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Tables and Chairs

Characters

Alice:
Female, innocent and naive, rather plain, completely unaware of the ruthless machinations of the real world, very neurotic, desperate to please, very wealthy.
Howard:
Male, strangely charismatic, inexplicably sexy, the perpetual bad boy, a charmer and manipulator
Spencer:
Male, faded, jaded man-of-the-world, the same age as Howard, rather dull but not unlikable, pretentious and demanding, essentially harmless.
Naomi:
Female, vivid and extravagant, a bit dangerous, the possessor of a vicious wit, a woman who has seen the beginning and the end, the same age as Howard and Spencer, always the bridesmaid, never the bride.

Setting

All scenes take place in a room of Alice's home. There is one entrance, up-stage center. The furnishings consist of a table and four chairs. A second table is added for Act Two, a third table for Act Three, and a fourth table for Act Four.

Production history

  • Staged reading, Second Stage Theatre, New York City; one scene published in Scenes and Monologues from the Best New Plays, Meriwether Publishing, Roger Ellis, editor.

The Story

Alice, wealthy and hopelessly naïve, meets and takes in Howard, Spencer, and Naomi, who are eternally unemployed, financially desperate, homeless, artist-theater con artists. Alice is madly in love with Howard, who, as the play opens, is having a “quiet day” and refuses to speak. Desperate to please him, Alice tries to cater to everyone’s needs as she is introduced to and indoctrinated into the world of Howard and Spencer and Naomi, who have been linked together symbiotically since childhood—an ad hoc, ad lib day-to-day existence of absurdist, dramatic adventures. This is a play with a highly absurdist comic edge, which explores life’s rituals and delusions, the mysterious power of love, and the unchanging and unchangeable nature of personality. Or as Naomi declares: "We’re all just props in the big drama of life."

Download full play here

The Dialogue

Naomi:
Spencer and Howard and I are very troubled people...
Spencer:
...very confused people.
Naomi:
We are people who have never been...[to SPENCER]... what do you call that?
Spencer:
Assimilated.
Naomi:
...into what is generally regarded as the "productive channels of society."
Spencer:
Howard and Naomi and I are members of the "Liberal Arts Generation"... young idealists who studied the liberal arts and then found out that there was nothing for us to do.
Alice:
I think you should make more films.
Spencer:
We did film. We did theater. We did Performance Art and Guerrilla Art and Hit-and-Run Art..
Naomi:
And now we do something called Survival Art.
Spencer:
We just get up in the morning and ad lib.
Alice:
[Excited/urgent] I would like to endow your entire operation. I would like to provide you with any amount of money you need both personally and professionally, so that you can pursue your beautiful creative endeavors.
Spencer:
We couldn't do that, Alice.
Alice:
I want to give you money. I want to help you. I want you to be able to create.
Spencer:
[With disgust] Money.
Alice:
Please.
Naomi:
We couldn't, Alice. You're too nice.
Alice:
I would like to be involved. I've never been part of an artistic collaboration or part of any collaboration. I've always been alone. And my father was a photograph on a wall, and my mother was a distant voice over the telephone every few weeks from a different hotel on a different continent...and there was the maid and the cook and the day nurse and the night nurse and the nanny and the house with a hundred rooms, but no one for me to play with...and I didn't understand how you ever got to know someone to play with because the nanny and the day nurse and my mother, when she was there, wouldn't let me talk to anyone or be seen by any one, "It's too dangerous," she said, "Strangers..." she said, and she talked about kidnappings and abductions and groups, "groups are dangerous"...and I watched out the window and saw groups of children playing together having fun, and I wanted to have a friend just like the other children had a friend...but I didn't know how to behave, I didn't know what to do or say and I still don't know what to do or what to say...the procedures about when it's my turn to talk and what I'm supposed to say...
Naomi:
You're doing just fine...
Alice:
I don't want to say the wrong thing and I don't want to do the wrong thing...I live in terror...I am embarrassed every single moment of my life!
Naomi:
Alice...
Alice:
[Very upset] Embarrassed! Embarrassed! It is not a comfortable emotion...
Naomi:
Alice, we're all embarrassed.
Alice:
Not as embarrassed as I am.
Naomi:
Being a human being is a very embarrassing proposition.