Audition Dates
Link: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/3456623122
Link: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/3456623122
CHARACTER LIST
ROY M. COHN: a successful New York lawyer and unofficial power broker.
JOSEPH PORTER PITT: chief clerk for Justice Theodore Wilson of the Federal Court of Appeals, Second Circuit.
HARPER AMATY PITT: Joe’s wife, an agoraphobic with a mild Valium addiction.
LOUIS IRONSON: a word processor working for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
PRIOR WALTER: Louis’s boyfriend. Occasionally works as a club designer or caterer, otherwise lives very modestly but with great style off a small trust fund.
HANNAH PORTER PITT: Joe’s mother, formerly of Salt Lake City, now in Brooklyn, staying in Harper and Joe’s apartment,
BELIZE: a registered nurse and former drag queen whose name was originally Norman Arriaga; Belize is a drag name that stuck.
THE ANGEL: four divine emanations, Fluor, Phosphor, Lumen and Candle; manifest in One: the Continental Principality of America. She has magnificent wings.
OTHER CHARACTERS:
ALEKSII ANTEDILLUVIANOVICH PRELAPSARIANOV: the World’s Oldest Bolshevik. Should speak with a Russian accent that is strong but comprehensible.
MR. LIES: Harper’s imaginary friend, a travel agent.
HENRY: Roy’s doctor.
ETHEL ROSENBERG: a ghost from Roy’s past.
EMILY: a nurse.
THE MANNEQUINS IN THE MORMON VISITORS’ CENTER DIORAMA ROOM: THE MOTHER, THE FATHER, THE VOICE OF CALEB, THE VOICE OF ORRIN.
THE CONTINENTAL PRINCIPALITIES: THE ANGEL EUROPA, THE ANGEL AFRICANII, THE ANGEL OCEANIA, THE ANGEL ASIATICA, THE ANGEL AUSTRALIA, THE ANGEL ANTARCTICA
CHARACTER MONOLOGUES
ROY COHN: Any more of your lip, boy, and you'll be flipping Big Macs in East Hell
before tomorrow night! And get me a real phone, with a hold button, I mean look at this, it's just one little line, now how am I supposed to perform basic bodily functions on this?
Yeah who is this, the operator? Give me an outside line. Well then dial for me. It's a medical emergency, darling, dial the fucking number or I'll strangle myself with the phone cord.
202-733-8525. Martin Heller. Oh hi, Martin. Yeah I know what time it is, I couldn't sleep, I'm busy dying. Listen, Martin, this drug they got me on, azido-methatalo-molamo-ca-whatchamacallit. Yeah. AZT. I want my own private stash, Martin. Of serious Honest-Abe medicine. That I control, here in the room with me. No placebos, I'm no good at tests, Martin, I'd rather cheat. So send me my pills with a get-well bouquet, PRONTO, or I'll ring up CBS and sing Mike Wallace a song: "The Ballad of Adorable Ollie North and His Secret Contra Slush Fund." Oh you only think you know all I know. I don't even know what all I know. Half the time I just make it up, and it still turns out to be true! We learned that trick in the fifties. Tomorrow, you two-bit scumsucking shitheel flypaper insignificant dried-out little turd. A nice big box of drugs for Uncle Roy. Or there'll be seven different kinds of hell to pay.
JOE PITT: I'm flayed. No past now. I could give up anything. Maybe... in what we've been doing, maybe I'm even infected. I'm so... afraid of that. Of things I never knew I'd ever be afraid of, things I didn't even know existed until we—I'm afraid, now, maybe for the first time, really ... um, scared. Because I don't want to be sick. I want to live now. Maybe for the first time ever. And… And I can be anything, anything I need to be. And I want to be with you. You have a good heart and you think the good thing is to be guilty and kind always but it's not always kind to be gentle and soft, there's a genuine violence softness and weakness visit on people. You ought to think about that.
JOE PITT: He didn't deserve what I did to him! I hurt him, Roy! I made him bleed! He ...
He won't ever see me again. Oh no, oh no... What did I do that for? What did I do? What did I— Tell me what to do now. I thought I was doing what I was supposed to do, I thought I'd find my way, the way you did, to the, to the heart of the things, to the heart of the world, I imagined myself... safe there, in the hollow of... but… I'm ... above nothing. I'm... of the world. Whatever... that means, whatever God thinks of the world, I think He must think the same of me. Tell me what I do now. I'm a liar. I lied. I never told you how much you frighten me, Roy. I'm not blind, not ... blind as I tried to be. I've always seen, known what you are. And, and I'm not like that. Not like you. But I've lied and lied and lied..
HARPER PITT: Night flight to San Francisco. Chase the moon across America. God! It's been years since I was on a plane! When we hit thirty-five-thousand feet, we'll have reached the tropopause. The great belt of calm air. As close as I'll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening … But I saw something only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who. had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired. Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that's so.
LOUIS IRONSON: I don't believe you. Not.. Roy Cohn. Joe wouldn't-Not Roy Cohn. He's, he's like the polestar of human evil, he's like the worst human being who ever lived, the, the damage he's done, the years and years of, of... criminality, that whole era, that-Give me fucking credit for something, please, some little moral shred of, of, of something, OK sure I fucked up, I fucked up everything, I didn't want to, to face what I needed to face, what life was insisting I face but I don't know, I've always, I've always felt you had to, to take action, not sit, not to be, to be trapped, um, stuck, paralyzed by-Even if it's hard, or really terrifying, or even if it does damage, you have to keep moving, um, forward, instead of-I can't just, you know, sit around feeling shit, or feeling like shit, I... cry way too easily, I fall apart, I'm no good unless I, I strike out at—Which is easy because I'm so fucking furious at my-So I fucked up spectacularly, totally, I've ruined my life, and his life, I've hurt him so badly but but still, even I, even I am not so utterly lost inside myself that I-I wouldn't, um, ever, like, sleep with someone who ... someone who's Roy Cohn's...
PRIOR WALTER: I'm sorry, baby, I ... I've tried, really, but... I can't, it follows me, it won't let me go. So, maybe I'm a prophet. Not me, alone, all of us, the, the ones whore dying now. Maybe the virus is the prophecy? Be still. Maybe the world has driven God from Heaven. Because, because I do believe that, that over and over, I've seen the end of things. And having seen, I'm going blind, as prophets do. Right? It makes a certain sense to me. Oh, oh God how I hate Heaven. But I've got no resistance left. Except to run.
PRIOR WALTER: But still. Still. Bless me anyway. I want more life. I can't help myself. I do. I've lived through such terrible times, and there are people who live through much much worse, but ... You see them living anyway. When they're more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they're burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children, they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don't know if that's just the animal. I don't know if it's not braver to die. But I recognize the habit. The addiction to being alive. We live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's it, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough, so inadequate but... Bless me anyway. I want more life.
HANNAH PITT: Pitt residence. No, he's out. This is his mother. No I have no idea where he is. I have no idea. He was supposed to meet me at the airport, but I don't wait more than three and three-quarters— I-Yes of course I know her, yes she lives here, what's— OH MY LORD! Is she-Wait, Officer, I don't-She did what, exactly? Why on earth would she chew down a pine tree? You have no business laughing about it, you can stop that right now. That's ugly. Apology accepted. I don't know where that is, I just arrived from Salt Lake and I barely found Brooklyn, I had to give the superintendent money to let me into the—I'll take a ... a taxicab.
No! No hospital! She's not insane, she's just... bewildered, she—I don't see how it's any business of yours what she is. Tell her Mother Pitt is coming.
BELIZE: This didn't come from me and I don't like you but let me tell you a thing or two: They have you down for radiation tomorrow for the sarcoma lesions, and you don't want to let them do that, because radiation will kill the T-cells and you don't have any you can afford to lose. So tell the doctor no thanks for the radiation. He won't want to listen. Persuade him. Or he'll kill you…Watch out for the double blind. They'll want you to sign something that says they can give you M&Ms instead of the real drug. You'll die, but they'll get the kind of statistics they can publish in the New England Journal of Medicine. And you can't sue 'cause you signed. And if you don't sign, no pills. So if you have any strings left, pull them, because everyone's put through the double blind and with this, time's against you, you can't fuck around with placebos.
THE ANGEL: House upon house depended from Hillside,
From Crest down to Dockside,
The green Mirroring Bay.
Oh Joyful in the Buckled Garden,
Undulant Landscape over which
The Threat of Seismic Catastrophe hangs:
More beautiful because imperiled.
POTENT: yet DORMANT: The Fault Lines of Creation!
When He, ALEPH,
GLYPH From Whom All Words Descend,
Tearing Glyph from Auto-Generative All-Adoring Gaze,
He Would Come Down to Us ABLAZE!
THEN: Heaven's Walls would Ring with the
Glad mad moaning of the Winged Throng.
Hot Wet FIRE would flood the Cosmos,
And Igneous Gases Enflame the Voids,
And lights revolve, and spheres resolve,
As ALEPH Burns.
He burns... forever, He...
And then…
HE…CHANGED.
ALEKSII ANTEDILLUVIANOVICH PRELAPSARIANOV: The Great Question before us is: Are we doomed? The Great Question before us is: Will the Past release us? The Great Question before us is: Can we Change? In Time? And we all desire that Change will come.
And Theory? How are we to proceed without Theory? What System of Thought have these Reformers to present to this mad swirling planetary disorganization, to the Inevident Welter of fact, event, phenomenon, calamity? Do they have, as we did, a beautiful Theory, as bold, as Grand, as comprehensive a construct? You can't imagine, when we first read the Classic Texts, when in the dark vexed night of our ignorance and terror the seed-words sprouted and shoved incomprehension aside, when the incredible bloody vegetable struggle up and through into Red Blooming gave us Praxis, True Praxis, True Theory married to Actual Life... You who live in this Sour Little Age cannot imagine the grandeur of the prospect we gazed upon: like standing atop the highest peak in the mighty Caucasus, and viewing in one all-knowing glance the mountainous, granite order of creation. We were one with the Sidereal Pulse then, in the blood in our heads we heard the tick of the Infinite. You cannot imagine it. I weep for you.
THE MORMON MOTHER MANNEQUIN: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice. God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching.
ETHEL ROSENBERG: I decided to come here so I could forgive you. You who I have hated so terribly I have borne my hatred for you up into the heavens and made a needle-sharp little star in the sky out of it. It's the star of Ethel Rosenberg's Hatred, and it burns every year for one night only, June Nineteen. It burns acid green. I came to forgive but all I can do is take pleasure in your misery. Hoping I'd get to see you die more terrible than I did. And you are, 'cause you're dying in shit, Roy, defeated. And you could kill me, but you couldn't ever defeat me. You never won. And when you die all anyone will say is: Better he had never lived at all.