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    The Columnist: A Play
    The Columnist: A Play
    The Columnist: A Play
    Ebook98 pages1 hour

    The Columnist: A Play

    By David Auburn

    ()

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    About this ebook

    A new play from the Pulitzer- and Tony Award–winning author of Proof, coming to Broadway this April

    In midcentury America, newspaper columnists are kings—and Joseph Alsop wears the biggest crown. Joe sits at the nexus of Washington life: beloved, feared, and courted in equal measure by the very people whose careers and futures he determines. But as the sixties dawn and America undergoes dizzying change, the intense political dramas Joe has been throwing his weight around in—supporting the war in Vietnam and Soviet containment, criticizing student activism—come to bear a profound personal cost.

    Based on the real-life story of Joe Alsop, whose columns at the time of his 1974 retirement were running three times a week in more than three hundred newspapers, David Auburn's The Columnist is a deft blend of history and storytelling. A hilarious, searing portrait of the glorious rewards and devastating losses that accompany ego, ambition, and the pursuit of power, The Columnist pens a vital letter from a radically changing decade to our own turbulent era.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateApr 24, 2012
    ISBN9781466841567
    The Columnist: A Play
    Author

    David Auburn

    David Auburn is an American playwright whose 2000 play Proof won the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and was also adapted into a film. He has received the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Manhattan.

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      Book preview

      The Columnist - David Auburn

      ACT ONE

      SCENE 1

      A hotel room. Moscow, 1954. JOE, late forties, in bed. A YOUNG MAN, Russian, mid-twenties, getting dressed.

      JOE: Come back to bed.

      YOUNG MAN: I have to go.

      (Beat. JOE watches him dress.)

      JOE: I’ve never had a Communist before.

      YOUNG MAN: Can you tell the difference?

      JOE: I’m not sure. I’d need to go again to give you a definitive answer.

      YOUNG MAN: I’m giving a tour at four o’clock.

      JOE: Where?

      YOUNG MAN: Red Square.

      JOE: That’s down the block. We have plenty of time.

      YOUNG MAN: This is my afternoon break. My boss does not like it when I’m gone so long.

      JOE: Your boss?

      YOUNG MAN: Is it the wrong word? For someone who tells you what to do?

      JOE: It’s the right word. I thought you were all comrades here.

      YOUNG MAN: We are, yes. But he tells me what to do.

      JOE: What if I told you to come back to bed?

      YOUNG MAN: You are not my comrade.

      JOE: No, I’m your superior. I’m older than you and American and I have more money. Now do as I say.

      YOUNG MAN: Go to hell.

      (JOE chuckles, lights a cigarette.)

      JOE: Your English is extremely good, you know that?

      YOUNG MAN: I was sent to government language schools. I do tours in French and German also.

      JOE: Do you have a family?

      YOUNG MAN: A sister.

      JOE: What does she do?

      YOUNG MAN: She’s a laundress.

      JOE: Doesn’t have your talent for languages.

      YOUNG MAN: She was a great athlete.

      JOE: Really? What sort?

      YOUNG MAN: Skiing. She tried out for the national team. As a girl. She was nearly chosen.

      JOE: Good for her.

      YOUNG MAN: We had interviews with the sports officials. Quite an exciting time. They took us to dinner, breakfasts in hotels with other athletes and their families. Eggs, sausages, fresh tomatoes, coffee with cream, thick white bread. Then she had a disappointing race, and …

      JOE: What happened?

      YOUNG MAN: Well, the meals stopped. We had been given a new refrigerator. Men came and took it away. They didn’t even bring the old one back. We had to use the neighbor’s from across the hall for five months—they let us have one shelf. Finally, finally, we got another refrigerator, an old one, worse than the one we started with.

      JOE: No, I meant, what happened at the race?

      YOUNG MAN: What do you mean, what happened?

      JOE: Well, did she fall on the course, or—

      YOUNG MAN: No, she didn’t fall. She ran a good course. She just came a bit short of the required time is all. She was nervous. How would you feel?

      JOE: That’s awful.

      (Beat.)

      YOUNG MAN: What is your job?

      JOE: I’m a journalist.

      YOUNG MAN: That’s why you ask me so many questions.

      JOE: I suppose so.

      YOUNG MAN: Are you from New York?

      JOE: Washington.

      YOUNG MAN: Which is your newspaper?

      JOE: Oh, I’m in hundreds.

      YOUNG MAN: Hundreds?

      JOE: Well. A hundred and ninety, at last count. I have a syndicated column. With my brother.

      YOUNG MAN: How many newspapers do you have in America?

      JOE: I don’t know. Thousands, I suppose.

      YOUNG MAN: No.

      JOE: Easily. Every major city has five or six. Morning, afternoon, evening. Even the smallest town has its own weekly. It’s one of our great strengths.

      YOUNG MAN: You write one thing, one column, it goes into one hundred and ninety newspapers.

      JOE: Yes.

      YOUNG MAN: And each of them pays you.

      JOE: Yes.

      YOUNG MAN: Are you rich?

      JOE: Yes, by your standards.

      YOUNG MAN: I’m beginning to think I should stay after all.

      JOE: I won’t pay you. That would tip things over into the sordid.

      YOUNG MAN: I was joking. Don’t insult me.

      JOE: Sorry.

      (Beat.)

      YOUNG MAN: So, what are you writing about here?

      JOE: The menace you pose to us.

      YOUNG MAN: Me?

      JOE: You seem very nice. No, you collectively.

      YOUNG MAN: And your readers in a hundred and ninety newspapers, this is what they want to read? How scary we are?

      JOE: We don’t give two shits what they want to read. We tell them what they need to know.

      YOUNG MAN: You and your brother. Is he here too?

      JOE: We never travel together. One of us goes, one of us stays home and writes, we switch off … Now you seem to be asking me all the questions.

      YOUNG MAN: Maybe I should be a journalist. If we had more than one newspaper. And journalists.

      JOE: (Laughs) Tell me something. Why on earth do they have you doing tours? An intelligent young man like you, with your languages … Why aren’t you in, I don’t know, the diplomatic corps?

      YOUNG MAN: I have wondered this myself, very often. I applied once. I was rejected.

      JOE: They don’t tell you why?

      YOUNG MAN: No. Maybe something to do with my sister, I don’t know.

      JOE: And you have no appeal in the matter?

      YOUNG MAN: Of course not.

      JOE: Barbaric country. You’d like America.

      YOUNG MAN: I would like to go there. It’s impossible, of course.

      JOE: Someday, when your Soviet masters give up on this idiotic experiment and rejoin the civilized world—assuming, of course, we haven’t already blasted each other into clouds of radioactive vapor—you can

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