Zap

I was driving by a high school, saw the sign advertising
Grease,
and said out loud, “Again?”

Like Pepsi or Coke paying to be a school’s sole soft drink,
Grease
and
Romeo and Juliet
had captured the drama departments. They and two or three other plays seemed to be in eternal rotation, like the seasons. Hadn’t anything new been written in the past thirty years that would work on the high-school stage?

I decided to take my own challenge. Not that I’d ever acted in a play. My one tryout in high school had elicited nothing more from the drama teacher than the comment “You have a low voice.” Nor had I ever written a bona fide play. I knew “Break a leg” but was vague about “downstage left.” Perhaps my innocence shows in
Zap
’s technical challenges. Then again, without that daring, nothing would ever get written, in any genre.

For years, I’d been collecting ideas under the heading “Multiple Genres.” Imagine the sound of pounding on Hamlet’s castle door in Denmark, the guard opens up, and there stand two girls from Sweet Valley High, who proceed to turn tragedy into comedy. Time travel had been done over and over; my idea was cross-book travel. The problem was finding an explanation. The usual solutions — time machines, doors on the past — didn’t appeal to me. Then my eye fell on the remote control. Rather than overlap genres, I could switch back and forth among them. This wasn’t fantasy; it was taking place every night across the country. All I had to do was to bring it out of the living room and onto the stage. It would suit high schools, which like huge casts. They’re also, I found, hungry for female roles. I obliged, and made the choicest role a female performance artist.

With the zapper in hand, I could stage a collision between not just two plays, but as many as an audience could keep straight. I settled on seven. Surely, I thought, one of them had to be by Shakespeare. I decided on
Richard III,
famed for its hunchbacked king and his final, frantic plea, “My kingdom for a horse!”— perhaps the most famous line in all of theater after “To be or not to be.”

Rather than use six other real plays, I decided to write my own, modeled on the most familiar categories — drama’s prime-time offerings. Thus, there’s a mystery set in the English countryside during World War I, strongly reminiscent of Agatha Christie. Though she’s most famous for her detective novels, she wrote plays as well, including the longest-running play of all time,
The Mousetrap,
in which a series of guests at an isolated inn are murdered.

I thought next of Anton Chekhov, Russia’s greatest playwright, author of
The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters.
His brooding dramas are set in the late 1800s and peopled with once-proud families enfeebled by dreaming and scheming. Russian accents would contrast nicely with British accents. I put Chekhov in my shopping cart.

It struck me that Chekhov’s characters would have felt at home in Tennessee Williams’s plays set in the American South, plays similarly filled with vanished fortunes, twisted families, and sensitive characters who take refuge in drink and rail against the lack of culture in the countryside.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie,
and
A Streetcar Named Desire
were all triumphs on the stage and later as movies. Dysfunctional southern families with a taste for liquor and eccentricity are still a staple of the stage and screen. I definitely needed a southern play.

What about comedy? The obvious model was Neil Simon, the comedy king of Broadway for decades, author of such smash hits as
The Odd Couple
and
The Sunshine Boys.
He’s the master of the wisecrack, the Woody Allen of the theater, whose plays deal with family foibles and modern life as lived in New York.

Speaking of modern, what about a play along the lines of Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot,
something avant-garde, full of non sequiturs, silences, and eerie situations of maddening hopelessness? The “theater of the absurd” grew out of the two world wars’ incomprehensible slaughter and the loss of faith that life made any sense. Corpses, I noticed, often figured in these plays. I decided I’d find a place for a corpse or two in mine. Last, for something truly up-to-date, I’d put in a monologue by a performance artist, one who spits on the traditions of the theater, unaware that she’s repeating its ageless themes.

Every few years, after a string of serious books, I’m ready to pack my bags and kazoo and take a vacation to comedy.
Zap
was my latest trip. I had a ball writing it. The question facing me when I finished was whether it would actually work.

When I heard that nearby Pacific Grove High School in California wanted to give the premiere, I was elated. Kelly Cool, the aptly named director, invited me to be part of the whole process, giving me a fabulous education along the way. The audiences were enlightening as well. Novelists never see the reader who chuckles or underlines a passage; playwrights are right in the same room. When the crowd doesn’t laugh where you wanted, you take note. When the room resounds, there’s no better place to be. Subsequent productions by James Rayfield’s students at Blake High School in Tampa, Florida, and at New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, under the guidance of Annie Thoms, nudged me farther along the learning curve. It’s been a thrill to watch the actors add inflections and gestures that weren’t on the page. Gratitude and bouquets to all three casts, several of whose inventive touches I’ve incorporated into the text.

My thanks go as well to Walter Mayes, Ron McCutchan, and Dan Gotch for the gift of their time and advice. And, as ever, a special ovation for my incomparably insightful and dedicated editor, Marc Aronson.

THE HOUSE MANAGER

The English Mystery

EMMALINE GRAY

CLIFFORD GRAY, her husband

BEETON, their butler

COLONEL HARDWICKE

MRS. MARJORIE HARDWICKE, his wife

REVEREND SMYTHE

LADY VANESSA DENSLOW

INSPECTOR SWIFT

The Comedy

IRV WEINSTEIN

SAMMY

AUDREY MCPHERSON

Shakespeare’s Richard III

Duke of Gloucester, later King Richard III

LADY ANNE, later married to Richard

Duke of BUCKINGHAM

Duke of NORFOLK

PRINCE EDWARD, Richard’s nephew

The Russian Play

NIKOLAI VOLNIKOV

IRINA, his wife

KONSTANTIN, his great-grandfather

PAVEL, his cousin

OLGA, his aunt

The Performance Art Monologue

MARSHA

The Avant-Garde Play

MAN

WOMAN

The Southern Play

AARON PUCKETT

REGINALD, his father

CAROLINE, his half sister

LUKE, his stepbrother

GRANDMAMMY