THE CHARACTERS:
ELIOT
JOYCE
FAULKNER
STEIN
THE SCENE: A bare room with the suggestion of windows and doors. The lighting
should be dim; enough to see the characters, but just enough. There is a chair CENTER
STAGE and two dustbins down R. of the chair.
(As the curtains open, JOYCE is sitting on the chair in the middle of the room. He is old,
cranky, and holding an empty bottle of whiskey in one hand. ELIOT is standing down L.
He goes down, peers at JOYCE, then crosses to the dustbins, looking inside each one.)
ELIOT: Bloody woman, good for nothing. (looks over at JOYCE) Apeneck Joyce among
the nightingales...
JOYCE: Ahhhhhhh...awake again, naturally. Me to drink.1 (He attempts to take a sip
from his bottle, but it is empty. He looks at the bottle dejectedly) Is there any writer—
better than me? No doubt. Formerly. But now?
(Pause)
Stein?
(Pause)
Faulkner?
(Pause.)
...Eliot?
(Pause.
I am willing to believe that they CAN write. But can they write as well as I? No doubt.
(Pause)
No, all is—
(yawn)
whiskey.
(grins)
The drunker a man is the fuller he is.
(sighs)
And then, the emptier.
(Looks at his bottle)
Eliot! One day that boy’s going to leave me and write something stranger than I did.
(Throws the bottle on the floor and bellows) ELIOT!
(ELIOT shuffles onto the stage. He is young, dapperly dressed, and very American,
though he is trying his best to adopt a British accent and failing miserably)
ELIOT: What do you want?
JOYCE: I want more whiskey!
ELIOT: There’s no more whiskey.
JOYCE: There was whiskey yesterday.
1
Joyce is Irish, and we all know that the Irish are filthy drunks.
ELIOT: Well, you drank it all, because you’re a bloody drunk..
JOYCE: And I think you’re a bloody idiot. Go get me book.
ELIOT: There is no more book.
JOYCE: And why not?
ELIOT: We finished that book.
JOYCE: Well, go look for another.
ELIOT: There are no more.
JOYCE: Did you know that I’m blind?
ELIOT: Yes, everyone knows it.
JOYCE: Did you ever look to see for yourself?
ELIOT: ...No.
JOYCE: How do you feel?
ELIOT: I feel fine, aside from the fact that I think the world is on its way to immortal
ruin.
JOYCE: You feel normal?
ELIOT: What is normal in this depraved world?
JOYCE: I feel a little drunk...Eliot?
ELIOT: Yes?
JOYCE: Have you not had enough?
ELIOT: Of drinking? I haven’t started yet.
JOYCE: No! Of this...thing.
ELIOT: I have always had enough. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling
across the floors of silent seas.
JOYCE: Have you been into my whiskey?
ELIOT: No.
JOYCE: Then go get me some.
ELIOT: There is no more.
JOYCE: I’ll give you nothing more to eat.
ELIOT: Should I, after teas and cakes and ices, have the strength to force the moment to
its crisis?
JOYCE: What are you talking about?
ELIOT: It’s one of my poems. Didn’t you read my first book?
JOYCE: No. I don’t read American trash.2
(Pause)
Why are you here?
ELIOT: Why are you here?
JOYCE: My purpose is to be read in English classes by bored university students for
years to come.
ELIOT: What a stupid purpose.
JOYCE: It’s your purpose too, you just don’t know it yet. You haven’t written The
Wasteland.
ELIOT: The Wa-who?
JOYCE: It’s no use telling you now. You’re going to write something stranger than even
Finnegans Wake.
ELIOT: That’s not possible.
2
Joyce did, in fact, read American trash.
JOYCE: You’re leaving me behind, all the same.
ELIOT: I’m trying.
JOYCE: You admired me once.
ELIOT: Once!
JOYCE: How is your anti-Semitism?
ELIOT: Still going strong.
JOYCE: But no one cares.
ELIOT: No, not terribly.
(Paces around)
JOYCE: Where are you?
ELIOT: Sometime in the middle of my disillusionment period.
JOYCE: Go and get your Cantos.
ELIOT: There are no more Cantos.
JOYCE: What have you done with your Cantos?
ELIOT: I never wrote them.
JOYCE: You are impossible!
ELIOT: Pound did.
JOYCE: Pound, Pound, Pound.
(FAULKNER emerges from one of the dustbins, listening. He also holds a whiskey bottle
gripped in one hand.)
ELIOT: I’ll leave you and go to him, I have things to write. (exits)
JOYCE: Outside of here there is no writing.
FAULKNER: My whiskey!
JOYCE: Accursed American!
FAULKNER: My whiskey!
JOYCE: Oh Absalom Absalom! What have you done to yourself? As I lay dying I am
subjected to your guzzle, guzzle.
(ELIOT enters)
JOYCE: I thought you were leaving?
ELIOT: Not just yet.
FAULKNER: My whiskey!
JOYCE: Give him his whiskey.
ELIOT: There’s NO MORE whiskey.
JOYCE (to FAULKNER): You hear that? There’s no more whiskey. You’ll never get any
more whiskey so you won’t write any stupid shite3 ever again.
FAULKNER: I want my whiskey!
JOYCE: Go get him a bourbon. (ELIOT exits) Accursed copycat! How is The Sound and
the Fury?
FAULKNER: Never mind The Sound and the Fury.
ELIOT: I’m back with the bourbon.
(Gives it to Faulkner)
FAULKNER: What is it?
ELIOT: Wild Turkey.
FAULKNER: It’s cheap! I can’t!
JOYCE: Bottle him!
3
British for “shit.”
(ELIOT pushes FAULKNER back into the bin and closes the lid)
ELIOT: If Americans only knew.
JOYCE: Teach him to write!
ELIOT: I can’t write.
JOYCE: True. And I can’t read.
ELIOT: That is not what I meant, at all.
JOYCE: To every one his own specialty.
(Pause)
No lady friends?
ELIOT: Ladies are not friends. They are chattering magpies.
JOYCE: I thought I told you to be off.
ELIOT: I’m trying. My life is miserable and Godless. (Exit Eliot.)
(JOYCE leans back in his chair. FAULKNER lifts up the lid of his dustbin and knocks on
STEIN’s dustbin. She emerges.)
STEIN: What is it, Faulkner? Am I famous yet?
FAULKNER: Were you asleep?
STEIN: Oh no!
FAULKNER: Kiss me.
STEIN: I can’t, I’m a lesbian. And besides, you’re drunk.
FAULKNER: Please?
STEIN: No. Why this farce, day after day?
FAULKNER: I’ve lost my manuscript of The Sound and the Fury.
STEIN: When?
FAULKNER: I had it yesterday.
STEIN (elegiac.) Ah, yesterday.
FAULKNER: Yes, that’s the theme. (pause.) Did you read my books?
STEIN: No. And you?
FAULKNER: No.
STEIN: Don’t worry; nobody did.
FAULKNER: Don’t say that. (pause.) Our art has failed.
STEIN: Yes.
FAULKNER: Did you understand my themes?
STEIN: Yes. And you?
FAULKNER: Yes. Our vision hasn’t failed.
STEIN: No. (pause.) Have you anything else to say to me?
FAULKNER: Do you remember—
STEIN: No.
FAULKNER: --Alice B. Toklas?
(They laugh heartily.)
STEIN: We lived in Paris.
(They laugh less heartily.)
FAULKNER: You had a salon4.
(They laugh still less heartily.)
Are you sad?
STEIN: Yes, terribly depressed, all writers are, and you?
4
A place where artists and writers would show up and brag to each other, in other words a wank-fest.
FAULKNER: I’m suicidal.
(Pause.)
Do you want to go in?
STEIN: Yes.
FAULKNER: Then go in.
(STEIN does not move.)
Why don’t you go in?
STEIN: I don’t know.
(Pause.)
FAULKNER: Has he changed your sawdust?
STEIN: It isn’t sawdust. Can you not be a little accurate, Faulkner?
FAULKNER: Your sand, then. It’s not important.
STEIN: It is important.
(Pause.)
FAULKNER: It was sawdust once.
STEIN: Once!
FAULKNER: Now it’s sand.
(Pause.)
From the shore.
(Pause. Impatiently.)
It’s the sand that Stephen Dedalus pissed on, from the shore.
STEIN: You sound like Hemingway crossed with that damned Joyce over there.
FAULKNER: Has he changed yours?
STEIN: No.
FAULKNER: Nor mine.
(Pause.)
I won’t have it!
(Pause. Holds up bourbon bottle.)
Like a swig?
STEIN: No.
(Pause.)
Of what?
FAULKNER: Bourbon. I’ve kept you half.
(He looks at the bourbon. Proudly.)
Three quarters. For you. Here.
(He proffers the bourbon.)
No?
(Pause.)
Do you not feel well?
JOYCE: Quiet, quiet, you’re keeping me awake.
(Pause.)
Talk softer.
(Pause.)
riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay
FAULKNER: Do you hear him? Riverrun!
STEIN: One mustn’t laugh at genius, Faulkner. Why do you always laugh at it?
FAULKNER: Not so loud!
STEIN: Have you anything else to say to me?
FAULKNER: No.
(Pause.)
Shall I tell you the story of the Jabberwocky?
STEIN: No.
(Pause.)
What for?
FAULKNER: To cheer you up.
STEIN: It’s not even yours.
FAULKNER: “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves. Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All
mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.”
STEIN: Not even yours.
FAULKNER: It sounds like it is. “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.” (Loud, drunken laugh)
JOYCE: Oh quiet! Be quiet! My kingdom for an American that shuts up! Eliot! Bottle
them!
(ELIOT enters and goes to bottle FAULKNER and STEIN. As he gets to STEIN, she pulls
him down to speak to him.)
STEIN: Desert! (ELIOT closes the bin lid on her.)
JOYCE: What did she say?
ELIOT: She told me to go into the desert—the cactus land.
JOYCE: Damn busybody!
(Pause.)
It’s time for my story. Do you want to listen to my story?
ELIOT: No.
JOYCE: Why not?
ELIOT: Because I’m leaving you.
JOYCE: But you can’t write.
ELIOT: And you can’t read.
JOYCE: Wake Faulkner and see if he wants to listen.
(ELIOT crosses to FAULKNER’s bin, knocks on it, and lifts the lid. After a moment.)
ELIOT: He doesn’t want to hear your story.
JOYCE: I’ll give him a jigger o’whiskey.
ELIOT: He wants a mint julep.
JOYCE: Tell him I’ll give him a mint julep.
ELIOT: It’s a deal. (exits)
FAULKNER: I’m listening.
JOYCE: Wanker!5 Why did you copy my stream-of-consciousness?
FAULKNER: I didn’t know.
JOYCE: What? What didn’t you know?
FAULKNER: That you were writing pretentious bullshit too.
(Pause.)
You’ll give me a mint julep?
JOYCE: After Ulysses.
5
A really funny word that basically means “bastard.”
FAULKNER: You swear?
JOYCE: Yes.
FAULKNER: On what?
JOYCE: My honor.
(Pause. They both laugh heartily.)
FAULKNER: Two.
JOYCE: One!
FAULKNER: One for me and one for—
JOYCE: Just one, you bloody drunk!
(Pause.)
Where was I?
(Pause.)
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which
a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained
gently-behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
(Pause.)
Introibo ad altare Dei.
Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:-- Come up,
Kinch. Come up, you fearful jesuit.
(Stifled hilarity of FAULKNER.)
Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed
gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awaking mountains. Then,
catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air,
gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy,
leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face
that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued
like pale oak.
(Pause.)
Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the bowl smartly.
Back to barracks, he said sternly. He added in a preacher's tone:For this, O dearly
beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. Slow music, please.
Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles.
Silence, all.
(Pause.)
He peered sideways up and gave a long low whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt
attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos.
Two strong shrill whistles answered through the calm.
(Pause.)
Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off the current, will
you?He skipped off the gunrest and looked gravely at his watcher, gathering about his
legs the loose folds of his gown. The plump shadowed face and sullen oval jowl recalled
a prelate, patron of arts in the middle ages. A pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips.
(Pause.)
FAULKNER: (Not waiting for him to continue) My mint julep!
(ELIOT enters)
ELIOT: There’s a cat in the kitchen!
JOYCE: A cat! Are there still cats?
ELIOT: There’s one in the kitchen.
JOYCE: And you haven’t written a poem about it yet?
ELIOT: Half. You disturbed us.
JOYCE: Is it good?
ELIOT: Somewhat.
JOYCE: You’ll finish it later; let us pray to God.
ELIOT: I don’t believe in God.
JOYCE: Funny, neither do I. The bastard doesn’t exist.
FAULKNER: My mint julep!
JOYCE: There are no more mint juleps!
FAULKNER: Stein! Stein!
(Pause. FAULKNER raps on STEIN’S lid. No answer. FAULKNER sinks down into his
bin and closes the lid.)
JOYCE: Our revels now are ended.
ELIOT: That’s Shakespeare. You know, I quoted a lot of Shakespeare in my poetry, most
notably my references to Hamlet in my poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,”
underlining Prufrock’s helplessness in the face of—
JOYCE: Would you just bloody shut up?
(Pause. Eliot begins to clear things away.)
JOYCE: What are you doing?
ELIOT: Putting things in order.
(Pause.)
The proper British way!
JOYCE: The British put nothing in order. They just like to think that they do.
ELIOT: I love order. It’s my dream. A world where the eyes reappear as the perpetual
star, multifoliate rose of death's twilight kingdom. The hope only of empty men.
JOYCE: (Staring at ELIOT) What. The. Hell.
ELIOT: I am just trying to put this place in a little order.
JOYCE: Drop it!
(ELIOT drops what he has been carrying.)
ELIOT: Do I dare disturb the mess?
(He goes toward the door.)
JOYCE: What are you doing?
ELIOT: I’m leaving you.
JOYCE: No!
ELIOT: What is there to keep me here?
JOYCE: The...cat.
(Pause.)
I’ve got to get on with my story.
(Pause.)
I’ve got on with it well.
(Pause.)
Ask me where I’ve got to.
ELIOT: Oh by the way, your story?
JOYCE: (surprised) What story?
ELIOT: The one that you keep telling yourself.
(Pause.)
And Faulkner.
(Pause.)
When you get him drunk enough to listen.
JOYCE: Ah, you mean Ulysses?
ELIOT: That’s the one.
JOYCE: Keep going, can’t you, keep going!
ELIOT: You’ve got on with it, I hope.
JOYCE: Not very far.
(He sighs.)
There are days like this, one isn’t inspired.
(Pause.)
No forcing, it’s fatal.
(Pause.)
All you can do really is drink.
(Pause.)
I say I’ve got on with it a little all the same.
ELIOT: Well I never! In spite of everything you were able to get on with it!
JOYCE: Oh not very far, but better than nothing.
ELIOT: Better than nothing?
JOYCE: I’ll tell you how it goes. He’s pissing in the sand—
ELIOT: Who?
JOYCE: What?
ELIOT: Who do you mean?
JOYCE: Who do I mean! Me! I mean, Stephen Dedalus!
ELIOT: Ah him, I wasn’t sure.
(ELIOT laughs.)
JOYCE: What’s so funny?
ELIOT: The sand.
JOYCE: It wouldn’t be the pissing?
ELIOT: Of COURSE it’s the pissing, you idiot.
(Pause.)
Well, go on.
JOYCE: That’s as far as I got.
ELIOT: Will it soon be the end?
JOYCE: Not for another 400 pages or so of babble.
ELIOT: You’ll get through.
JOYCE: I don’t know.
(Pause.)
I feel rather drained.
(Pause.)
If I could drag myself down to the sea and pillow my head on the sand!
ELIOT: Mind you don’t piss on it first.
(Pause.)
There’s no more sand, anyway.
JOYCE: Go and see is Stein dead.
(ELIOT crosses to the bins, raises the lid of STEIN’s, looks in. Pause.)
ELIOT: Looks like it. (Closes lid, straightens.)
She deserved it. Stein sounds...Jewish! And she was a woman!
JOYCE: (Ignoring ELIOT) And Faulkner?
(ELIOT crosses to FAULKNER’s bin, raises lid, looks inside. Pause.)
ELIOT: Doesn’t look like it.
JOYCE: Dammit. What IS he doing, then?
(ELIOT looks again.)
ELIOT: He’s swilling bourbon. And writing.
JOYCE: Then he’s living. God preserve us.
(Pause.)
Did you ever have an instant of happiness?
ELIOT: Have you even READ my poetry?
JOYCE: Open the window.
ELIOT: For what?
JOYCE: I want to hear the mermaids singing, each to each.
ELIOT: I do not think that they will sing to you.
JOYCE: No, it’s YOU they won’t sing to.
ELIOT: No.
JOYCE: So it’s not worthwhile opening it?
ELIOT: No.
JOYCE: Then open it anyway!
(ELIOT crosses to window, opens it. Pause.)
JOYCE: I do not hear them singing.
ELIOT: What did I tell you?
(Long pause.)
JOYCE: Faulkner!
(Pause.)
Faulkner!
(Pause. To ELIOT.)
Go and see if he heard me.
(ELIOT crosses to FAULKNER’s bin, raises lid. Pause.)
ELIOT: He did.
JOYCE: Both times?
ELIOT: One only.
JOYCE: Must’ve been the second.
ELIOT: We will never know, except in death’s dream kingdom.
(Closes the lid.)
JOYCE: Is he still drinking?
ELIOT: No, but he is still writing.
JOYCE: The sober write worse.
(Pause.)
Where is the cat?
(ELIOT goes toward the kitchen.)
No!
ELIOT: I should not finish the poem about the cat?
JOYCE: No.
ELIOT: Then I’ll leave you.
JOYCE: (sadly) That’s right.
ELIOT: (goes to door, turns) If I don’t write that poem, then Andrew Lloyd Weber won’t
base a ridiculously horrid musical on it in the later part of the 20th century.
JOYCE: It will be the end and there I'll be, wondering what can have brought it on and
wondering what can have...(he hesitates)...why it was so long coming.
(Pause.)
There I'll be, in the old shelter, alone against the silence and...
(he hesitates)
...blind. If I can hold my peace, and sit quiet, it will be all over with sound, and
motion, all over and done with.
(Pause.)
I'll have called Faulkner and I'll have called my...
(he hesitates)
Eliot. And even twice, or three times, in case they shouldn't have heard me, the
first time, or the second.
(Pause.)
I'll say to myself, He'll come back.
(Pause.)
And then?
(Pause.)
And then?
(Pause.)
He couldn't, He has gone too far. Soon he will write The Wasteland.
(Pause.)
And then?
(Pause.)
Ah let's get it over!
(He whistles. Enter ELIOT with poem. He halts beside the chair.)
What? Finished?
ELIOT: In spirit only.
JOYCE: Listen to the mermaids!
ELIOT: That again.
JOYCE: They’re calling for you!
(ELIOT hums, going to the window.)
JOYCE: Don’t sing.
ELIOT: One is not allowed to sing anymore?
JOYCE: Are you a mermaid?
ELIOT: What did I do with those steps?
(Finds the ladder, puts it against the wall. Goes halfway up.)
Time still to turn back and descend the stair—
(Pause. Comes back down.)
JOYCE: Eliot.
ELIOT: Mmm?
JOYCE: Do you know what it is?
ELIOT: Mmm.
JOYCE: I’m a drunk Irishman.
(Pause.)
Eliot!
ELIOT: What?!
JOYCE: I said I’m a drunk Irishman.
ELIOT: Lucky for you. At least you’re not American who wants to be British.
(Pause.)
There’s one thing I don’t understand.
(Pause.)
Why the literature anthologies will always compare us. And Faulkner and Stein
too.
JOYCE: No. Perhaps they are too educated for their own good.
ELIOT: I’m tired of our goings-on, very tired.
JOYCE: Then put me in my coffin!
ELIOT: There are no more coffins!
JOYCE: And let it end...with a bang!
ELIOT: No, a whimper.
JOYCE: Did anyone ever really read my work?
ELIOT: Are you referring to me?
JOYCE: (angrily) It’s an aside. You who quote Shakespeare should know about
asides. I’m warming up for my last soliloquy.
(Pause.)
Eliot, this is the end...you have to go write rubbish now.
(ELIOT starts to exit.)
Before you go...say something.
(Pause.)
For inspiration!
ELIOT: Inspiration?
JOYCE: Yes!
ELIOT: 'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
'They called me the hyacinth girl.'
-Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed' und leer das Meer.
JOYCE: Enough!
(ELIOT starts to leave again).
Eliot!
ELIOT: This is what we call making an exit.
JOYCE: Eliot, I’m obliged to you. For your work.
ELIOT: It’s I who am obliged to you.
JOYCE: One last thing. Say hello to Pound for me.
(ELIOT exits.)
JOYCE: Faulkner! Stein!
(Pause. No answer.)
So that is the way it goes, eh?
(Pause.)
A way a lone a last a loved a long the