Setting is a not quite bleak room in a community rec center and an adjoining office, also bleak. There is one door into the rec room from the outside, stage right. The characters enter and exit through the door stage right. Two windows sit uncomfortably close to one another on the back wall of the rec room. A dirty blind is fully drawn on one window; the other is open to a view of the Eiffel Tour at night. Six chairs are arranged in a rough semi-circle, a seventh chair is set behind one the chairs, preferably stage left. There is a card table on the back wall with a coffee machine that used to be a different color. There are coffee cups on plastic bases laid out. There is also a plate of sugar cookies, without visible colored sprinkles. The ornamentation in the room is a framed picture of El Greco's St. Dominic in Prayer and a highly colored poster of trees and woods, uncomprehending in its communication of a serenity not present in the room. Adjacent to the rec room is a cramped office. Unreadable professional degrees hang on the wall. There is a desk and two chairs, one behind, the other in front of the desk. The only illumination comes from a bare bulb above the desk. A door separates the office and the rec room.
Ann Johnston, 39, lead psychologist
Cynthia Synder, 26, psych intern
Tim Burton, 23, patient
Julia Franson, 28, patient
Yvette Demerci, 19, patient
Robert Bates, 31, patient
Darling Darling, 35, patient
The room begins empty. If the director chooses any music, it should be Musac-y and without words. The music ends as the first characters enter. Ann and Cynthia arrive first, followed by the other characters. Once in the room, the actors should be instructed to behave as they believe their characters would. They are free to take a cup of coffee or not, ignore the cookies or not. They may examine the chairs and move them around, so long as they are roughly facing the audience when they finally sit in the order indicated. They are permitted to hum, sing or talk to themselves, as group therapy participants (or actors) might do. What they must not do is speak to one another until Ann begins, “Let’s get started…” As the room fills and the number of parties not communicating increases, this will seem more and more artificial. This non-engagement should be as natural as possible. Ann and Cynthia sit across from one another in the office. Ann is behind the desk.
Julia: It may work if you don't push too hard.
Cynthia: Ann, there are genuine barriers here. You told me so yourself.
Julia: The group’s barriers, not yours, Cynthia. Just let the participants – especially Julia – work at their own pace. Remember, process is king; we’re just handmaidens. And for Christ sakes, if you're going to use that prop we discussed, don't expect anyone to accept it literally…You know what I mean.
Cynthia: Yeah, of course. But a little scrubbing won't hurt any of these patients – even from a handmaiden.
Julia: That's just the point: they’re not patients. They’re group participants. The hurt must be self-inflicted, if at all. Otherwise, they could wind up – god knows where…
Cynthia: Why do you assume that bathing in self-reflection is going to hurt them? Other characters start to enter the rec room, distracting Cynthia.
Julia: Cynthia, you don’t know the group, or what you know is solely from the case files. Baths get cold, rose petals sink, soap bubbles pop…
Cynthia: What?
Julia: They could wind up alone.
Cynthia: Yes, alone. I understand. [Pause.]
Julia: Anyway, when we're done tonight [places her hand on Cynthia’s shoulder as she rises and comes around the desk], you're invited back to my place for a little celebratory dinner.
Cynthia: [Drawing away from Ann’s hand, but not too noticeably] Actually, I have plans...
Julia: Oh... Once seated, the characters should appear from left to right: Tim, Julia, Yvette, Robert, Darling, and Cynthia, with Ann's chair behind and adjacent to Cynthia's. Ann and Cynthia enter from office where the light is extinguished.
Julia: Ok, let’s get started. I'd like you to meet Cynthia. She will be leading our group today.
Julia: Holy fuck, we're being sold for lab rats.
Darling: Speak for yourself, Julia. The only thing I'll be sold for is a Paris bedroom, circa 1924, and 700 thread count sheets, covered by a little Egyptian.
Julia: You're disgusting.
Julia: Julia, remember in the open circle [opening her hands in a half-circle], we accept differences. That's how we learn from others. Behind Ann and Cynthia, Darling mimics Ann's concluding words, holding her hands in a half circle. Julia brings her hands together and flips her off.
Julia: Cynthia's a psych intern who’s asked me to mentor her through her group therapy training. She will be leading today's session and some future ones, [smiles at Cynthia] if things work out. Cynthia has studied the prevailing group therapy models, read her Moreno and more recently Blatner, and is very familiar with your individual histories. [Some members of the group roll their eyes or glare at each other, except Robert and Darling.] I am encouraged by some of the ideas she wants to introduce today.
Julia: I can feel the bullshit between my toes.
Robert: Give it a rest Julia. [She shoots him a dirty look.]
Julia: Let me start out by introducing each of you. We'll go counter-clockwise. Cynthia, meet Tim. Black out. When the lights come up in the office, Ann is seated at the desk with Cynthia looking over her shoulder at a pile of files. Spot on Tim.
Ann (picking up one of the files on her desk): Tim Burton, not his real name, ran away at 14, alcoholic by 15, adopted off the street by a couple who provided him a home, an education, and their basement, where things didn't go well for Tim. Tim's multiple suicide attempts involved swallowing the couple's valuables, and bouts of remarkable deception, leading to a long psychiatric commitment where the couple's systematic abuse was revealed. He was in an adult care facility for 5 months. This is his 13th session since his release.
Cynthia: Moreno advises drowning suicidal tendencies in a host of positive memories to isolate the trauma and leave it undernourished.
Julia: You’ll find Moreno to be a good guide, Cynthia, but theories are of little help when Tim has your butterfly corsage between his teeth.
Tim [dreamily to the audience]: Hi, Cynthia. Can I touch your necklace?
Julia: So don’t get lost in Tim’s watery libido. He’s not looking for connection but for a life preserver that deflates on contact.
Cynthia: I’ll remember that. Ann: Next is Julia. (Spot on Julia.)
Julia [To the audience]: What makes you fucked up enough to want to help me?
Cynthia: You’ve told me about her. I’ve actually got something written up – anticipating one of her tantrums [takes a folded paper from her pocket]. Can I read it? [without waiting for an answer]. Julia, I appreciate the opportunity to sit in your circle. I am not here to challenge you nor suggest I know the source of your anger. My role here is to give you tools, safe tools. How you use them is up to you.
Julia: Tools. That’s an interesting approach. But Julia has a way of wrenching just about everything from your hands and putting it to other, uglier uses. Be careful what you hand her.
Julia: Who are you kidding? They're just using us to paste another star on your report card so you can charge for real when it comes to the blah, blah, blah these people talk. This isn't about us or me or even help, which is -- what'd you call it Boy Scout? (gesturing to Robert) -- 'a fetid urchin with short arms'.
Julia: Clearly, Julia's got anger issues, which are tied to both a depressive condition and probably an undiagnosed bi-polar disorder. Thus far she’s rejected any effort to mitigate the disabling effects of her condition. We know little of her history. From her reluctant contributions, we believe she's about 28, had a normal upbringing, no early sexual trauma, no major deprivations of love nor paternal care. Based on this incomplete picture, we can't identify the source of her pervasive mistrust and persistent anger.
Julia: ...so equip me with all the tools you want. [Miming hitting someone before her with a hammer.] My hammer will destroy any prison you fill with false kindness. [Rotating her arm in a screwing manner towards the audience.] And I'll screw you with my screwdriver. Pause.
Julia: Yvette DeMerci is our next participant. [Spot on Yvette.]
Robert: Hi, Cynthia.
Julia: Yvette is on a year abroad from France which has lasted through two (or three) psychotic breakdowns. She, too, has been abused but we are only just learning the extent of it. Her identity is occluded with self-denial, a need for love, and a craving to punish those seeking to help her. She also harbors an irrational fear of things German, another oddity in her calamitous life.
Robert: I don’t hate Germans – I hate what they do to themselves. They came for a grand view of Paris and instead got a view of my ass…and something more. I’m sorry for them. Their culture holds them captive. [Screaming the following.] But if they don’t get their fucking eyes off me, I’m going to launch a few Messerschmitts of my own. Got it Mein-a Herr! Got it Mein-a Frau!
Julia: Next is Robert Bates. [Spot on Robert.]
Robert: Cynthia, thank you for selecting us for your training.
Julia [from the darkness]: And, thank you, King of the Fruit Loops, for showing the rest of us how to curtsy asshole first.
Darling: Nice, Julia. Very nice.
Julia [returning one file and obtaining another]: Robert is our elderstateman. He's been in and out of various group therapies for over 20 years. His trauma was an accident which killed his father and mother. He was discovered living on the family's farm -- he was an only child -- years after his parents had passed. No one knew how he survived. The bodies of his parents were never recovered, though local authorities assumed he buried them or they were consumed by animals. He's tormented by these events, though his outward affect is mostly compliant, even professional.
Robert: I could attend other groups, where my fellow participants have a more mature grasp of their illnesses. Please don’t mistake me: I’m still burdened with trauma. But I’ve had more time to roll the issues around in the mud, so to speak, and consume only what I could stomach. My fellow group members still have milk on their whiskers.
Julia: You will find Robert to be well concealed behind his self-insight.
Cynthia: Darling’s last, right? [Spot on Darling.]
Julia: Darling is a transsexual. Born Herbert as the only boy in a Mormon family of 8 girls. Mother left the fold when he was 10 to join – I know it sounds crazy -- a traveling French circus. Something about chasing the Human Cannonball. Ergo Herbert's obsession with Paris, where she (he insists on being addressed as "she") imagines that she will one day be reunited with her Mother. Her father and siblings have soundly rejected her sexual explorations, and she’s been expelled from the LDS Church.
Darling: The pleasure is all mine. I love your pumps.
Cynthia [addressing the audience]: Tim, Julia, Yvette, Robert and Darling, thank you for the opportunity to lead your group today. I have an idea I'd like you all to try. It involves this small bar of soap.
[Spots on the all group participants. Collective gasps and some obscenities.]
Lights go dark on the rec room.
Cynthia: So here's my idea, Ann. I want them to use that little bar of soup you got from Paris to help build a world in which they're completely happy.
Julia: First off, that soap stays in my apartment. And why Paris? Isn't that where everyone thinks they'll be happy but instead gets their heart broken?
Cynthia: (speaking rapidly and excitedly): Why Paris? Because none of them has ever been there, and none has ever been miserable there -- except perhaps Yvette. So it may not work for her. But you know what Blatner says, "not all members of the group will profit equally." I got the idea from Darling's fantasies about meeting his, I mean her, mother in Paris. You know, that stuff in her file. In her fantasy, she's completely happy -- but she can’t extend that happiness outside the fantasy.
Julia: I think you're taking a risk.
Cynthia: I may be. But isn't that what you've taught me. Help patients take the risk that they cannot. I know it's not going to work across the board, but each of these patients is utterly incapable of finding themselves in a place of happiness and self-worth. With this little bar of soap, I'm hoping they can identify some piece of themselves that wants to be happy, that wants to feel joy at the end of an afternoon. And if there's a little metaphor tucked in there about washing away their unhappy days, then that thought can percolate in the French press of their damaged minds, n'es pas?
Julia: Fair enough. You have my permission to give it a try. But don’t use my bar of soap. Find some knockoff…
Cynthia: Sure, a knockoff…
Black out. All Characters in the rec room.
Robert: So, Cynthia, let me see if I understand. You want each of us to hold this bar of soap in our hands, which happens to be printed with a small drawing of the Eiffel Tour. We then project ourselves to Paris, imaginatively in all but Yvette's case. We then discuss the most perfect day we've spent there, describing in detail the sights, sounds, and pleasures we enjoyed. Though I haven't figured out what role the soap is supposed to have...
Julia [to Robert]: For washing off the shit we’re swimming in?
Cynthia: Julia, please. You’re pretty close, Robert, but I am not looking for stories about Paris. I want each of you to possess the actual experience of having lived this marvelous day in the most beautiful of cities. I want the "you" that was happy in Paris, not some rendering of Paris with a happy you in it. The point of the soap, which actually came from Paris, is just a touchstone for you to "feel" how it was to enjoy this marvelous day. The soap need have no role in your story or it can occupy any portion -- as you wish.
Julia (to Cynthia): You found a bar just like mine?
Cynthia: So, as I was explaining to Robert, when it's your turn, grab hold of the soap, stare hard at the Eiffel Tour, and tell us about that day when the traumas, the misguided futures, the demons in your life disappeared behind the clouds that separate the top of the Tour from its base. The clouds are lifting away your troubles.
Julia: (only to Cynthia): Too much detail, Ann. Let them develop it...
Cynthia: Darling, please go first (handing her the soap).
Darling (standing, addresses the audience): I don't know what to say. I am flattered by your selection...of me, to tell you about my best day in the world's most romantic city. First, you must know, I have not come to Paris for a lover or for sex spread-eagled over the Fountaine Trocadero.
Julia (to Yvette): I told you she’d use the soap as a dildo (Yvette turns away).
Darling: I have come to Paris to meet, to lavish affection on, to love, my mother. She left my father when I was ten. Before she walked out the door, she crept into my bedroom, and whispered, "Bertie -- that's what she called me -- I'm leaving now but when I get to Paris I will write your father and ask him to send for you. I love you Bertie. I can’t bear leaving. But tonight I saw a beautiful man, a god really, erupt out of the mouth of a cavernous gun. And like a bird of immense precision and undeniable luck, he folded himself into my arms. When he spoke, he used words I had heard all my life but never really understood. “
Male voice from offstage: I am a human projectile. I project the human above the earth and into your arms. Come with me to Paris where I will be your horse and your saddle, your cannon and your fodder, your wick and your match.
Darling: I know why the letter never came. Because my father swallowed it like he swallowed everything beautiful in my life. So I came to Paris to find her. (Rubbing the soap.) And now here I am. I have visited every cirque ancienne from Montmartre to the 13th, and still have not found Mama. Though once I passed a princely rider on a Roan stallion. Beneath his beautiful ass was the blanket mother slipped from her bed before she left.
Julia: What are you saying, bitch? Cannonball man is riding your mother? Did you ever fucking find her?
Darling: Tai-toi, mon fleur tale. I did find my mother, but not such lips as could be kissed. One night, as I was weeping in the Boie de Boulogne, a man spoke to me from behind a massive Beech tree. When I called to him, he revealed himself to be a knot in that tree but also one of its branches. I threw my arms around him and knew I had found the thing I had lost.
Julia: With a French faggot tree? (Turning to Cynthia and Ann). What's she talking about?
Tim: She's...
Robert: talking…
Robert: about…
Darling: love.
A Voice from Offstage [with a French accent]: Darling, mon chere, there's someone here who wants to see you. She says she knows you...
Darling [rising from her chair and, as she speaks, moving towards the door]: Mommy? Mommy? Is that you? [Rushes off-stage.]
Tim [sheepishly]: Did she take the soap? [pause.]
Cynthia: Robert, it's your turn. [Handing him the soap.] Remember, you can cradle it or put it aside. Start when you like.
Robert: I'm sorry, Cynthia. I am not in Paris. I'm in Friendship, Montana, and the wheat's higher than my father's head. He's riding his tractor and all I can see are tufts of his blood brown hair bobbing between the rows. His eyes are narrower than a steel disc so they don't see me. From my room, I can hear each tall Wheat Soldier fall to the ground as the scythe passes.
Cynthia: Robert, remember, use the soap to transport yourself.
Robert [interrupts the last portion of Cynthia's line]: The tractor doesn't stop where the wheat ends. Father drives it right up to the house at lunchtime and then by the evening, our farm gets flatter and flatter as more and more Wheat Soldiers fall. The grass stains his face and hands. He’s awash in toppled blades. I run, even before he opens the front door, into the washroom and turn on the hot water and fill the sink. Then I slip a bar of soap into the water and hide behind the door.
Cynthia (trying out a French accent): Robert, I can smell the brioche and croissant from the corner Patisserie. Smell them with me...
Julia: Cynthia, don't cross the line. This is Robert's Paris, not yours.
Robert: I'm sorry, Cynthia, but Friendship didn’t have any pastry shops. Paris is 5,673 miles away.
Cynthia [to Ann]: He's trapped in this ugly upbringing where something bad happened. How do I draw him out of it?
Julia: You don't.
Robert: And then a man came selling linen, he said, all the way from Paris, France. Mother had never worn anything but gingham. So against my father's wishes she invited him in. With his samples laid on the kitchen table, my father could see how much Mother wanted a bolt of fabric to make new dresses. So he unrolled two twenties from the roll he carried under his belt and paid the man. That night, while we were sleeping, the linen salesman returned with a friend for the rest of my father's twenties. My parents…fought hard.
Cynthia: You don't have to go there, Robert.
Julia [to Cynthia]: Yes, he does, Cynthia. This is where the exercise has taken him...
Robert: And then they came for me. They dragged me into the kitchen where my mother and father were rolled up in Paris linen, off white with a thousand red buttons. Pete, the linen salesman who was really just a thief and a murderer, made me take my parents out into the field and disc them into the Wheat Soldiers. (Beginning to weep now.) And then for three years, until they found me, I lived off that wheat: porridge, bread, I even used it to make beer. There wasn't a bite that didn't taste like…There wasn't enough rain, enough fallen soldiers, to wash away their industry.
Cynthia [to Ann as an aside]: My god, Ann, what a failure this is…
Julia: Robert, you honored your parents with your own industry. You survived, Robert, you survived.
Robert [not hysterical but as many tears as words]: But I would rather have eaten brioche and croissant, and bathed my parents' bodies with a bar of soap like this (showing Ann the soap), beautiful, beautiful, without a single Wheat Soldier staring up at me. [Continues to weep silently.]
Julia: Let's take a break. We will start up with Yvette in 10. [To Cynthia away from the group, which mingles around, getting coffee, eating cookies, and talking quietly to each other or themselves. Tim attempts to comfort Robert, who shies away.] We need to talk. Your expectations are way too literal. The soap may depict Paris, you may expect to hear renditions of a projected happiness in Paris. But you may also find a scene of grief and carnage. You may find the spoils of their efforts spoiled before you can examine them. So as your advisor, Cyn, please let Yvette, Julia (especially Julia), and Tim fall down whatever rabbit hole advances upon them. Robert got as close to Paris as he could.
Julia [to the group]: Ok, everyone, let's re-enter the circle.
Cynthia: Yvette [handing her the soap], please tell us about your day.
Robert [following in an authentic French accent]: Merde! I have seen a million bars of hotel soap like this. This isn't special, and it's not even an accurate drawing of the Tour Eiffel. There should be three tiers above the line of clouds. I know, because when Emil, who was my boyfriend, was fucking me on the observation deck, I repeatedly counted each steel element my body would hit on the way down. First the girder to the left, then the span at the center, then to the right. I would pirouette all the way down like a graceless Spiderman. Did I mention the deck was full of German tourists?
Cynthia leans forward to speak.
Julia [interrupting her]: Remember, Paris can be 5,673 miles away or not. Let her work...
Robert: He was supposed to be different. He was supposed to care about my different holes: my mouth (for words), my navel (not just for piercing), the one in my heart (for mending). He worked at the Jules Verne, a restaurant on the deuxieme etage. He was a beautiful boy from Egypt, from a family of merchants. He rebelled against his family's religion and their view of women. He let me speak my mind. He let me initiate sex and say no when I didn't want it. He stopped using hashish with the other busers and started attending University classes with me. And then…
Julia: He turned into the dirty little Arab he always was and fucked you from behind while people gawked at the only hole he was really interested in.
Robert: Julia, it's a shame you take Cynthia's exercise as an opportunity to degrade yourself and others. Your remarks...
Julia: Listen, Fruit Loop, why don't you go back to your steaming bowl of Mom and Dad? [Whereupon the others gasp and Robert looks helplessly at Ann and starts to silently weep.]
Robert: No, she's right. He saved for three months to take me to the Jules Verne for my birthday. After, he invited me up the observation deck to see the lights of Paris. A hug became a kiss, a kiss a grope, I asked him to stop, he demanded sex, even as the deck filled with tourists. When I told him he could have everything back at his apartment, he got angry. He had fed me a dinner costing two weeks word, and wanted his dessert. So there I am, looking over the edge of the steel fence, my ruffled skirt hooked to my belt, my liberated Emil fucking me from behind (when I turned to see his eyes, they were narrow as slits in the fence). The Germans made their own noises. When he was finished, I unhitched my skirt, and stood behind him, cupping his spent balls in my hands. With the weight of my whole body, I lifted Emil a few feet off the ground and to the horror of the Germans, I grabbed hold of his ankles and launched him off the observation deck. Sadly, he hit every girder, beam, and span I had identified. After he stopped making clanging noises, all the Germans silently filed into the elevator. Only one American woman, dressed like a circus performer, remained behind. She clapped with such ferocity you would have thought the tiger had eaten the tamer. I could go on…
Julia: No, thank you, Yvette.
Cynthia [to Ann]: I can only imagine what her perfect day’s going to be like. (As Yvette hands the soap to Julia): Julia, please tell us about your day in Paris.
Julia [taking the soap, briefly staring at it and then tucking it under her armpit. Tim, in distress, points at her and gestures to Ann]: This way it will smell like me, not the other way around. [Rising to address the audience, laying the soap on her chair, whereupon Tim seizes it] From my prior conduct, you are convinced that my Paris will be a joyless shithole. Instead of the aroma of pastries and cheese, I will fill it with attacks on my fellow crazies. Right you are. I am certainly not going to fantasize about my happiest day in the City of Lights. Who but a schmuck would be happy there? I’m pulling the plug on this festering cesspool.
Julia [to Tim]: Give me the soap, dickhead [which she takes by pretending to grab his balls. She draws it under her nose and starts dreamily, with a French accent]. I’m in a community rec room in [she walks to the open window and draws the blind; opens the other to a view of the Empire State Building at night]…the lower East Side, a corner of the Empire State Building visible through the grubby windows. In the circle are six lost souls. Instead of these wet sisters, I’m the group leader. [Turning to Cynthia] Why don’t we put a little elbow grease into this slippery bath of yours? [Using the soap and pretending to scrub under her arms and between her legs]. Bullshit on. Bullshit off. Bullshit on. Bullshit off. [Gesturing offstage] Darling harbors fantasies of reconnecting with her mother, but not one who ran away with the human cannonball. Rather, Darling’s mother died giving birth to him. His father and 8 sisters never forgave him for her death. They dressed little Herbert as a girl, made her attend school as a girl, and made certain her first awkward sexual experience was as a girl, clouding his sexual identity, to say the least. Who knows what the circus imagery means. Probably just a loose screw on his Ferris wheel. Bullshit off.
Darling [from offstage]: Mama, you look so good. Do you still love me?
Julia: The dead never disappoint, do they Darling? Robert grew up in Wichita where his father was a healthcare executive. He has two sisters and a brother, all still living. There were no Wheat Solders nor steel discs. Pete the creep never killed his parents nor wrapped them in linen. [To Robert] Nice touch though. The trauma he experienced was High Plains normalcy. In my professional opinion, the only illness he suffers from is wanting to project a tragic childhood he never had.
Robert: Then explain this [opening up a piece of white fabric from his inside coat pocket. It's spotted with red. He shows it to the audience.]
Julia [taking the cloth from Robert]: You're right, Robert. This is the shroud of… Friendship. I can almost see your father's sorry face in it... [as she lowers her face into it she blows her nose] Bullshit off.
Cynthia [to Ann]: This can't continue.
Julia: Oh but it can, Cynthia. [In a bad French accent] Zis bitch here [indicating Yvette] is about as French as my fucking accent. [Out of accent.] I too can count the steel membrane of a grossly over-documented national symbol and concoct a scene of immense degradation to satisfy my loneliness. I too dated an Emil who presented one way and fucked another. [Addressing Yvette] And, listen, my bruised flower, I too have been surrounded by tourists all my life, gawking at the wrong hole. I don't know where you hail from but I'm hearing Chicago, southside.
Yvette [standing and confronting Julia. She lets fly a torrent of French cursing, which isn't real. The actress will be provided a series of French slurs which she will string together.]
Julia [addressing the audience]: A few French words, but not a single sustained French sentence. Like I said, Chicago, southside. Bullshit off. [Ignoring Yvette, Tim tries to seize the soap, Julia yanks it back.] Now, Tim, he's a squeaky clean mystery. What accounts for his interest in Cynthia's, or is it Ann's? bar of soap? Why does he act like he’s run its slender shape over his hairless pubes? Did he have someone guiding his hand through the soapy water?
Tim [grabbing the soap from Julia; spitting his words]: You have no right! She has no right. Does she, Cynthia?
Julia [to Cynthia]: Cyn, why is Tim acting like that?
Julia: What are you two whispering about? For that matter, stop whispering, or I’ll drown you in the same bath you concocted for us. [Turning to Tim] Speak up, little man.
Tim [holding the soap in his extended right arm, assertively pushing Julia aside]: This is my day in Paris. I’ve already bathed with this soap, this soap is from Paris, and now I am in Paris, guided down the Champs de Elysees by a flood of soap bubbles. And because this is my soap – not anyone else’s, a bubble the size of a cannonball scoops me up and I’m at the top of the Eiffel Tour hovering above the observation deck where a young woman is making love to her handsome boyfriend. We snuggle closer.
Julia: Cyn, who’s in Tim's soap bubble?
Cynthia: This isn't how I wanted you to find out.
Julia: Find out what?
Julia: Find out that she, Cynthia, against your wishes, borrowed your precious talisman from your own failed Parisian romance and devised an exercise based on your history of replacing happy memories with unhappy ones. Of course, she was concerned how it might work out...
Julia: So?
Robert: So she took your unblemished bar, not the counterfeit you requested, and one evening invited Tim to slide into a bath…
Julia: Where you bathed his body with my soap! Where you plunged your hands below the surface and made soap bubbles big enough to exceed the romance to which you were invited.
Cynthia: Me?
Robert: She? (pointing to Cynthia)
Robert: C’est possible?
Julia (to the audience): This is richer than the mousse aux chocolat at Jules Verne.
Cynthia: I had no idea. [Addresses the audience] Your letter didn’t say anything about me coming to Paris; it was addressed to someone else. When you came home, I just assumed you’d lost another lover. [Addressed to Ann.] Oh, Ann, how painful it must have been, sitting there alone in Paris, your scented bath, your bar of Parisian soap, the water getting colder and colder. No knock at the door, no warm sheets to share, your heart broken in the City of Lights.
Julia: Yes, I did lose another lover, but that’s because you never arrived. How could you leave me there? Why didn’t you at least call? [Starts to cry.] You don’t know anything about how cold that bath was…about how alone I felt.
Pause.
Cynthia: Who’s Ellen?
Julia: Why does it matter? You broke my heart, not Ellen. She was my intern prior to you.
Cynthia: Ann, you invited several lovers to Paris hoping one would accept, didn’t you? Who was prior to Ellen?
Julia: I couldn’t be in Paris alone, with just a stupid bar of soap. If none of you came, I’d be no better off than my deluded patients, waiting for the impossible to happen.
Group: Hey, What the fuck, Deluded?
Julia: [Dropping her voice] Prior to Ellen it was…
Julia: Speak up, Ann. We can’t hear you.
Julia: My prior intern was Julia. It was you, bitch. Others gasp. Julia takes a bow.
Julia: I just can’t believe I mixed up those letters. I must be crazier than I thought. Tim holds his hand over his mouth, giggling.
Julia: O my god, Tim, what did you do?
Julia: The grubby truth is that Tim found your letters in your office, opened them, read them, and then resealed them in other envelopes, making them enticing but unrecognizable to their recipients. For Cynthia, that suggested fashioning your Parisian fantasy into a role play for our group. For me, I chose to become the therapist you never trained me to be. I cannot speak for Ellen. But I don’t believe her unrecognized talents were wasted.
Julia: You said yourself you weren’t crazy enough to help others with their problems.
Julia: My first mistaken diagnosis. I should have billed for it.
Julia: And you, Cynthia, you can’t hijack a life; I wanted you in my bath, scented with rose petals, not turning me into a class project. You’ve ruined everything, everything. That was my soap…
Cynthia: A counterfeit wouldn’t do – though apparently counterfeits were good enough for you. I thought if I used your soap, the soap you had suffered with, to lift the fate of the group, you would be happier…knowing that not everyone’s dream of a perfect day in Paris was reduced to cannon fodder for delusions, or got diced into a bloody Montana wheat field, or was hurled headlong off the Eiffel Tour, or ended up alone, cruelly, mercilessly alone, in a cold bath, in Paris. Some end in floating bubbles.
Julia: It was my soap, Cyn, my bubbles, from my trip to Paris, without you, or Ellen, or Julia.
Julia: But now your bubble’s popped. You tried to over-pack it and it popped.
Julia: It hasn’t popped. It’s still mine. [Directed to Cynthia] You didn’t get the idea from Darling’s file. You got it from me, not from me -- from my miserable life. Those are my bubbles, Cynthia, bubbles I wanted to share…And you stole them.
Cynthia: I didn’t steal them, Ann. I diverted them. I sent them around the world. And unlike your counterfeit lovers, they’ve come home to be shared with everyone.
Tim has unwrapped and is eating the soap.
Julia: That’s one way to internalize: eat the precious talisman. You go, little man.
All turn to watch him.
Woman, dressed as a circus performer, enters stage left, with a working bubble machine.
Julia: Ellen? She continues to operate it.
One by one, starting with Ann, the characters approach the Woman, including Darling from offstage, and are enveloped too. The Woman hands the bubble machine to Ann and then steps out in front of the enveloped lives, smiles at the audience and starts to clap ferociously.
Blackout.
END.
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