Alice in Bed Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  A NOTE ON THE PLAY

  SCENE 1

  SCENE 2

  SCENE 3

  SCENE 4

  SCENE 5

  SCENE 6

  SCENE 7

  SCENE 8

  By Susan Sontag

  Notes

  Copyright Page

  ALICE JAMES

  NURSE

  YOUNG MAN

  Visions of family

  FATHER

  HENRY (“HARRY”), her brother

  MOTHER

  At the tea party

  MARGARET FULLER

  EMILY DICKINSON

  KUNDRY

  MYRTHA, Queen of the Wilis

  Mattress team

  M I (man)

  M II (woman)

  TIME: 1890

  PLACE: London

  (Scene 3 is a flashback or memory, and takes place

  two decades earlier in Cambridge, Massachusetts.)

  A NOTE ON THE PLAY1

  Suppose Shakespeare had a sister, a brilliant sister, a sister with a writing gift as immense as her brother’s. That’s what Virginia Woolf asks us to imagine in her epochal polemic A Room of One’s Own. Is it likely that Judith Shakespeare—the name Woolf imagines for her —would have found the inner authority that could have made her a playwright? Or, as is more likely, would her gift have remained silent? Silent not merely for want of encouragement. Silent because of the way that women are defined and therefore, commonly, define themselves. For the obligation to be physically attractive and patient and nurturing and docile and sensitive and deferential to fathers (to brothers, to husbands) contradicts and must collide with the egocentricity and aggressiveness and the indifference to self that a large creative gift requires in order to flourish.

  Shakespeare, as far as we know, did not have a sister. But the greatest American novelist, Henry James, whose brother was the greatest American psychologist and moral philosopher, William James, had a sister, a brilliant sister, and we know what she became. The waters of depression closed over her head when she was nineteen, she tried to summon the courage to commit suicide, she suffered from a variety of vague and debilitating ailments, she went abroad, she stayed in bed, she started a diary, she died … at forty-three.

  So Alice in Bed is a play about women, about women’s anguish and women’s consciousness of self: a free fantasy based on a real person, Alice James, the youngest of five children (and only daughter) of an extraordinarily distinguished nineteenth-century American family. The father, heir to a large business fortune, was a well-known author on religious and moral subjects. An eccentric and strong-willed man, who had lost a leg in an accident at thirteen, he was his children’s principal tutor, and took them on several trips to Europe when they were young. (Not surprisingly, the mother was a mild, retiring person who had little influence on the life of the family.) When Alice James was thirty, she is said to have made her desire to commit suicide known to her father, who, after a solemn lecture, granted his permission. In 1884 she moved to England, where her brother Henry (“Harry”) had settled, and lived there, bedridden, until her death from breast cancer seven and a half years later.

  Perhaps nothing about a person is more potent, and also more arbitrary, than the person’s name.

  The name of my historical character, Alice James, inevitably echoes the nineteenth century’s most famous Alice, the heroine of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The all too common reality of a woman who does not know what to do with her genius, her originality, her aggressiveness, and therefore becomes a career invalid, merged in my mind with the fictional figure of the Victorian girl-child who discovers the world of adult arbitrariness in the form of a dream (in the style produced by that perfectly legal and widely used nineteenth-century drug, opium), in which the changes in and perplexities about her feelings are imagined as arbitrary changes in physical size and scale.

  And once Alice James, my Alice James, had fused with the Alice of Alice-in-Wonderland, I knew I could have a scene inspired by (though quite different from) the most famous chapter of Lewis Carroll’s book, “A Mad Tea-party.”

  At my mad tea party I have convened, for the purpose of advising and consoling Alice, the ghosts of two nineteenth-century American writers. One, Emily Dickinson, was a genius—who dealt with her searing originality by spending her life as a reclusive spinster, keeping house for her family; of Dickinson’s more than seventeen hundred poems, fewer than a dozen were published in her lifetime.

  Margaret Fuller, the other writer summoned to the tea party from beyond the grave, is the first important American woman of letters, who wrote a study of Goethe and a notorious proto-feminist book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. She drowned with her young Italian husband and their baby when the ship bringing her back to America from Italy, where she had lived for some years, foundered in a storm a hundred yards or so off Fire Island, New York.

  I have also convened at my tea party two exemplary angry women from the nineteenth-century stage: Myrtha, the Queen of the Wilis, a company of ghosts of young women who, betrayed in love, have died before their wedding day, from Act II of Giselle; and from Parsifal, my Dormouse: Kundry, the bitter, guilt-ridden woman who wants to sleep.

  After the crowded tea party, a monologue. Alice, in her mind, must go to Rome—which her brother Harry often visited and where Margaret Fuller lived. And there she will imagine not only her freedom but the weight of the past and the distressing claims of the world beyond the privileged one in which she lives, represented by the figure of a child with a maimed hand.

  A real encounter with a representative of the world that does not have the bourgeois luxury of psychological invalidism moves the play to its climax, when a young burglar enters the invalid’s bedroom.

  All is fiction, of course, in my play. Much is invented.

  I wrote Alice in Bed in two weeks in January 1990, but I first dreamed it from beginning to end ten years earlier, in Rome, while rehearsing the production I directed of a late play by Pirandello, As You Desire Me—another play about a woman in despair who is, or is pretending to be, helpless.

  I think I have been preparing to write Alice in Bed all my life.

  A play, then, about the grief and anger of women; and, finally, a play about the imagination.

  The reality of the mental prison. The triumphs of the imagination.

  But the victories of the imagination are not enough.

  SCENE 1

  Blackout. ( ALICE’s bedroom.)

  NURSE’s voice

  Of course you can get up.

  ALICE’S voice

  I can’t.

  NURSE

  Won’t.

  ALICE

  Can’t.

  NURSE

  Won’t.

  ALICE

  Can’t. Oh. All right.

  NURSE

  Want to. Want to get up.

  ALICE

  First turn on the light.

  SCENE 2

  ALICE’S bedroom. Victorian, overfurnished. French doors in the rear. Chaise longue, piano. ALICE—around forty, long hair, childlike—in a large brass bed, under a stack (ten?) of thin mattresses; her head, shoulders, and arms are free. NURSE, who is very tall and wears a uniform of striped mattress ticking, is perched cross-legged on top.

  NURSE

  Are you going to get up. It’s only a question of will power.

  ALICE

  I think it’s time for my injection.

  NURSE

  Don’t change the subject.

  ALICE

  I’m not. My legs don’t work.

  NURSE

  I know the time. He’s coming at four. You like to please him. He’d be so happy to se
e you sitting up, in a chair.

  ALICE

  I wonder. I think he likes to see me in bed.

  NURSE

  Whatever for.

  (She jumps or climbs down.)

  ALICE

  That way he knows where I am. I’m in my place.

  NURSE

  They visit. Your brother. Your friends.

  ALICE

  Friends who are curious. They want to see if I’m still alive. They’re waiting. I’m disappointing them.

  NURSE

  Wouldn’t you care to visit them, lazybones. Aren’t you in the least bit curious. Haven’t you had enough of this room.

  ALICE

  Go out. See, as they say, the world.

  NURSE

  Yes.

  ALICE

  I see better from here.

  (The light flickers.)

  NURSE

  Don’t tempt fate.

  ALICE

  That’s exactly what I want to do. Tempt fate. Can you explain to me why fate is so untemptable. Downright obdurate.

  NURSE

  Perhaps if you put on some powder, a little rouge. You are a woman, you know.

  ALICE

  Do I look a fright. Tell me.

  NURSE

  I don’t want to be unkind.

  ALICE

  Tell me.

  (The NURSE fetches a mirror from a drawer—it’s a wooden oval on a stick, Italian, ornate, gilt—and puts it in ALICE’s hand.)

  My mirror.

  NURSE

  Of course you have a mirror.

  ALICE

  Which by the way once belonged to Sarah Bernhardt. Did you know that. Did I ever tell you.

  NURSE

  I’ve never been to the theatre.

  ALICE

  You should. There are inexpensive tickets. Even from the second balcony one can see the whole width of the stage.

  NURSE

  I never had the time.

  ALICE

  Did no one ever invite you. Some young man, you should go with some young man.

  NURSE

  Someday.

  ALICE

  Help me.

  (The NURSE rings bell. M I and M II—they wear white sailor suits—enter and remove the mattresses, stacking them in the rear of the stage.)

  NURSE

  That’s better.

  (As mattresses are removed, NURSE helps ALICE to sit up in bed, putting three cushions behind her head. ALICE continues to look at herself in the mirror. M II exits; M I remains near mattresses.)

  ALICE

  I think I am not dissatisfied with my appearance.

  NURSE

  Don’t be so vain.

  (NURSE takes the mirror and looks at herself.)

  There is always room for improvement.

  ALICE

  Of course.

  NURSE

  A woman can always make herself more attractive.

  ALICE

  I was not thinking of that kind of improvement. (Begins to turn restlessly in the bed) Why are you tempting me.

  NURSE

  I’m helping, you poor motherless girl.

  ALICE

  Do you know what I once said about Sarah Bernhardt, do you know. (More and more agitated) She is a moral abscess, festering with vanity. I did say that.

  NURSE

  Shall I play some music.

  ALICE

  Oh, oh.

  NURSE

  My dear …

  ALICE

  I’m having those thoughts again. (Thrashing about) Oh, oh …

  (NURSE sits at piano, starts playing passage from Parsifal.)

  Maybe I need the mattresses again on me. Where. No. I see myself with a knife—no, it’s a brick. I see his brains tumbling out of his head. His black Irish brains.

  (NURSE signals M I, who takes a syringe from the black bag on a table near the chaise longue and gives ALICE an injection.)

  Yes, I’ve done it. I don’t care. Let them all hate me. I’m tired of making them sad. Of making them comfortable. Let them hate me. Oh, the relief. (She is slowing down) Such relief.

  (NURSE still playing. Lights dim. ALICE sleeps. Very dim. A few seconds more of music before blackout.)

  SCENE 3

  A younger ALICE is standing in a shaft of light, center stage, in a long white dress. Light slowly widens, brightens to reveal FATHER’S study. Books, books. FATHER on a ladder.

  ALICE

  Father.

  FATHER

  A minute more.

  ALICE

  Father.

  FATHER

  Just one.

  (He descends the ladder awkwardly, walks stiffly to the desk, sits in his high-backed chair.)

  ALICE

  Father.

  FATHER

  Yes m’dear.

  ALICE

  Father.

  FATHER

  I’m listening Alice. Though I’m busy.

  ALICE

  Father.

  FATHER

  My child be reasonable. I’m giving you a portion of my busy time. As much as you need.

  ALICE

  Father.

  FATHER

  I’m listening. I’m patient.

  ALICE

  Father.

  FATHER

  I’m sitting down. In the listening position.

  ALICE

  Father.

  FATHER

  It’s not been hard for you to speak has it. We are a very eloquent family. I and your four brothers. I was so proud of you Alice. We, I dare say, are so proud of each other. Our family.

  ALICE

  Father.

  FATHER

  And you the youngest. The baby. Our little girl.

  ALICE

  Father.

  FATHER

  My brilliant talkative children. Always chattering, always prattling. Plying your father with questions. Little curious minds. Using big words before you even knew what they meant. Talking, talking.

  ALICE

  Father.

  FATHER

  Are you bored m’dear. I have not confined you to women’s fiddle-faddle. I gave you the run of the library as I did your brothers.

  ALICE

  Father.

  FATHER

  You’re merciless m’dear. Do you want to drive me to anger. (Pauses) You remind me of your mother.

  ALICE

  Father.

  FATHER

  (Coldly) She would drive me mad with her silences too. If you have an accusation to bring against me kindly have the courage to speak out.

  (Parsifal music is heard from off-stage.)

  ALICE

  I’m very unhappy Mother.

  FATHER

  Your father m’dear. I’m your father.

  ALICE

  I’m very unhappy Father.

  FATHER

  What did you want to ask me.

  ALICE

  Is it, yes, is it wrong to want to take one’s life.

  FATHER

  Why do you want to grieve those who love you. It’s wrong to cause us so much worry.

  ALICE

  I’ve tried Father.

  FATHER

  If you can try at all then there’s no reason ever to stop trying.

  ALICE

  Father I’ve climbed the tree beyond its leaves.

  FATHER

  In my opinion m’dear you’ve not even begun to exercise your considerable talents. This is a more than remarkable family and you, you know I’m not given to flattery, you are not the least endowed. Of my five children I would rate you third in order of genius. Do you hear me. Less brilliant than two of your brothers, you exceed in brilliance the other two. That middle position would count as unparalleled genius in almost any other family.