View Editor's Note: |
| Adrienne is truly one of our greatest playwrights ("our" as in women, theater, philosophy, writing). Here came this play in 1964 with heart-stopping filmic imagery with so much to say about emerging consciousness, the archetypal power of film, sometimes about being black, mostly about being a woman, aspirations, surroundings, a play demanding attention then, and now. |
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A MOVIE STAR HAS TO STAR IN BLACK AND WHITE (Scene III)
SCENE III
JEAN PETERS and BRANDO are still sitting in Viva Zapata but now there are photographs above the bed of CLARA'S parents when they were young, as they were in Now Voyager. Wally's room is dark. Lights of the ship from Now Voyager.
JEAN PETERS. Wally is not expected to live. (She tries to stand.) He does not move. He is in a coma. (Pause.) There are so many memories in this house. The rooms besiege me.
My brother has been living here in his old room with my mother. He is separated from his wife and every night has been driving his car crazily around the street where she now lives. On one of these nights was when he had the accident.
(JEAN PETERS and BRANDO stare at each other. A small dark boat from side opposite Wally's room. In it are SHELLY WINTERS and MONTOGOMERY CLIFT. CLARA sits behind SHELLY WINTERS writing in her notebook. MONTGOMERY CLIFT is rowing. It is A Place In The Sun. Movie music. BRANDO and JEAN PETERS continue to change sheets.)
CLARA. I am bleeding. When I'm not at the hospital I have to stay in bed. I am writing my poems. Eddie's come from New York to see my brother. My brother does not speak or move.
(MONTGOMERY CLIFT silently rows dark boat across. CLARA has on a nightgown and looks as if she has been very sick, and heartbroken by her brother's accident. MONTGOMERY CLIFT, as was HENREID and BRANDO, is mute. If they did speak they would speak lines from their actual movies. As the boat comes across BRANDO and PETERS are still. Movie music. EDDIE comes in the room with JEAN PETERS and BRANDO. He still has his textbook and briefcase. SHELLY WINTERS sits opposite MONTGOMERY CLIFT as in A Place In The Sun. CLARA is writing in her notebook.)
EDDIE. (To JEAN PETERS; simultaneously CLARA is writing in her diary.) Are you sure want to go on with this?
JEAN PETERS. This?
EDDIE. You know what I mean, this obsession of yours?
JEAN PETERS. Obsession?
EDDIE. Yes, this obsession to be a writer?
JEAN PETERS. Of course I'm sure.
(BRANDO is reading. CLARA - from the boat.)
CLARA. I think the Steinbergs have lost interest in my play. I got a letter from them that said they have to go to Italy and would be in touch when they came back.
EDDIE. I have enough money for us to live well with my teaching. We could all be so happy.
CLARA. (From boat.) Ever since I was twelve I have secretly dreamed of being a writer. Everyone says it's unrealistic for a Negro to want to write.
Eddie says I've become shy and secretive and I can't accept the passage of time, and that my diaries consume me and that my diaries make me a spectator watching my life like watching a black and white movie.
He thinks sometimes
- to me my life is one of my black and white movies that I love so - with me playing a bit part.
EDDIE. (To JEAN PETERS looking up at the photographs.) I wonder about your obsession to write about your parents when they were young. You didn't know them. Your mother's not young, your father's not young and we are not that young couple who came to New York in 1955, yet all you ever say to me is Eddie you don't seem the same since you came back from Korea.
(EDDIE leaves. MONTGOMERY CLIFT rows as SHELLY WINTERS speaks to him. Lights on BRANDO and PETERS start slowly to dim.)
SHELLY WINTERS. (To MONTOGOMERY CLIFT.) A Sunday Rain
- our next door neighbor drove me through the empty Sunday streets to see my brother. He's the same. My father came by the house last night for the first time since he left Cleveland and he and my mother got into a fight and my mother started laughing. She just kept saying see I can laugh ha ha nothing can hurt me anymore. Nothing you can ever do, Wallace, will ever hurt me again, no one can hurt me since my baby is lying out there in that Hospital and nobody knows whether he's going to live or die. And very loudly again she said ha ha and started walking in circles in her white shoes. My father said how goddamn crazy she was and they started pushing each other. I begged them to stop. My father looked about crazily.
I hate this house. But it was my money that helped make a down payment on it and I can come here anytime I want. I can come here and see my daughter and you can't stop me, he said.
CLARA. (To diary.) The last week in March I called up my mother and I told her that Eddie and I were getting a divorce and I wanted to come to Cleveland right away.
She said I'm coming up there.
When, I said. When?
It was four o'clock in the afternoon.
When can you come I said.
I'll take the train tonight. I'll call you from the station.
Should I come and meet you?
No, I'll call you from the station.
She called at 10:35 that morning. She said she would take a taxi. I went down to the courtyard and waited. When she got out of the taxi I will never forgot the expression on her face. Her face had a hundred lines in it. I'd never seen her look so sad.
CLARA. (Reciting her play.) They said: I had lost my mind, read so much, buried myself in my books. They said I should stay and teach summer school. But I went. All the way to London. Out there in the black taxi my cold hands were colder than ever. No sooner than I left the taxi and passed down a gray walk through a dark gate and into a garden where there were black ravens on the grass, when I broke down. Oow
- oww.
SHELLY WINTERS. This morning my father came by again. He said Clara I want to talk to you. I want you to know my side. Now, your mother has always thought she was better than me. You know Mr. Harrison raised her like a white girl, and your mother, mark my word, thinks she's better than me. (It was then I could smell the whiskey on his breath
- he had already taken a drink from the bottle in his suitcase.)
(She looks anxiously at MONTGOMERY CLIFT trying to get him to listen.)
CLARA. (Reading from her notebook.) He came to me in the outhouse, in the garden, in the fig tree. He told me you are an owl, ow, oww, I am your beginning, ow. You belong here with us owls in the fig tree, not to somebody that cooks for your Goddamn Father, oww, and I ran to the outhouse in the night crying oww. Bastard they say, the people in the town all say Bastard, but I
- I belong to God and the owls, ow, and I sat in the fig tree. My Goddamn Father is the Richest White Man in the Town, but I belong to the owls.
(Putting down her notebook. Lights shift back to PETERS and BRANDO on the bed.)
JEAN PETERS. When my brother was in the army in Germany, he was involved in a crime and was court-martialed. He won't talk about it. I went to visit him in the stockade.
It was in a Quonset hut in New Jersey.
His head was shaven and he didn't have on any shoes. He has a vein that runs down his forehead and large brown eyes. When he was in high school he was in All City track in the two-twenty dash. We all thought he was going to be a great athlete. His dream was the Olympics. After high school he went to several colleges and left them; Morehouse (where my father went), Ohio State (where I went), and Western Reserve. I'm a failure he said. I can't make it in these schools. I'm tired. He suddenly joined the army.
After Wally left the army he worked nights as an orderly in hospitals; he liked the mental wards. For a few years every fall he started to school but dropped out after a few months. He and his wife married right before he was sent to Germany. He met her at Western Reserve and she graduated cum laude while he was a prisoner in the stockade.
(Movie music. Dark boat with MONTGOMERY CLIFT and SHELLY WINTERS reappears from opposite side. MONTOGOMERY CLIFT rows. CLARA is crying.)
SHELLY WINTERS AND CLARA. Eddie's come from New York because my brother might die. He did not speak again today and did not move. We don't really know his condition. All we know is that his brain is possibly badly damaged. He doesn't speak or move.
JEAN PETERS. I am bleeding.
(Lights suddenly dim on MARLON BRANDO and JEAN PETERS. Quite suddenly
SHELLY WINTERS stands up and falls "into the water." She is in the water, only her head is visible, calling silently. MONTGOMERY CLIFT stares at her. She continues to call silently as for help, but MONTGOMERY CLIFT only stares at her. Movie music. CLARA starts to speak as SHELLY WINTERS continues to cry silently for help.)
CLARA. The doctor said today that my brother will live; he will be brain damaged and paralyzed.
After he told us, my mother cried in my arms outside the hospital. We were standing on the steps, and she shook so that I thought both of us were going to fall headlong down the steps.
(SHELLY WINTERS drowns. Light goes down on MONTGOMERY CLIFT as he stares at SHELLY WINTERS drowning. Lights on CLARA. Movie music. Darkness. Brief dazzling image of COLUMBIA PICTURES LADY.)
END
Adrienne Kennedy has been a force in American theatre since the early 1960's, influencing generations of playwrights with her hauntingly fragmentary lyrical dramas. She has been commissioned to write plays for the Public Theater, Jerome Robbins, The Royal Court, and Juilliard. Kennedy has been a visiting lecturer at many universities, including New York University, the University of California Berkeley, and Harvard. She has received a Guggenheim fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters award. Her plays are part of college curricula in the United States, Europe, and Africa. Kennedy is the recipient of an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Writer's Award, the Pierre LeComte duNouy Foundation Award, and three Obies. Kennedy's autobiography, People Who Led to My Plays, was published by Knopf in 1987 and is currently available in paperback from Theatre Communications Group. A Movie Star has to Star in Black and White and her other plays (including Funnyhouse of a Negro Obie Award 1964 and June and Jean in Concert Obie Award 1996) are published in the Adrienne Kennedy Reader by the University of Minnesota Press, Copyright 2001.