Part IV of the Seattle Cycle A Play in Three Acts by Lydia Parker DRAMATIS PERSONAE:.

PAT, an aging musician LYDIA, a playwright and Pat's girlfriend MARLA, a young waitress LYLE, Lydia's stepfather JOE, a British music promoter UMI, a British club girl LONDONER, a passing businessman CAST:.

PAT: Pat Bender LYDIA: Bryn Pace LYLE: Kevin Guest MARLA/UMI: Shannon Curtis JOE/LONDONER: Benny Giddons The action takes place between 2005 and 2008, in Seattle, London, and Sandpoint, Idaho.

ACT I.

Scene I [A bed in a cramped apartment. Two figures are entangled in the sheets, Pat, 43, and Marla, 22. It's dimly lit; the audience can see the figures but can't quite make out their faces.]

Marla: Huh.

Pat: Mm. That was great. Thanks.

Marla: Oh. Yeah. Sure.

Pat: Look, I don't mean to be an ass, but do you think we could get dressed and get out of here?

Marla: Oh. Then . . . that's it?

Pat: What do you mean?

Marla: Nothing. It's just- Pat: [laughing] What?

Marla: Nothing.

Pat: Tell me.

Marla: It's just . . . so many girls in the bar have talked about sleeping with you. I started to think there was something wrong with me that I hadn't done it with the great Pat Bender. Then, when you came in alone tonight, I thought, well, here's my chance. I guess I just expected it to be . . . I don't know . . . different.

Pat: Different . . . than what?

Marla: I don't know.

Pat: 'Cause that's pretty much the way I've always done it.

Marla: No, it was fine.

Pat: Fine? This just gets better and better.

Marla: No, I guess I just bought into the whole womanizer thing. I assumed you knew things.

Pat: What . . . things?

Marla: I don't know. Like . . . techniques.

Pat: Techniques? Like what? Levitation? Hypnosis?

Marla: No, it's just that after all the talk I figured that I'd have . . . you know . . . four or five.

Pat: Four or five what?

Marla: [becomes shy] You know.

Pat: Oh. Well. How many did you have?

Marla: So far, none.

Pat: Well, I'll tell you what: I owe you a couple. But for now, do you think we could get dressed before- [A door closes offstage. The whole scene has taken place in near darkness, the only light coming from an open doorway. Now, still in silhouette, Pat pulls the covers over Marla's head.]

Pat: Oh shit.

[Lydia, 30s, short hair, army cargo pants, Lenin cap, ENTERS. She pauses in the doorway, her face lit by the light from the other room.]

Pat: I thought you were at rehearsal.

Lydia: I left early. Pat, we need to talk.

[She comes in, reaches toward the nightstand to turn on the light.]

Pat: Uh, maybe leave the light off?

Lydia: Another migraine?

Pat: Bad one.

Lydia: Okay. Well, I just wanted to apologize for storming out of the restaurant tonight. You're right. I do still try to change you sometimes.

Pat: Lydia- Lydia: No, let me finish, Pat. This is important.

[Lydia walks to the window, stares out, a streetlight casting a glow on her face.]

Lydia: I've spent so long trying to "fix" you that I don't always give you credit for how far we've come. Here you are, clean almost two years, and I'm so alert for trouble it's all I see sometimes. Even when it isn't there.

Pat: Lydia- Lydia: [turning back] Please, Pat. Just listen. I've been thinking. We should move away. Get out of Seattle for good. Go to Idaho. Be near your mom. I know I said we can't keep running from our problems, but maybe it makes sense now. Start fresh. Get away from our pasts . . . all this shit with your bands, my mom, and my stepdad.

Pat: Lydia- Lydia: I know what you're gonna say.

Pat: I'm not sure you do- Lydia: You're gonna say, what about New York? I know we screwed that up. But we were younger then, Pat. And you were still using. What chance did we have? That day I came back to the apartment and saw that you'd pawned all of our stuff it was almost a relief. Here I'd been waiting for the bottom to fall out. And finally it did.

[Lydia turns to the window again.]

Lydia: After that, I told your mom that if you could've controlled your addictions, you'd have been famous. She said something I'll never forget: "But dear. That IS his addiction."

Pat: Jesus, Lydia- Lydia: Pat, I left rehearsal early tonight because your mom called from Idaho. I don't know how to say this, so I'm just going to say it. Her cancer is back.

[Lydia walks over to the bed, sits on Pat's side.]

Lydia: They don't think it's operable. She might have months, or years, but they can't stop it. She's going to try chemo again, but they've exhausted the radiation possibilities, so all they can do is manage it. But she sounded good, Pat. She wanted me to tell you. She couldn't bear to tell you herself. She's afraid you'll start using again. I told her you were stronger now- Pat: [whispering] Lydia, please . . .

Lydia: So let's move, Pat. What do you say, just go? Please? I mean . . . we assume these cycles are endless . . . we fight, break up, make up, our lives circle around and around, but what if it's not a circle. What if it's a drain we're going down? What if we look back and realize we never even tried to break out of it?

[On the bedside, Lydia reaches into the tangle of covers for Pat's hand. But she feels something, recoils, jumps from the bed, and turns on the light, throwing a harsh light across Pat and the other lump in the bed. She pulls the covers back. Only now do we see the actors in full light. Marla holds the sheet to her chest, gives a little wave. Lydia backs across the room. Pat just stares off.]

Lydia: Oh.

[Pat climbs slowly out of bed to get his clothes. But he stops. He stands there naked, as if noticing himself for the first time. He looks down, surprised that he's grown so thick and middle-aged. Finally he turns to Lydia, standing in the doorway. The quiet seems to go on forever.]

Pat: So . . . I guess a threesome's out of the question.

CURTAIN.

In the half-empty theater there is a collective gasp, followed by bursts of agitated, uncomfortable laughter. As the stage goes dark, Claire realizes she's been holding her breath throughout the play's short opening scene. Now she's breathed out, and the whole audience with her, a sudden release of tense, guilty laughter at the sight of this cad standing naked on a stage-his crotch subtly and artfully covered by a blanket over the bed's footboard.

In the darkness of a set change, ghosts linger in Claire's eyes. She becomes aware of the scene's clever staging: played mostly in half-light, forcing the audience to search the near-darkness for the figures, so that when the harsh lights finally come up, Lydia's tortured face and Pat's white softness are boned into their retinas like X-rays-that poor girl staring at her naked boyfriend, another woman in their bed, a strobe of betrayal and regret.

This wasn't what Claire was expecting (community theater? in Idaho?) when they arrived in Sandpoint, a funky Old West ski town on the shores of this huge mountain lake. With no time to check into their hotel, the investigator took them straight to the Panida Theater, its lovely vertical descending sign marking a quaint storefront in the small L-shaped downtown, classic old box office opening into a Deco theater-too big for this small, personal play, but an impressive room nonetheless, carefully restored to its old 1920s movie-house past. The back of the theater was empty, but the front seats had a good spread of black-clad small-town hipsters, older Birkenstockers, and fake blondes in ski outfits, even older moneyed couples, which-if Claire knew her small-town theater-would be this theater group's patrons. Settled in her hard-backed seat, Claire glanced at the photocopied cover of the playbill: FRONT MAN * PREVIEW PERFORMANCE * THEATER ARTS GROUP OF NORTHERN IDAHO. Here we go, she'd thought: amateur hour.

But then the thing starts and Claire is shocked. Shane, too: "Wow," he whispers. Claire sneaks a glance at Pasquale Tursi, and he appears rapt, although it's hard to read the look on his face-whether it's admiration for the play or simple confusion about what that naked man is doing onstage.

Claire glances to her right, at Michael, and his waxen face seems somehow stricken, his hand on his chest. "My God, Claire. Did you see that? Did you see him?"

Yes. There is that, too. It's undeniable. Pat Bender is some kind of force onstage. She's not sure if it's because she knows who his father is, or perhaps because he's playing himself-but for one quick, delusional moment, she wonders if this might be the greatest actor she's ever seen.

Then the lights come up again.

It's a simple play. From that opening scene, the story follows Pat and Lydia out on their parallel journeys. In his, Pat spends three drunken years in the wilderness, trying to tame his demons. He performs a musical-comedy monologue about the bands he used to be in, and about failing Lydia-a show that eventually gets him dragged to London and Scotland by an exuberant young Irish music producer. For Pat the trip smacks of desperation, a misguided final attempt at becoming famous. And it all blows up when Pat betrays Joe by sleeping with Umi, the girl his young friend loves. Joe runs off with Pat's money and he ends up stranded in London.

In Lydia's parallel story, her mother dies suddenly and Lydia finds herself stuck caring for her senile stepfather, Lyle, a man she's never gotten along with. Lyle provides daft comic relief, constantly forgetting that his wife has died, asking the thirty-five-year-old Lydia why she isn't at school. Lydia wants to move him into a nursing home, but Lyle fights to stay with her, and Lydia can't quite do it. In a storytelling device that works better than Claire expects, Lydia fills in the gaps and marks the passage of time by talking on the phone to Pat's mother, Debra, in Idaho. She never appears onstage but is an unseen, unheard presence on the other end of the phone. "Lyle wet the bed today," Lydia says, pausing for a response from the unseen Debra (or Dee, as she sometimes calls her). "Yes, Dee, it would be natural . . . except it was my bed! I looked up and he was standing on my bed, pissing a hot streak and shouting, 'Where are the hand towels?' "

Finally, Lyle burns himself on the oven while Lydia is at work, and she has no choice but to move him into a nursing home. Lyle cries when she tells him about it. "You'll be fine," she insists. "I promise."

"I'm not worried about me," Lyle says. "It's just . . . I promised your mother. I don't know who will take care of you now."

In the wake of that realization-that Lyle believes he has been caring for her-Lydia understands that she's most alive when she's caring for someone else, and goes to Idaho to take care of Pat's ailing mother. Then, one night, she's asleep in Debra's living room when the phone rings. The lights come up on the other side of the stage-revealing Pat, standing in a red phone booth, calling his mother for help. At first Lydia is excited to hear from him. But all Pat seems to care about is that he's run out of money and needs help to get home from London. He doesn't even ask about his mother.

Lydia goes quiet on the other end of the call. "Wait. What time is it there?" he asks. "Three," Lydia says quietly. And Pat's head falls to his chest exactly as it did in the first scene.

"Who is it, dear?" comes a voice from offstage-the first words Pat's mother has spoken in the entire play. In his London phone booth, Pat whispers, "Do it, Lydia." Lydia takes a deep breath, says, "Nobody," and hangs up, the light going out in the phone booth.

Pat is reduced to being a vagrant in London-ragged, sitting drunk on a street corner playing his guitar cross-legged. He's busking, panhandling to make enough money to get home. A passing Londoner stops and offers Pat a twenty-euro note if he'll play a love song. Pat starts to play the song "Lydia," but he stops. He can't do it.

Back in Idaho, with snow on the cabin window marking the passage of time, Lydia gets another phone call. Her stepfather has died in the nursing home. She thanks the caller and goes back to making tea for Pat's mother, but she can't. She just stares at her hands. She seems entirely alone in the scene, in the world. And that's when a knock comes at the door. She answers. It is Pat Bender, framed in the same doorway Lydia stood in at the beginning of the play. Lydia stares at her long-lost boyfriend, this derelict Odysseus who's been wandering the world trying to get home. It's the first time they've been onstage together since that awful moment when he stood before her, naked, at the start of the play. Another long silence between them follows, echoing the first, extends as long as an audience can possibly bear (Somebody say something!), until Pat Bender gives just the slightest shudder onstage, and whispers, "Am I too late?"-somehow conveying even more nakedness than in the first scene.

Lydia shakes her head no: his mother is alive still. Pat's shoulders slump, in relief and exhaustion and humility, and he holds out his hands-an act of surrender. Dee's voice comes again from offstage: "Who is it, dear?" Lydia glances over her shoulder and somehow the moment stretches even longer. "Nobody," Pat replies, his voice a broken husk. Then Lydia reaches out for his hand, and in the instant their hands touch, the lights go down. The play is over.

Claire gasps, releasing what feels like ninety minutes of air. All the travelers feel it-some kind of completion-and in the rush of applause they feel, too, the explorer's serendipity: the accidental, cathartic discovery of oneself. In the midst of this release, Michael leans over to Claire and whispers again, "Did you see that?"

On her other side, Pasquale Tursi holds his hand to his heart as if suffering an attack. "Bravo," he says, and then, "e troppo tardi?" Claire has to guess at his meaning, for their erstwhile Italian translator seems unreachable, his head in his hands. "Fuck me," Shane says. "I think I've wasted my whole life."

Claire, too, finds herself drawn inward by what she's just seen. Earlier, she told Shane that her relationship with Daryl was "hopeless." Now she realizes that throughout the play she was thinking of Daryl, hopeless, irredeemable Daryl, the boyfriend she can't seem to let go of. Maybe all love is hopeless. Maybe Michael Deane's rule is wiser than he knows: We want what we want-we love who we love. Claire pulls her phone out and turns it on. She sees the latest text from Daryl: Pls just let me know U R OK.

She types back: I'm okay.

Next to her, Michael Deane puts his hand on her arm. "I'm buying it," he says.

Claire glances up from her phone, thinking for a moment that Michael is talking about Daryl. Then she understands. She wonders if her deal with Fate is still in play. Is Front Man the great movie that will allow her to stay in the business? "You want to buy the play?" she asks.

"I want to buy everything," Michael Deane says. "The play, his songs-all of it." He stands up and looks around the little theater. "I'm buying the whole goddamn thing."

By flashing her business card (Hollywood? No shit?) Claire gets an enthusiastic invitation to the after-party from a goateed and liberally pierced doorman named Keith. On his directions, they walk a block from the theater toward a brick storefront, which opens to a wide set of stairs, the building intentionally unfinished, all exposed pipes and half-exposed brick. It reminds Claire of climbing to countless parties in college. But there's something off in the scale, in the width of hallways and the heights of ceilings-all the extravagant, wasted space in these old Western towns.

Pasquale pauses at the door. "e qui, lei?" Is she here?

Maybe, says Shane, looking up from his phone. "C'e una festa, per gli attori." It is a party for the actors. Shane returns to his phone and sends a text message to Saundra: "Can we talk? Please? I realize now what an ass I've been."

Pasquale looks up at the building where Dee might be, removes his hat, smooths his hair, and starts up the stairs. At the top of the landing, Claire helps the winded Michael Deane up the last steps. There are three doors to three apartments on the second floor and they walk to the back of the building, to the only open door, propped open with a jug of wine.

This back apartment is big and lovely in the same primitive way as the rest of the building. It takes a moment for them to adjust to the candlelight-it's a huge two-story open loft with high ceilings. The room itself is a work of art, or a junk pile-filled with old school lockers, hockey sticks, and newspaper boxes-all of this surrounding a curved staircase made of old timbers, which seems to float in thin air. Upon further inspection, they can see that the staircase is held with three lines of coiled cable.

"This whole apartment is furnished with found art," says Keith, the theater doorman, who arrives right behind them. He has spiky, thin hair and painful-looking studs in his lips, neck, upper ears, and nose, as well as pirate hoops in his ears. He has acted in TAGNI productions himself, he tells them, but he's also a poet, painter, and video artist. (That's all? Claire wonders. Interpretive dancer? Sand sculptor?) "A video artist?" Michael is intrigued. "And is your camera nearby?"

"I always have my camera," Keith says, and he produces a small, simple digital from his pocket. "My life is my documentary."

Pasquale scans the party, but there's no sign of Dee. He leans over to ask Shane for help, but his translator is staring helplessly at Saundra's return text: You just NOW realized you're an ass? Leave me alone.

Keith sees Pasquale and Michael looking around, mistakes this for curiosity, and steps in to explain. The apartment's designer, he says, is a former Vietnam vet, featured last month in Dwell magazine. "His general concept is that every design form has an innate maturity alongside its youthful nature, that too often we cast aside the more interesting forms just when they're starting to grow into this older, more interesting second nature. Two old hockey sticks-who cares. But hockey sticks made into a chair? Now, that's something."

"It's all wonderful," Michael says earnestly, gazing around at the room.

The cast and crew aren't at the party yet; so far it's just fifteen or twenty black-glasses-and-hippie-sandaled audience members, with their low talk, little squalls of laughter, all of them taking turns inspecting the strange travelers of the lost Deane Party. The crowd is familiar, Claire thinks: smaller, a little rougher around the edges, but not much different from an after-party anywhere. Wine and snacks are lined up on a metallic table made from the door of an old freight elevator; a small backhoe bucket is filled with ice and beer. Claire is relieved, when she goes to the bathroom, to find that the toilet is an actual toilet, and not an old boat motor.

Finally, the cast and crew begin arriving. Word of the great Michael Deane's presence seems to be spreading throughout the crowd, and the ambitious make their way over, casually mentioning their appearance in the straight-to-video movies shot in Spokane, appearing alongside Cuba Gooding Jr., Antonio Banderas, John Travolta's sister. Everyone Claire meets seems to be an artist of some kind-actors and musicians and painters and graphic artists and ballet instructors and writers and sculptors and more potters than a town this size could possibly support. Even the teachers and attorneys also act, or play in bands, or sculpt blocks of ice-Michael fascinated by all of them. Claire is amazed at his energy and genuine curiosity. He's also on his third glass of wine-more than she's ever seen him drink.

An attractive older woman in a sundress, her deep sun-worshipping wrinkles the opposite of Michael's smooth skin, leans in close and actually touches his forehead. "Jesus," she says, "I love your face," as if it's a piece of art he's created.

"Thank you," Michael says, because it is-his work of art.

The woman introduces herself as Fantom "with an F," and explains that she makes tiny sculptures out of soap, which she sells at craft shows and barter fairs.

"I'd love to see them," Michael says. "Is everyone here an artist?"

"I know," Fantom says as she digs through her bag. "It gets old, huh?"

While Michael looks at tiny soap art, the rest of the Deane Party is growing anxious. Pasquale watches the door nervously as his lovesick translator, still stinging over Saundra's texted rejection, pours a tall glass from a bottle of Canadian whiskey and Claire asks Keith about the play.

"Some intense shit, huh?" says Keith. "Debra mostly puts on kiddie plays, musicals, holiday farces-whatever gets the skiers off the mountain for a couple hours. But once a year she and Lydia do something original like this. She gets crap from the board sometimes, from the cranky Christians especially, but that was the tradeoff for her. Come keep the tourists happy, and once a year you can bust out something like that."

By this time, all of the cast and crew have made it to the party-except for Pat and Lydia. Claire finds herself in conversation with Shannon, the actress who played the girl in bed with Pat at the start of the play. "I understand you're from"-Shannon swallows, can barely say the word-"Hollywood?" She blinks quickly, twice. "What's that like?"