Shorter, Faster, Funnier Read online

  ALSO EDITED BY

  Eric Lane and Nina Shengold

  Take Ten: New Ten-Minute Plays

  Take Ten II: More Ten-Minute Plays

  Plays for Actresses

  Leading Women: Plays for Actresses II

  Talk to Me: Monologue Plays

  Under Thirty: Plays for a New Generation

  Laugh Lines: Short Comic Plays

  A VINTAGE ORIGINAL, MAY 2011

  Copyright © 2011 by Eric Lane and Nina Shengold

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Permissions can be found at the end of the book.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shorter, faster, funnier : comic plays and monologues / edited by Eric

  Lane and Nina Shengold.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-74335-0

  1. American drama (Comedy). 2. Monologues, American.

  I. Lane, Eric. II. Shengold, Nina.

  PS627.C65 S56 2011

  812′.052308—dc22

  2011001949

  www.vintagebooks.com

  Cover credit: Chris Faith in the 2009 production of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)” produced by The Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Lee A. Butz.

  Design by Katya Mezhibovskaya

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Drew Larimore THE ANNIVERSARY

  Samara Siskind BAR MITZVAH BOY

  David Ives THE BLIZZARD

  Ean Miles Kessler BROTHERLY LOVE

  Amy Herzog CHRISTMAS PRESENT

  Theresa Rebeck THE CONTRACT

  Eric Lane CURTAIN RAISER

  Nina Shengold DOUBLE DATE

  Edwin Sánchez ERNESTO THE MAGNIFICENT

  Peter Handy FRIENDSHIP

  Christopher Durang FUNERAL PARLOR

  Liz Ellison GABRIELLE

  Anton Dudley GETTING HOME

  Eric Coble H.R.

  Gary Winter I LOVE NEIL LABUTE

  Michael Mitnick LIFE WITHOUT SUBTEXT

  Jane Shepard LONG DISTANCE

  Garth Wingfield MARY JUST BROKE UP WITH THIS GUY

  Dana Yeaton MEN IN HEAT

  Mikhail Horowitz MERE VESSELS

  Jeffrey Hatcher MURDERERS “Match Wits with Minka Lupino”

  Pete Barry NINE POINT EIGHT METERS PER SECOND PER SECOND

  Warren Leight NORM-ANON

  Philip Dawkins NOTHING

  Elizabeth Meriwether PARTICLE BOARD

  John Augustine PEOPLESPEAK

  Mark Harvey Levine THE RENTAL

  Billy Aronson REUNIONS

  Elizabeth Wong RIPPER GIRL

  Dan Kois THE RUMOR

  Nicole Quinn SANDCHAIR CANTATA

  Wayne Rawley THE SCARY QUESTION

  Daryl Watson SNAP

  Dan Berkowitz SOURPUSS

  Halley Feiffer THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR STOPPING

  Barbara Wiechmann 36 RUMSON ROAD

  Adam Bock THREE GUYS AND A BRENDA

  Mary Louise Wilson TIRADE

  Caleen Sinnette Jennings UNCOVERED

  Jacquelyn Reingold A VERY VERY SHORT PLAY

  Laura Shaine THE WHOLE TRUTH & NOTHING BUT THE BLUETOOTH

  Megan Mostyn-Brown THE WOODS ARE FOR SUCKERS AND CHUMPS

  Rob Ackerman YOU HAVE ARRIVED

  Mark O’Donnell YOU KNOW WHO ELSE I HATE?

  CONTRIBUTORS

  ABOUT THE EDITORS

  INDEX BY CAST SIZE

  PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Asian chefs cite five flavor notes—sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and spicy—without which no meal is complete. While assembling the plays in this anthology, the editors enjoyed a dazzling range of comedic hors d’oeuvres. From laugh-out-loud funny to subtly amusing, caustic, witty, or outrageous, there are as many flavors of comedy as there are senses of humor.

  We read over 400 short plays and monologues to create this all-you-can-eat comic buffet. We found delectable morsels by celebrated humorists Christopher Durang (Funeral Parlor), David Ives (The Blizzard), Warren Leight (Norm-Anon), Mark O’Donnell (You Know Who Else I Hate?), and Theresa Rebeck (The Contract); inspired monologues by actor/playwrights Halley Feiffer (Thank You So Much for Stopping), Dan Berkowitz (Sourpuss), and Tony Award winner Mary Louise Wilson (Tirade); plus enough superb audition pieces, two-handers, and ensemble plays to satisfy laugh-hungry actors, readers, and audience members.

  We chose monologues of all lengths, from Liz Ellison’s swift Gabrielle and Elizabeth Wong’s spiky Ripper Girl to Jeffrey Hatcher’s epic Match Wits with Minka Lupino, from his monologue trio Murderers. Pete Barry’s irascible businessman extends his free fall from a plane to hilarious lengths in Nine Point Eight Meters per Second per Second. Jane Shepard’s Long Distance reveals a man’s thorny encounter with a former classmate, while Edwin Sánchez’s Ernesto the Magnificent fiercely paints a performance by an embittered sword swallower.

  There’s also a wealth of plays for two actors. Amy Herzog’s Christmas Present, Mark Harvey Levine’s The Rental, and Garth Wingfield’s Mary Just Broke Up with This Guy put unique spins on that staple of comedy, boy meets girl. In Anton Dudley’s romantic Getting Home, boy meets hunky Indian cabdriver. The couple in Eric Lane’s Curtain Raiser tackles an abandoned Woolworth building; in Wayne Rawley’s The Scary Question, another couple bonds over zombies.

  There are graceful duets for young actors, including Samara Siskind’s Bar Mitzvah Boy, Megan Mostyn-Brown’s The Woods Are for Suckers and Chumps, Michael Mitnick’s Life without Subtext, and Ean Miles Kessler’s bullet-paced Brotherly Love. Senior actors will cherish Peter Handy’s bittersweet Friendship and Drew Larimore’s The Anniversary, quite possibly the first play about retirees in postapocalyptic Siberia.

  Three plays for two actresses—Nicole Quinn’s lyrical Sandchair Cantata, Laura Shaine’s poignant The Whole Truth & Nothing but the Bluetooth, and Barbara Wiechmann’s salty duet for obsessed Realtors, 36 Rumson Road—treat women’s darkest anxieties with a refreshingly light touch.

  On the testosterone side, Dan Kois’s The Rumor outs a surprising scandal in men’s sports, Gary Winter’s I Love Neil LaBute deftly skewers the playwright dubbed “America’s reigning misanthrope,” and Dana Yeaton’s Men in Heat bares the mysteries of the male biological clock.

  Genders bend freely in Adam Bock’s Three Guys and a Brenda, in which all four title characters are played by actresses. Nina Shengold’s Double Date upends political correctness by taking “joined at the hip” at face value, while Jacquelyn Reingold’s A Very Very Short Play sparks an airplane romance between a one-foot-tall woman and a twelve-foot-tall man, both played by actors of average height.

  Rob Ackerman’s You Have Arrived also encourages very non-traditional casting, as one of its actresses plays a GPS monitor. Other three-character plays include John Augustine’s uproariously acerbic cell-phone-age comedy PeopleSpeak and Caleen Sinnette Jennings’s Uncovered, which finds gallows humor in the post-Katrina cleanup. Eric Coble’s physical comedy H.R. is equally topical, observing a quartet of cubicle workers whipping themselves into a froth at the prospect of being downsized.

  Three plays with larger casts go back to school for laughs. Billy Aronson’s Reunions offers a wonderfully demented spin on catching-up small talk among high school alumni, Philip Dawkins’s whimsical Nothing r
iffs on an alien invasion at school, and the gruff coach in Daryl Watson’s hilarious Snap tries to whip his dozens insult team (including a stuttering girl with unforeseen gifts) into shape.

  For divinely inspired slapstick humor, try Mikhail Horowitz’s Mere Vessels, a fearless inquiry into the spiritual lives of ventriloquists’ dummies, or Elizabeth Meriwether’s Particle Board, which gives the pompous Great Man documentary a well-deserved plank in the face.

  As editors of more than a dozen play anthologies, we’ve been gratified to hear of many multiplay productions culled from our previous books. We urge readers of Shorter, Faster, Funnier to enjoy these plays in any way you can: read them aloud with friends; mount a staged reading, full production, or evening of short plays. As always, be sure to acquire the proper rights first—playwrights don’t take kindly to finding unauthorized performances in online listings or YouTube postings. Contacts for performance rights are listed in the back of this book, along with playwrights’ biographies and an index by cast size.

  Whatever your comic taste, you’re sure to find something within these pages to make you laugh. You’ll also find heartache and suspense, poetic language and raunchy jokes. Comedy is a many-flavored banquet, and we invite you to pull up a chair. Enjoy!

  ERIC LANE AND NINA SHENGOLD,

  June 2010

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many people contributed greatly to the creation of this anthology. We’d like to thank the many literary managers, theaters, agents, publishers, playwrights, and friends who led us to such terrific plays and helped us secure the rights.

  In particular, we’d like to thank John McCormack at Summer Shorts and INTAR, Meghan Beals McCarthy at Northlight Theatre, Lorca Peress at MultiStages, Sarah Chodoff, Roxanne Heinze-Bradshaw at Samuel French, Craig Pospisil at Dramatists Play Service, Brendan Conheady, Jason Pizzarello, and the entire staff at Playscripts.

  Deep gratitude to Actors & Writers, Orange Thoughts Productions, the Drama Book Shop, and the Corporation of Yaddo. As always, we are indebted to our wonderful agent, Susan Cohen, and our superb editor at Vintage, Diana Secker Tesdell. And Bob Barnett and Maya Shengold for bringing laughter to our lives on a daily basis. Many thanks to the playwrights for their amazing plays.

  THE ANNIVERSARY

  Drew Larimore

  The Anniversary made its U.S. debut with Artistic New Directions’ “Boxers & Briefs” New Play Festival March 15–28, 2010, in New York City at Theatre 54. It was directed by Nick Stimler and featured Anita Keal and Jane Marx.

  The Anniversary premiered at the Short & Sweet New Play Festival in Melbourne, Australia, on December 15, 2007. It was directed by Claire Wearne and featured Debra Zuckerman and Tiffany Loft.

  CHARACTERS

  DORIS; MARGE: Two New York women, late sixties/early seventies.

  TIME

  2008.

  PLACE

  Tunguska, Russia (Siberia).

  SETTING

  A park bench between two homes.

  The play begins. Except nothing at first—only darkness. A surge of some sort, like the rising of a firework but more intense—then nothing again, until a few seconds later …

  A GIGANTIC EXPLOSION.

  Lights slowly rise to DORIS and MARGE entering from opposite ends of the stage, covered in black soot from said explosion, their hair sticking straight up. They look at one another in acknowledgment, then begin walking to center stage.

  DORIS: I’m not even gonna say it.

  MARGE: Oh, Doris—

  DORIS: A rumble here—a spark there—

  MARGE: You’ll get yourself all worked up—

  DORIS: Never did I think it’d come to this—so quick, so terrible—

  MARGE: It could’ve been worse, it could always be worse—

  DORIS: One minute you’re minding your business, the next you’re fifty feet from where you thought you were—

  MARGE: You know how you get upset—

  DORIS: Marge! This is the worst one yet!

  (They sit on the bench. Pause.)

  Where were you this time?

  MARGE: The kitchen.

  (DORIS scoffs.)

  Making the pirozhkis Harry likes so well.

  DORIS: Oh, God … Did it—?

  MARGE: Of course. They’re everywhere.

  DORIS: Are you …?

  MARGE: Eh, just a little—a mark on my elbow. It’s the pirozhkis I’m worried about.

  DORIS: Then, at least—

  MARGE: The windows blew in—the oven exploded. The cabbage went to the ceiling. The meat, too. The insides—they get stuck.

  DORIS: Stuck?

  MARGE: Like spitballs. Used to be I’d call Vladimir and have him bring over a ladder. That was before we lost him.

  DORIS: Sheesh.

  MARGE: I can’t climb up there. My legs, they get—

  DORIS: Weary.

  MARGE: And tired. Standing so long.

  DORIS: And it takes a while, you know, to—

  MARGE: Scrape them off the ceiling. And such delicate pirozhkis. (Turning to DORIS.) You?

  DORIS: Oh, the garden.

  MARGE: At least outside.

  DORIS: This time, anyway.

  MARGE: You find cover?

  DORIS: Eh … I used my hands … You know …

  (She places her hands over her head, covering the back of her neck.)

  MARGE: Like you’re in an earthquake!

  DORIS: Exactly—an earthquake.

  MARGE: But no—no trees falling or …?

  DORIS: No, none-a-that this time.

  MARGE: Thank God. When it gets like that, you never know—

  DORIS: Except my lilies. They were bright yellow and I couldn’t wait to take them inside. I was gonna give it another day. Just when you think they can’t get any more yellow they do. That pigment. Hard to believe it’s natural. Lloyd loves the lilies.

  MARGE: Aww.

  DORIS: Says they keep longer than other kinds.

  MARGE: Longer than other lilies?

  DORIS: Mm-hmm. And it’s havin’ ’em around the house that makes him … well … It gets him.

  MARGE: Gets him?

  DORIS: Makes him, you know …

  (DORIS makes an ambiguous gesture with her hands, attempting to symbolize “emotion.”)

  MARGE: Right.

  DORIS: But when it happened, of course—when it happened—they turned black. I tried to touch one and it fell apart in my hands. Dust.

  MARGE: (Sympathetic.) Oh, Doris.

  DORIS: Have to wait a whole ’nother year to get them that yellow again.

  MARGE: And with winter comin’ so soon …

  DORIS: If I’ve said it before, I’ve said it a thousand times … Of all the places to spend the golden years—

  BOTH: Siberia.

  (They sigh. Beat.)

  DORIS: (Growing perturbed.) I mean, you’d think they could give us a warning. A sign.

  MARGE: (Pointing in the distance.) There we go—another one! Off in the distance! Didn’t Edith used to live out that way?

  DORIS: A loudspeaker—or through the radio.

  MARGE: Edith was such a lovely host when we’d play bridge on Sundays. Don’t you remember what a lovely host Edith was?

  DORIS: ’Cause if it was Moscow—St. Petersburg—it’d be different. But it’s not happening in Moscow or St. Petersburg. You have to look at where it’s happening, Marge.

  MARGE: Now I bet all that’s left of her house is a pile of ash. I bet you couldn’t find a deck of cards if you tried!

  DORIS: It’s the end of the world. It gathers momentum. Don’t you know it when you see it?

  MARGE: See what? I can barely see anything the way the air is.

  (A flash of light.)

  (Pointing.) Look—over there! Another!

  DORIS: When I’d go to buy yams, Denny at the store would always remind me the first one hit in 1908. I always asked him why the hundred-year wait—and he’d say it was a domino effect. Once one hits, the others can
’t help themselves. Course, that was before the store blew to smithereens.

  MARGE: (Still looking off in the distance.) I wonder if that one was near Shirley Feldman—you know, Judy’s sister, who lost a foot when her living room caved in on her?

  DORIS: At first it was fun to look at. All the colors. Purple—pink—blue.

  MARGE: It was better than television—a Streisand concert.

  DORIS: Until they started blowin’ folks into trees.

  MARGE: Oh, I’ll never forget my first time being blown into a tree.

  DORIS: Innocent folks—minding their own business.

  MARGE: I was finding twigs in body parts I didn’t know I had!

  DORIS: But nearly a hundred years later—all this time—can’t anyone sit down and explain to me why asteroids keep hitting Siberia?

  MARGE: If they could explain it, then we’d know.

  (Moment.)

  DORIS: I’ll tell you one thing. I’d love to blow Lloyd into a tree.

  MARGE: What’s that?

  DORIS: When I start to think about it, makes me so damn angry.

  MARGE: What does?