THE SWEET CHEAT

64 Pages·2010·18.71 MB·English

THE SWEET CHEAT
All photographs by Tod Seelie unless otherwise noted.
www.todseelie.com
THE SWEET CHEAT
CAST:
Kevin Lee.......................................................................................................Trevor Zhou
Cassandra.............................................................................................. Monica Hunken
Serena/Tara........................................................................................Hannah Corrigan
Eddie Cortez /Ricky Martin..............................................................................Ben Cerf
Ernst Wentworth.........................................................................................E. James Ford
Bike Messenger 1/ Grad Student 1/ Bob........................................................... M Scrivo
Bike Messenger 2/ Grad Student 2.......................................................Lizzie Steelheart
Deanna.....................................................................................................Helen Buyniski
Irving Paley/ Ferryman........................................................................... Dylan Gauthier
CREW:
Assistant Director...........................................................................Theresa Buchheister
Music and Sounds...................................................................................George Graham
Lights.......................................................................................................... Jason Sinopoli
Costumes................................................................................................Sarah McMillan
R
Alita Edgar
Sets................................................................................................................Robyn Hasty
Props.................................................................................... Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels
Tech................................................................................................... Bobby Dangerously
House Manager.........................................................................................Kevin Balktick
Photography......................................................................................................Tod Seelie
Design......................................................................................................... Jason Engdahl
Video................................................................................................... Jonathan Jacobson
Casting................................................................................................. Alexandra Caffall
VIDEOS:
Actors.........................Ben Cerf, Hannah Corrigan, Dylan Gauthier, Trevor Zhou
Photos................................................................................................................Tod Seelie
Edits..........................................................................................................Todd Chandler
Music and Sounds.................................................................................George Graham
Costumes.................................................................................................Ellen Johansing
Sound Recordings...........................................................Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels
Director...............................................................................................................Jeff Stark
With Mark Krawczuk, Shalin Scupham, Stephan von Muehlen, Radek Szczesny,
Joe Riley, Adam Katzman, Hannah Curtis, and Vanessa Cronan.
Adapted from the Albertine Notes by Rick Moody.
Directed by Jeff Stark.
PRODUCTION NOTES
The play is adapted from the 2002 short story The Albertine Notes, by Rick Moody.
The company performs in a derelict building. The audience buys tickets at Grand
Central station and rides a train to the performance. Crew members warn the
audience about risks of the performance on the train.
Scenes are played on sets throughout the building complex. The audience moves
from place to place, following actors, music, and sound cues.
Interscenes (entr’acte) are micro-scenes that take place amid the linear, narrative
scenes. They are impressionistic, and the audience does not need to see them all or
experience them in a particular sequence. In fact, the audience might entirely miss
more than one of them. Some interscenes will happen simultaneous with scenes.
PROLOGUE
LOCATION: Northbound train.
SETTING: A lecture hall.
[M Scrivo warns the audience of the risks and dangers of attending the
performance.]
Wentworth: In the next 15 minutes, the New York City that you know will no
longer exist.
Most of lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn were incinerated when an
unknown person detonated a nuclear explosion in Union Square. Millions of
people were killed and many more injured. Your family, lovers, pets, and co-
workers are all gone. And you were left to carry their memory.
This all happens in the next 13 minutes.
If you were standing in Harlem that day facing Southwest, you would have seen
the entire skyline subsumed in a perfect blinding light. A dark cloud rose above
the remaining buildings and stretched its arms over the city. The nausea you
felt, as your cells were slowly poisoned by radioactive particles, would gradually
overtake you and you’d collapse to the ground vomiting.
All of this, just 12 minutes from now.
The years following the blast were filled with tragedy for those who survived.
Most were driven mad by their memories. The rest would seek some sort of
relief. When you’re used to living a comfortable middle-class life, going to the
organic farmer’s market on the weekend, or enjoying dinners out at the new
Indian restaurant, you’re bound to become very uncomfortable when 50 square
blocks of your city suddenly look like a NASA photo of Mars.
[Deanna, who has been quietly watching the prologue, nods off and falls out of
her chair.]
Oh, dear. Miss?! Miss, are you alright? Could someone please attend to her. A
young woman has just collapsed in the aisle. Forgive us ladies and gentlemen, for
the brief interruption.
Grad Student 2: I think she’s high.
Wentworth: [Exasperated.] Good lord. Then get her out of here. We have an
extremely limited amount of time to prepare and we can’t afford interruptions
from a worthless junkie. Make sure she’s put somewhere safe ... Wretched thing.
[Grad Student leads Deanna to the back of the car. Ernst waits for them to
leave.]
My apologies for the disturbance. I assure you, it won’t happen again.
[Checks his watch.]
Unfortunately, our brief window of time has grown even briefer. The further
this train travels, the closer we get to what changed everything.
It’s only seven minutes now. Seven minutes until we arrive in New York City
after the blast. After the fires. After the evacuation. After the trauma units filled
with burn victims.
Crime syndicates now control the streets and the remaining residents have taken
refuge in the outer-boroughs or barricaded themselves in college campuses,
abandoned warehouses, and old armories. People just turned their backs on
Manhattan, which is the center of nothing now, except maybe of society ladies
with radiation burns. It is nothing but a landfill.
You will be a witness to what remains. Pay attention. Listen carefully. Remember
what you see. The world is filled with forgetters now.
E. James Ford wrote this prologue with help from zombie newsreels and the Albertine Notes.

SCENE 1
LOCATION: Out building, third floor. Long room. Corner.
SETTING: Kevin Lee’s armory building/the newspaper office/a diner.
MUSIC: The Mind Is a Waiting Room on portable amp.
[Kevin Lee in a chair to the audience. Tara, Bob, Deanna in view. Tara wears a
phone headset.]
Kevin Lee: [Into a recorder.] The first time I got high all I did was make sure
these notes came out all right. I mean, I wanted the girl at the magazine to offer
me work again, and that was going to happen only if the story sparkled. There
wasn’t much work then because of the explosion.
That was before Albertine.
Street name for the buzz of a lifetime. Bitch goddess of the overwhelming past.
Albertine. Rapids in the river of time. Take up the Albertine eyedropper and
any memory you’ve ever had is available to you all over again.
Not a memory like you’ve experienced it before, not a little tremor in some
register of your helter-skelter consciousness, like, “Oh yeah, I remember when
I ate peanut butter and jelly with Serena in Boston Commons and drank rum
out of paper cups.”
No. The actual event itself, playing in front of you as though you were
experiencing it for the first time. There’s Serena in blue jeans with patches on the
knee, the green sweatshirt that goes with her eyes, drinking the rum a little too
fast and spitting up some of it, picking her teeth with her deep red nails, shade
called “lycanthrope,” and there’s the taste of super-chunky peanut butter, in the
sandwiches, stale pretzel rods. The smell of a city park at the moment when the
rain dampens the pavement, car exhaust, the sound of kids fighting over the
rules of softball, a homeless dude scamming you for a sip of your rum.
Get the idea?
It almost goes without saying that Albertine appeared in a certain socio-
economic sector not long after the blast. When you’re used to living a
comfortable middle-class life, when you’re used to going to the organic farmer’s
market on the weekend, maybe a couple of dinners out at the new Indian place,
you’re bound to become very uncomfortable when 50 square blocks of your city
suddenly look like a NASA photo of Mars.
You’re bound to look for some relief when you’re camped in a high school
gymnasium pouring condensed milk over government-issued cornflakes. Under
the circumstances, your memory sustains you, right? So you take the eyedropper,
hold open your lid, and escape into the past. Afternoons in the stadium, those
lights on the turf, the first roar of the crowd. Or how about your first concert?
Or your first kiss?
Only going to cost you twenty-five bucks.
I’m Kevin Lee. Chinese-American, third generation, which doesn’t mean my
dad worked in a delicatessen to get me into MIT. It means my father was an
IT venture capitalist and my mother was a microbiologist. I dropped out of
UMASS and moved to New York to get away from their disappointment. I
got a job writing for one of the alternative weeklies. It was something. But the
newspaper office and nine-tenths of its reporting staff were incinerated. Not like
I need to bring all of that up again. If you need to assume anything, assume that
all silences from now on have grief in them.
Tara: Look, you don’t have to like the assignment, just do the assignment. If you
don’t want it there are 50 others behind you who do.
Kevin Lee: The editor was called Tara. She had turquoise hair. She looked like
a girl I knew when I was younger. There were a lot of stories. Lots of different
experiences. Lots of fibs, exaggerations, innuendoes, rumors. Not only did
Albertine trigger bad memories as frequently as good ones -- this is the lore --
but she also allowed you to remember the future.
Tara: Find out if it’s true. Find out if we can get to the future on it.
Kevin Lee: Why? What do you want to do with it?
Tara: None of your business. [Beat.] Maybe see if I’m ever going to get a
promotion.
Kevin Lee: Large-scale drug dealing, it’s sort of like beta-testing. There are
unscrupulous people around. Try giving your drug to a hundred and fifty
thousand disenfranchised members of the new poor in a recently devastated
American city.
But these bad memories, it became a problem. One guy I interviewed, early on
when I was chasing the story, he spoke about having only moments of intense