While We Wait 3
A play about what survives the noise
This short play is the final part of the NOISE/QUIET cycle. If you’re just joining, I recommend starting at the beginning with Overture: Sound Collage Collapse.
To read the second part of this three-part drama, While We Wait 2, click here. If you want to revisit the previous play in the cycle, Succession Play, or What You Make of It, click here.
Endings are hard to write. They have to provide a satisfying narrative conclusion while also driving home the main theme of the show. In writing this play, I experienced a double-pressure because While We Wait 3 is not only the end of a three-play sequence, it’s the end of the entire cycle of nine pieces.
As with the previous two segments, I looked for inspiration from Kurt Vonnegut and his rules for writing to help me craft the ending. Rule #6 says:
Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
I don’t think of myself as a sadistic playwright, but I do think this ending reveals exactly what May and June are made of in the conclusion of the play.
While this may be goodbye to May and June on the page, I look forward to meeting them one day in a rehearsal room and later on the stage.
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While We Wait 3
The same waiting room as before. The same clock still hangs on the wall. June is alone.
The clock ticks
MAY enters.
MAY: June
JUNE: Hi May.
MAY: I haven’t seen you in weeks. I thought maybe Travis completed his treatment. I guess you just changed your days so that…
Beat. The clock ticks.
MAY: I can wait for Duke in the coffee shop.
JUNE: Don’t go.
MAY: Are you sure?
JUNE: Don’t go.
MAY: OK. (Beat.) Is it alright if I sit down?
JUNE: Yes.
MAY: June, I’ve been thinking about you… going over and over in my head all the ways I should have handled myself. I wanted to write a letter to you, but I didn’t have an address…
JUNE: May stop.
MAY: Please June, just let me…
JUNE: May… he’s gone.
MAY: Who’s gone? The doctor? I just saw him…
JUNE: Travis. Travis is gone.
MAY: Oh June…
JUNE: Three days ago, he spiked a fever. He was doing so well. Nobody could tell he was sick. I brought him to the emergency room while the kids were at school. They sent us home with ibuprofen and said to give him fluids. The fever wouldn’t go down. We told the kids “Daddy has the flu.” The next night he couldn’t stop vomiting. And when there was nothing left, it was dry heaves—for hours. In the morning he finally fell asleep. Last night he woke me up, crying in pain. I called the sitter to stay with Sam and Beth, they were already asleep. I drove Travis back the emergency room. This time they admitted him. He was unconscious a few hours later, and then… We never said goodbye.
Then I left the hospital and drove home. It was already seven. I sent the sitter home, woke the kids up, got them dressed, made them breakfast and put them on the bus.
We never told them May. He was doing so well… We didn’t think… As soon as the bus drove away I thought, “What am I going to tell them when they come home? What am I going to say when they ask where their daddy is?” We never told them May. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know where to go. So I came here. Hoping to see you. Because I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. What do I do May?
MAY embraces JUNE. JUNE wails.
The clock ticks.
MAY: Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to wait here with me. When Duke is done, we are going to take him home and drop him off. He’s going to sleep the rest of the day anyway. Then you’re going to take me to your home, and we are going to wait for the school bus. We will sit Sam and Beth down, and tell them together. That’s what you’re going to do.
JUNE: They’ll never forgive me.
MAY: Listen to me—there’s nothing to forgive. You and Travis loved those kids so much, you gave them time to be happy with their father, as a family. You both gave them a gift.
JUNE: Thank you May.
MAY: Thank you.
JUNE For what?
MAY: For coming back.
The clock ticks.
JUNE: Did you and Duke just get here?
MAY: We did. But we shouldn’t have to wait longer than an hour.
JUNE: I know this sounds silly, but, while we wait, do you happen to have a book? To pass the time?
MAY: Do I have a book? Do you even have to ask?
JUNE: I can’t think too clearly right now—can you read it to me?
MAY: It would be my pleasure. (MAY takes out a book.)
JUNE: What is it?
MAY: One of my favorites: Joan Didion, Play it As it Lays.
The clock ticks into…
BLACKOUT
In the darkness the clock tick turns into the sound of a heart monitor. The pulse sound changes to the sound of flatline.
END OF CYCLE
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It’s an effective bookend for the entire cycle, with its attention to sound - particularly noise and silence and their alternation with speech - and it anchors the whole sequence with emotional gravity in an unexpected way: not a ‘happy ending’ but still an affirmation of human interaction.