Benedict Andrews: Collected Plays by Benedict Andrews

Author:Benedict Andrews
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oberon Books
Published: 2016-02-20T16:00:00+00:00

THE STARS

Characters

MIKE, late 30s

A GIRL, 17 or 18

A long table. Food. Alcohol.

An incredibly fat man, MIKE, sits there, stuffing his face.

A GIRL, 17 or 18, but could look younger, at the other end of the table. She just sits there, watching MIKE. She keeps her eyes on him for the duration of his performance. Barely reacts. Minimal, natural movement. Maybe she has a bottle of water and a glass from which she takes an occasional drink.

MIKE (Speaking with mouth full.) She looks down at me. I look up at her, over her naked belly. She stares. Wide-eyed. With pleasure or discomfort? Pleasure, of course. Her belly is tense, her spread legs quiver, and her wide eyes stare up at me. Hold on — if it’s pleasure shouldn’t they be shut? Shouldn’t her neck be reclining and her mouth be ever so slightly open? And why isn’t she moaning?

He drinks wine. Eats.

She looks like a stunned animal. Like a deer on a mountain road. A deer who wandered from the forest onto a moonlit mountain road. She stares up at me like that deer staring into the eyes of a motorist rounding the bend of a mountain road. Like I’m the driver out for a midnight drive suddenly coming across this stunned deer in the middle of the road. Like I’m driving my drop-top convertible up the mountain road at midnight, wind in my hair, tearing around hairpin bends, when too late I see this deer frozen in the moonlight, swerve to avoid, lose control, crash through the barrier, soar off the cliff, spin seemingly in slow motion above the moonlit pines before plummeting to fiery death. The deer, hearing the explosion in the valley below, springs from the road into the depths of the forest.

Eats. Drinks.

Unless of course the deer wasn’t startled by a convertible rounding the corner but by a truck loaded with felled pines driven by a trucker who, knowing the mountain roads like the back of his hairy hand, is driving on auto-pilot, some pop song from childhood bouncing around his head, as he rounds the corner and, confronted with the stunned deer in his headlights, hits the brakes too hard for a truck loaded with felled pines travelling at reckless speed around a hairpin bend which now jack-knifes and skids, collecting the moonlit deer which was just standing there like a fucking statue of a deer, and is killed upon impact, dragged under the truck’s six locked wheels as it crashes through the safety barrier and soars above the pines, suspended impossibly in the moonlight before it plummets and careens down the embankment splintering pines, cabin jerking and rolling while the white knuckled driver at the wheel, no longer on auto-pilot, hopelessly tries to correct the steering wheel that now has a life of its own, a tremendous crack echoes through the previously still night and a resounding boom startles the animals who live in the forest as the fuel tank explodes, the cabin is engulfed

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