Where Things Are (Short plays by Steven Schutzman) (Selected Short Plays by Steven Schutzman)
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I could feel the pain behind it.
Sunday, April 08, 2007
Then at least you'll have the dignity of not playing the victim like you were a guest on some TV talk show. What gives you the right to come along, sit next to a total stranger in this empty car and lay your big egg of pain in her lap? Thank you for making me angry. It feels good to be angry in front of you but not at you. I've spent a lot of time in hospitals, overweight, diabetic, with high blood pressure and a bad heart. Never expected to live this long. I used to think of every year after forty as gravy. I was born in a hospital and I will die in a hospital.
Maybe I should never have left the hospital. There's something about a fat man selling life insurance, wheezing through his sales pitch that creates an urgency as if death himself was presenting the charts. I could make my fingers tremble when I flipped the cards. I was salesman of the year five years running.
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My picture was on all the walls, bigger than anyone else's picture. I was so good I was able to get my wife a job at the company. Of course my wife was fat like me and this fact overshadowed all other facts about us. Everything seemed to happen because we were fat. We were set up with each other because we were fat. We were meant for each other because we were fat.
We married each other because we were fat. We were never just two people married to each other but always two fat people married to each other. People thought of us that way and we thought of ourselves that way. It's like coming into a room riding a beast while every one else is on his two feet. It creates spikes of attention to counteract my mesmerizing use of repetition.
The Salesman: A Fifteen Minute Play - Steven Schutzman - Eclectica Magazine v12n2
You don't want to put people to sleep but you don't want them completely awake either. A trance is basically what I'm after. It part of my training as a salesman. And a strong love grew up between us, I thought. A love of the soul. But you know, there's always something; medical advances, new medicines to take and she heard about one for losing weight. A miracle drug but with side effects. Bad for the heart valves. Because of my other ills, I was afraid After expecting to die all those years, I loved my life too much. I begged my wife not to take them, saying I was afraid for her health but there was another deeper reason, you might guess, my fat man's fear, not of my fatness, but that she'd lose weight and leave me, really my fear that the body is the soul: My fear that we get the body our soul deserves, that what's seen is what's inside too: The pills worked and my wife lost weight fast without fasting.
She became regular size, normal, desirable and began acting very differently toward me. It was as if her fatness had been a pregnancy, as if her former self gave birth to a new self; mean, unforgiving, unsympathetic to me anymore in my fatness, as if all the hatred she used to have for her body was suddenly born to be directed at me. I thought it would pass and clung to her desperately.
I tried to serve her but all my kindness was turned on me, taken for weakness, treated as a desperate needy act of clinging. And the attitude of the others in the company changed too. I suddenly became the fat man who was beating them out for salesman of the year. They started sniffing around my wife who felt liberated in the new form of her body. She took a lover from among the other salesmen. People in groups are cruel. Once my wife felt free to make fun of me it liberated everyone else to make fun of me too. Especially as my sales figures fell and I was less valuable to the company.
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I clung to it like a drowning man. Finally when I was cuckolded, fired, humiliated, kicked out of my house, a walking joke, I bought a handgun. I wasn't going to kill anyone else. I wasn't some freak high school student or disgruntled postal employee who kills ten people before he kills himself. I was going to kill myself first, do things in the right order.
The Salesman: A Fifteen Minute Play
You may laugh there. Not one that I'd actually go through with. It just felt good to indulge my planning and self pity in the well-known way. But you know there's always something and one night it happened to push me over, something mysterious. It was on a Thursday.
Thursday is the fat man's day, don't ask me why. Months before, across the street from the boarding house where I was living, a huge tree had fallen in a storm and, don't ask me why, suddenly workers were out there in the middle of the night under the full moon chain-sawing the trunk into large rounds. Chain saw noise way into the night, workmen looking so small next the huge trunk they were cutting up in the moonlight.
I watched them from my window believing I was being shown something. Little men, the giant tree. The world was about me, about me only.
About this show
I had become a world drama like Jesus Christ. You can't imagine the state I was in. And then, the beauty of it, the beauty, when the men would finally saw through a piece of the trunk and expose the flesh of the tree and roll it away, the beautiful round white discs shining like coins of bone all over the ground.
He further suggested that the mainstream culture always manages to co-opt each new development, thereby destroying its power, and that only the art of the artless was immune from the insidious influences of the cultural establishment in which no artist of genuine originality could survive. Miller A young couple's love for one another is tested as they try to conceive a child. Playwrights retain all copyright of their works. My picture was on all the walls, bigger than anyone else's picture. Especially as my sales figures fell and I was less valuable to the company. Again, I felt a lawlessness in the charging train and a kind of permission in the speed of us flying through the darkening twilight of no country at all.
I wept for the sadness of what I had been and the beauty of what I could become. It meant something to me and pushed me over. On the last Friday of every month there's always a potluck at the company where I used to work and my wife still does work. Everyone cooks something and sets it out on a table in the middle of the office with paper plates and napkins and plastic silverware. Keep in mind that Theatre Brut seeks to foster the creative impulse unfettered by social and artistic convention. If you have ever aspired to "experiment" or stretch the boundaries of theater, this is the time to do so.
We are requesting submissions of short plays 10 minutes or less.
Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Where Things Are (Short plays by Steven Schutzman) (Selected Short Plays by Steven. Find "Where Things Are: Selected Shorter Plays by Steven Schutzman" for The Bank Robbery a widely anthologized, Pushcart Prize winning short story · .
These pieces can be dramatic, comedic, musical, monologues, or whatever sparks your creative impulse. That being said -- small casts no more than 4 actors and simple sets are encouraged. Deadline for submission is September 1. There is a rolling acceptance so the sooner-the-better. There is no compensation for presenting the work. Playwrights retain all copyright of their works.
Playwrights may attend the festival. Housing is provided, however, travel is not reimbursed.
Gabor Barabas, Executive Producer.