Trust Me
Trust Me is an early one-act play, one of two that won places in the Fritz Blitz
Festival in 2004. It started as a little monolog that I wrote for myself to perform
in my acting class. In that early form, it was just me and my trusty flip-chart
representing a company called Thanat and selling methods of murder to an
housewife who was bored with her husband. Murder Inc. invades suburbia.
How did I ever get interested in gangsters? Amoral people who will do anything
for money and not think twice about it? My first goal was to do a little satire on
consultants, some of whom, it seems, will do just about anything for money. I
had used flip charts for years to sell people management ideas. Ratcheting the
pitch up to murder was, I suppose, a kind of purgation.
With this play, I think I discovered that I could build a story from a scene. In this
case, a story of successive double-crosses. I picked up a rhythm that worked
for me along about scene 2 (Ivan and Arnie). I also started playing with
language. For all the characters but Ivan, the language is as plain and
monosyllabic as possible. Mostly root English words. Ivan is the only one who
uses fancy and foreign words (e.g., philia). The sentences got shorter and
shorter as I rewrote. Characters (Reggie and Kitty) were developed on the
basis of a single mention in a scene. (And these two turned out to be my
favorite characters). I also fell in love with indirect responses. If characters in a
play typically want different things, as we are told in acting classes, why should
they respond to each other in direct, linear ways?
Another allusive toy I found myself playing with was opera. The second scene
(Ivan and Arnie) is modeled on the Rigoletto-Sparafucile scene in Rigoletto.
And I very much had in mind a sort of operatic mad scene when I wrote the final
speech for Kitty.
I want to assure you that I am a moral, loving person with a highly developed
conscience. At the same time, I'll confess that it was great fun to write a story
about characters for whom the mouth, the mind, the fist, and the gun all carry
the same moral significance.
To the play.