Landscape of the Body Read online

  Landscape of the Body

  Plays by John Guare

  Bosoms and Neglect

  Chaucer in Rome

  Cop Out

  A Few Stout Individuals

  Four Baboons Adoring the Sun

  General of Hot Desire

  His Girl Friday (adaptation)

  Home Fires

  House of Blue Leaves

  Lake Hollywood

  Landscape of the Body

  Lydie Breeze:

  Part One: Women and Water

  Part Two: Bulfinch’s Mythology

  Part Three: The Sacredness of the Next Task

  Marco Polo Sings a Solo

  Moon Under Miami

  Muzeeka

  Rich and Famous

  Six Degrees of Separation

  JOHN GUARE

  Landscape of the Body

  Copyright © 1977, 2007 by John Guare

  Preface copyright © 2007 by John Guare

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that Landscape of the Body is subject to royalties. It is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and all British Commonwealth countries, and all countries covered by the International Copyright Union, the Pan-American Copyright Convention, and the Universal Copyright Convention. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound taping, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved.

  The stock and amateur live stage performance rights to Landscape of the Body are controlled exclusively by Dramatists Play Services, Inc. No professional or nonprofessional performance of the play may be given without obtaining in advance the written permission of Dramatists Play Services, Inc., 440 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016, and paying the requisite fee, whether the play is presented for charity or gain and whether or not admission is charged.

  First-class professional applications for permission to perform it, and those other rights stated above, must be made in advance to International Creative Management, Attn: Sam Cohn, 40 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication-Data

  Guare, John.

  Landscape of the body / by John Guare.

  p. cm.

  e-Book ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9965-2

  I. Title.

  PS3557.U2L3 2007

  812’.54--dc22 2006048770

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 12 11 10 09 08 07

  For Adele in 1977

  The best part

  For Adele still in 2007

  WHAT IT WAS LIKE

  Do you rewrite a play when it’s revived?

  First, a little history. I wrote Landscape of the Body in 1977. In 2004, Michael Greif did a terrific production of the play at the Williamstown Theater Festival under the aegis of Michael Ritchie, with Lili Taylor and Sherie Rene Scott as the two sisters. Michael Greif wanted to underline the musical elements of the play in a way that had never been done before. He hired the young composer J. Michael Friedman to take the songs I had written for the play and use them as the basis for a score to be played by an omnipresent four-piece jazz combo that would roll in and out on Allen Moyer’s set and play throughout the entire show, making it a true melodrama. That musical decision expanded the part of Rosalie—not by words but by her presence in every scene. I loved the mad comic energy Sherie Rene brought to the part, which in turn intensified the depth of Lili Taylor’s brutally honest performance. We had had a terrific time working on the play during our two-week run in the Berkshires. Then a year later James Houghton called.

  James Houghton is the estimable founder of the Signature Theatre on West Forty-second Street in New York City, which has an extraordinary mission. Every year, the Signature devotes one season to the work of one playwright. Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Adrienne Kennedy have been some of the previous playwrights so honored. August Wilson would be the subject of the 2005-2006 season. August, unaware at this time of the illness that would prove fatal, asked James if he could delay his scheduled season to 2006-2007, as he was finishing Radio Golf, which would be the last play in his epic ten-play cycle. James agreed and asked Horton Foote and me, previous Signature play-wrights, if we could fill out the suddenly blank season with Horton’s The Trip to Bountiful and my Landscape of the Body.

  Absolutely.

  I was eager for a chance to get back to work with this cast on the play. Miraculously, Lili was available in the spring of 2006. Sherie Rene could get a leave from her Broadway musical. Would I change anything? Let me think about that.

  Michael Greif and the brilliant cast we had assembled asked me why I had written the play in 1977 in the first place.

  That was easy to answer. Happiness. I had met the woman who’d become my wife on Nantucket in 1975 and it looked as if Adele and I might actually work out, or, more to the point, that I might not mess it up. I was finally living in my future. I searched out a play to mark this time.

  One day while walking along Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, where I lived (I was probably mumbling a song to myself —I don’t know—“New York, New York! A helluva town, the Bronx is—”), a flash of yellow crashed into me. A spandex-clad cyclist leaned over my body, sprawled on the pavement, and yelled down at me, “You broke the chain on my ten-speed Raleigh! You broke the chain on my ten-speed Raleigh bike! I wish you were dead! Die! Die! Are you dead?” He went off, pushing his lopsided yellow racer, screaming, “Die! Die!” I limped home. Nothing broken, but suppose I had died? Worse—suppose something happened to Adele? What would happen if I lost all this? How permanent was this unusual, precious happiness that she had brought to my life? What was the shelf life of our time together? I suddenly could imagine dying. The unimaginable became imaginable. But if I lost everything, what would I be left with? What if something happened to— No, I couldn’t even think it. Everything seemed to be so perilous, life merely waiting to be broken by a yellow spandex flash out of nowhere. Is it all Mary Tyrone’s last line in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night: “And then I … was so happy for a time”?

  I had to remind Michael Greif and the cast that things in the seventies were not so hot for little old New York. Like me and that cyclist, the city constantly careened on the brink of collapse. Basic services vanished. Garbage seemed to collect everywhere on the streets. Gangs of thugs would set those piles of trash on fire. Lots of street crime. People exchanging mugging stories became the new small talk. “I gave him all I had. He waved his gun at me: ‘Is this it?’ ‘Would you take a check?’” Graffiti tattooed walls, windows, buses, billboards, parks. An English friend said the graffiti made each subway train zoom into the station with the force of an obscene phone call. On October 30, 1975, the New York Daily News headline immortalized President Gerald Ford’s respon
se to this blight: FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.

  I also had to point out to this young cast what was going on in the Village in those days. A massive, oppressive construction called the West Side Highway ran above and along the abandoned rotting piers that lined the Hudson River on West Street from Christopher Street to Fourteenth Street. In the round-the-clock darkness under the highway trucks were parked, block after block of trucks, their rear doors hanging open, inviting anyone who desired to climb in, turning this underbelly into an ulcerous parking lot from hell. A sub-subculture of illicit sex, drugs, violence festered in the backs of these trucks. Were they abandoned? Where did they come from? You would never walk along the river at night unless you were feeling suicidal.

  Don’t forget the unsolved Greenwich Village “bag murders”; butchered bodies in black plastic bags would float in the Hudson right off this hellhole. And just to keep you on your toes: a gang of wild neighborhood kids went around beating up people at random.

  Yet I was the happiest I’d ever been in my life.

  “We’ll have Manhattan / the Bronx and Staten / Island too.”

  When I met Adele in 1975, I was living in the Village near the river on Bank Street in what had been John Lennon’s apartment before he moved uptown to meet his fate in the Dakota. What an apartment! It consisted of two rooms, the first being the ground-floor length of the brownstone building, windowless and very dark; the second room was all light, a thirty-foot ceiling, banks of skylights, a spiral staircase leading to a roof garden. An unnamed sculptor decades before had built this dream studio on what had been the brownstone’s garden.

  Part of me loved living in the shabby residue of John Lennon’s fame. It made me interesting. Another part of me refused to face the fact that the apartment was unlivable. The studio room with the thirty-foot ceilings and skylights was impossible to heat in the winter. The drinks by my bed would freeze during a January night. In the summer it would take a nuclear-powered A/C to tame this thirty-foot-high inferno.

  I asked the landlord, “Why did John Lennon move out?” “He wanted more room.” And I said, “But that’s why I’m moving in.” The rent for the time was outrageous. Five hundred dollars a month. I took it.

  All that remained of John and Yoko was a large bed in the center of the room with a number of posts around it; attached to each post was a television set tuned to one channel; in pre-cable days this meant seven TVs, seven stations. My predecessors apparently would stay in bed wearing headsets whose sound channels they would switch as they switched (or didn’t switch) their eyes. A large closet contained a secret room in the cellar. You could find the trapdoor only by lifting the carpet in the closet floor. I went down there once. No, this airless tomb was a remnant of the Inquisition. I never made the descent again.

  The first night I moved in I heard scratching at the front door, which led up a short flight of stairs onto the street. “John?” the voice said. “Who is it?” I asked brightly as I started to unlock the door, sure it was some pal stopping by to see my new glamour pad. The desperate voice mewled, “John, let me in. I’ve come such a long way.” Which friend was playing a joke? “No, who is it?” “John, let me in. I love you.” “Tell me who you are?” “John, I love you. Let me in.” The creepy urgency in the late-night voice was no joke. I didn’t open the door. The scratching and weeping continued all night. I opened the door in the morning. Bouquets of wilted flowers lined the doorstep with a card: “I love you John.”

  Almost every day in the four years I lived there I would find sprays of roses or chrysanthemums left at the door or elaborately decorated cakes with “John Forever” in frosting or long, yearning confessional letters that only John—the other John, the real John—would understand. They told me their secrets.

  In those pre-Internet days, these pilgrims had not yet learned that the object of their obsession had moved uptown; 105¼ Bank Street (yes, ¼; not ½) was still the requisite destination for their hajj. I’d say to the anguished spiritual travelers huddling outside my door, “He doesn’t live here.” “But we’ve come so far. Australia. Japan. New Zealand. Oregon. Germany. Where is he?” Sometimes they’d get very angry. “Hey, don’t get mad at me. I’m not hiding him. He doesn’t live here. I swear to you. Yoko doesn’t live here. No, I don’t know where he went. Back off.” “Let us in.” “No, you can’t come in.” “We want peace!” “I want peace!” “We have to come in!”

  I understood that. I wanted “in” somewhere as well. I wanted peace as well. What was my life going to be? I inadvertently lived in a world that for so many others was the Mecca of desperate dreams. Why couldn’t I be that John? Once, someone left a delicately painted, self-proclaimed official passport ensuring John free passage to anywhere in the universe. Why couldn’t I have a passport like that to get me out of that place Wallace Stevens described so accurately where one’s desire is too difficult to tell from despair.

  I had a baby grand piano I loved to play, gleefully torturing my next-door neighbors John Cage and Merce Cunningham, who would pound on the wall for me to shut up. Across the street was the HB Studio, founded by Uta Hagen, the legendary actress who was the original and greatest Martha in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and her husband, Herbert Berghof, no slouch of an actor himself. Men and women and children of all ages took acting classes at the Hagen/Berghof Studio on what seemed to be a twenty-four-hour schedule. Some days you’d see the great Uta herself striding up Bank Street followed by a group of her acolytes receiving life transfusions from her aura, shouldering the weight of their dreams as they followed her to and from class. You could hear the students talking earnestly in the street. The conversation seemed to consist of a chant: Uta says. Uta said. Uta told me. Uta Uta Uta.

  And then there was upstairs in my building. I learned never to live in the same building with the furtive love interest of a Major American Drama Critic. MADC was having a hot romance with a woman who lived upstairs at 105 Bank. I vaguely knew MADC and his wife, making him Married MADC. I did not want to become an eyewitness to the MMADC’s clandestine life while MMADC could still be reviewing any of my plays. Would he make me pay for knowing his secret? I’d just stay out of the way. Don’t let him know I know. I’d leave my apartment, size up today’s crowd of Lennonites, make sure MMADC wasn’t coming down or going up the front steps, and then I’d trot up the street to do my day’s errands—and watch out for yellow bikes. When I wasn’t writing, I liked to (and still do) walk around the Village. In 1973 I’d stop in at the Lilac Chocolate Shop on Christopher Street, drop in at the great Phoenix Bookstore on Jones Street and the Riviera for a drink, then some unnamed junk shop by Hudson that sold stacks of old Life magazines and comic books from my childhood— Mandrake the Magician, Captain Marvel, The Shadow. See what Godard or Truffaut or Altman was playing at the Eighth Street movie theater. Browse at Wilentz’s Eighth Street bookshop. Once at two a.m. I went to the twenty-four-hour supermarket a block from Bank Street to get some coffee. A uniformed chauffeur pushed a cart down an aisle. Beside him a beautiful African-American woman in a sable coat tossed bread and milk and coffee into the cart. I couldn’t believe it. I said, “Leontyne Price in D’Agostino’s at two in the morning?” She said, “Honey, even a diva’s got to eat.”

  Then in the midst of all this I met Adele and discovered another truth: “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things” (Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”).

  Landscape of the Body came together out of incredible happiness and daily violence and insatiable yearning in this failing city that dreamed of success.

  One morning after the cyclist incident, I said my good morning to the day’s gaggle hoping for a sighting of their master, disappointed them, checked that MMADC wasn’t fleeing down the front stairs of the brownstone hoping for the magical appearance of a cab to take him home, and went up to the coffee shop on the corner of Hudson Street for breakfast. As I ate my poached eggs I noticed two boys and two girls—fourteen, tops—who should
have been in school, whispering in a booth. The boys were proud young roosters telling the girls the most fascinating tale anyone had ever heard. What caught my eye was this: the boys’ arms were each lined with wristwatches, ten or eleven on each scrawny arm. The enthralled girls, leaning forward, flicked the straps of the gold watches. I tried to hear what the boys were saying but couldn’t get close enough.

  I went home and wrote down what I thought those kids were saying. That became the first scene I wrote for Landscape of the Body.

  I’d been writing songs and wanted those songs in the play. That’s the best part of making plays: the things you like to write determine the style of your play. I would need a singer to sing the songs; she would tell us the story. What was the story? Of course: She was killed by the cyclist who hit me but she kept on singing! Why should death stop her career?

  Sometimes happiness gives you the security you need to go into the dark places.

  Other people from my life showed up. Durwood Peach was the summertime Good Humor man when I was a kid out on Long Island. Durwood was from South or North Carolina and a very good-humored man indeed. I remembered Raulito, a young Cuban who worked on Two Gentlemen of Verona (a musical I wrote for the New York Shakespeare Festival with Galt MacDermot and Mel Shapiro] as Raul Julia’s dresser. What would my Raulito do? Wait—I know! When I got out of the air force in 1964 I had worked for a travel agency on Fourteenth Street and Eighth Avenue whose main activity was working the phones, luring people down to our place of business by telling them they had won a holiday on the chance the boss could sell them a real vacation. Raulito would own the travel agency in the play.

  But who was the central character?

  And then Alice Crimmins in her red hair and heavy makeup and red slutty toreador pants stepped up to the plate. Alice Crimmins was a great-looking dame, described in her trial as a “former cocktail waitress,” who wore lots of white makeup to cover teen acne scars. In the 1960s she was charged with murdering her two young children on the grounds they stood in the way of her social life, which meant in the press “affairs with numerous men.”