Playwright Portrait, Gina Gionfriddo, Excerpt from Beck Shaw

Gina Gionfriddo, Playwright 2010

pswb©2010

a quote from the play, "Becky Shaw."

performed @ second stage nyc 2010

SUZANNA: Iraq is not your problem, Becky is not your problem...

MAX: That's right. They're not. And I make no apologies. Unless you're Ghandi or Jesus, you have a limited sphere of responsibility. You have a plot of land and the definition of a moral life is tending that plot of land--

SUZANNA: You need new material. I've heard the "plot of land" speech.

MAX: Becky Shaw is not on my plot of land! You are. And I tend my plot. I will always tend my plot.

SUZANNA: You make me sound like an obligation. Am I more than that to you?

MAX: Yes! If I didn't want you on my plot, I would rip you out and compost you. I want you on my plot.

Playwright Portrait, Christopher Durang, Excerpt from Laughing Wild

The Playwright Christopher Durang, 2010

©pswb 2010

Laughing Wild

And think about God. You know, it was nice to believe in God, and an afterlife; and I’m sometimes envious of the people who seems comfortable because they still have this belief. But I remember when everybody won Tonys for “Dreamgirls,” and they all got up there thanking God for letting them win this award, and I was thinking to myself: God is silent on the Holocaust, but He involves himself in the Tony awards?

 

- The Man in “Laughing Wild”

---

I want to talk to you about life. It’s just too difficult to be alive, isn’t it, and to try to function? There are all these people to deal with. I tried to buy a can of tuna fish in the supermarket, and there was this person standing right in front of where I wanted to reach out to get the tuna fish, and I waited a while, to see if they’d move, and they didn’t – they were looking at tuna fish too, but there were taking a real long time on it, reading the ingredients on each can like they were a book, a pretty boring book, if you ask me, but nobody has; so I waited a long while, and they didn’t move; and I couldn’t get the tuna fish cans; and I thought about asking them to move, but then they seemed so stupid not to have sensed that I needed to get by them that I had this awful fear that it would do no good, no good at all, to ask them, they’d probably say something like, “We’ll move when we’re goddam ready, you nagging bitch,” and then what would I do? And so then I started to cry out of frustraton, quietly, so as not to disturb anyone, and still even though I was softly sobbing, this stupid person didn’t grasp that I needed to get by them to reach the goddam tuna fish, people are so insensitive, I just hate them; and so I reached over with my fist, and I brought it down real hard on his head and I screamed: “Would you kindly move asshole!!!”

    

- The Woman in “Laughing Wild”