Long Days

Characters:

Two play every role here: an actor around forty to play Dan most of the time, and an actor close to sixty to mostly play Paul. The younger of these two has the first line of the play, and with each new character-heading they alternate. The right-hand column contains suggestions for photographs and video to be projected somewhere prominent onstage, as well as suggested light and sound.

Setting:

These scenes are set in Hollywood during the annus horribilis of 2016. Scenes previous (and after) tell the true story of the playwright's treatment for cancer in the wake of his wife's treatment for cancer, while his friend the war reporter Paul Watson, whose 1993 photograph of the body of an American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia, won him a Pulitzer Prize, sojourns in Syria. Together playwright and war reporter concoct a plan to sell a "prestige" TV drama about western journalists in Syria. This play requires only a unit set: a version of this photo of Mohammed Mohiedin Anis in his home in Aleppo. No props. One costume for each actor.

Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty Images

After the end of the worldafter my deathI found myself in the middle of lifeI created myselfconstructed lifepeople animals landscapes

this is a table I was sayingthis is a tableon the table are lying bread a knifethe knife serves to cut the breadpeople nourish themselves with bread

one should love manI was learning by night and daywhat one should loveI answered man

— Różewicz, translated by Miłosz

Part I

Dan:

Thank you for these pages, Paul. Normally
pitching is prose. Conversation, really.
But yeah, it sure is fun to imagine.
I had hoped to finish our pitch before
going under. Aware that surgery
carries with it the possibility
of not waking up. Uncontrollable
bleeding. Heart failure, stroke. Clots. Infection
in the days after. In the days before
I start anxiously googling myself,
to somehow assert I'm alive, and find,
instead of my author's photo, Google's
using an image of Kevin Carter,
a white South African war reporter
in the nineties, member of the so-called
Bang Bang Club, who won a Pulitzer Prize
the same year as you, who haunts you because
he killed himself. What could it mean? What kind
of sign is this? I leave my wedding ring
on the dresser top. Wear comfortable shoes.
Drive to City of Hope, in the desert,
where in the 1920s and thirties
tuberculosis patients came to die.
Some survived, of course. Like Eugene O'Neill,
though he didn't convalesce here. He's been
a hero of mine, till lately. Long Day's
Journey into Night felt like a memoir
of my own childhood. I saw it in school
and walked out of there like I was walking
on air. I worshipped him. But I fear him
now, his life's tragedy. I want to live
comedies now. I disrobe. Nurses plug
a hose blowing warm air into a hole
in my paper gown. Make a pincushion
of my veins. Put socks on me. The gas man
stops by to creepily ask if he can
bend my head backward precipitously
while I lie unconscious, the easier
to ram his breathing tube in. Dr. Fong,
my surgeon, is world-famous. He's smiling
as I roll into the operating
theater. Just another workday for them.
Blue gowns and masks. The bold white freezing room.
More intros offered. Ceiling lights whirling
like UFOs. Or medical halos.

Fong:

Oh, about six hours. We'll open you up
along the same incision the other
surgeon used for your colon resection
in March. We're going to have to cut higher
though, because we need to reach that corner
of your liver next to your diaphragm
here, on this side. Feel it? We're going to take
about fifteen percent of your liver,
at least that's the plan. Your...