Baitz - Three Hotels: Plays and Monologues

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

The Substance of Fire and Other Plays

Copyright 1994 by Available Light Productions, Inc.

Three Hotels copyright 1990, 1992, 1993 by Available Light Productions, Inc. All rights reserved.

Four Monologues copyright 1991 by Available Light Productions, Inc. All rights reserved.

Coq au Vin copyright 1991 by Available Light Productions, Inc. All rights reserved.

It Changes Every Year copyright 1993 by Available Light Productions, Inc. All rights reserved.

Recipe for One, or A Handbook for Travelers copyright 1994 by Available Light Productions, Inc. All rights reserved.

Three Hotels: Plays and Monologues is published by Theatre Communications Group, Inc.,

355 Lexington Ave., New York, NY 10017.

CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that the works in Three Hotels: Plays and Monologues are subject to a royalty. The plays and monologues are fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America, and of all countries covered by the International Copyright Union (including the Dominion of Canada and the rest of the British Commonwealth), and of all countries covered by the Pan-American Copyright Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention, and of all countries with which the United States has reciprocal copyright relations. All rights, including professional and amateur stage performing, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound recording, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved. Particular emphasis is laid upon the matter of readings, permission for which must be secured from the Authors agent in writing.

Inquiries concerning rights should be addressed to William Morris Agency, Inc.,

1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019. Attn.: George Lane.

Lyrics to Lets Live Dangerously (Noel Coward) copyright 1932 Chappell Music Ltd.

(Renewed) All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Baitz, Jon Robin, 1961

Three hotels : plays and monologues / Jon Robin Baitz.1st ed.

ISBN 978-1-55936-820-9

I. Title.

PS3552.A393T48 1994

812'.54dc20

93-51492

CIP

Design and composition by The Sarabande Press

First Edition, May 1994

CONTENTS

Tangier, Morocco

St. Thomas, Virgin Islands

Oaxaca, Mexico

I think I first conceived of Three Hotels as an act of vengeance on my parents behalfthis being the kind of hubris only children are capable of, and only when they believe, erroneously or not, that they have witnessed the humiliation of a mother and father.

Memory is everything to me. In an earlier play, I have a character say, I live each day only so that I may have something to remember tomorrow. Sometimes I think that is the playwrights life (or this playwrights life). Fallible and dangerous as memory is, I do, however, quite clearly recall the phone ringing in my parents small, somewhat charmingly cramped Beverly Hills apartment, and me picking up to hear my father say, Well, Robbie, they finally did it. They let me go, and then a slight laugh of bitter relief.

As it transpired, my father, who had worked for the same company for thirty-some years and had risen amicably through the ranks, had been one of several vice presidents who were asked to take an early retirement that Black Monday, as it came to be known in family mythology. When he retired, I think he became someone else, a man in what was only definable as the second act of his life. My mother was relieved that all the traveling, the secret battles for corporate survival, the hours and days lost in a cold sweat of work-fear, the failing health, the diminution of spiritthese would all finally end.

That is not, I hope, what Three Hotels is about. It simply served as the leaping-off point for what I now realize is an ongoing attempt to understand the unknowable nature of two people I have loved and wanted to protect ever since I was a child, and thereby to learn something about my own flawed and leaky little psychic bag of tricks.

I think what I write about is betrayal. Consider the story of the scorpion who encounters a water buffalo at a riverbank and implores the buffalo to ferry him to the other side. The water buffalo, reluctant at first, says, Youll sting me; I know you, but the scorpion swears on his life his good intentions. Of course, halfway across, the buffalo feels the inevitable white-hot stab of the scorpions sting and asks, wonderingly, Why? Now youve killed us both! To which the scorpion replies, as they go down for the third time, I cant help it; its my nature.... This, to me, is maybe the only story there is, and one simply lives to see it proven or disproved (disproved more often than not, I think, I hope.)

Three Hotels is most assuredly not a play about my parents, but a rumination on betrayal of ones self, ones hopes; and finally, it is the fervent prayer that there be something in this wrecked world to salvage. I wrote it very quickly at a beach hotel much like the one described in Part Twoa hotel exactly like the kind of place I grew up in transit at. After seeing the play, people sometimes express the desire for an actual scene of dialogue, but at the Hoyles hotel there is no talking. There is only a terrible, aching silence, which can only be bridged by the longing to feel that one is still human, even though there is little evidence left to support that wish.

All of the other pieces in the book (with the exception of Recipe for One, or A Handbook for Travelers, written for a benefit at Circle Repertory Company) were written for Naked Angels, a theater company that has been a home to me in New York, and a place to work on a small scale between the more scarily public outings that are the playwrights lot. I am terribly grateful to have had such a place, and such friends as Fisher Stevens, Geoff Nauffts, Patrick Breen, Ron Rifkin and Joe Mantello, Naked Angels all. I have been unspeakably lucky, I realize, to work as a playwright, and to be surrounded by so many people who happily have no place in the sorry fable of the water buffalo and the scorpion.

Jon Robin Baitz

8 February 1994

New York City

This play is dedicated to Joe Mantello,

who brought it and its author to life.

An earlier version of Three Hotels, produced by Public Televisions American Playhouse in 1990, was directed by the author and won him a Humanitas Award.

Three Hotels was orignially produced on the stage in July 1992 by New York Stage and Film Company in association with the Powerhouse Theater at Vassar College, under the authors direction. Later the same summer the play was produced by the Bay Street Theatre Festival in Sag Harbor, New York, under the direction of Joe Mantello.