Contemporary American Playwrights - Lanford Wilson

  Lanford Wilson As the s came to a close the American theatre was in a crisis. After a period that had seen a series of outstanding plays from Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, along with the last, great, plays of Eugene O’Neill, Broadway seemed to have little to offer. The mining of O’Neill was over, Miller was silent and Williams faltering. Broadway itself faced escalating costs and competition from television. On the other hand change was in the air, in terms both of culture and politics. Eisenhower, a president who represented the values of the past, had gone, to be replaced by a president who traded on his youth and sought to address a new generation. While embracing a familiar Cold War rhetoric, he sought to kindle a new idealism with the Peace Corps and, somewhat grudgingly, acknowledged that the supposed homogeneity of American society had been a sham. Civil Rights was now securely on the agenda. The streets were turning into theatre: a crude melodrama in the South, a carnival in the North. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Eisenhower’s favourite reading had been westerns. Now there was a man in the White House who frequented opera, apparently read books and invited their authors to dinner, and went to the theatre. And for the first time private foundations began to fund theatre, not, of course, Broadway, in some ways the epitome of the capitalist enterprise, but that theatre which had begun to spring up first in small, unfashionable venues far from nd and rd Streets, and then in cafés, lofts, church halls, anywhere that a sometimes non-paying audi- ence could assemble. Eventually, by the mid s, city, state and federal governments would also offer subsidies, never, of course, quite enough but sufficient to sustain a number of companies. And if the definition of a theatre was up for reconsideration, so was the definition of what theatre itself might be, as artists experimented with ‘happenings’, dance flirted with narrative, texts made way for improvisation, frontiers blurred. The theatre of the absurd, a European  import, did not prove philosophically at home in America, but its resis- tance to non-naturalistic dialogue, its radical revision of character, its ironic approach to plot had its impact, as did European theories. Such an atmosphere was likely to prove conducive to those whose work was as yet unformed and who would have had no chance of pro- duction on, and, indeed, little to offer to, Broadway. They were talents in the making and the place toinvent yourself was Off-Off-Broadway. And just as Tom Stoppard would say that to want to be a writer in Britain in the early sixties was towant tobe a playwright, so, much the same was true in America, particularly in New York, though there were few young writers whodid not alsofind themselves painting sets, acting and direct- ing, as well as cleaning tables. This was a theatre rich in talent but not rich in much else. Two decades later such people would have streamed toLos Angeles, seeing film as the key genre. For the moment, however, it was the other way about. Sam Shepard made his way from California while Lanford Wilson, himself briefly from California though now living in Chicago, also set out for New York, with little more to his name than the draft of a couple of one-act plays. There was, however, a degree of serendipity about this movement since those who found themselves in New York were scarcely following a preconceived career plan. Off-Broadway already had its successes. In  Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story opened at the Cherry Lane Theatre while the Living Theatre staged Jack Gelber’s The Connection, both of which seemed to draw some inspiration from a European theatre that had itself discovered a new direction. Off-Off-Broadway was altogether different. With little review coverage, it tended at first to recruit its audiences from those who shared many of the values and interests of those whose work they watched. It appealed to a different age group from Broadway and to people looking for a different theatrical experience. It was self-consciously challenging authorised texts in the theatre as, by degrees, it challenged the author- ised text of mainstream America itself. This was theatre with its hair down, a poor theatre before Grotowski’s theories became popular, a theatre touched by an amateur spirit following no prescribed pattern, adopting no particular ideological or aesthetic position. There were those, like Sam Shepard, who staged surreal images, influenced in part by the drugs already a feature of the counter-culture, images that would gain a political and social edge as the decade devel- oped. But there were equally those who looked to create a theatre lan- guage out of everyday speech, to confront audiences with familiar sights, reforged into theatricalised gestures. Lanford Wilson was one such. At a  Contemporary American playwrights time when an Artaud-influenced theatre was de-emphasising language he created a bruised lyricism, a poetry generated out of the inarticula- cies of prosaic lives. While lamenting a loss of community, he saw in the theatre a means of exploring that community. Sometimes that led to sen- timental encomiums to the dispossessed, the marginal, the emotionally and spiritually wounded, of a kind that made him close kin to Tennessee Williams, and even, at times, toEugene O’Neill. Certainly the family, that fundamental American icon, was liable to be seen as deeply flawed, the origin of tension and pain. Yet if, like Shepard, he heard the sound of America crashing intothe sea he alsosaw in the theatre itself some- thing more than a mechanism to expose such fragmentation. For its very methods relied upon that sense of community which he otherwise saw as disappearing; its communicative power, its subtle linguistic nuances, sug- gested the survival, no matter how vestigially, of the urge to break out of privacies, to understand the mechanisms of decay and hence of renewal. One of the advantages of the Off-Off-Broadway movement was that it made the one-act play fashionable again. At the beginning of the century the Little Theatre movement, which included seminal groups such as the Washington Square Players and the Provincetown Players, launched the careers of several playwrights by offering an opportunity to experiment with short drama, never a practical proposition on Broadway. Now, once again there was a chance for writers to explore technique, language, character in the context of shorter works and Wilson, like most of the writers in this book, seized the opportunity and produced an astonishing deluge of works, testing his talent, experiment- ing with character, language and form. Lanford Wilson was born, an only child, in Lebanon, Missouri, in . He later suggested that it was the fact that he was an only child that led to his being drawn to the group, both in terms of the theatre as a com- munal art and the group as method and subject. He studied briefly at Southwest Missouri State where, in , he recalls seeing a production of Death of a Salesman that was ‘the most magical thing I’d ever seen in my life . . . the clothesline from the old buildings all around the house gradually faded into big, huge beech trees. I nearly collapsed! . . . It was the most extraordinary scenic effect, and of course, I was hooked on theater from that moment . . . that magic was what I was always drawn to.’ 1 Then, for a year, aged nineteen, he went to San Diego State, Lanford Wilson  1 Gene A. Barnett, Lanford Wilson (Boston, ), p. . subsequently moving on to Chicago, where he planned to become an artist, supporting himself, meanwhile, by working in an advertising agency. During lunch breaks from work he tried his hand at writing stories, and when this failed turned to plays, taking an adult education class which involved working with actors from the Goodman Theatre. He finally arrived in New York at the age of twenty-five, in , anxious not only to write but to see theatre. To his dismay there was no Miller or O’Neill on offer. Instead, Broadway presented a diet of come- dies. The real energy lay elsewhere and he quickly found his way to the new spaces of Off-Off-Broadway. His first productions, which included the one-act plays called Home Free () and The Madness of Lady Bright (–), were staged by the Caffè Cino, one of the best Off-Off- Broadway venues and the place where he had seen Eugene Ionesco’s The Lesson, a play which itself suggested a new set of possibilities for a writer raised on American classics or what he had read in Theatre Arts magazine or anthologies of European plays back in Missouri. There is a refreshing and, at the same time, disturbing quality to Wilson’s comments on his own works. In interview he is liable to offer a mechanistic account of the development of his sensibility and drama- turgy. As he has admitted, he stole, borrowed, studied, appropriated, absorbed what he saw or read, creating his own style almost by default. From the beginning, however, he also followed a track of his own, taking what he wanted from the dramatic smorgasbord on offer in sixties America. Watching the fragmented products of an avant-garde deriving its confidence in part from its own naiveties as well as from the legitima- tion offered by Artaud’s slogan, ‘No More Masterpieces’, he developed a theatre that celebrated the displaced, the marginal, the deviant in plays that worked against a simple realism, while never embracing the radical experiments of many of his contemporaries. Aware, later in his career, of the public success of the well-made play, he set himself to a system- atic study of realist texts, reading Ibsen but deriving from the experience the conviction that Ibsen and Chekhov were two sides of the same coin. And Chekhov, along with the Chekhov-influenced Tennessee Williams, was to remain a major influence, to the extent that he studied Russian in order to be able to translate his plays. The irony is that somewhere in this apparently random search for form and style, he did develop his own distinctive drama – lyrical, allu- sive, layered, a realism suffused with the poetic. At the same time he gen- erated a series of theatrical metaphors for a society that seemed to him to be in decline, its institutions in a state of decay, its private and public  Contemporary American playwrights relationships under stress. Without appearing to do so he offers a critique of a culture in crisis. His plays celebrate those who are victims equally of their own sensibilities and of a society which sees them as irrelevant to its own myths of progress, to normative values that have little to do with human necessities. The world that he pictures in his work is one in which commitment is withheld, in which the old symbols of communality, grace, social and moral cohesiveness have lost their authority. He stages the dramas of those who deal with the consequences of wounds already sustained. That he chose to do this in plays in which, early in his career, he tried to breathe life into the stereotype and which, later, were often lyrical, perhaps deflected attention from the critique which lies at the heart of so much of his work. He does not, to be sure, choose to tackle the world head on. He works by indirection. His angle of attack is oblique. He deals in distorted echoes. Meaning is often generated out of discrete moments or events brought momentarily together. He values language but recognises its incapacities. He communicates through tone, inflexion, dissonance, harmony. The past, meanwhile, exists as a shadow but a shadow with the power to sear the present. None of this makes him seem quite the social critic that he is, but then compassion, which is perhaps the single dominating force in his work, can often defuse the force of what sounds, on occasion, like a barely muted anger, so that the elegiac and the nostalgic, the celebratory, triumph over his sometimes caustic presentation of personal and social decline. Wilson began his career in the small spaces of Off-Off-Broadway, but in , along with three others, and at the invitation of Harry H. Lerner, founder and acting president of the Council for International Recreation, Culture, and Lifelong Education, he co-founded the Circle Repertory Company (which took its name from the initial letters of Lerner’s organisation), though he is inclined to play down his involve- ment in that event. In time this became his New York base. It would be difficult to over-emphasise the importance of the Rep to Wilson or of Wilson to the Rep. It gave him a virtually guaranteed outlet for his work, facilitated the various experiments in which he tried out his ideas and offered a shop-front window in which to display his talents. It also led to his long-term relationship with Marshall W. Mason, who was to direct most of his work. Eventually he took one further step, to Broadway, but always felt uneasy about this while acknowledging the boost which Broadway production gave even to a play with a truncated run. In other Lanford Wilson  words, he has experienced virtually all aspects of the American theatre. His plays are widely performed, not least, perhaps, because they reflect something of his midwestern values, because that blend of theatricality, nostalgia and a poetic sensibility that made Our Town such an enduring success is equally a mark of his drama. His career began, however, in New York and in theatres which in truth were not theatres at all. The size of the Caffè Cino limited the number of characters in a play so that Wilson’s first works were for small casts. The ingenuity required of those working in such a venue itself helped to forge an aesthetic. In Home Free, the first play he wrote after moving to New York, and also the first of his plays ‘based loosely on people I knew’ because ‘it takes a while to be convinced you’re supposed to write about something you know’, 2 he doubled his cast by making two of them imaginary. Lawrence and Joanna are, it appears, brother and sister and involved in an incestuous relationship. Since they are also fantasists, however, it is difficult to be sure. Slipping in and out of nursery school language, they talk to one another and to the invisible children who share their game. There is, perhaps, an echo of Tennessee Williams in a play in which a toy Ferris wheel symbolises the fantasy world into which they step, a world in which they are protected from a reality which they can only engage with when they have transformed it, the price of that protection being their own infantalising. It is an isolation they both fear and crave. The play caused something of a stir and marked the beginning of Wilson’s career, more especially since he scored a success with another product of that year – The Madness of Lady Bright. This also features a character for whom fantasy is consolation and entrapment. Leslie Bright is ‘a screaming preening queen, rapidly losing a long-kept “beauty”’. 3 He has transformed his one-room apartment into a shrine in which he worships his own memories of past love. The two other figures who appear have no real substance, setting the stage, stirring memories, prompting, recalling, echoing, chiding, remonstrat- ing, quarrelling, consoling. They are generated by his need, part of an internal dialogue that breaks surface only because ‘Lady Bright’ is alone, projecting this fantasy girl and boy out of his solitariness. They are an expression of his need, his desperation. At times they become the lovers whose existence is otherwise only recalled by signatures on the apart- ment walls, mementoes of one-night stands, passing contacts. At times  Contemporary American playwrights 2 Lanford Wilson, Twenty-One Short Plays (Newbury, VT, ), p. . 3 Lanford Wilson, The Rimers of Eldritch and Other Plays (New York, ), p. . they are his means of acknowledging the suicidal impulse he feels, dis- mayed, as he is, by a sexuality which he otherwise seems to celebrate but which makes him a victim of more than fate. The voices keep him alive. The play ends with what seems very like an echo of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, as the fallen ‘Lady Bright’ is appar- ently assisted by a stranger, who exists only in his mind but who will lead him away to a place of protection. ‘I’m sorry – I hate to trouble you, but I – I believe I’ve torn my gown . . . would you take me home now, please? .Take me home’(Rimers,p.). There is, however, no home and no stranger to take him to it. His repeated cry, ‘Take me home. Take me home. Take me home’, uttered in what is supposedly his home, is no more than a cry of desperation. Wilson has confessed that ‘the subject and form of Lady Bright’owe everything toAdrienne Kennedy’s The Funny House of the Negro. ‘In other words I ripped Adrienne off totally’ (Twenty-One Short Plays,p.). Kennedy’s play had featured ‘a young African-American girl quietly going mad in her apartment’, while Lady Bright was, in his own words, ‘about a screaming queen going stark raving’ (Twenty-One Short Plays,p. ). Whatever the degree of influence, however, the play won an Obie award for Neil Flanagan, who played the part of Leslie Bright, while Jerry Talmer’s review in the New York Post was the first review of an Off- Off Broadway play in a major New York daily, itself a significant moment in the development of the postwar theatre in America. The Madness of Lady Bright was revived in  and was still playing when Joe Cino committed suicide. The Caffè Cino closed, supposedly after receiving , citations for violating various city codes and ordi- nances in a single day. As Gene A. Barnett reminds us in his book on Wilson, Lady Bright had run a total of  performances, its closure, along with that of the Caffè Cino, marking a change in the Off-Off-Broadway theatre, which now became less communal and more competitive. In February , Wilson followed The Madness of Lady Bright with Ludlow Fair, a comic dialogue between two women in their twenties, a character study in which the inconsequence of their lives emerges indi- rectly through their conversation and which ends with one of them staring vacantly into space for what Wilson insists must be a full thirty- second pause, a device he would use in later works, increasingly aware of the power of silence, as he was of the void which can equally exist at the heart of a whirlpool of language. In July of the same year came This is the Rill Speaking, a play, as he explained, ‘for six voices’ with characters doubled and actions being Lanford Wilson  pantomimed. This creates a portrait of a small community in the Ozark Mountains, Missouri, out of fragments of experience, overlapping scenes, orchestrated dialogue, techniques he would also use in his later work and particularly in The Rimers of Eldritch, which presents a darker view of small-town America. Not without a certain sentimentality, a strain that runs through a number of Wilson’s plays, and which finds its expression in his fondness for the adolescent, the emotionally vulnerable, it explores the world of youthful naivety and the gulf which opens up between the young and those who have so easily forgotten their own youth. Theatrically, and perhaps in terms of mood, it owes something to Thornton Wilder, but Wilson identified another source, suggesting that ‘I would never have written This is the Rill Speaking if I had not read Yo u May Go Home Again by David Starkweather, which was a completely non- realistic play. This is the Rill Speaking is essentially the same play. It’s just my experience, my going home’. 4 His own work, however, is less radically non-realist than Starkweather’s nor is it ‘filled with hate’ in the way he saw Starkweather’s as being, albeit a hate which coexisted with love. On the contrary, the nostalgia, the sentimentality at its heart, lacked the contrasting element which was a feature of You May Go Home Again. To Wilson, This is the Rill Speaking was ‘a deliberate exercise to set down just the sound of the people, without thinking how the play was to be done. It was to be a play for voices’ (Rimers,p.), that would resist those stereotypes of rural America that seemed to him to appear too fre- quently in the American theatre. It was, however, a play whose title seemed to baffle everyone, including those who worked at the Caffè Cino taking telephone bookings. The conversation, he explained, usually ran: ‘Hello, Caffè Cino. (Beat) Lanford Wilson’s THIS IS THE RILL SPEAKING . (Beat) Rill. (Beat) ---. (Beat) I have no idea’ (Twenty-One Short Plays, p. ). Following Days Ahead (), a monologue set on Valentine’s Day, in which a middle-aged man talks to a wall behind which his wife may or may not be entombed, a wall that is both literal and symbolic, and Wandering (), a brief three-character play in which only one speech exceeds a single line, Wilson decided to write a play that would require a larger stage. Accordingly, he moved on to Ellen Stuart’s Café La Mama Experimental Theatre Club and a new phase in his career. Nonetheless,  Contemporary American playwrights 4 Jackson R. Bryer, The Playwright’s Art: Conversations with Contemporary American Dramatists (New Brunswick, NJ, ), p. . there is something impressive about these early works. The restrictions of the Caffè Cino space were turned to advantage. They necessitated a flexible approach to staging and a non-realist version of character, while the emphasis on short plays, which was an aspect of that theatre, encour- aged an impressionistic use of language, a poetic density, a sense of the metaphoric force of setting. He had also begun to experiment with the collage technique that was to be a mark of a number of his plays. The influence of other playwrights may be evident but he was already trying out techniques that he would deploy to greater effect later. With Balm in Gilead, however, he wrote a play that could not be contained within the Caffè Cino stage. It opened in January , at La Mama, and featured twenty-nine characters. Set in and around an all-night coffee shop on Upper Broadway, Balm in Gilead seems, at first, as Frank Rich of the New York Times later described a revival, a naturalistic account of the low-life denizens of this hang-out for prostitutes, pimps and petty criminals. It seems to be a blend of Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End, Elmer Rice’s Street Scene and Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie or The Iceman Cometh, with Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real thrown in. That last reference, however, suggests the extent to which the play is something more than a slice of life, a glimpse into the lower depths. It is true that the dramatis personae does indeed identify most of the characters as prostitutes, addicts, ‘bargain- ers, hagglers’, those who would ‘sell anything including themselves to any man or woman with the money’, that it includes lesbians, homosex- uals and a transvestite, along with two people who seem to have wan- dered in from another world: Joe, a middle-class New Yorker, and Darlene, an attractive but dumb woman, ‘honest, romantic to a fault’, just arrived from Chicago. But this is a self-consciously theatrical piece, carefully choreographed, almost like the opening scene of Guys and Dolls, and, Wilson insists, should ‘be breakneck fast’ and ‘concentrate on the movement of the whole’. 5 On occasion characters address the audience directly (something he had learned from seeing a production of James Saunders’s Next Time I’ll Sing to You), the action is momentarily frozen, scenes are repeated, with the set reversed, while the action is framed, accompanied or interrupted by music: rock and roll or blues sung by a group of black entertainers, songs from a juke box and a ‘round’ sung by several of the characters. Having seen a production of Brendan Behan’s The Hostage in Chicago, he was convinced that theatre should be Lanford Wilson  5 Lanford Wilson, Balm in Gilead and Other Plays (New York, ), p. . ‘a three-ring circus’. 6 Balm in Gilead, named for the hymn sung by the characters, is that three-ring circus, and, perhaps, the most significant of his early works. The all-night café is a no-man’s land in the battle for survival waged on the streets, back alleys and rooming-houses which lie at the other end of the spectrum from the American dream. Here the characters snatch a cup of coffee, make assignations, argue, reach out to one another before hurrying off to hustle, to trade themselves in against a tomorrow when the world will be transformed. In his description of the characters Wilson points out that ‘what they are now is not what they will be in a month from now’ (Balm in Gilead,p.), but this is not the familiar American piety that they can re-invent themselves, climb up an invisible ladder to success and self-fulfilment, but an acknowledgement that they are passing through, that their world is transient. They sink no roots but, like Tennessee Williams’s characters, survive by keeping on the move. Indeed, if they are unwise enough to stay too long, as Joe is, unschooled in the rules of the game, then disaster looms. These are men and women who survive by making no commitments, seizing what they can while they can. The only logic that operates in their lives is that of decline and entropy. Balm in Gilead is impressionistic, pointillist. Each character is no more than part of a shifting portrait of an America in which space and time are the only coordinates, where definitions are of no account, violence threatens and despair and hope seem to exist in the same moment. These are, as Wilson has said, losers who refuse to lose and hence are reminiscent of Tennessee Williams’s bums, prostitutes and desperate romantics trading love, or its simulacrum, for momentary relief from awareness of their own failed hopes. The lethargy of the characters in Jack Gelber’s The Connection, longing for their fix, so many Vladimirs and Estragons awaiting the arrival of a revelatory meaning, is here exchanged for a frenzy of febrile activity as Wilson’s figures evade truths they would rather not confront, substitute action for knowledge, aware- ness and being. Speeches overlap. The juke box is turned on. There is a constant buzz of chatter in order to avoid the silence in which questions require answers, though there are also those who wander through the scene mute, apparently baffled by the world in which they find them- selves and from which they seem alienated, linguistically and socially withdrawn.  Contemporary American playwrights 6 David Savran, In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights (New York, ), p. . [...]... ostensibly oblivious, caught up in their own lives Jean, prompted by a word from Delia, begins to re-enact that linguistic collapse that had preceded her hospitalisation: ‘Inscrutable In - , in, Scrut - - - - , scrut Inscrut Ah , ah Inscruta – ble - - , ble Inscrutable Inscrutable: - - - - - - - - - , inscrutable’ (p ) At that moment, Cynthia, dressed in a robe, wanders past them and out of the... Bill Lewis Paul Grainger, a twenty-year-old student, is ‘a tenor’, while April Green, a thirty-year-old prostitute, is a ‘mellow alto’ and Suzy, another prostitute, ‘a mezzo’ It is not that this is an operatic work It is that Wilson is a creator of tone poems So, Mr Morse, a seventy-year-old, is partly distinguished by his ‘high croaking voice’ as a sixty-eight-year-old former waitress, Millie, is characterised... at times too much of a dramatised debate, in which arguments are rehearsed and the dialectics of race are substituted for that concern for character which Wilson had 7 Lanford Wilson, The Gingham Dog (New York, ), p   Contemporary American playwrights announced as his objective, does manage to reach towards something more The second act contrasts sharply with the first, which had ended with... descriptions Wilson offers of his characters Mr Katz is ‘firm and wary and at times Lanford Wilson  more than a little weary’ (p xi) Mrs Oxendam, the day desk clerk, is ‘quick-speaking with no commerce’ (p xi) Mrs Bellotti is ‘a sigher’ Millie is ‘Elegance marred by an egocentric spiritualism’ (p xi) April is a ‘soft pragmatist’, Suzy ‘hopelessly romantic and hard as nails’ (p xi) Wilson is a quick-sketch... damage control Wilson s description of the characters makes plain the extent to which 10 Lanford Wilson, The Hot l Baltimore (New York, ), p xiii Lanford Wilson  he sees Hot l Baltimore as what Ntozake Shange, in a different context, would call a choreopoem It is a play for voices scored so that the result is a chorus, a series of broken arias, and that fact is underscored by Wilson s own description... ‘the first railway center in this country That’s why the lament for the railroad goes through the play’ (Barnett, Lanford Wilson, pp –) The building itself, an old railroad hotel, is in decline (windows will not close, the boiler fails, the elevator is  Contemporary American playwrights boarded up) and scheduled for demolition Its inhabitants are all on a notice to quit, in more ways than... production of Gertrude Stein’s significantly named In Circles, but then, to him, one of the great virtues of the Off-Off-Broadway movement lay in its eclecticism, in the fact that works were seen as in some sense common property since so many of those contributing to it were  Contemporary American playwrights themselves on a sharp learning curve Thus, he sees another influence on Balm in Gilead as lying in... and the romantic self have broken on the rocks of a crude reality, lacking transcendence Lanford Wilson  These figures are, for the most part, tolerant of one another, but that tolerance hardly seems a virtue when it is momentary, so easily broken, no more than an alliance of the desperate at this end-of-the-line café They await the next fix, the next trick, serve the moment, provoke and respond to... by what it couldn’t say – what was really there’ (Lemon Sky, p ), and, indeed, slowly, the invisible becomes manifest as hidden truths break surface, threatening 8 Lanford Wilson, Lemon Sky (New York, ), p   Contemporary American playwrights to destabilise a family held together by little more than routine and the secrets they are afraid to articulate Alan himself is a catalyst He brings hidden... protective humour The guests in this end-of-the-line hotel (it was built to service the nearby railroad terminal, itself now gone) live in their separate rooms, like those in the rooming-house pictured by Edward Albee in The Zoo Story, meeting only in a lobby which is a no man’s land, a limbo where they brush up against one another for a moment Theirs is a non-teleological world, with no first cause . the apart- ment walls, mementoes of one-night stands, passing contacts. At times  Contemporary American playwrights 2 Lanford Wilson, Twenty-One Short. ‘Hello, Caffè Cino. (Beat) Lanford Wilson s THIS IS THE RILL SPEAKING . (Beat) Rill. (Beat) - - - . (Beat) I have no idea’ (Twenty-One Short Plays, p. ).