Table of Contents
OTHER WORKS BY WALLACE SHAWN
SCREENPLAYS:
My Dinner with Andr
by Wallace Shawn and Andr Gregory
Marie and Bruce
by Wallace Shawn and Tom Cairns
TRANSLATIONS:
The Mandrake by Niccol Machiavelli
The Master Builder by Henrik Ibsen
The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht
OPERA LIBRETTI:
In the Dark, music by Allen Shawn
The Music Teacher, music by Allen Shawn
PLAYS:
The Hotel Play
Our Late Night
A Thought in Three Parts
Marie and Bruce
Aunt Dan and Lemon
The Fever
The Designated Mourner
To some people, folk tales, fairy tales, and myths seem like the most realistic narratives. Did my father enchant Mr. Behrman to write that bookin order to lead me to you? When I was a boy, did Behrman enchant me, with his conjurers tales about the theater, plays, actors, costumes, to send me to Andr, Gerry, Cecilyou? Was Marvin real? And were the false dimes in subway telephone booths, the parties, the friends, all merely tricks and enchantments whose true purpose was to lure you out and bring you to me?
I would have slept through everything. If you had just walked by, if you hadnt stopped
For darling D, from W
PRODUCTION HISTORY
Grasses of a Thousand Colors received its world premiere on May 18, 2009 at the Royal Court Theatre, London. The production was directed by Andr Gregory, with design by Eugene Lee, costumes by Dona Granata, lighting by Howard Harrison, sound by Bruce Odland and video by Bill Morrison. The cast was:
| THE MEMOIRIST (BEN) | Wallace Shawn |
| CERISE | Miranda Richardson |
| ROBIN | Jennifer Tilly |
| ROSE | Emily McDonnell |
CHARACTERS
THE MEMOIRIST (Ben), around sixty-five?
CERISE, around fifty?
ROBIN, around forty-five?
ROSE, around twenty-five?
Part One
HE
Well. Hello, everybody. Hello! Hello there! Im just so flattered that youve come to see me here this evening and that youre actually going to allow me to read you some sections from my memoirsI hardly know what to say except, Thank you. Im grateful.
Sowhat should I say, to start things off? I meanwellyou see, this roomI call this room the satin heart, because its sort of shaped like that, its sort of shaped like a chocolate box, you see, and all of you have just become chocolates in a way, because when youre all so nicely sitting there and listening to me, Im deriving a great deal of pleasure from each and every one of you, as if you were chocolates I was eatingha ha ha!and some of you are sort of whiskey-flavored and some are sort of coffee-flavored, or whatever, but I sense each of you distinctly and all of you together, and I find that delicious. And of course I know Im greeting you a bit informally here in my dressing gown and slippers, but everything just feels nicer to me when Im comfortable with what Im wearing, and, you see, I absolutely hate the way men normally dress, because its horribly constricting.
So lets start briskly. Its always good to be brisk, isnt it? And some of you look a bit weary already, you seeyou certainly doso I think Ill just discard these introductory remarks (throws a huge sheaf of papers into a wastepaper basket) and just plunge in, to use a toilet metaphor. OhIm going to recite my epigraph for you, though, because I rather enjoy it. Its by Count DAurore. When I finally awakened after a long, long sleep with many dreams, I was surprised to find that I was lying on a battlefield and holding a sword. It was just after dawn, the air was cold, and the ground was damp with my own blood. As I wondered what circumstances could have brought me here, I looked across the vast expanse of the plain on which I lay, and it seemed that I could see grasses of a thousand colors, in which many rabbits, in absolute silence, were leaping and running like small horses. And then, you see, I just start off with a very simple sentence: Im a lucky person. (and now he reads) Im a lucky person. I was born lucky. And to call a person lucky means, really, that good things sort of rush towards that person, sort of fly towards them somehow, special privileges that other people dont have, and the privileges sort of carve little channels in the fabric of the universe, channels that flow in that persons direction, so that each good thing that went in their direction yesterday helps to make it more likely that more good things will go in their direction today. And, of course, one reason its nice to have luck is that human beings in general are drawn irresistibly to luck, and even words like friendship and love mainly refer to the feelings that draw us to those who are lucky, and so lucky people are surrounded by friends and get to pick whoever they like to keep them company every day, which is a very agreeable situation.
(He looks up from the book and speaks to the audience:)
So you see, it begins with that very basic idea of luck, and then, in the first chapters, well, I do try to define myself a bit. I mean, most of you know me, obviously, first and foremost as a scientista man of science, as we sayeven though I began as a doctor, a man of medicineand of course you know me as a businessman of some description, a man whos accumulated a certain amount of wealth, and of course you also know that Ive spent quite a bit of that supposedly vast amount of wealth on some rather worthy causes, and that I seem to put in quite a bit of time these days expressing my thoughts about the world in various venues, which is probably why youre all so horribly sick of me!ha ha habut you see, I feel its appropriate, frankly, to give my views when people ask my opinion about important thingsIm sorrylets all play a useful role in society for as long as we can, right?so I mean, if youre so goddamned sick of me, why are you here? Fuck you!!! No, no, no, Im only joking. Ha ha ha
Incidentally, Im sure youve noticed that sometimes people who have good luck are tempted to complain about it. They feel guilty. Oh dear, why me? But theres an idiocy in that.
You see, Im an optimistI come from an optimistic generation. Everyone I know from my generationwere fixers, improvers. Thats what we are. We were born that way, apparently. Do you have a problem? Fine. Problems can be solved. Are you dissatisfied with how fast you can run? Are you dissatisfied with how fast you can think? These are problems that can be solved. So if something isnt right, for Gods sake, fix it. But the exception to that is luck, because luck is the one thing that cant be fixed. Theres good luck for some people and bad luck for other peopleand thats just the way things work in the universe that you and I live in, because, in our particular universe, everything simply isnt situated in the same place. Im sitting over here, a bit closer to the fireplace, youre over there, a bit farther away. In any line of ducks in a pond, some duck will be in front, some duck will be in back. Only one face of the diceand not all sixwill be on top. And in a game of musical chairs, the number of chairs is always one less than the number of people, and when the music stops, theres always one person who has no chair. And so in the book I do a little tracing of some of the very simple pathways of luck:
