 45 physicality of the piece—the ability to recognize physical bodies that an audience is sharing space and time with, as well as the moments of physical connection and intimacy (kisses, Bernie and Christoph’s final embrace, etc.)—insists on its performance in a physical context. Staging the work in any form without allowing, at the very least, for the actors to share the physical space together might undercut the way the play hopes to hold space for generations of queer men brought together on- and offstage in a public showing. Us hopes to bring people together and foster conversations in a way that I’m not sure I’m able to transfer to a digital showing at this moment. (In the interest of transparency, I’m very interested in writing pieces for these new structures and media, and even look forward to it. But I believe that I’ve written Us for the outcome of live, in-person performance, and that method of performance still suits it best.)
This might be symptomatic of one of the larger realizations I’ve had throughout this process: Writing is hard. This is, I imagine, not news to many who have attempted it. I have found writing to be a daunting process, even when enjoyable, and I’m quick to invest incredible
(often invented and self-imposed) stakes in it. This difficulty has only been exacerbated by writing the capstone project of my MFA during a global health crisis. Whereas the drafting process was made hard by my own anxieties about a writer—about claiming the title of “queer writer” or purporting to write “queer work,” about the levels of investment and self-reflection that both works in this program have required of me, about even identifying as a playwright or a queer person in general—the editing process has been hard for other reasons. It has been difficult to consider the future of my writing, and my own future by extension, when it’s been difficult to think even a week in advance. Living internationally, being the only member of my immediate family not exceptionally at-risk during this crisis, and coordinating care and support during this time have offered little time for more than modest introspection, exacerbated even more by being
Scalzo 46 a temporary resident in a country I hope to make a career and a life in. Writing has often seemed less important, and I find it easier to deny myself writing in the interest of what feels like more actionable forms of support (of family, of the theatre community, of organizations I work for or belong to).
I find myself reminded of another quote from Richard Rose’s “The Significance of
Theatre: A Commencement Address”: “The art of the theatre itself is, in a fundamental sense, a tragic art. The perishable performance is part of the theatre artist’s everyday experience” (234).
Us’ rehearsal process allowed me the gift of confronting how perishable performance is. But it also, almost strangely, encouraged me to seek out what theatre offers that I’m so drawn to despite theatre’s ephemerality. If the play itself disappears, the ideas and conversations it generates are ongoing. In writing Us, and Taking Shelter before it, I have crafted what I hope are sensitive explorations of community and identity, and the tensions that arise when those two concepts seem to be at odds with one another. I hope that these plays are able to return to venues for live performance alongside the digital forms that will continue to develop. I hope to have created work that is not only hard, but also vital and that speaks to the immediacy of these explorations in a way that I’ve felt them personally. I hope they encourage broader discussions and empathy both within queer communities and without, and can find themselves in it as I have found myself.
Scalzo 47
Works Cited
“alt.polyamory.” alt.polyamory, www.polyamory.org. Accessed 13 June 2019.
“alt.polyamory Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).” alt.polyamory,
www.faqs.org/faqs/polyamory/faq. Accessed 13 June 2019.
Dickinson, Peter. “A Living Archive of Queer Performance, Practice, and Politics: The Q2Q
Conference.” Canadian Theatre Review, vol. 171, Summer 2017, pp. 104-105. Project
Muse, doi: 10.3138/ctr.171.017. Accessed 7 Apr. 2019.
Dolan, Jill. “Building a Theatrical Vernacular: Responsibility, Community, Ambivalence, and
Queer Theatre.” Modern Drama, vol. 39, no. 1, Spring 1996, pp. 1-15. Project Muse, doi:
10.1353/mdr.1996.0004. Accessed 3 July 2019.
Gatchalian, C.E. “Identities, Aesthetics, Politics, Performances: Planning Q2Q.” Canadian
Theatre Review, vol. 171, Summer 2017, pp. 102-103. Project Muse, doi:
10.3138/ctr.171.016. Accessed 7 Apr. 2019.
Halferty, J. Paul. “Editorial: Queering our Futures.” Canadian Theatre Review, vol. 171,
Summer 2017, pp. 100-101. Project Muse, doi: 10.3138/ctr.171.015. Accessed 5 Apr.
2019.
---. “Queer and Now: The Queer Signifier at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.” Queer Theatre in
Canada, edited by Rosalind Kerr, Playwrights Canada Press, 2007, pp. 239-255.
Healy, Brendan. “Seven Reasons Why I Believe We (Still) Need a Queer Theatre.” Canadian
Theatre Review, vol. 165, Summer 2017, pp. 84-86. Project Muse, doi:
10.3138/ctr.165.019. Accessed 5 Apr. 2020.
Jepsen, Carly Rae. “Cut to the Feeling.” Cut to the Feeling, 604, 2017.
King, Moynan. “Twenty-Six Observations on a Queer Theatre Conference.” Canadian Theatre
Scalzo 48
Review, vol. 171, Summer 2017, pp. 120-121. Project Muse, doi: 10.3138/ctr.171.022.
Accessed 7 Apr. 2019.
Norman, Marsha. “Marsha Norman.” What Playwrights Talk About When They Talk About
Writing, By Jeffrey Sweet, Yale UP, 2017.
Nottage, Lynn. “Lynn Nottage.” What Playwrights Talk About When They Talk About Writing,
By Jeffrey Sweet, Yale UP, 2017.
Parry, Evalyn. “Queer Culture’s Generation Gap.” Intermission Magazine,
www.intermissionmagazine.ca/artist-perspective/queer-culture-generation-gap. Accessed
13 June 2019.
Porfido, Giovanni. “Queering the Small Screen: Homosexuality and Televisual Citizenship in
Spectacular Societies.” Sexualities, vol. 12, no. 2, 2009, pp. 161-179. doi:
10.1177/1363460708100917. Accessed 3 July 2019.
Teo, Kris Vanessa/张欣恩. Interview with Jenna Rodgers. Swallow-A-Bicycle Theatre, 27 May
2020, https://www.facebook.com/swallowabicycle/videos/567220940579020. Accessed
27 May 2020.
Rose, Richard. “The Significance of Theatre: A Commencement Address.” How Theatre
Educates: Convergences & Counterpoints, edited by Kathleen Gallagher and David
Booth, U of Toronto P, 2003, pp. 231-238.
Woodruff, Paul. The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched. Oxford UP,
2008.
Scalzo 49
US
by Zachary Scalzo
Scalzo 50
CHARACTERS BERNIE mid-30's, American (think, 37) HENRY early 50's, American (think, 52) CHRISTOPH mid-20's, Austrian (think, 26)
Scalzo 51
SETTING
The house Bernie and Henry bought together, in the mid-Atlantic US.
TIME
The recent past. Sometime around the mid to late '90s. Everyone is on the verge of being accessible, but no one is quite yet.
Scalzo 52
NOTES ON PUNCTUATION
...: The line trails off. This can be a loss for words, a suggestion, an invitation for another character to fill in a blank, etc. / : The line is interrupted at this point. They continue speaking through it. - : The line is interrupted (by another character, another thought, etc.) or brought up short or speechless. The character stops speaking here. > : The line is continued in the character's next line of dialogue. The character does not stop, even if another character is interrupting or speaking simultaneously.
Scalzo 53
ACT I
SCENE 1
The interior of the home of BERNARD WALLACE (BERNIE). A table, a sofa, and two chairs. A dining area that can be rearranged, as can most of the furniture in the home. Cardboard boxes of every imaginable size occupy most of the horizontal surfaces. Most boxes have been cornered, unsealed. There is a neat stack of boxes on the side of the fireplace nearest the door. They are unmarked.
Evening. The fireplace is out. There is a pack of cigarettes on the table, next to an open box.
BERNIE enters with a cup of tea and moves to the table. He carries a packet of envelopes, which he places next to the box. He places the tea on the table, walks around the room, collecting things as he notices them. He begins to fill the box.
A knock at the door.
BERNIE pauses, shakes his head. He continues working through two more sets of knocks. A key rattles in the door. Instinctively, BERNIE puts the pack of cigarettes in his pocket. The door finally opens to reveal HENRY. He has a small travel bag. It's nondescript, but it contains everything he's deemed essential to bring back with him. BERNIE's back is to him and he will make the most use of it as he can.
HENRY Hi.
BERNIE doesn't stop what he's doing, but when he moves away from the box, he doesn't look at HENRY. HENRY remains in the doorway.
A beat.
HENRY (CONT'D) You know, I wouldn't have kicked you out. (pause)
Scalzo 54
I don't know if I could. (another, shorter pause) You're not the one who left for-
BERNIE slams something in the box. Does not break it. HENRY has a chance.
HENRY (CONT'D) You can stay, Bernie.
BERNIE I'm not owing anybody anything.
HENRY You don't owe-
BERNIE I'm not owing you anything.
HENRY Nobody would think of it like that.
BERNIE I would.
A tense beat.
BERNIE (CONT'D) My lawyer was supposed to send you the contracts.
HENRY She did. With a cover letter that-
BERNIE Did you sign them?
HENRY inhales.
HENRY I did.
BERNIE Good.
HENRY opens his bag. With little fuss, he produces mortgage papers. He moves to bring it to BERNIE.
HENRY They're all here.
Scalzo 55
BERNIE (gesturing towards the front door) Over there.
BERNIE gestures to some kind of basket hanging on the wall between the fireplace and the door to hold mail. HENRY obeys and places the papers there.
HENRY And you're off the mortgage.
BERNIE Soon enough, anyway. (a redirection, an attack) You're back?
HENRY Yes.
BERNIE Alone?
HENRY waits. BERNIE continues what he's doing.
HENRY Cold in here.
BERNIE The fire went out.
HENRY I'll make another.
BERNIE I have a sweater.
HENRY Bernie...
HENRY puts his hand into his coat, which he has not taken off. He produces a small red box wrapped with a ribbon, which BERNIE would see if he would turn around.
HENRY (CONT'D) I brought you marzipan. It's from Vienna.
He takes a tentative step toward BERNIE.
Scalzo 56
HENRY (CONT'D) I remember when we got off the train. I was almost out of the station before I turned around and you weren't there anymore.
BERNIE stops packing and looks at the ceiling in frustration. Through his next line, HENRY gets closer and closer.
HENRY (CONT'D) You'd seen some young painter--remember? Not much younger than you. Just inside the platform. He had a tiny canvas on his easel and he was painting the train and you were talking about the tiny little dots of people's heads. You were speaking loudly to him, as if that would help him understand English, which he clearly did not speak. You were asking him why he was wasting his time painting this train when there were all these people around. I just... watched you. The both of you. Smiling, knowing that you didn't understand one another. But both so excited. He was talking to this beautiful man about his terrible art and missing the whole point. (reaching BERNIE) What deserved to be painted was standing right in front of him.
He waits a brief moment before extending the box.
HENRY (CONT'D) He gave you a piece of marzipan and pointed to a shop down the road. To me, it always tasted like dirt. But seeing you light up when you tried it... It just, changed. (pause) That's when I knew I was in love with you, Bernie. If you made marzipan taste good, then... Who knew what else you could do?
BERNIE does not take the box. HENRY puts it on the table. He steps back, but not too far. BERNIE picks up then marzipan and says nothing. He almost softens. He drops it in the box with a loud thud.
BERNIE I'll be done soon.
HENRY You don't have to leave.
BERNIE As soon as those papers are filed, I am leaving this house, I am leaving this town-
Scalzo 57
HENRY Where are you going?
BERNIE DC. I'll find an apartment there and-
HENRY You hated DC.
BERNIE It's closer to my brother.
HENRY You hate your brother.
BERNIE Things change.
HENRY What about work?
BERNIE Like DC doesn't have bakeries? North Carolina isn't exactly Mecca for bakers.
HENRY But what about the bakery here?
BERNIE Well, I'll at least tell them I'm leaving. If that's what you mean. (to himself, mostly) The "bakery here?" It's a grocery store. They'll find some sixteen-year-old to replace me. (a beat, then pointedly) Wonder what that's like.
HENRY Bernie-
BERNIE How is he?
HENRY Christoph.
BERNIE (almost trying it out) "Christoph."
A beat.
Scalzo 58
HENRY He's well. We spent the last few days in Vienna and >
BERNIE (under HENRY, mostly to himself) Oh, well, that's nice.
HENRY - we were walking through the Belvedere. You remember the Belvedere, right?
BERNIE I remember it from the one time you took me there.
HENRY Right. And-
BERNIE (interrupting) You moved to the city?
HENRY Well, Christoph-
BERNIE (overlapping) I thought you fell in love with Salzburg. Vienna's quite the move.
HENRY He prefers the West. Somewhere closer to Germany.
BERNIE Salzburg's in the West.
HENRY Vienna made sense.
BERNIE registers this vocally. Another beat. By this point, BERNIE has probably stopped actively packing, but the box remains open. He might move it, close it, reopen it. Feng shui it with his tea. Anything to keep busy.
BERNIE So Long, Farewell to Salzburg.
HENRY Well, it was Something Good.
Scalzo 59
BERNIE Or was there just No Way to Stop It?
HENRY Oh, a cut song from the film. That's how you win an argument like Maria.
There is a beat of a moment between them. BERNIE almost smiles. HENRY does.
HENRY (CONT'D) We've still got it.
BERNIE As long as we can return it.
BERNIE turns away again. He starts packing more aggressively.
HENRY Bernie?
BERNIE (almost mocking) "Henry?"
HENRY Are you okay?
BERNIE I'm fine.
HENRY Hey, just calm down and / talk to me.
BERNIE (overlapping) I am calm.
HENRY It just feels like-
BERNIE Henry. I'm fine. Just let me get through this last box and I can go to sleep and you can go anywhere else but here.
HENRY Where else would I go?
BERNIE snorts.
Scalzo 60
HENRY (CONT'D) Tell me what you want me to do and I'll do it. What do you want me to say?
BERNIE I wanted you to tell me about "Christoph."
HENRY I did. He's fine.
BERNIE That's not what I meant.
A beat.
HENRY I'm sorry.
BERNIE It's been two years, Henry. I'm going to need more than sorry.
HENRY (trying to lighten the mood) There's the marzipan.
This isn't funny. HENRY knows and moves to BERNIE.
HENRY (CONT'D) Bern-
BERNIE What, Henry? You leave for a contract out in Austria--one that, you'll remember, I took all of my vacation time to help you move for. You're supposed to fly me out in two months, then another, and another, and by then you're almost coming home, so I think "It's fine, I can wait." Then, three days before you're supposed to come back, you call me and there's some bullshit about a delayed timeline and that doesn't smell right, but fine. Who am I to ask? I trust you. But, I know. And soon enough, it all comes out. There's someone else. "Christoph." And you take my silence--a silence, Henry, that was mainly me trying to talk myself from throwing myself in the river--to mean "I think we both need time." You leave no number for me to get in touch with you, I don't speak Austrian, and your sister is apparently the one fucking travel agent in North Carolina, and I won't ask her to get me a ticket. I hear nothing from you until I get this > (indicates the top envelope) postmarked from Austria and I figured "Oh, great, now he'll tell me what's going on" and it's the beginning of what I assume is some horrific memorial parade through the last fucking roll of film we took there. Yes,
Scalzo 61
Henry, I remember the Belvedere. The Belvedere and your terrible handwriting with a "Miss you, -H" on the back. "Miss" me? (a frustrated beat; HENRY waits) You left and I waited. I waited around for you to come home for two more years and you... didn't do anything. And these fucking envelopes kept coming, but I-- I figured, if you're not going to pick up a goddamn phone, then I'm not going to sit here and-- (pause, gestures to the open box) And now? Now I'm packing. (throwing the envelopes in the box) And I'm almost done, so sorry's not going to be enough.
HENRY I just got in from Europe (beat) Sorry's all I've got.
A beat. BERNIE considers. Sighs.
BERNIE You can stay on the couch. Do not touch these boxes.
HENRY I can do that.
BERNIE And it's just for tonight.
HENRY Just for tonight. (moves to exit to the bedroom) I'll just grab a blanket from-
BERNIE You can stay. On the couch.
HENRY (after a pause) Okay. The couch.
BERNIE has finished his tea. He offers the cup to HENRY.
BERNIE Drop this in the sink before you go to bed.
HENRY I'll do you one better and wash it.
Scalzo 62
BERNIE Stick to your strengths.
BERNIE begins to exit to the bedroom.
HENRY I'll see you in the morning.
BERNIE We'll see.
Scalzo 63
ACT I
SCENE 2
A morning, later.
HENRY lies awake on the couch. He has gotten some sleep, but not enough. He now has a blanket. Boxes are still stacked, HENRY's papers are still in the basket on the wall.
HENRY gets up, stiff, and moves to the bedroom door. Very softly and cautiously, he tries to open it. It's locked.
He moves to the mantle and begins looking around the things BERNIE has been packing. He moves to the table. Doesn't touch the box, but looks. Picks up the pack of envelopes BERNIE has placed in it. The bedroom door clicks before he can leaf through them and he puts them down. BERNIE enters in his housecoat.
BERNIE Coffee?
HENRY Started the water. Got to pee.
BERNIE stands aside, holding his housecoat closed even though it's belted. HENRY passes, and only then does BERNIE move into the room. He pats his pocket and moves to the door. We can hear HENRY peeing.
HENRY (CONT'D) If you start the coffee, I'll make the fire.
BERNIE Close the door.
We hear the bathroom door close and BERNIE redirects, moving to the box on the table. He pulls out the marzipan box and opens it, taking a small piece out. He has done this before.
The toilet flushes and BERNIE quickly eats the candy and replaces the box.
Scalzo 64
HENRY re-enters. Looks at BERNIE, hovering near the box.
HENRY Deal?
BERNIE Yep.
BERNIE moves to the kitchen and HENRY looks in the box. Smiles. He begins to build a fire.
BERNIE (CONT'D) We can just do the space heater.
HENRY You don't want to use the space heater.
BERNIE I don't care, as long as it's more than four degrees in here.
HENRY A fire's so much... nicer.
BERNIE We can pass on nice if it's faster.
HENRY It's just so much less...
He trails off as he begins looking for a lighter or starter. BERNIE enters with a French press and two mugs.
BERNIE Looking for something?
HENRY Starter?
BERNIE places the coffee somewhere and takes a lighter from his housecoat. HENRY takes it. BERNIE takes the coffee and one mug, sits on the half of the couch where HENRY's blanket is not. HENRY mutters under his breath as he tries to light the fire.
HENRY I think you're out of fluid.
Scalzo 65
BERNIE There might be some matches in the box.
HENRY (re: the crowded room of boxes) Box?
BERNIE The enamel one you brought back from Japan? I keep it on the mantle.
It isn't there. HENRY takes his mug from wherever BERNIE has placed it and moves to the couch. BERNIE pulls the blanket over his knees so HENRY can sit.
BERNIE (CONT'D) No luck?
HENRY We'll use the space heater.
BERNIE smiles, right. He gestures for the lighter's return. HENRY gives it back. BERNIE puts it in his pocket. They sit in silence, not awkward, but not comfortable.
BERNIE We're out of milk.
HENRY I take it black now.
BERNIE How European.
HENRY We should head to the grocery soon.
BERNIE Write down what you want. I can head out this afternoon.
HENRY I'll go with you.
BERNIE (a laugh) No you will not.
HENRY What's wrong with that?
Scalzo 66
BERNIE "Oh, hi, Geoff. Love the Holiday Hat. Even though it's January. No, they don't get old. Really! Oh, him? This is Henry--you remember Henry. The one who used to get all the looks with me when I started here."
HENRY Okay...
BERNIE (continuing) "Why, it has been a long time since we've seen his face around here. He was abroad. Austria. No, Austria. Mountains not kangaroos. And what was he doing in Austria all this time? Well, I'm glad you asked-"
HENRY I get it. You'll go by yourself.
They drink their coffees.
HENRY (CONT'D) Love to see his face, though.
BERNIE Geoff?
HENRY His little scrunched-up raisin face under whatever "Holiday Hat" he'd have on. (a pause, mostly gauging BERNIE) He once told me he owned over a hundred.
BERNIE (unamused) I'd believe it. He's... festive.
HENRY Do you remember the mistletoe one?
BERNIE I remember the poor stock girl. The way he'd make eyes at her, leching from the register.
HENRY Hey, even Geoffs need love.
BERNIE She was sixteen, Henry.
HENRY No...
Scalzo 67
BERNIE The blonde who always had her hair half up, half down and refused to wear a hairnet?
HENRY Yeah.
BERNIE With the East High sweatshirt under her apron?
HENRY She could have graduated.
BERNIE Maybe by now.
HENRY I never was good with ages.
BERNIE Yeah, no kidding.
HENRY laughs to himself, BERNIE sits in the silence of it. HENRY takes part of the blanket and puts it over himself. BERNIE sips his coffee. Stands.
BERNIE (CONT'D) I should get ready. Make that list.
HENRY Are you sure?
BERNIE I have to go to the bank anyway.
HENRY I could always go myself.
BERNIE I'll stop on my way home.
HENRY I could go while you're out.
BERNIE Maybe if you're lucky, I'll ask Geoff where he gets his hats from.
HENRY It's really no trouble-
Scalzo 68
BERNIE You disappear for a few years and come back in love with grocery shopping? No more asking me to grab something after I clock out because you're tired, like I haven't been on my feet all day? (tiny beat) Maybe you should disappear more often.
HENRY is silent. An unanticipated beat. Finally, BERNIE breathes.
BERNIE (CONT'D) Okay. I'll leave some money on the counter.
HENRY You don't have to-
BERNIE (looking through his jacket) I told you, I'm not / owing you anything >
HENRY Hey, Bernie, slow down. It's okay.
BERNIE and that includes money for fucking milk.
HENRY We can talk about it later.
BERNIE Yeah, that works well for us.
HENRY is silent.
BERNIE (CONT’D) I could use the time to pack, anyway. (beat, looking for an out) I'll be back later. I'll give you money then. If you head out before I'm back, don't forget milk.
HENRY nods. BERNIE puts on his coat, pats the pocket, and leaves. He has forgotten the mortgage papers.
Scalzo 69
ACT I
SCENE 3
Morning. Time has passed, boxes have been moved around, and it's hard to tell how much, if any, progress has been made. A single box still sits on the table.
HENRY is back at the table. Next to the box, he finds a pack of cigarettes. He picks it up, examines it as one might a pottery shard.
BERNIE appears in the kitchen doorway. HENRY doesn't notice. BERNIE takes a second, watches HENRY, then returns to the kitchen.
A beat.
Something in the kitchen shatters.
BERNIE Fuck.
HENRY moves to the kitchen. He puts the cigarettes in his pocket.
BERNIE (CONT'D) I'm fine. It just slipped.
HENRY Are you hurt?
BERNIE enters the living room and moves directly to the bedroom. HENRY is trying to keep up.
BERNIE It was the last fucking one, too.
HENRY We can buy new wine glasses.
BERNIE They were the ones we bought in Italy. You bought in Italy.
HENRY It's fine, ba-
Scalzo 70
BERNIE has come out of the bedroom with a broom. He cuts HENRY off with a look.
BERNIE Please get out of the way.
HENRY Let me.
BERNIE I've got it, Henry.
HENRY You're... flustered. (a change in tactic) Can't pack with a hand full of glass.
BERNIE surrenders the broom and HENRY exits. BERNIE waits, then goes to the table. Looks where HENRY was earlier.
HENRY (CONT'D, O.S.) (trying to make light) One less thing to box, anyway, right?
BERNIE noiselessly makes a face that's a mocking laugh.
HENRY (CONT'D, O.S.) I know you're doing the face.
BERNIE I'm not doing a face.
HENRY appears in the doorway, broom and dustpan in hand. He makes the face. It's actually a pretty accurate impression. He leaves and we hear more sweeping and disposal. He might be back and forth until done with the glass.
BERNIE (CONT'D) You're not as funny as you think you are.
HENRY I'm better?
BERNIE (half to himself) Well, you couldn't get worse.
Scalzo 71
HENRY Looking for something?
BERNIE (looking) No, just thought that...
HENRY You thought that...?
BERNIE I just thought maybe I packed something on accident.
HENRY In the box with my things?
BERNIE I was distracted.
HENRY Wonder why.
BERNIE starts with the face again.
HENRY (CONT'D) Face.
Unseen to HENRY, BERNIE smiles.
HENRY (CONT'D) I'm almost done in here. I can help you look.
BERNIE It'll turn up.
HENRY No, really, let me-
BERNIE It's fine, Henry.
HENRY You know, things would turn up easier if you stopped packing the house.
BERNIE Make it harder to move, too.
HENRY has entered for good, done with the broken glass. Neither quite knows what to do. HENRY remains open. BERNIE is almost there.
Scalzo 72
BERNIE One of us should get started on dinner.
Moment shifted, not necessarily broken. BERNIE shifts his weight, then moves towards the kitchen.
HENRY You sit. I can do it.
BERNIE Since when? You sit. Cooking's never been your thing.
HENRY That's not fa-
BERNIE The last time you made a sandwich, it was soggy and your sister's dog ended up eating more of it than me.
HENRY You said you liked my cooking!
BERNIE I liked what it did for my weight.
HENRY It wasn't that bad.
BERNIE Compared to starving.
HENRY half-pouts, half-smiles.
BERNIE (CONT'D) Fine. I was joking.
HENRY takes a step.
BERNIE (CONT'D) Not enough to actually let you do dinner. Sit down.
BERNIE goes off.
HENRY I've gotten a lot better.
BERNIE (O.S.) I'm sure.
Scalzo 73
HENRY Even made a couple sachertortes in the past year.
BERNIE (O.S.) Talk to me when you get a mille-feuille down.
HENRY Gesundheit.
BERNIE (O.S.) (not a laugh, beated like "gesundheit") Ha-ha-ha.
We hear BERNIE still moving around the kitchen.
BERNIE (O.S., CONT'D) I don't even know what you could cook. I'm not sure there's anything that can even make a full meal here. Do you even take the list with you?
HENRY You get what you like. Who needs a list?
BERNIE (O.S.) You, apparently.
After a little more searching, BERNIE appears with a few items-- think "charcuterie on a budget."
BERNIE (CONT'D) What am I supposed to do with half a thing of smoked turkey breast, baby carrots, and a single Babybel cheese?
HENRY There's still some marzipan.
BERNIE I finished that.
HENRY I put more in the drawer. It's chocolate covered.
BERNIE Okay. "And some marzipan."
HENRY We could order in. (a beat) There's a new Italian place on Arlington.
Scalzo 74
BERNIE You can't remember milk, but you can tell me the new place on Arlington?
HENRY I pay attention.
BERNIE Well, it's been there since last winter. Delivered Italian?
HENRY What's wrong with delivered Italian?
BERNIE (very obvious) The cheese gets all goopy. And we can't always do takeout. This is a home.
HENRY Our home?
BERNIE It is a home trying to operate on half a shopping list. (a beat) It's fine. You're right. We can order in.
BERNIE walks to the hanging basket by the door and grabs a menu.
BERNIE (CONT'D) I'm going to go have a smoke.
He holds it out to HENRY, pulls it back when HENRY reaches for it.
BERNIE (CONT'D) I know you have them.
A shorter beat. He extends the menu.
BERNIE (CONT'D) The sun's already down and it's gonna be fucking freezing, so let me do this now so I don't have to go out in the middle of the night.
HENRY reluctantly hands over the cigarettes.
HENRY Just do it through the window.
BERNIE I don't want the house to smell.
Scalzo 75
HENRY One time's fine.
BERNIE It'll stay in the house.
HENRY (not an attack) You're moving.
BERNIE takes the point. He opens the window and sits next to it, so it doesn't have to be open all the way.
BERNIE Thank you.
A beat.
HENRY You smoke.
BERNIE I smoke.
HENRY Two years go by. I cook, you smoke.
BERNIE nods.
HENRY (CONT'D) Never really liked the taste myself.
BERNIE Well, if I smoke now like you cooked then, I think we're okay. (pause) And you're not tasting it anyway.
HENRY You quit.
BERNIE I did.
BERNIE gestures with the cigarette in his hand.
HENRY But that was such a good- ... You made a choice to quit, for your health.
Scalzo 76
BERNIE (matter of fact) I quit for you. (beat) And now I smoke.
HENRY A lot changes in two years. (a beat; toward BERNIE) Not everything, though.
BERNIE I smoke.
HENRY (clarifying) You didn't move.
BERNIE says nothing. Smokes.
HENRY (CONT'D) Is there anything you want to know? About...
BERNIE lifts the screen, tosses his cigarette into the snow, and shuts the window, a little loudly. He moves to the kitchen.
HENRY (CONT'D) (getting up) It's just-
We hear rustling in the kitchen. HENRY stops. BERNIE returns with a bottle of gin and two glasses.
BERNIE All right.
BERNIE arranges furniture in some way that he and HENRY can face each other, glasses and bottle between them. He puts one glass in front of him, one in front of HENRY, and then pours some gin in each.
BERNIE (CONT'D) One to start. (takes his glass) Cheers.
He drinks. BERNIE indicates for HENRY to
Scalzo 77
drink, and he does.
HENRY (a cough) It's warm.
BERNIE It's all I could find. (pause; refills) Maybe one more for me.
He does. Then, exhales.
BERNIE (CONT'D) Okay. You first.
HENRY What?
BERNIE What's your question?
HENRY I already asked one.
BERNIE Okay. Fine.
HENRY goes to drink some gin.
BERNIE ("no") Uh-uh. It's my turn. We'll go one at a time. If you don't want to answer, you drink.
HENRY If you wanted to... Do we have to do it this way?
BERNIE Do you want to ask me questions? (a beat of acceptance from HENRY) Okay. Was that marzipan really from that shop in Austria?
HENRY Yes.
BERNIE Damn.
Scalzo 78
HENRY What?
BERNIE I was really hoping it was from the duty-free shop. Your turn. Ask me something.
HENRY Okay. How much do you smoke a day?
BERNIE Not as much as I used to. Are all of your questions going to be about smoking?
HENRY No. My turn.
BERNIE What?
HENRY You asked a question.
BERNIE That wasn't my question.
HENRY (smiling) That was my answer.
BERNIE Okay. Fine.
HENRY Why didn't you move?
BERNIE drinks his gin.
BERNIE (demonstratively, as he refills) My turn.
HENRY smiles.
BERNIE (CONT'D) When did you leave Christoph?
HENRY drinks, refills.
Scalzo 79
HENRY Would you ever want to meet him?
BERNIE What?
HENRY Would you want to meet Christoph?
BERNIE Why?
HENRY Shouldn't you answer before you ask me a question?
BERNIE drinks.
BERNIE Why?
HENRY I thought that maybe...
BERNIE (waiting) "That maybe"...? I'd want to meet the man you left me for?
HENRY It isn't like that.
BERNIE What is it like?
HENRY drinks.
BERNIE (CONT’D) Nope. You're gonna have to do better than that.
HENRY I thought the game-
BERNIE Fuck the game.
HENRY Bernie, I don't know why I said it. I just did.
BERNIE And that was the right move? Innocent question, cute smile, then float the plan of us running to Austria so I can see what I was missing?
Scalzo 80
HENRY You think I've got a cute smile?
BERNIE is caught off guard. Flustered.
HENRY (CONT'D) (still playful) It's okay, you know.
A beat. A redirection.
BERNIE Let's get back to the questions.
HENRY Okay. Why did you let me stay? Is it the smile?
BERNIE You had nowhere else to go. Have you really made sachertorte?
HENRY Multiple.
BERNIE And no one died?
HENRY Oh, you already asked a question.
BERNIE smiles and absently sips at the gin. HENRY points at the glass. BERNIE stops.
HENRY (CONT'D) I’ll make you one. I'll make dinner this week. I'll even buy whatever's on the list.
BERNIE This week?
HENRY Friday.
BERNIE This Friday?
HENRY Yes.
BERNIE Our...
Scalzo 81
HENRY Anniversary. If we still have one. (pause) And if not, we'll still have dinner. (another) And I'll still have hope.
They look at each other. BERNIE looks away.
HENRY (CONT'D) You can answer later.
BERNIE I'd hope so, since you just asked me if I'd meet your mistress.
HENRY I've never been great with timing.
They wait.
BERNIE I think it's still your question.
HENRY No comment on the cute smile?
BERNIE almost smiles himself. It's enough.
HENRY (CONT'D) Why did you want the marzipan to be from duty-free?
BERNIE (after a second of consideration) Because I could be pissed at you for lying about it. (a brief beat, then) It was good, though.
HENRY Thank you.
BERNIE You didn't make it. (a second, maybe a realization) You didn't make it, did you?
HENRY I didn't make it. (a pause) I'll let you have a second question.
Scalzo 82
BERNIE readies himself. He doesn't look at HENRY.
BERNIE Why didn't you come back?
HENRY probably should have seen this coming. He begins to raise the glass to his lips and BERNIE, silent, responds to that.
HENRY I'll tell you. (drinks) I'll try.
He refills as he talks. He looks at BERNIE, at the glass, at the house, around, as he speaks. BERNIE is at the point where he's actively trying to control how he responds. Some times are harder than others.
HENRY (CONT'D) I- ... Asking me now, it... it doesn't make sense. My contract was ending and they asked me for an extension. I thought about how badly I wanted to go home, and to be with you. But I also... I wanted to stay.
BERNIE With Christoph.
HENRY With Christoph. I knew that I loved him and I... I felt like if I came home to you- to someone who I know wanted me and who cared for me and who loved me as deeply as you do- as you did... I can't tell you why I didn't come back. I don't know. I don't know why I stayed. But I'm here now, Bernie. I'm here and I love you.
BERNIE shifts.
HENRY (CONT'D) And I don't have anything better to say than that right now, but I promise that I will soon. I need a little more time.
A beat.
HENRY (CONT'D) We should order. I'm starting to feel it.
BERNIE nods. They sit for a brief while.
Scalzo 83
BERNIE Sure.
HENRY But before...
BERNIE "Before..."?
Another pause.
HENRY Are you happy I came back?
A moment of truth. HENRY leans forward, puts his fingers on the rim of BERNIE's glass, holding it down. BERNIE looks down at the glass.
BERNIE Yes.
HENRY looks at BERNIE, who does not look up. Satisfied, HENRY removes his hand and BERNIE drinks.
BERNIE (CONT'D) We should order.
He takes a look at the menu.
HENRY Bernie?
BERNIE Do you think we can just put cheese on it when it gets here? Broil it to finish it?
HENRY Bernie.
BERNIE Hm?
HENRY I was wondering about sleeping on the couch.
BERNIE Yeah?
Scalzo 84
HENRY More... wondering if I could stop doing that. Maybe start sleeping in the bed?
BERNIE thinks about it, still looking at the menu.
HENRY (CONT'D) It's just... It's been weeks, and you know my back.
BERNIE Sure.
HENRY Sure?
BERNIE You're right. You should be sleeping in the bed. (handing the menu to HENRY) Get me the veal. See if they'll do it without the cheese.
He gets up and brings HENRY's pillow and bed things into the room.
HENRY shifts, looks at the menu, then at the bedroom door. Smiles. He chooses what he wants and grabs a cordless handset to call the restaurant.
BERNIE enters, holding his pillow, a flat sheet, and a blanket.
HENRY (phone in hand, undialled) That's... not what I'd had in mind.
BERNIE I know. (He doesn't have to explain, but) I know you came back. I know you... have strong feelings. But I can't undo two years in two months. (a beat) I don't want to.
BERNIE puts the pile on the couch neatly. He picks up one of the glasses and sips, now more aware that it is, in fact, room temperature gin.
BERNIE (CONT'D) (re: the phone)
Scalzo 85
I'm starving.
Scalzo 86
ACT I
SCENE 4
Late the same night of the previous scene. Open takeout containers are on the table, utensils and glasses still there. Some might be on the floor.
BERNIE is asleep on the couch, hot in the glow of a fire. A blanket is partially draped over his body like a Renaissance painting.
HENRY has opened a box and is looking through it, placing items on the mantle as he searches. The bundle of envelopes is now on the mantle and, aside from the first, they are still unopened.
He takes the envelopes, puts them in his pocket before putting on his coat. He stands behind the couch, taking in BERNIE. Maybe touching the back of the couch or even the pillow, but not his head. BERNIE turns over, still asleep.
HENRY walks to the door and slips on his shoes and gloves. He leaves.
Scalzo 87
ACT I
SCENE 5
Evening.
Everything in the house is neater. The boxes (which there might be less of now?) have been pushed to as close to the walls they can get, all cornered and stacked.
HENRY has put small things around, on the mantle and in other conspicuous places, souvenirs from their relationship. If necessary, HENRY has rearranged the furniture so that there is a formal dining area and sitting area. There are four champagne flutes out, the full set. Two have cocktails in them. There are no dishes or place settings set out individually and, instead, they are all stacked. There are candles, lit. The fire is going. The light in the kitchen is on, the light in the living room is dim.
BERNIE enters, taking off his gloves, coat, boots, etc. as he talks. He does not take in the room. As BERNIE speaks, HENRY comes in, helps him out of the coat, and picks up the two cocktails.
BERNIE I should have known. Every time I have something that I tell them I need to leave on time for, there's some last minute fucking fiasco that only I can take care of for some reason.
At the end of this, he turns to see the room.
BERNIE (CONT'D) What's this?
HENRY Dinner.
BERNIE For the French aristocracy?
HENRY lets out a soft laugh. Clinks his glass against BERNIE's. Does not drink.
Scalzo 88
HENRY The only things French here are the French 75s.
BERNIE You made cocktails. (looking at the drink) I don't know if I can drink again.
HENRY You used to be ready to go the next morning. Sometimes you wouldn't even stop. Getting slow in your old age?
BERNIE Look who's talking. You were so quiet that night I could have sworn I was in the house alone.
HENRY Very funny. You were asleep on the couch before I even went to bed.
BERNIE raises his eyebrows, not in a way that HENRY can see. He smells.
BERNIE What did you make?
HENRY Well, before the sachertorte, I thought I'd keep the European theme going. Fra diavolo. Like we had in Venice.
BERNIE Italian again?
HENRY You like pasta.
BERNIE That's not cooking.
HENRY How?
BERNIE They write out the instructions on the side of the box. Any moron can do it.
HENRY Ah, yes, but can this moron do it? Stay tuned and find out. Long day?
BERNIE Jean forgot an entire cake order, and we didn't even have any buttercream
Scalzo 89 made, and of course it's a custom flavor so I can't just sub from the shelves. Anyway, long story short, Lacey is going to have a happy birthday after all and a full sheet cake with blackberry buttercream to prove it. And Jean is somehow still going to have a job because I won't go to Barb to say anything about it. Because that's what I do.
HENRY What?
BERNIE Nothing. I do nothing.
HENRY Well, that can change. To the future?
BERNIE isn't sold.
HENRY (CONT'D) A drink between friends? (pause) Between roommates?
BERNIE shakes his head. Smiles. Raises the glass.
HENRY (CONT'D) To roommates.
BERNIE To friends.
HENRY knows better than to press his luck tonight.
HENRY To friends.
They toast. A semi-uncomfortable beat.
BERNIE You might want to go check on that. Or else it'll be "to new beginnings."
HENRY Who says it won't be anyway?
He lets it hang there.
HENRY (CONT'D) I'll be right back. Hold this?
Scalzo 90
He hands BERNIE his drink, and exits to the kitchen.
BERNIE sips his own drink. He doesn't know what to do with himself. Walks around and looks at what HENRY's done to the living room. Tries to snap himself out of it. Stands, an island in his own home.
HENRY returns.
HENRY Everything's according to plan in there. Timer's set and- You're hovering.
BERNIE What? No, I'm fine.
HENRY It's okay. All this might be a little... much. But it's important to me. It's a big night. For us.
BERNIE Right. Sorry, I'm just tired from work. That's it.
HENRY Of course. (moving to BERNIE, taking his drink) Here, I'll take that and we can-
BERNIE kisses HENRY. It's not big to anyone but them. They're close, but neither speaks for a moment. Something's calmer between them.
BERNIE I'm sorry. I don't know why / I did that.
HENRY Don't be. I'm not.
A beat.
BERNIE I'm trying.
HENRY I know. (beat) Thank you.
Scalzo 91
BERNIE Thank you. This is... this is amazing.
HENRY This is pretty good. Amazing is the sachertorte.
BERNIE Not the pasta?
HENRY You're really unimpressed with spaghetti, aren't you?
BERNIE (a joke) It's a special night and now I have to worry about stray noodles flicking sauce on my shirt. Of course I'm unimpressed.
HENRY Well, it'll all be made up. I got the bittersweet chocolate from Austria. And I remember how well the Austrian sweets went over last time.
BERNIE So maybe I'll throw this one in a box, too?
HENRY Oh, you can try.
He gestures for BERNIE to sit, pulling the chair out and sliding him in when he sits. It's a little gross, but it's mostly cute.
BERNIE Where did you find Austrian chocolate?
HENRY Hmm?
BERNIE I mean, just... I figured if there were somewhere to get Austrian chocolate, I'd know about it. I don't do purchasing for the store or anything, but I mean. You'd think I'd know.
HENRY Ah, well, I have my sources.
BERNIE I can find Italian. Sometimes Swiss, if I'm lucky. I mean, I guess aside from like a Toblerone.
Scalzo 92
HENRY This is much better than a Toblerone.
BERNIE (smiling) We'll see.
BERNIE realizes HENRY is standing.
BERNIE Why don't you sit down?
HENRY Oh, no. I'll stand, it's okay.
BERNIE You said everything's going according to plan, right? Sit.
HENRY Oh, it is. I just- (a redirection) You just never know, right?
BERNIE Are you okay?
HENRY Of course. More than okay. I feel... excited. Ready.
BERNIE Ready?
HENRY I'm fine, Bernie. I'm great.
A beat.
BERNIE Look, maybe I shouldn't have kissed you, I was just / I don't know, thinking about like how patient you've been and it felt like it was right, but also still kind of wrong, like maybe it wasn't the right time, I don't know.
HENRY Oh, Bernie. No, no, it's not that at all. No, don't- That was, that was amazing. Hey, Bernie. Bernie. Stop. (Beat) That was okay. That was wonderful. I'm just... nervous, I guess. It's silly.
Scalzo 93
BERNIE (endeared) It's something, all right. (pause) But, really. You can sit.
HENRY exhales, purposefully.
HENRY You're right. You're right. I can sit down, across from you, and-
As he's about to, there's a knock at the door.
BERNIE Are we expecting someone?
HENRY Actually, yes.
BERNIE (genuinely, getting up) What?
HENRY Oh- Just, just sit there. No need to get up. (a breath) Bernie, I wanted to make sure that tonight was special. And I didn't want... I want to be with you. Completely, and transparently, with you.
BERNIE (not getting it) Henry, are you okay?
HENRY No. I mean, yes. Everything's good. Everything's according to plan. There's just someone I thought you might... meet. Who I want you to meet.
He moves towards the door, as another knock sounds.
BERNIE Introducing me to your Austrian chocolate hookup?
HENRY Well...
HENRY opens the door. He smiles, nervous. Nods at a brief, almost unheard greeting behind the door. He fully opens the door.
Scalzo 94
HENRY (CONT'D) Bernie. Meet Christoph.
He stands in the door, wine in hand.
HENRY (CONT'D) Christoph, Bernie.
End of Act One.
Scalzo 95
ACT II
SCENE 1
The same setup as the end of Act 1. BERNIE sits at the table, HENRY and CHRISTOPH at the door, the latter just at the threshold. CHRISTOPH holds up a bag.
CHRISTOPH I was not sure if white or red would be more appropriate. So, I thought to bring both.
BERNIE Sorry?
CHRISTOPH Oh, there is no need to apologize. It was no trou-
BERNIE No. That wasn't an apology. That was an "I'm sorry, what?"
CHRISTOPH I am not sure I understand.
HENRY Bernie, this is-
BERNIE Yeah, no shit. I know who "this is," Henry. What I don't know is why the fuck-
HENRY Bernie.
BERNIE No, why the fuck he's on our doorstep >
CHRISTOPH Henry didn't tell-
BERNIE while you've got a dinner for our anniversary in the other room?
HENRY I thought we could talk.
BERNIE I told you I didn't want- You come back--to me--after literal years and
Scalzo 96 then you bring the kid / you were cheating on me with.
HENRY He's not a "kid," Bernie. Don't make it out to be worse than-
BERNIE When did he get here?
HENRY What?
BERNIE Look at him. There's no way he just got off a plane.
HENRY Bernie, let's just calm down-
BERNIE Oh, we're way past calm down now. When did he get here?
CHRISTOPH I am standing here in the room. (re: the doorway) Well, nearly.
BERNIE (to CHRISTOPH, now) Fine. When did you get here?
HENRY Bernie. Give him-
CHRISTOPH I have been here a month.
BERNIE is speechless. HENRY, caught.
BERNIE A month?
Beat.
CHRISTOPH Well, nearly.
BERNIE (back to HENRY) He's been here fucking month?
Scalzo 97
HENRY Bernie-
BERNIE You haven't been back for three months and he's been here a month?
HENRY I got back and- I was waiting for- I couldn't just leave him.
BERNIE You couldn't just leave him?
BERNIE moves to exit towards the bedroom. Redirects, goes to kitchen. HENRY moves as if to follow.
BERNIE (CONT'D) Don't.
BERNIE exits.
CHRISTOPH That was not how I expected to be greeted.
HENRY What are you doing here?
CHRISTOPH I did not travel by plane for nearly a day to sit in a hotel room.
HENRY I said I would call you by seven.
CHRISTOPH It is almost ten past. And that is after having stopped for wine. Despite not even knowing what was being served. (beat) Though some of us did not even know the guests invited.
HENRY What was I supposed to say? "I know you said no, but I wasn't really joking?" This is important to me.
CHRISTOPH Then you might have said that, Henry.
CHRISTOPH raises the bag. HENRY takes it and, almost absently, starts to move toward the kitchen.
Scalzo 98
CHRISTOPH Perhaps...
HENRY understands, redirects. A small silence. After another beat,
HENRY I asked if he'd want to meet you.
CHRISTOPH Was this before or after you had purchased a ticket in my name?
HENRY I didn't know if you'd come otherwise.
CHRISTOPH I do not know that either. I am also unsure if I am to stay.
HENRY Let me talk to him.
CHRISTOPH Was that not your plan before?
HENRY Don't be like that. Please.
CHRISTOPH Do not tell me how I should or should not be, Henry.
HENRY What can I say?
CHRISTOPH That you want me to stay.
HENRY I just did.
CHRISTOPH No. You said that you would talk to him.
A beat.
HENRY Stay. Please.
CHRISTOPH will.
Scalzo 99
HENRY (CONT'D) He was so... closed off. And time was running out. He's not like you. You listen and you think and respond... Bernie, he just feels.
CHRISTOPH Just because I am taking the time to think does not mean I do not feel. If he had shown up in Vienna and you had called him to you there, I might have-
HENRY You wouldn't have made such a / scene.
CHRISTOPH Henry. (pause) I might have felt very similarly to him. In fact, I think I do. (a beat) And now? Shall I wait until the expiry date on my tourist visa in the hotel room I've now called my home?
HENRY You know you couldn't stay here.
CHRISTOPH What I know is that you bought a plane ticket, a hotel room, and left me alone for most days.
HENRY You've... learned the city on your own terms.
CHRISTOPH I am not here to learn about the city. I did not wish to walk here, alone. To be here, alone. That is no way to find a life, a home. And no way to apologize to me for not telling Bernie I was arriving. (beat) I hate when you move our conversations sideways, when we both are aware they must push forward.
HENRY I thought I'd come back and he'd see that we still love each other--he and I, I mean. That we can live together, do things for each other, work at being with each other. Make a life together. I thought that he'd see that nothing's changed.
At some point during HENRY's line, BERNIE has appeared behind them with an open bag of chips. He leans against the doorway, a bottle under his arm.
Scalzo 100
CHRISTOPH But has nothing changed?
BERNIE Well?
HENRY startles.
HENRY Jesus!
BERNIE Nope. Just me.
BERNIE makes his way back to the table. He downs his drink and takes the bottle from under his arm.
BERNIE (CONT'D) (filling up the glass) This is nice. Christoph, your glass? Time for a toast!
HENRY Jesus Christ.
BERNIE 0 for 2. Again, Bernie. But it's hard to keep track with all the new arrivals.
CHRISTOPH gives him a glass, and BERNIE begins to put maybe a little too much in it. HENRY is even more obviously unamused than he might have been up to this point.
BERNIE (CONT'D) Just a little getting-to-know-you gin.
HENRY I thought you couldn't drink anymore.
BERNIE Well, it's a special occasion. And, if I recall, questions about Christoph go best with gin.
CHRISTOPH Pardon me? (pause) I think that maybe I should let yo-
BERNIE No, don't leave. You've only just got here. And we have so much in
Scalzo 101 common. (an intentional beat) Well, at least one thing in common.
HENRY Maybe we slow down with the alcohol and get to know each other like adults and not like teenagers at the beginning of some B movie.
CHRISTOPH (taking the glass, re: the drink) Well, perhaps two.
BERNIE That was funny. (to HENRY) He's funny.
CHRISTOPH Perhaps our similarities include that, as well.
He raises his glass.
HENRY (to CHRISTOPH) You don't have to drink that.
CHRISTOPH I am aware.
BERNIE Chip?
He offers the bag to CHRISTOPH. A beat. CHRISTOPH takes a few.
CHRISTOPH Thank you.
HENRY Dinner is going to be ready / in a few min-
CHRISTOPH Das Appetithäppchen. (to BERNIE) Yes?
BERNIE Appetizer?
Scalzo 102
HENRY (to CHRISTOPH) What are you doing?
BERNIE I'm learning Austrian.
HENRY German. I wasn't talking to you.
CHRISTOPH Bernie offered me a chip.
BERNIE Bernard.
CHRISTOPH Bernard.
HENRY Okay, fine. (now, to BERNIE) What are you doing?
BERNIE I told you. Getting to know-
HENRY No. With the gin and the "appetizer."
BERNIE Look, I'm just trying to make nice with the kid you've been / fucking-
CHRISTOPH I do think that "kid"-
HENRY (Simultaneously with CHRISTOPH, slamming a fist on the table) He's not a fucking kid, Bernie.
A tense beat. Both BERNIE and CHRISTOPH are taken aback.
CHRISTOPH Henry-
BERNIE Oh, I've got this one.
Scalzo 103
HENRY (to BERNIE) Why do you have to... Why can't you just-
Another beat.
BERNIE Just what? Bang on tables? I can just bang on the table, Henry. (he does) Is this what you want? (again) Is banging on the table the right thing to do? (and again) Because I can bang / on the table!
CHRISTOPH (under, until HENRY speaks) Mein Gott, would you both-
HENRY Oh, calm down!
BERNIE You bring the kid you left me for to our anniversary dinner and you want me to calm down?
CHRISTOPH I am not a kid.
HENRY I want you to get to know him!
BERNIE That's what I'm trying to do, Henry! >
HENRY (under) Don't mock me, Bernie.
BERNIE Tell me, Christoph? What do you do when you're not buying wine? Is this your first time in the States? First boyfriend's boyfriend you've met?
CHRISTOPH I am not the one who kept me from you, Bernie-
BERNIE Bernard.
Scalzo 104
HENRY That's enough.
BERNIE No, we're getting to know-
CHRISTOPH If I could-
HENRY No you're not. You're acting like a sadist.
BERNIE What?
HENRY He walked in the door and you were practically at his throat-
CHRISTOPH I actually think-
BERNIE Then maybe you shouldn't have brought him.
HENRY I didn't have a choice!
BERNIE I said no!
HENRY Of course you said no! You only say no, Bernie! / You're afraid of giving him a chance, and I get it. You don't trust me and that's- That makes sense. It does! But nothing's- He's not a kid, and you're being- No, you listen to me- Nothing's going to get better unless you're able to put your infantile bullshit aside and-
BERNIE I only say no? Well, at least I'm saying something, Henry. I don't ask you if I can bring the kid I'm fucking to meet my- Listen to me. You asked me if I wanted to meet him, and I told you I didn't, but now he's here and I guess that just means that- "Infantile bull-"?
CHRISTOPH finds a way to stop them both. As non-violently as possible.
CHRISTOPH (taking control, not raising his voice) If you want to yell at and bicker with each other until one of you relents, that is fine, but I will not sit here and be spoken about and not with. By
Scalzo 105 either of you. If either of you want me to leave, I will leave. (waits) If, instead, you do wish to know me, I will be happy to stay. But I will not have you yell over me as we do.
Silence. A timer goes off in the kitchen. HENRY doesn't immediately move. Waits. Looks at BERNIE.
BERNIE Do you have to go check on something?
HENRY Not if you're going to stab him with a broken gin bottle when I leave the room.
CHRISTOPH I am fine.
HENRY shakes his head.
CHRISTOPH (CONT'D) We are fine.
HENRY gets up.
HENRY Play nice.
HENRY goes into the kitchen.
BERNIE drinks, refills. He and CHRISTOPH sit in an uncomfortable silence. Agitated, BERNIE gets up and starts messing with boxes. Throughout his conversation with CHRISTOPH, he'll be pulling out some things and placing them where he can reach them.
CHRISTOPH You are still packing up things.
BERNIE acknowledges, affirms.
CHRISTOPH (CONT'D) Henry had said that you had stopped.
BERNIE Well, Henry says a lot of things.
Scalzo 106
CHRISTOPH I know.
He does. BERNIE pauses for a moment. As he continues,
BERNIE Well, you wanted to talk. So, talk.
CHRISTOPH What do you want to know?
BERNIE is silent.
CHRISTOPH (CONT’D) Nothing you do not already know?
BERNIE This isn't about me.
CHRISTOPH You are right. This is about us.
BERNIE scoffs.
CHRISTOPH (CONT'D) What do you want to know? What it was like to live in Austria, with Henry, these years? How often he spoke of you?
BERNIE I know Henry, Christoph.
CHRISTOPH You do know a Henry. I do, too.
BERNIE No, I know Henry. Not "a Henry," not "some Henry," Henry. Who I don't know, Christoph, is you.
CHRISTOPH Would you like to?
BERNIE Do I have a choice?
CHRISTOPH Yes.
A beat. They're silent.
Scalzo 107
CHRISTOPH (CONT'D) But if you wish to ask me without Henry present, I believe time is running out. There are only so many steps in a dinner. And he had started before I arrived.
CHRISTOPH waits.
CHRISTOPH (CONT’D) You know I am from Austria. I trust you've seen my pictures, too.
BERNIE reacts. Doubles down on his search.
CHRISTOPH (CONT'D) I had worked in proofreading until I met Henry. He insisted his firm to take me in order to write copy. I had just become twenty-two years old.
BERNIE reacts.
CHRISTOPH (CONT'D) You were young, too, when you met.
BERNIE It was different.
CHRISTOPH How different could it have been?
BERNIE You couldn't--I don't know--use those online rooms or just meet in an office or-
CHRISTOPH Oh, no. We had met in a bar. I gave him my business card, and-
BERNIE A 20-year-old in a bar. At least he's consistent.
A beat.
BERNIE (CONT'D) It was different for us, Christoph. It meant something. Henry and I. Being... together. It meant something. People were taking guys--guys like us--and if they saw us, they'd-
He can't continue. He exhales, frustrated.
CHRISTOPH Do to them as they do to us today?
A beat.
Scalzo 108
CHRISTOPH (CONT’D) It is different now, I do not minimize that. But it is not... so different. And perhaps we are not, as well. (a brief pause) As one example, I know that I missed him, too. (a beat as BERNIE reacts) I can leave, if you'd like.
BERNIE It's fine. I could, too.
CHRISTOPH What are you searching for?
BERNIE I'm not sure.
CHRISTOPH And how will you know when to stop?
BERNIE I'm not sure I will.
CHRISTOPH Now you sound like you are him. He is very unsure now.
BERNIE No, he just can't choose. That's his problem. Can't choose, and can't follow through. Give him simple expectations. A grocery list.
CHRISTOPH And he comes back without five of the things listed.
BERNIE Out of six. (pause) You lived together.
CHRISTOPH For a while.
BERNIE Makes sense. Two years. No self-respecting person would stay with someone who wouldn't live with them after two years.
CHRISTOPH You did.
BERNIE I said "no self-respecting person."
Scalzo 109
CHRISTOPH He spoke of you often. I do not know that I believe it.
BERNIE Don't measure up to what he said?
CHRISTOPH No. You "don't measure up" against what you have said.
HENRY re-enters.
HENRY Cakes are out and against my better judgment I stepped away from the glazes to see if there was any bloodshed.
BERNIE (breaking the previous mood) Ooh, "glazes." Plural.
CHRISTOPH We are well.
BERNIE Just peachy.
CHRISTOPH I believe apricot might be more appropriate. (after a beat of their confusion) It is a sachertorte, correct?
The joke relatively bombs.
CHRISTOPH (CONT’D) We were speaking of Austria.
BERNIE All Christoph's talk of bars had me waxing nostalgic.
HENRY Understandable. I've met some of the best people in my life in bars.
HENRY approaches CHRISTOPH, and touches him affectionately. BERNIE takes it in, takes a beat.
BERNIE Christoph, you said you're a writer?
CHRISTOPH nods. BERNIE indicates to wait, and searches through a box. He pulls out a thin
Scalzo 110
book.
BERNIE (CONT'D) You'll like this. It's from the first time Henry took me to Italy. Did you know he spoke Italian?
HENRY They have buildings in Italy, too.
BERNIE And so many people in bars.
HENRY lets this pass. BERNIE notices.
BERNIE (CONT'D) You wanted me to get to know him. Now he'll get to know us. (handing CHRISTOPH the book) Here. A first edition of some poet from Venice. He gave it to me on our fifth anniversary. Fifth's usually wood, but paper's almost the same.
CHRISTOPH It is very considerate.
BERNIE Romantic, even.
HENRY (showing CHRISTOPH) There's an inscription.
CHRISTOPH (reading; then, to BERNIE) I do not know how to speak Italian.
HENRY (re: the book) A toast to five years. Unparalleled love.
An almost tender beat. CHRISTOPH puts the book on the table. BERNIE picks up the bottle to refill glasses.
BERNIE More?
CHRISTOPH declines. BERNIE offers it to HENRY, who also declines. BERNIE shrugs, takes a sip right from the bottle.
He pours some gin on the book and throws it
Scalzo 111
into the fire.
HENRY Oh my god.
CHRISTOPH (simultaneously) Mein Gott.
BERNIE Sure you don't want that drink? We can toast to five more years! (to CHRISTOPH) If you don't want more gin, we've got some vodka in the freezer.
HENRY Jesus Christ, Bernie.
BERNIE Oh, I'm sorry. And, of course, your wine, Christoph. (To HENRY) Such a thoughtful host.
HENRY That's not / what I-
BERNIE What did you mean? What did you fucking expect, Henry?
HENRY I expected you to not act like a child.
BERNIE Isn't that your type?
HENRY I swear to God-
CHRISTOPH I had expected that Henry would have told you of my arrival. (beat) And, nevertheless, I expect that we can talk.
BERNIE Sure, let's talk, Christoph. Maybe let's start with who you think you are- no, who you think I am that you know how I'm supposed to feel.
CHRISTOPH I know how you feel, Bernard.
Scalzo 112
BERNIE See, that's the thing. You don't. You don't know anything about me.
CHRISTOPH I may not know you, but I know what Henry's told me. What he's shown me.
CHRISTOPH produces the Belvedere picture from his pocket, still in the envelope HENRY sent it in.
CHRISTOPH (CONT’D) Look at this photo. Look at you. You with him. I know that. I've felt that, Bernard. I know who you were.
BERNIE What the fuck-?
HENRY Bernie.
CHRISTOPH No, he is right. I might have been upset, too. But you brought none of me, did you?
HENRY Christoph, I-
CHRISTOPH Was this your plan all along? To run back to Bernard? To run away again? Henry, when I had told you that you should come back-
BERNIE When you what?
Beat.
CHRISTOPH I suggested that he- Nothing was different. Nothing had changed. And when he received the notice about your house, I thought that...
BERNIE You told him to come back.
HENRY Christoph-
BERNIE Let him answer. You told him to come back.
Scalzo 113
CHRISTOPH He told me he had not stopped thinking of you. That he needed more time to... accustom himself. To Austria. To me. I presume to a life without you. He said he needed time for it to pass, but I knew. It wouldn't. Pass. I do not know what it's like to wait for a man you love for two years. But I do know what it is like to be loved by a man who loves another, too. Who does not admit to doing so. Or does not realize. It is unfair. To both of us.
BERNIE Where are the rest?
CHRISTOPH looks to HENRY.
BERNIE (CONT’D) The pictures. You didn't send just one. Where are they?
HENRY moves to his coat. He takes out the packet of envelopes. They are all open.
HENRY I didn't know what to say. I still don't. Not yet.
Moving to BERNIE, eventually putting the envelopes he's flipping through in his hands.
HENRY (CONT'D) I- figured that, well. We have something that isn't words. We have these. We have a history. A life we shared together. One I hope we'll still share together. All three of us.
BERNIE is looking at the pictures in his hands.
BERNIE All three of us. (scoffs) All three of us. Well, I'm glad you've been able to- (to CHRISTOPH) Well, no wonder you know how I "measure up."
CHRISTOPH I have seen photos. I have heard stories.
BERNIE "Seen photos." Fuck you. You don't / understand-
HENRY What would you have done?
CHRISTOPH Henry, please-
Scalzo 114
HENRY No, Christoph. I'm serious. What would you have done, Bernie? What would you have said if you were in his position?
CHRISTOPH Our positions are not dissimilar.
HENRY (simultaneously with BERNIE) Yes they are.
BERNIE (simultaneously with HENRY) Yes they are.
CHRISTOPH They are not.
BERNIE Oh, "they are not"? (to HENRY; getting progressively louder) You come back, you make me believe that you love me / and you bring him here, >
HENRY (under him) I do love-
BERNIE tonight, of all nights. If you have something to say to me--both of you-- you can say it to me. "We don't have the words?" Fuck off, you two.
He tries to tear the pack of envelopes. Frustrated, he throws them into a box.
BERNIE (CONT’D) "We"- We have nothing. Get out of my house.
HENRY The papers-
BERNIE You're going to fight this on a technicality now?
HENRY If you stopped yelling at us, / then-
CHRISTOPH I think he is yelling at you. (pause)
Scalzo 115
...if we are speaking in technicalities. He is making a fair point.
BERNIE You're fucking right it's a fair point. (to HENRY) So you took my photos- and you- What were you thinking?
HENRY I was thinking that maybe we'd be able to-
Frustrated, he lets it linger.
BERNIE "To"...?
HENRY I don't know.
BERNIE No, you do know. What were you going to say?
HENRY Why are you so upset? / You didn't even open them.
CHRISTOPH Henry, please. This is not helpful.
BERNIE (starting at HENRY's "open") They were mine, Henry!
HENRY (to CHRISTOPH) No, it's not fair. It's two against one now and-
CHRISTOPH You started this evening as one against two.
HENRY is stunned.
CHRISTOPH (CONT’D) You did.
HENRY I didn't mean to.
BERNIE And now it's two against one.
Scalzo 116
CHRISTOPH I do not think-
A look. Beat.
BERNIE All right, then. Since Henry's so set on menage-ing this trois, let's get you up to speed.
Agitated, BERNIE starts to busy himself, pulling things from where HENRY has placed them. After he explains them, he throws them into the box as punctuation.
BERNIE (CONT’D) This here is a nice little ceramic shoe from... (reads from it) Holland, it seems.
Into the box.
BERNIE (CONT’D) And then Henry went to Japan and all I got was this lacquer box. Nice design, though.
Into the box.
HENRY Bernie-
BERNIE And this geode here came all the way from Utah. Exotic, I know.
He turns it over in his hands as he speaks. He's performing, at this point.
HENRY Bernie, can we sit down and calmly-
BERNIE I am calm, Henry. I'm great.
HENRY You're going to break things. Things we can't replace.
BERNIE might laugh. He definitely throws the geode into the box with renewed intention.
HENRY (CONT’D) I think-
Scalzo 117
BERNIE Nope. No more time for thinking, Henry.
An idea. He pulls the photos out of the box.
BERNIE (CONT’D) You've had plenty of time for that. (beat, then to both) And these need no explanation, I'm sure.
He throws the photos into the fire.
HENRY Bernie, stop!
BERNIE No, you stop. Stop trying to control this. You don't get to control this. You flew your boyfriend to our anniversary.
HENRY I had thought- Look, I brought / you two together like thi-
BERNIE Oh, good, finally. Why did you bring him here, Henry? Why did you show him pictures of our whole fucking relationship-
HENRY They're important to us.
BERNIE To you, Henry.
HENRY To us. You wouldn't be so upset if they didn't mean something to you.
BERNIE And maybe they'd mean something to me if you didn't steal them and share them with him.
CHRISTOPH (to HENRY; trying to reorient the conversation) You were saying why you brought me here.
HENRY I brought you here because I love you. Both. (turning to BERNIE) I love you, Bernie.
BERNIE Oh fuck me.
Scalzo 118
CHRISTOPH (simultaneously) Henry, maybe-
HENRY Yes, you too. Christoph, you know that.
CHRISTOPH That was not what I had meant. (redirecting) Henry, why have you brought me here?
HENRY I want to be with you. I want us to be together. (to BERNIE) And I know you love me, too.
BERNIE Do you, Henry? Do you know that?
HENRY You're devolving into parroting my questions, Bernie, which means / that you're-
BERNIE Oh, what does that mean? Please, enlighten me-
HENRY It means that you don't have anything else to say to it. It means, Bernie- It means that you love me, too. That this might work.
BERNIE (a quiet burn) You see, that's where you're wrong. Maybe- maybe for a second I did let myself love you again. But the second you opened that door, Henry. The second you opened that door tonight, it was all over.
CHRISTOPH You might both stop speaking like this.
BERNIE Oh, great.
CHRISTOPH I know this is not how you anticipated the night going.
BERNIE Easy for you to say. You knew it was happening.
Scalzo 119
CHRISTOPH I did not know it would happen like this.
BERNIE What did you expect?
CHRISTOPH I feel the same as you, B--
BERNIE The same as me? You think- You think we're the same?
CHRISTOPH I think we're both waiting for an explanation.
He turns to HENRY. HENRY is silent. BERNIE sits.
HENRY (to CHRISTOPH) You're right. (to BERNIE) And you, too. I'm sorry. (to both) I... I've never had to do this before. Which might be why I haven't done it yet. There are just... I've been trying to think of how to... explain. If there's a right way to do it or a wrong one, or if it's more- just "get it out there."
BERNIE That one.
CHRISTOPH stops BERNIE.
HENRY Please. (a beat) Before you, I never had a serious boyfriend, much less a partner, and when I met you... It didn't matter anymore. Loving you, I didn't apologize for who I was, because that was never a choice I had. You were never optional. You're still not. And I know that now. I know that I love you, and when I stayed in Austria, when I didn't call or write... I didn't want to hurt you and thought that maybe by removing myself completely, I'd let you get what you need without insisting on what I thought I needed.
BERNIE What I needed was to talk to you.
HENRY I'm sorry.
Scalzo 120
BERNIE Sorry doesn't change what you did. I needed to- I deserved to talk to you. I deserved to know why you left, and I deserved to know >
HENRY I know.
BERNIE if you needed time or if you were coming back or if you decided to live your happy life with Christoph.
CHRISTOPH Let us place aside our blame and apologies. We all have shares there.
BERNIE Do we?
CHRISTOPH Tonight is not about me and him, nor is it about you and him, nor is it even about me and you. Tonight is about us. If we are to decide what is to happen tonight, we must recognize that we share this all together. And I cannot speak of you and Henry, but he and I have always been about us-- the three of us--whether I had meant it or hoped it or neither of the two.
A beat.
HENRY (to BERNIE) Do you remember what it felt like when you realized who you were? When you found baking? When you found me? (to a quietly cautious CHRISTOPH) I'm getting there, I promise. What it was like when you learned that two men could be- that we could be- us? Bernie, I have that now. I know me now and I want to share it with who I love. And that's... why you're both here now. I love you, Bernie. Both of you. I am in love with both of you. And while I was in Austria, I did some research. Christoph helped me find some websites. Online fora. I found a word for who I was. Who I am. And Bernie, that was everything to me. That's my baking. That's my you.
BERNIE needs a second. Tries to recalibrate.
BERNIE But you came back.
HENRY I'm hoping that-
BERNIE (not listening) You came back to me.
Scalzo 121
HENRY Christoph is teaching online and freelancing with his writing. We can / make this work.
BERNIE You chose me.
CHRISTOPH Bernard, we must make a choice.
BERNIE "We" have to make a choice, Christoph? What choice is there to make?
HENRY Christoph. Can you go check on the glazes for me? I don't want them to burn.
CHRISTOPH The heat must be low. You have been here for-
HENRY Christoph. Please?
CHRISTOPH understands. With some reluctance, leaves.
BERNIE stands.
BERNIE You leave and cut contact with me completely for two years. Two. Years. You finally come back, and you can't live without Christoph for months?
HENRY We're... different. Christoph and I.
BERNIE Months, Henry. And what am I supposed to do now? It took you two years to come back, and I waited. I waited for two years, Henry. And now what? I have to let you go again?
HENRY I don't want to leave again, Bernie. I miss you.
BERNIE But not enough to give up Christoph.
HENRY I came back to you. I love you both.
Scalzo 122
BERNIE I understand. I do. (he doesn't) You miss what we had. Have. Whatever. And I've missed it, too. But the difference--the real difference here, Henry--is that when you've been missing "us," you've had someone else with you. What did I have, Henry? When it hit me that you weren't coming back? When I realized I might wait forever for something that wouldn't ever happen?
HENRY I'm sorry, Bernie. And if I could go back and tell myself not to do- not to hurt you, I would. I'd-
BERNIE Then, do it. If you love me, you'll do it.
They know he can't. BERNIE, frustrated. Sad. He throws something, and might start crying. Softly. HENRY gives BERNIE a moment, tries to reach for him but BERNIE pulls away.
BERNIE (CONT'D) Goddamn it.
HENRY I'm sorry. I am. I wish it could be different. Not that I were different, and not that I didn't love Christoph. I love him and that's... how it is. But I don't just love him. (thinks) He was right. I wasn't happy. And at first, I thought maybe I was mourning our home or our past together or the trips to the farmers' market or the way you kept asking for a dog, despite my allergies. But I wasn't. I didn't miss home. I missed you.
BERNIE And Christoph?
HENRY exhales.
HENRY I missed him, too. I love him. And he loves me. And, if you give him a chance, maybe-
BERNIE reacts, HENRY stops short.
HENRY (CONT’D) It isn't a bad thing, Bernie. Or even that different.
BERNIE It is, though. It is, Henry. You said it yourself. You and Christoph, you're
Scalzo 123 different. You have something that I don't.
HENRY It doesn't have to be that way. We can all- / together, we can-
BERNIE That's not- I don't...
BERNIE stops. Puts his head in his hands. HENRY waits.
BERNIE (CONT'D) You said I didn't leave because I love you. And maybe I do, but do you want to know why I didn't leave, Henry?
Without speaking, HENRY encourages BERNIE to go on.
BERNIE (CONT’D) Where would I go? It's different for you and for him.
A beat.
BERNIE (CONT'D) That was the only place I knew I belonged. When you left, you took the only place I knew I belonged. I didn't leave because I was angry. I didn't leave because I was sad. I didn't leave because I thought that maybe you'd come back and have an explanation for what you had done. To me. I didn't leave, Henry, because I didn't know what else I could do or be or what I was a part of.
A beat. HENRY is trying to collect his thoughts.
CHRISTOPH, now in the doorway, has probably overheard a good part of this.
BERNIE (CONT'D) I've been thinking about it for years and I don't have an answer. You don't need to either.
HENRY I wish I did, Bernie.
BERNIE Me, too.
Another beat.
Scalzo 124
CHRISTOPH It is different-
BERNIE Oh my God. (pause) Can I not just have a conversation with one of you without the other one barging in?
CHRISTOPH I believe you did it first.
BERNIE Great. Now someone pays attention.
CHRISTOPH This might be the most genuine you've been this evening.
BERNIE (not smiling) I assure you it's not.
CHRISTOPH I know that. (beat; then, when no one speaks) I know that you feel lost-
BERNIE I'm not lost.
CHRISTOPH Unbelonging.
BERNIE That's not a word.
CHRISTOPH You might permit me to speak, Bernard.
HENRY Hon-
CHRISTOPH (continuing) We do not have words for many things we feel. But we do have the choice of what we do when confronted with that fact.
CHRISTOPH turns from one to the other. BERNIE concedes. A beat.
Scalzo 125
HENRY I love you both. I'm... I'm polyamorous, Bernie, and I realized when I came back here that, yes, I did miss you. But I was running away. Again. I've spent fifty-two years living in closets. And the time I've done it with you is the best time I've had doing it. But I won't do it again. I'm offering us the chance to maybe find somewhere we belong. Together. If you want it.
BERNIE is silent. He thinks. CHRISTOPH speaks.
CHRISTOPH I understand.
BERNIE You don't.
CHRISTOPH I mean that it makes sense to me.
BERNIE Yeah, it makes sense but you don't understand. I remember what it's like to be another man he hides from his family. Someone who has to take a separate grocery trip or come home just a little later than he does. To walk across the hallway below the fifth-story walk-up--the only place we could get--so you could come up the other stairwell after he'd closed the door. / To be another--I'm not done. >
CHRISTOPH Do you not think-
BERNIE To be just another face in a bar--if he was even looking at faces by that point. And now you're here. You've been here for months, he's been lying for months. Years. I-- I deserve once--Just this once-- I deserve to be picked first. No long-winded speeches about love and insecurity and "finding yourself on the Internet" or whatever else he's trying to fill us with, because I know him. I found him. I deserve to be first.
A sympathetic look from CHRISTOPH.
BERNIE (CONT'D) You didn't live it. You didn't live all the waiting for the one person you thought loved you to realize he actually does.
CHRISTOPH I know what it is like to live with a man who loves someone else.
BERNIE That's not the same.
Scalzo 126
CHRISTOPH Who gives himself to you with the condition he does not give up someone else.
BERNIE It's not-
CHRISTOPH How is it not?
HENRY Christoph-
CHRISTOPH No, he has said this repeatedly. You have said it, too, I am sure. How is it different? Either of you. You say we are not the same, Bernard, but we are. The difference I see, Bernard, the difference I see is that you must make up for two years where I must do so for twenty.
CHRISTOPH waits. HENRY finds himself between. He moves to BERNIE.
HENRY I know how it feels to be different or apart or like you're... And I know how safe it can feel to come back. Just, give it some thought.
BERNIE is lost. HENRY tries to physically comfort him. CHRISTOPH isn't jealous, but he's not happy either. He needs to say something.
CHRISTOPH You should attend to the...
HENRY What?
CHRISTOPH It might burn.
HENRY You were just-
CHRISTOPH Henry.
HENRY Christoph, hon, it's just-
Scalzo 127
CHRISTOPH It is burning.
HENRY pauses. CHRISTOPH deserves this.
HENRY (to BERNIE) Take some time. Think about it. (a beat like a kiss) And not just because I have to go finish the sachertorte.
HENRY goes into the kitchen. On the way, he kisses CHRISTOPH's cheek. Squeezes his hand.
CHRISTOPH and BERNIE give each other some space. They feel out the room.
CHRISTOPH Why should you stay?
BERNIE What?
CHRISTOPH All night we have been speaking around the subject that we find ourselves in, you and I. I believe I owe it to you to speak of it plainly. We owe it to each other, Bernard.
BERNIE is silent.
CHRISTOPH (CONT’D) You think it is different for us-
BERNIE It is. Christoph, he left me.
CHRISTOPH He has left me, too.
BERNIE For two months. He brought you with him, Christoph, and he brought me- He brought me nowhere.
CHRISTOPH You were with him in-
BERNIE We both know that's not the same.
Scalzo 128
A beat. CHRISTOPH thinks.
CHRISTOPH You are right.
BERNIE It's better. Now. I mean, he said it himself. He never had the choice to say who he was, so he... lived how he had to. And I know it's not easy now, but... it's easier. Isn't it? You can use one of those websites and you can talk to someone in another town, another country, and even if they're not right there- even if you can't see them or touch them, God, you know that they're out there somewhere. That there's somewhere, there's someone who understands. Who understands you. It's not great, but it's- It's better. It is.
He breathes in. CHRISTOPH shifts.
BERNIE (CONT’D) You don't know what it means to be alone in the way that I have. Am. (short beat) Neither of you.
CHRISTOPH This was a surprise for me, as well.
BERNIE You didn't know that Henry left a house in North Carolina and that someone might have been occupying it--alone--for the past two years?
CHRISTOPH I had.
BERNIE While you were sharing a bed, an apartment--a life with him?
CHRISTOPH I had thought to- that maybe-
It hangs there.
BERNIE Well, now it's too late.
CHRISTOPH Am I the one who has made it too late?
BERNIE, again, is silent.
CHRISTOPH (CONT'D) I am trying.
Scalzo 129
BERNIE Why? Why try? You still haven't-
CHRISTOPH (thinking only a little faster than he's speaking) You are so upset that he left that you do not know what it means to me that he did. All evening, I have been trying to make room. For you, for Henry, for how the two of you feel, for the history you have had. You still have. And you are unsure. Were we in Vienna, how might you feel? Traveling all this way to have not one, but two doors in your face?
CHRISTOPH has a point.
BERNIE I liked you better before the third degree.
CHRISTOPH I do not understand that.
BERNIE Before the... interrogation.
CHRISTOPH You believe I do not understand your position. I believe that I do. The only choice I have is to ask questions. Less direct approaches have not proven successful this evening.
BERNIE You're very direct now.
CHRISTOPH One of us must be.
A concession.
CHRISTOPH (CONT’D) You are so concerned, Bernard, that you have lost two years. You do not understand what it is like to have lost twenty you never could have had.
Another. A softening?
CHRISTOPH (CONT'D) If we are to wait for him to make a decision, we may die of old age. Some of us sooner than others.
BERNIE smiles.
CHRISTOPH (CONT'D) And it appears he will not choose, anyway. It is not who he is. Not what this is.
Scalzo 130
(beat) All evening you have wanted answers. I would like the same.
BERNIE Well...
CHRISTOPH I had meant answers from you.
BERNIE I know.
A beat.
CHRISTOPH If you are willing, I would like to try.
BERNIE This?
CHRISTOPH I trust we are both afraid to try the sachertorte.
BERNIE laughs.
BERNIE I don't know.
CHRISTOPH (not an attack) What do you know?
BERNIE I'm tired.
CHRISTOPH I am also.
BERNIE accepts it.
CHRISTOPH (CONT'D) And, like you, I do not know. I know that Henry is who he is. He feels these things and I trust him. I love him. And despite what seem to be his efforts to keep us both relatively unaware of the situation, I trust that he had his reasons.
BERNIE He's an idiot.
Scalzo 131
CHRISTOPH And that may very well be the reason. And it may also be why he will buy sweets at three times the price he can pay at a duty free shop in the airport. Well, it is perhaps one reason why.
BERNIE And you?
CHRISTOPH I think that I would try.
BERNIE With a 37-year-old who can't- I don't know.
CHRISTOPH I love him. And, despite this evening, I find I might still grow to tolerate you. Which I do not think to be an excuse. I find us... possible. You and I... we truly aren't that different. (a shift, for both) I also cannot imagine what it was like for him. What it was like for you. In Vienna, our home had one staircase and a woman who lived on the landing below who would ask after "his son" when he would come in at night. I would hear them on the stairs. Perhaps she heard us, too.
A beat.
BERNIE I'm sorry.
CHRISTOPH You are forgiven.
BERNIE No, about-
CHRISTOPH I know, Bernard.
BERNIE Bernie. (a sigh) I'm a dick.
CHRISTOPH You are that, as well. Bernie.
BERNIE laughs, halfheartedly.
BERNIE I wasn't kidding. When I said I thought you were funny.
Scalzo 132
CHRISTOPH I have been holding fast to that for the entire evening.
BERNIE Clever in a second language, too.
CHRISTOPH I have read a lot.
BERNIE Well, whatever it was, it worked.
CHRISTOPH smiles. BERNIE exhales, trying to shake things off.
BERNIE (CONT'D) God, what would this even look like?
CHRISTOPH I do not know.
BERNIE Do we even want to do this?
CHRISTOPH I do not know. But it seems we want to try.
BERNIE thinks. CHRISTOPH, too.
BERNIE We don't even have a guest room.
CHRISTOPH I do not think I would be here.
BERNIE What?
CHRISTOPH I would not live here. If I am to stay, if we are to- I think we would need separate spaces. Places that we might call our own. That we would invite each other into. We might build this together.
BERNIE We'd be dating.
CHRISTOPH Perhaps.
A beat as BERNIE considers.
Scalzo 133
BERNIE And you're okay with that?
CHRISTOPH thinks he is. Another beat.
BERNIE (CONT'D) I do love him, you know.
CHRISTOPH I do.
BERNIE In spite of...
BERNIE gestures--to the fireplace, the general room, him and CHRISTOPH, maybe all three.
BERNIE (CONT'D) I did. Miss him. A lot. (thinks, then an admission) But sometimes... I think I just missed someone here. For... To listen to me. Hold me, maybe. To make sure things would be okay.
CHRISTOPH To make sure you are okay?
BERNIE nods.
They stand in a meaningful silence. Slowly, CHRISTOPH moves towards BERNIE. He waits behind him for a few seconds, a test before he embraces him from behind. CHRISTOPH puts his head on BERNIE's shoulder. BERNIE accepts. They stand like that for a while.
HENRY re-enters with a pretty okay-looking sachertorte in hand. The chocolate glaze is rushed, but the plate's been wiped clean of any runoff or streaks. He watches just long enough.
HENRY We could all use dessert first, I think.
CHRISTOPH (still from BERNIE's shoulder) Yes.
BERNIE (also not moving)
Scalzo 134
Okay.
When HENRY reaches the table with the cake, BERNIE and CHRISTOPH separate and move to the table. HENRY cuts three pieces as CHRISTOPH grabs a bottle of wine he brought. BERNIE hands him glasses. HENRY plates each and places the plates in front of BERNIE, CHRISTOPH, and then himself. They set up, sit, and all taste.
HENRY The apricot's a little burnt.
CHRISTOPH It is still quite good.
BERNIE (a smile) It is.
They eat.
End of play.