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A Lovely Gay Play

Discussion in 'Entertainment and Technology' started by Prccgeek, Oct 21, 2009.

  1. Prccgeek

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    Hey, I don't really know if this is any good, but my AP English teacher gave us a free write assignment, which rarely happens. The only rule was that it had to involve a quote from our summer read about characters growing or changing, finding theirself. So I took advantage of it and wrote a play. My characters were not originally gay, but... I just have more fun writing about gay people. what can I say? We are just so interesting. I thought I would post it up here to see what you guys thought. I already turned it in so there are no more changes. I just hope my teacher is cool with the whole gay thing... we will see.

    I tried to italisize the stage notes. That is how I originally had it, but when I copy and pasted over to here, I had to redo it. Sorry if I missed any.

    Hope you enjoy it. :icon_bigg

    The Art Behind the Army
    “She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we would assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.” from Kate Chopin’s The Awakening
    Setting: It is a small apartment in San Francisco in the winter. The walls are painted a radiant light blue. Upstage right there is a kitchen on the back wall. There is a big rectangular kitchen table in front of it. Center stage there is a worn out sofa that has clearly seen a lot of wear and is a place of comfort, emotionally and physically, for its owners.
    Scene 1
    There isn’t much light in the apartment, just the morning sun slithering in from the window above the sink. It shines down on a man. He is gripping a piece of paper. He is frozen there. One hand is running through his hair. It is hard to make out what he looks like in the darkness of the apartment.
    Alex walks in the door. He has is ear buds in his ears. He is mouthing the words of some upbeat pop tune and bouncing around to the beat a little. He drops his bag down on the couch. He pulls his iPod out of his coat pocket and turns it off, takes out his ear buds and quickly raps them around the iPod, and throws that down on top of his bag. He pulls of his coat and sets it on the arm of the couch. He is wearing a generic looking scrub top. He is just coming back from a night shift at the hospital. He quietly walks towards the bedroom door (stage left.)

    Alex: Hey Mikey, you up? knocking on the door
    Opens the door a crack and pops his head in for a quick look. He doesn’t see Michael.
    Alex: Michael, you here?
    He walks toward the kitchen.
    Alex: There you are. What are you looking at?
    Alex opens up the fridge which releases a strong yellow glow. That light shines brightly and for the first time we get a good view of Michael. His eyes are still glued to the paper. He looks as though he could have been crying. Alex is rummaging through the fridge.
    Michael: A letter.
    Alex: From whom?
    Pause
    Michael: My father.
    Alex: Oh my god! The mysterious Papa Norris! When was the last time –Ouch! Shoot! He jams his toe on the table leg; Michael still doesn’t move. God! We need some light in here. I have no idea how you are reading a letter with no stinking light. He crosses over to the light switch. He hits the switch and the room fills with a intense sharp light.
    Alex looks back at Michael and sees for the first time the condition that he is in. Michael is silent and still, but tears are falling down his face. Michael lifts up is head and their eyes connect. Alex’s face changes from the jolly look he had prior to a look of pure fear and worry. He immediately senses how serious it is. Michael breaks the look with a big sob filled breath. Alex walks over to Michael quietly, yet briskly. He stands behind his chair. He puts his hands on Michael’s shoulders, not a massage , but just pressure, just to show he is there. He stays like that for a moment. Michael is crying now, with some volume. He constantly takes in loud shallow breaths. He almost sounds like a little kid.

    Alex: Shh… It’s okay…. It’s okay… …… There you go. Breathe. It will be alright. Alex has no idea what the problem is; he runs his hand through Michael’s hair and twists it in between his fingers.
    Michael: He is at the Winn Army Hospital in Georgia. He has some kind of cancer…. And he isn’t going to last very long.
    Alex: Oh my God Michael, I’m so sorry. I’ll hop onto my computer right now and buy you a plane ticket.
    Michael: Why would I need a plane ticket?
    Alex: To go see your father, of course. I’ll find you the soonest possible flight out to Atlanta.
    Michael: I don’t need one.
    Alex: What are you going to do? Take an early morning jog from Cali to Georgia?
    Michael: The letter asks me to help him get his affairs in order. I don’t need to be in the state of Georgia to do that. I assume I can do it through the internet and a few phone calls here and there.
    Alex: Michael, he is dying. Don’t you want to go and be with him for a few weeks or few days or whatever he has left? I know you guys had your differences, but seriously…he is your dad.
    Michael: He isn’t my dad. He is my biological father, and he is Sergeant Norris, but not my dad. He hated it when I call him that. He treated me like he treated every other soldier. He was a complete army man from the top of his helmet to the sole of his perfectly polished boots. There wasn’t a speck of “dad” in him.
    Alex: He had to treat you differently from his average soldier. You’re his son.
    Michael: You’re right. He did treat me differently. Unlike all the other soldiers, I held the oh so sacred name of “Norris” to protect.
    Alex: See, he cared about family.
    Michael: Which meant if I did anything wrong, I would be staining the pure and unmarked name and disgracing him and the legacy of army legends that came before him in our family. He made sure I remembered that every waking moment of my young life. He worked me harder than anyone else. I started training when I was only eleven. By the time I was thirteen, I was running three miles every day before school.
    Actually though, everything at that point was going well for me. I didn’t love all the endless training, but I was pretty athletic so I didn’t really have to sweat too much over the physical work. I was the star forward on my soccer team, and I did decently in school.
    Alex: I know I would have failed miserably at any form of training. I fail at any form of movement! But you sounded like you were pretty content. He certainly doesn’t sound like the warm kind of father you would run up and bear hug, but he doesn’t sound atrocious.
    Michael: This was before I found the true love of my life.
    Alex: Jokingly Wait, but you didn’t meet me until you were…
    Michael: Shut up! First time we see him smile or laugh. I’m talking about art.
    Alex: But I thought you didn’t get into art until you were in college.
    Michael: I didn’t get really into it, but even on an army base, they require some classes in the arts. It was 8th grade, and we all had to take a general arts class.
    Alex: And now I am going to get another one of your famous “then I filled up with joy, the sparks flew, and I knew this what I wanted to do for the rest of my life” stories.
    Michael: Yeah, I’m sorry. They probably get tedious. It is just…
    Alex: You love art, and I love that art makes you so happy. I just didn’t expect to hear many of these stories with you being younger than 18. I’m getting your life story Star Wars style. I get movies three through six first, and now I go all the way back to story number one.
    Michael: Do you get why in the world they made the movies like that?
    Alex: Nope.
    Michael: Well, whatever. “So the sparks flew,” blah, blah, blah, and as a result, I started to sketch in a notebook at night before I would go to bed. I would just draw anything that would flutter into my head. But apparently, sketching doesn’t help to maintain a cool kid rep in middle school.
    Alex: I have to admit, my ballet audition for the V-show in 7th grade really pushed me down to the musty basement floor on the vicious middle school hierarchy.
    Michael: Tutu and all?
    Alex: Um… with some attitude I don’t understand how anyone who calls themselves a true ballet dancer can go on stage without a tutu!
    Michael is cracking up.
    Really I just don’t get it!
    Michael: Well, I was not tutu boy, but I did get a huge amount of grief about it from some of the guys in my living quarters. They would steal my notebook and write stupid comments and pictures all over my sketches. I really ran into trouble when the kid who slept on the bunk above me made copies of all of the pages and posted them up everywhere across the base. My father of course saw them and exploded with anger. It was like nothing I had ever seen at that point, and I had seen him get pretty mad at some of those lazy bum cadets. I can remember hearing him yelling and screaming as he walked down the hall to my quarters where I was hiding from the inevitable tirade.
    Scene 2
    The lights dim on the present scene and lights go up stage right. We see a simple set of a door on the left of the new set piece that leads into a room with three bunk beds across the back wall. They are all uniform looking with a dreary gray finish on the metal frames of the beds. All of the beds have white sheets and a blue blanket that are perfectly folded on their beds. A young Michael is sitting on the bottom bunk on the far right, clutching a sketchbook in his arms.
    Norris is storming through the hallway (across the front edge of the stage, in front of the past scene) as he swipes up copies of his son’s sketches scattered across the floor.
    Norris: Idiot, Idiot, Idiot! He is speeding down the hallway to Michael’s room. He gets to the door and bursts into the room. Immediately, Michael runs from his bed to the center of the room and stand there perfectly still, like a little toy soldier. Explain this to me. What in the world are these?
    Young Michael: They are sketches form my notebook, sir.
    Norris: May I see this notebook?
    Young Michael: Yes, sir. He runs to his bed were his notebook is sitting and picks it up. He stays there for a second, just holding the notebook before he runs it over to his father, and with a slight bit of hesitation, hands it over. He immediately runs back to the spot he was standing before and falls back into his still stance.Norris flips through the pages with a disgusted look on his face. He gathers all the used pages in one hand and rips them out of the notebook in one quick jerk.
    Michael: As he lets out a scream of pain, he breaks his unmoving stance. It is as if there had been strings holding him erect like a marionette doll, and the strings just disappear. His body collapses, but he stays standing. No! Dad. No. No. Daddy!
    Norris: Daddy!? What are you, a little girl crying over her worthless doodles? Toughen up! He throws the notebook by Michael’s feet, and Michael’s quickly picks it up, hugging it in his arms. Tears are still streaming down his face. Get some actual use out of the pages left.
    Norris briskly walks out the door and down the hallway throwing the crumpled sketches away in a garbage can. Michael sits down on his bed, clutching his notebook and wiping away some tears.
    Scene 3
    Michael and Alex are sitting on the couch looking at some old crumpled up papers.
    Michael: I grabbed them out of the garbage after he left. Flipping through the pages and handing them to Alex. They aren’t even that good, but it was all I had.
    Alex: I think they are pretty amazing for an eighth grader to draw.
    Michael: Yeah, I guess they are.
    Alex: He might not think of your artwork as just doodles if he saw the incredible things you are doing now.
    Michael: That man wouldn’t care a morsel about my art career.
    Alex: Okay, even a cave man could have seen the sheer beauty of that big one you sold last week at the gallery, which, by the way, earned us some much needed cash.
    Michael: I know! That was the most money I have been offered for a piece. I left a message with Jenna, who runs the gallery, but she hasn’t gotten back to me with the information about who bought it.
    Alex: Whatever. Whoever they are, they love your work, and they should. Your work is phenomenal! Your father should be proud of you.
    Michael: I would fully agree that he should, but you try convincing him of that.
    Alex: Okay. He whips out is flip phone and opens it up.
    Michael: No way. He grabs the phone and closes it.
    Alex: Seriously. Why not? Even if you don’t want to talk about all this crap you guys have between you, you need to help him deal with all the technical stuff and paperwork. Besides, you never know, he may have changed.
    Michael: Oh yeah, the man who believes that fighting for your country is the only honorable act one can do…
    Alex: He could have seen the light! Dramatically
    Michael: The only two activities he finds even fun are running laps and getting drunk!
    Alex: Michael, it is possible that he could have grown up a bit and accepted that the life he wants you to live is just not going to happen.
    Michael: No it isn’t!
    Tensions started to build and there is a bit more anger in their tone.
    Alex: Just do it. He hands him the flip phone.
    Michael: I said no!
    Alex: Seriously, Michael. Be the bigger person here and call your dad.
    Michael: Why?! Why is it my duty to be the bigger person?
    Alex: He slow it down a bit and speaks sincerely. Because you’re a good guy, Michael. What are you afraid of?
    Michael: He is starting to lose it. I don’t want to be rejected, okay. Why would an honored army veteran want to accept his runaway son who is living in a cheap flat in this crazy gay mecca? He probably wants me to disappear off the face of this earth, and if he wants to keep his dignity with anyone from our base, he should!
    Michael falls into Alex’s arms.
    Alex: I don’t want you off the face of the earth. I want you to stay right here. Okay?
    Alex just quietly holds the sobbing Michael. The flip phone rings. Just get some sleep. Michael lays down and closes his eyes. Alex gets off the couch, walks over to the kitchen, and answers his phone.
    On the left edge of the stage a spot light shines down on Jenna. She is on the phone.
    Jenna: Is this…Alex?
    Alex: Uh…yeah. Who’s this?
    Jenna: My name is Jenna Hastings. I own the gallery where Michael was displaying his work last week.
    Alex: Oh yeah. Hey, we were wondering if you found the name of the person who bought his drawing.
    Jenna: Yeah. I don’t know if it was just a really weird coincidence, but it was bought by someone with the last name Norris. The address was really obscure too. It was the address of some hospital all the way out in Georgia.
    Alex stands there in shock.
    Maybe they are redecorating?
    Alex: I’ll let Michael know. Thanks.
    The lights go out on the stage except for two spots, one on Alex and one on Michael, who is sleeping on the couch. Alex still has the phone stuck to his hear in shock. After a second or two a big smile of relief spreads across his face, and he glances down at Michael. He holds the phone out in front of him and as he flips it closed, the stage goes black.
     
  2. coreyjazz23

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    No, no, no. I need more, this simply won't do. But in a way it does wrap up quite nicely. Wonderfully written.
     
  3. Prccgeek

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    I think I might write a second act (someday, I'm a bit busy right now, school, auditions, recitals, common apps, and a choral festival in Vienna and radio show... It goes on forever) you would see how Michael reacts and he goes to see his father. I don't know, still Rollin it around in my mind.
     
  4. punkrocker99

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    WOW this is AMAZING! :slight_smile: I Loooooove it. pleeease write more!!
     
  5. Prccgeek

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    Thanks a lot!
    Ps I'm diggin' the happy dance.
     
  6. Prccgeek

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    Hey, I got a 94% on this!!!! My AP class is one of my harder classes so I was really proud of myself! It totally boosted up my grade! yay for creative writing projects! (It probably also means that my teacher is pretty gay friendly which makes me happy too.)
     
  7. Prccgeek

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    I entered this thing in a writing contest. Hope it does well.