The Oarsmen & Other Plays

By Louis Phillips

A new collection of plays from Louis Phillips, a widely published poet, playwright, and short story writer, has written some 50 books for children and adults.

• Language: English
• Publisher: M. Stefan Strozier
• Release date: Apr 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781508440659

Book preview

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Oarsmen.....................................................5

Thinking of Egypt.............................................22

Border Crossing...............................................41

The Palace of the Grand Inquisitor.................59

Dead Dog Bounce............................................73

The Stone-Cutters...........................................78

Leda and the Swan........................................105

THE OARSMEN

A moody, misty cove with vegetation unknown to man or beast. A light fog shimmers in the early morning light. Two university men (Robert Handley and Camden Morgan one white, one black, both of  Irish descent) are in a lightweight scull, rowing, rowing, rowing. They wear  sweat shirts and shorts. The University sweat shirts bear the motto: IN VINO VERITAS.

ROBERT: Row one, pearl two...row one, pearl two.... CAMDEN: Pearl two, row one, Row two, pearl one...

The oars dip and raise in unison

ROBERT: I walked into the men's room this morning and there scribbled upon the walls was spread your labia...Oh, oh, I thought: Harvard is suffering from sexual confusion once again.

CAMDEN: Without sexual confusion we would be in the backwater of humanity. It's a sure sign of progress. Think of Oedipus Rex, for example. Or the story of Tereisias. He was first a man, then a woman, then a man again. Those Greeks knew how to hook an audience.

ROBERT: And then someone had written underneath, in pencil—wrong restroom, I think. It was that phrase that has been bothering me all morning. I believe I can handle the word labia, though it's like the word liberal, not used in polite company....

CAMDEN: No need to worry. There is no polite company anymore.

ROBERT: All I know is that somewhere on our campus is a person very unsure of himself....herself.

CAMDEN: My father insisted I go to an Ivy League  University because he believes one finds a better class of graffiti in the bathrooms....correct spelling, at least.

ROBERT: Yes, that's one way to choose a college...Not recommended by most guidance counselors but it will do...Row one, row two, lift oars...Check out the spelling in the bathrooms. If they can't spell your basic four-letter  words right, then I say pack it in. Community colleges are much cheaper anyway. And they are far less pretentious.

CAMDEN: As Socrates said to Phaedrus, perhaps you were in the wrong bathroom.

ROBERT: They didn't have bathrooms in ancient Greece. That's what made them all so philosophical....Hold it! ..Stop rowing...stop!

CAMDEN: What's the matter? ROBERT: Where are we?

CAMDEN: On the Charles River at sunrise. Where we've  been every morning for the past three weeks, while our fellow classmates wind themselves homeward from a night of fornication or razoring pages out of reserve books, or just sleeping in their dorms, all snug in their dreams of annuities and golden parachutes, hostile takeovers, the true classic texts of investing in the Corporate good lining their shelves....While we shiver and sweat and break our backs to bring glory to the Dining Club of Crew.

ROBERT: So you say. But this no part of the Charles River I have ever seen before.

CAMDEN: We place our scull on the Charles River... and we row on the Charles River and we go with the current  or against the current, or with or against the flow of things, we still go wherever the river goes. Ergo, we are still on the Charles River. It follows as the night follows the day, as the high salary and the good life naturally flows from the Harvard MBA.

ROBERT: How can I believe a black man named Camden Morgan?

CAMDEN: My father named me in honor of a race horse.

ROBERT: Your father gives you a horse's name and tells you to enter Harvard because there is a better class of graffiti in  the rest rooms....Oh ye gods look on. What a man is  this!  What a paragon of virtue! A poor, naked forked creature...(in despair) Where are we?

CAMDEN: Perhaps on the fringes of a bad neighborhood, where The Boston Globe daily dips into its reservoir of human interest...one more local family torn asunder by fusion  cooking.

ROBERT: The fog is getting worse...

CAMDEN: Mental fog, yes...But that is what our professors create in us, trying to stomp our imaginations into oblivion with the hob-nailed boots of the unimagined advanced  degrees, complete with footnotes and notorious panty raids into deconstructive literature, shouting Death to Jean-Paul Sartre and Existentialism!

ROBERT: Jean-Paul Sartre is dead... I think. It's difficult to  tell about people who don't appear on television.

CAMDEN: Well that just goes to show you. ROBERT: Goes to show me what?

CAMDEN: Close your eyes and someone is missing...Where did everybody go?

ROBERT: Don't panic. We'll just turn back. Something has gone terribly wrong. I don't even see any other sculls on the river.

CAMDEN: Because we are so well-trained and have left the others behind.

ROBERT: No. Because we don't know a hawk from a handsaw....We must be the first crew in the history of the college to get lost on the Charles River...It's impossible!

CAMDEN: Another F in geography. My family cannot bear it... perhaps we have rowed into a side creek or a cove where Red Sox fans come to drown themselves each pathetic Fall...

ROBERT: It does smell funny here, doesn't it?...The smell of decay....

CAMDEN: Are you trying to scare me?....Can we turn back? Let's go home. We've practiced enough.

ROBERT: (panicking) I don't know where home is!

CAMDEN: The Charles is only a little river. It doesn't rank with the Amazon or the Nile or even Kilimanjaro!

ROBERT: Kilimanjaro is not a river!

CAMDEN: Ah! Now you see the justice of my flunking geography. A mountain or a river it all comes out the same on the final exams! Besides what is geography to a black man?  The world is divided into two simple hemispheres, into those who have meaningful work and those who don't; into those who are given a chance, and those who aren't. That's the true geography of the human race and all the rest is propaganda.

CARRYING A LONG WOODEN OAR AND A LIT LANTERN, A SMALL, WHITE HAIRED MAN (CHARON) IN RAGS, APPEARS OUT OF THE FOG. HE STANDS ON THE SHORE WITH HIS EYES BURNING LIKE COALS.

ROBERT: I am feeling terribly chilled all of a sudden, and it was suppose to be warm today.

CHARON PLACES THE LANTERN ON THE GROUND AND STROKES HIS BEARD.

CHARON: How refreshing to see people coming here in their own boat. It gets to be too much of a burden upon me to have to provide all the transportation....

CAMDEN:"Who is that old man standing on the shore?

CHARON: Without government subsidies, even the Ferry Boat of the Dead will have to curtail its services.

ROBERT: Who is he? From your misanthropic tales, I  thought he was your father.

CAMDEN: He's not my father. My father's dead. ROBERT: Dead?

CAMDEN: From a stroke. Not a rowing stroke, of course...And he would never go outside looking like that. Gotta comb your hair, he would say. Comb your hair. Look good. People always judge you on first impressions. He was the Willy Loman of Bed-Stuy.

CHARON: (CALLING TO THE OARSMEN) Row toward

the shore...It's getting late!

ROBERT: Late? It's not even eight o'clock.

CHARON WALKS DOWN TO THE BOAT. FROM OFF- STAGE WE CAN HEAR SOME FAINT MOANS. AND GROANS AND THE LASH OF WHIPS.

CHARON: You can row across the Acheron and I shall join you on the other side.

ROBERT: Who are you?

CHARON: My name is Charon. Who are you?

ROBERT: My name is Robert Handley and my friend here is Camden Morgan. He's named after a race horse.

CAMDEN: (TO ROBERT) I told you that in strictest confidence! You don't have to tell everybody! Just because I'm a philosophy major, you don’t think I have feelings?

CHARON: After you cross the river, we can break up your boat and burn it for firewood.

ROBERT: We can't do that! The boat belongs to Harvard. They have all kinds of rules about destroying school property.

CHARON: As you wish. You can set it adrift, if you prefer. Now let's see how fast you can row across the River of the Dead.

ROBERT: (starts to row) Right!...Row one, row two...Wait a minute! What river did he say?

CAMDEN: I think he said the River of the Dead.

ROBERT: (calls to Charon) Wait a minute, old  man! Come back. What river did you say we were on?

CHARON: (returning) The river of