You wait. The old man keeps cocking and recocking his head to get a better angle, and finally, finally, he sees it.
“Well,” he says, “I’ll be damned.”
You hit him in the head with the shovel, and the old man says, “Now, hold on,” and you hit him again, seeing her face, the mole on her left breast, her laughing once with her mouth full of popcorn, and then the third swing makes the old man’s head tilt funny on his neck, and you swing once more to be sure and then sit down, feet dangling into the grave.
You look at the blackened shriveled thing lying below your father and you see her face with the wind coming through the car and her hair in her teeth and her eyes seeing you and taking you into her like food, like blood, like what she needed to breathe, and you say, “I wish…” and sit there for a long time with the sun beginning to warm the ground and warm your back and the breeze returning to make those tarps flutter again, desperate and soft.
“I wish I’d taken your picture,” you say finally. “Just once.”
And you sit there until it’s almost noon and weep for not protecting her and weep for not being able to know her ever again, and weep for not knowing what your real name is, because whatever it is or could have been is buried with her, beneath your father, beneath the dirt you begin throwing back in.
Coronado: A Play in Two Acts
Introduction
I wrote the first draft of “Until Gwen” in a mad rush one night on my front porch in Boston. The porch is surrounded by a hundred-year-old wisteria. This proved crucial because a storm hit that night, a torrent of rain and lightning unlike any I’d ever seen before outside of the South. It was with that mad-scientist vibe, as the rain clattered on the roof and snapped off the street, that I wrote the first draft, from around seven in the evening until about four in the morning. I rewrote it a few times over the next few days and then shipped it off to Great Britain, to the writer John Harvey, who’d commissioned it for an anthology he was editing called Men from Boys. I went back to work on other things. But the story never quite let go. Bobby and Bobby’s Father and poor Gwen kept walking around in my head, telling me that we weren’t done yet, that there were more things to say about the entangled currents that made up their bloodlines and their fate.
Around this time my brother, Gerry, showed up at my house. Gerry’s an actor in New York, and he arrived on my doorstep one Christmas Eve with two actress friends. The four of us spent the next ten days shooting pool in my basement, watching old movies, and talking about the nature of drama and story and the creative process. We also talked, usually around 3 or 4 A.M. in my kitchen, about the various lost loves and discarded hopes that accumulate as one’s life progresses in all its noise and folly. It felt like college, or certainly my early twenties; several nights, joined by other friends, we even ended up sitting on the floor. During those ten days, we hatched the idea that I would finally write a role for my brother and a play for the theater company to which he belongs. An aspect of my brother, Gerry, that’s worth mentioning — he is one of the nicest human beings I’ve ever known. In the top two, actually. The problem is that this innate decency often leads him to be typecast in “nice guy” roles. I promised him I would create his role against type: I would write him the meanest, nastiest, most unconscionable monster I could imagine.
Finding that monster proved surprisingly easy because I’d already written him: Bobby’s Father. I’ve created villains before, but most are tortured or misunderstood and a lot less villainous than we might prefer in terms of our comfort level with the human race as a whole. Bobby’s Father, however, is all-villain-all-the-time. He possesses some measure of charm (I hope) that might make him a fun bar companion on a slow night, but otherwise he’s irredeemable. So I started with him and that led me back to Bobby and Gwen. It also led me back to those kitchen conversations about love and loss and hope. Gradually other characters began to emerge — a psychiatrist and his patient, two lovers carrying on an illicit affair, a sad-sack husband, a comic-relief waitress. I had no idea who these people were or how they connected to the story I’d told in “Until Gwen,” but every now and then one of them would mention a town called Coronado in such a way that suggested a measure of relevance, and I trusted these new characters would begin to account for themselves.
They did. How they did is the point of the play. And if Gwen and Bobby and Bobby’s Father never quite reach Coronado, and maybe none of the characters in any of my stories do either, then that’s okay, I think. It’s the trying that matters. The hope.
Coronado premiered on November 30, 2005, at Manhattan Theatre Source in Greenwich Village. It was produced and performed by the Invisible City Theatre Company, under the direction of David Epstein, with the following cast:
GINA Rebecca Miller
WILL Lance Rubin
WAITRESS Elizabeth Horn
PATIENT Kathleen Wallace
DOCTOR Jason MacDonald
BOBBY’S FATHER Gerry Lehane
BOBBY Avery Clark
HAL Dan Patrick Brady
GWEN Maggie Bell
Coronado was performed as part of the closing-night festivities of the Writers in Paradise Conference in St. Petersburg, Florida, on January 28, 2006. It was produced by American Stage Theatre Company and Eckerd College with set design by Scott Cooper. It was directed by Todd Olson with the following cast:
GINA Nevada Caldwell
WILL Steve Garland
WAITRESS Megan Kirkpatrick
PATIENT Julie Rowe
DOCTOR Dan Bright
BOBBY’S FATHER Tom Nowicki
BOBBY Steve Malandro
HAL Drew DeCaro
GWEN Caitlin O’Grady
YOUNG WOMAN Talia Hagerty
MAN Kyle Flanagan
Characters
WILL a man in his twenties
GINA a woman in her twenties
DOCTOR a man in his late thirties
PATIENT a woman in her mid-thirties
BOBBY a man in his late teens, early twenties
BOBBY’S FATHER a man in his mid-forties
GWEN a woman nineteen years old
HAL a man somewhere between forty and fifty-five
WAITRESS a woman of indeterminate age
A MAN and a YOUNG WOMAN
Settings
ACT I takes place in an unnamed bar at various times.
ACT II takes place at the fairgrounds, a parking lot, and the bar, at various times.
Act I
A booth in a bar where a couple, GINA and WILL, sit.
GINA So how was the trip?
WILL Lotta two-light, three-bar towns. Hartow, Rangely, Coronado.
GINA How is that place?
WILL It’s coming up, I gotta say. Might be nice someday.
GINA So you’re back.
WILL And you’re going.
GINA Just for a week.
WILL A week. Jesus.
GINA We can do two weeks.
WILL Without talking? Maybe. Without touching, though?
GINA I could bite through my lip looking at you.
WILL I could…
[GINA looks over at the bar, then back at WILL.]