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Myself

Characters:

Robert - 40's, black glasses, intellectual
Yvette - mid to late 20's, slender, fairly petite, pretty
Linda - 40's, dyed blonde hair, face lifts, glamorous
Larry - early 20's, handsome hunk

ACT ONE:

Setting: A hotel room in Paris

(Robert and Yvette; Robert is in his bathrobe, having an argument with Yvette.)

YVETTE: You are so predictable!

ROBERT: I am a romantic and all you want is to be amused.

YVETTE: You are a realist to women - that's your problem.

ROBERT: I left New York for Paris thinking my life as a playwright would change.

YVETTE: I wish you would change.

ROBERT: How, Yvette, from moment to moment? I can't live that way for you.

YVETTE: Then go back to Larry.

ROBERT: He's dying.

YVETTE: So you leave him.

ROBERT: No, I couldn't live with myself.

YVETTE: You have never accepted the facts of life.

ROBERT: I'm a writer. I deal with the unpredictable.

YVETTE: You play act with women, and Larry too. You think he's dying but you are dying to be with him and not go on with your life.

ROBERT: I'm an idealist.

YVETTE: You wanted the ideal life for a hedonist without any accountability. You don't even want responsibility for your own acts. You've hidden your life behind your plays. Maybe I'm just an actor to you and not your lover.

ROBERT: Prove that.

YVETTE: You want me as a star in your play but you never wanted me to get to know Larry.

ROBERT: Larry was also my star in a previous Broadway play.

YVETTE: I'm sure he made out with you better than I have.

ROBERT: Cool it. People are listening next door.

YVETTE: All you care about is the public, publicity agents, stars - all for your glory and honor. And to think, your sister was a nun...

ROBERT: Sister Helen was a novice. She got out quickly.

YVETTE: Like you in bed.

ROBERT: But at least she was a saint to Larry.

YVETTE: Because you wouldn't go visit him.

ROBERT: It was too painful.

YVETTE: Doesn't Larry have to live with pain also?

ROBERT: Yes, but I was angry.

YVETTE: No, you were in fear that you too would die younger than you expected, even though Larry is only twenty.

ROBERT: He was my life, my idol.

YVETTE: Idolatry! No, he was your ticket to success like I am. He was your ideal, he renewed your youth, your dream of love, your last chance; and even there you failed.

ROBERT: I gave you and Larry stardom and freedom through my plays.

YVETTE: You wanted us chained to you.

ROBERT: But I'm the one who left America for Paris and could not escape you.

YVETTE: You've still managed to escape me.

ROBERT: At least I thought you and I were friends.

YVETTE: You're too selfish to have a friend or a lover.

ROBERT: I'm suffering too.

YVETTE: You're insufferable, Robert, but you [can] bear to be alone.

ROBERT: I used to read, I used to play the clarinet, I used to be interested in politics, even religion, but I lost interest after Larry's horror story.

YVETTE: Are people just comic book characters to you, or pawns on a chess board?

ROBERT: Stop. I've helped give Larry the best care the doctors are capable of giving.

YVETTE: But you won't give of yourself. I've felt it being next to you, and Larry told me he had the same feeling.

ROBERT: So I'm a cold fish.

YVETTE: No, you're a crocodile.

ROBERT: Yvette, you think you're the only actor. I can line up a dozen for my play.

YVETTE: I like your play. That's where you are honest and real - and only there.

ROBERT: Be grateful. For after the play I wrote for you, Larry became sick and I got writer's block. I couldn't sleep and I lived on vodka and tranquilizers.

YVETTE: It didn't stop you from having Linda by your bedside.

ROBERT: Oh, so you're jealous of my ex. We were married for years and been divorced even longer.

YVETTE: Even the trade magazines knew you married her because they were going to out you.

ROBERT: Ridiculous! Well, okay, in those days it wasn't easy, and honey, in liberal Hollywood it's the same scene today.

YVETTE: Linda took the heat off you.

ROBERT: I paid her off.

YVETTE: Just like you had her take the heat for your youthful left wing political indiscretions.

ROBERT: I had beliefs once, but they've all been betrayed. Read the headlines.

YVETTE: And Robert, you haven't betrayed others?

ROBERT: That's the untold story and it'll only make it on the obituary page. Life's a bitch, hon.

YVETTE: Your memoirs will explode, I'm afraid.

ROBERT: I destroyed my journals and diaries when Larry was diagnosed. The funny thing is, the other day I found them on the hard drive.

YVETTE: Did it give you a hard-on since it was about you?

ROBERT: Only a tease, hon.

YVETTE: Why is it all the men I've been intimate with are writers? It must be something in me that drives me into their stories.

ROBERT: You like to be part of their plot lines.

YVETTE: Then why do I have to play the romantic, erotic parts as the audience looks into your soul? Is it because I am only a body and only you have a soul?

ROBERT: Do you think I have one? Sister told me that in gaining the world's praise I lost mine.

YVETTE: You do not believe it.

ROBERT: Nor do you. We are rationalists, and here in France is the height and breadth of rationalism. No one has faith here; they are merely completing the last of the revolution's goals - atheism.

YVETTE: You are right, Robert, but with a corrupt clergy the utopian, terroristic heirs of Robespierre are still around our necks.

ROBERT: Is it any different in the rest of Europe?

YVETTE: We all hang by the same rope, the same guillotine. In Germany, it is nationalism; here, as you know, it is rationalism. But it's atheism that contributed to Communism just like a fallen Christianity with atheism contributed to Nazism and the Vichy regime.

ROBERT: What did it mean to your family, Yvette?

YVETTE: My family claim they were in the Resistance but so does every family.

ROBERT: Who then murdered the Jews and those who were against fascism?

YVETTE: Only history knows the truth, or God, if you believe that He is a witness.

ROBERT: Yvette, what do you believe?

YVETTE: I was brought up with a rather olympian, Sartrean existential faith in action.

ROBERT: And became of their reaction?

YVETTE: They all are in the dark. We have no answers, only the problems of relations, both foreign and of a domestic kind. I was married once to a man who was on the Left politically but became disillusioned with the Algerian situation and ended his life after reading Camus. I was only nineteen and at the Sorbonne.

ROBERT: How did you deal with his suicide?

YVETTE: Paul's death convinced me to express myself and I took a part in the play "Dirty Hands."

ROBERT: That's where you were discovered...

YVETTE: By your agent.

ROBERT: Actually it was Larry's older brother, who liked your performance.

YVETTE: I remember Louis. He was a serious thinker and a fun guy.

ROBERT: He left the States for London and is back taking care of Larry.

YVETTE: Were they close?

ROBERT: Louis blames me, of all people, for Larry's promiscuity. Isn't that ridiculous? Thinking I was always too busy for Larry so he had other lovers. Louis said to me that I wanted sex and justice on my own terms.

YVETTE: Isn't that true, Robert?

ROBERT: Come on, grow up, just for me, Yvette. You can stop acting.

YVETTE: I've been in your fame game long enough, Robert. Unlike you, I've kept myself aloof from my celebrity.

ROBERT: Then why are you on the cover of every French and American magazine?

YVETTE: You want to create a scandal in my home, never in yours.

ROBERT: I don't need to create any scandal. You've had enough on your own.

YVETTE: Go to hell. You offered me this part as a partner but you know you want all the credits.

ROBERT: It's I who have put you in lights. Don't tell me you don't crave the attention. Because of me, you're on every marquee.

YVETTE: Who are you, Robert, the modern Marquis de Sade, offering Sodom with your freedom?

ROBERT: I offered you only work.

YVETTE: And that is work with you and live with you and love you, but you betray and destroy everything you try to love, with your poker face. You are anti-life, Robert.

ROBERT: You are my ante; but my price for being lucky at cards is that my lovers leave or die on me.

YVETTE: That's the choice you gave us.

ROBERT: Is it worth it, Yvette?

YVETTE: I'm in your play, aren't I? I'm your playmate as well. But as a writer, you want to infantilize me in your playpen by making all the decisions.

ROBERT: My little girl with little feet.

(Robert kisses Yvette violently. She resists but succumbs.)

ROBERT: We have a news conference, so you'd better touch up your make-up.

YVETTE: My whole life is make up to the world.

ROBERT: I'll make it up as we go along.

(Yvette stares at Robert.)

ACT TWO:

Setting:

Robert's Hollywood apartment

(Larry and Linda)

LARRY: You've come to my bed instead of Robert's.

LINDA: He's still in Paris.

LARRY: Not by himself?

LINDA: No, these days Robert isn't himself. He can't live with himself or by himself.

LARRY: I used to think he needed me.

LINDA: I thought the same about me. We were only props for his ego.

LARRY: Robert propositioned us and we gave our assent.

LINDA: I brought you fruit and veggies.

LARRY: Put them next to my cocktail. Robert thought he was the man.

LINDA: He's really a child.

LARRY: I realized that Robert cannot love. He needs and craves love but cannot part with himself.

LINDA: That's where we come in.

LARRY: When you came in today I was just thinking that Yvette serves him well. But she's also hidden her real feelings like we have.

LINDA: And we all diminish ourselves for his art. That is only a ruse. We didn't want to offend art, so we made believe that we didn't want to offend Robert. We feared his anger towards us. And when Robert gets mad, he is really crazy.

LARRY: He got positively mad at me when my diagnosis came out positive.

LINDA: I think he was devastated.

LARRY: But what about me? Am I chop suey?

LINDA: Larry, even though we've been rivals for Robert's affection, I always had a soft spot for you.

LARRY: Because of my body, or simply your desire for revenge against Robert?

LINDA: Perhaps jealousy made me try to love Robert even more. I hated when The Hollywood Reporter called me his "ex."

LARRY: And the press accused me of being the cause of his marriage breakup.

LINDA: It was over long, long ago.

LARRY: I remember the day of my first audition. I wanted it to go smoothly. I did a scene from "Streetcar." I won him over.

LINDA: You sure did, Larry.

LARRY: Don't be condescending.

LINDA: I remember how happy Robert was with you.

LARRY: Do you think, in retrospect, it was real? I thought he just wanted to show me around.

LINDA: Yvette and I are just chattel to him.

LARRY: Do you talk with her?

LINDA: Intimately. Larry doesn't know a thing. He'd kill me. But I was her confidante on her last picture. She said to me, here we are; an ex and a sex kitten. I told Yvette she was a great actress. But she wouldn't believe me. Robert had convinced her that it was his direction that made her great.

LARRY: I think Robert shot the same game to my head.

LINDA: Larry, I will stand by you.

LARRY: Because I'm gonna die?

LINDA: We're all gonna die, Larry.

LARRY: Did Robert set you up to come here?

LINDA: Don't get paranoid with me.

LARRY: My mind is not the same.

LINDA: I have Robert's number in Paris, if you'd like to contact him.

LARRY: Did he give you his phone number to give me?

LINDA: No, I just thought...

LARRY: Why doesn't he even call me?

LINDA: He's trying to forget you but he can't. That's why Yvette says he's taken up with her.

LARRY: Am I supposed to be sorry?

LINDA: You know Robert made two suicide attempts.

LARRY: Oh, Robert once asked me if we could do it together, in the Russian style.

LINDA: How Tolstoian!

LARRY: Robert called me the idealist.

LINDA: He called you his god.

LARRY: Am I supposed to have an orgasm, or just purr?

LINDA: Why don't we both call him now?

LARRY: I think this is pre-arranged.

LINDA: You're crazy, Larry!

LARRY: So what. Go call.

(Linda dials the phone. Robert appears, answering the phone.)

ROBERT: Hello.

LINDA: Hello.

ROBERT: Oh, Linda, nice to hear from you.

LINDA: Larry is here!

ROBERT: Put him on. Hi Larry, what's up?

LARRY: I'm popping my 23rd pill.

ROBERT: Welcome to the club. Yvette is here.

YVETTE: Hi, Larry.

LARRY: How's the play going for you, Yvette?

YVETTE: Better.

(Larry hands phone to Linda.)

LINDA: Yvette, it's Linda.

YVETTE: Allo.

LINDA: It's good to hear your voice. But I need to see you.

YVETTE: I will be a presenter at the Oscars in late March.

(Yvette puts down the phone.)

ACT III

Setting:

Robert and Yvette in the hotel room in Paris

(Robert is laying in the bed, his head propped up on the pillow.)

ROBERT: That was fun.

PYVETTE: Amusing for you, Robert, but I don't think for Linda or Larry.

ROBERT: Do you think it was torture?

YVETTE: I wouldn't go that far, Robert. But Larry may not be with us very much longer. And don't you think we should go see him?

ROBERT: I wasn't planning on it. I don't like bedtime dramas.

YVETTE: I thought that was your specialty.

ROBERT: You want to depress me, Yvette? I won't receive it. And I don't deserve sarcasm, least of all, baby, from someone with no sense of humor.

YVETTE: You want me to contribute to your collection box for sex and justice.

ROBERT: I can't change, and I don't believe in deathbed conversions either.

YVETTE: You only want reassurance that I won't leave you.

ROBERT: We're all like that -- Linda, Larry, everybody.

YVETTE: You want to be in solitude, but your nature won't let you. People are just characters for your next play. That's your reality.

ROBERT: And what is yours, Yvette? Applause and romanticism?

YVETTE: I wouldn't expect much else.

ROBERT: I never joined the Army or the church, or got into politics, because I hated to be with the masses.

YVETTE: Except when they rave for you.

ROBERT: I savor the raves of the few critics I respect.

YVETTE: Larry is your best critic. He's always been honest with you.

ROBERT: Larry isn't always objective.

YVETTE: Not when you made him solely a love object; where could he turn to breath?

ROBERT: Maybe I'll make a one-man show about Larry's predicament and star that young hunk on the soaps, Joe Fontina.

YVETTE: Robert, I'm leaving for London tonight.

ROBERT: And the play? This is my magnum opus!

YVETTE: There will be others.

ROBERT: No, I don't think so. I'm miserable without you.

YVETTE: I'll be back for the matinee on Sunday. Get the stand-in tomorrow night. You have a crush on Solange. I can always tell.

ACT IV:

Setting:

Linda's house in L.A.

(Linda and Yvette)

LINDA: I got your telegram and I read between the lines.

YVETTE: I wanted to be with you while I'm doing the Oscars.

LINDA: Larry died last night. I think Robert should know. But I was waiting for you to be here.

YVETTE: Solange is doing wonderfully in my absence. She's the real sex kitten - not me. Robert thinks I'm too serious. And the play is doing fabulous every night. Solange said Robert hasn't been able to sleep at all, and he's hearing voices.

LINDA: Do you think it's any of ours?

YVETTE: There's no feeling any more between Robert and I.

(Linda calls Robert on the phone.)

LINDA: Larry is dead.

(A gun shot is heard on the phone.)

THE END

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