Imaginary Friends Read Online Free PDF

fired at the end of the play—
    LILLIAN : Let’s just go back to you liked it.
    BARTENDERS :
    THEY CLASH, THEY LINK
    MARY : I did.
    LILLIAN : Thank you.
    BARTENDERS :
    INCENSED IN SYNC
    Both women start to say something, then change their minds
.
    A SMOKE, A DRINK
    LILLIAN AND MARY :
    AND YOU
    MARY AND LILLIAN :
[To a
BARTENDER .
]
Bartender!
    BLACKOUT
.
Scene 4

    Reds
.
    A huge red parachute silk curtain drops from the flies
.
    ENSEMBLE :
    ARE YOU NOW
HAVE YOU EVER
STATE YOUR NAME
DO YOU SWEAR
GIVE US NAMES
WHO WAS THERE
WAS THERE ANYBODY ELSE
IT’S THE HOUSE
UN-AMERICAN
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN
DID YOU KNOW
WERE YOU THERE
I REFUSE ON THE GROUND
GIVE US NAMES
DO YOU SWEAR
ARE YOU NOW
DID YOU EVER
THE COMMITTEE IS IN ORDER
GIVE US NAMES
ARE YOU NOW
HAVE YOU EVER EVER BEEN
STATE YOUR NAME
SO HELP YOU GOD
    We see
LILLIAN
and
MARY
dressed as young women
.
    ANNOUNCER : Are you now or have you ever been a member of the—
    MARY : Me? Are you serious? I was the palest of pinkos. I marched in the May Day parade in my prettiest dress. I became a Trotskyite almost by chance—
    LILLIAN : No one here even knows what a Trotskyite is anymore—
    MARY : No one here knows what a Stalinist is, either. She was a Stalinist. Tell them what you believed—
    LILLIAN : I never said I was a Stalinist.
    MARY : You’re dead. Tell them. What can happen?
    LILLIAN
isn’t going to admit it
.
    All right, then: had you been a Stalinist, what might you have believed?
    LILLIAN : The Stalinists believed that a certain amount of bad stuff was part of any revolution, and that it would eventually stop.
    MARY : And the Trotskyites believed that bad stuff was bad stuff and would lead to more bad stuff.
    LILLIAN : The Stalinists turned out to be wrong.
    MARY : So wrong. So very very wrong.
    LILLIAN : I said they were wrong.
    MARY : And we turned out to be right.
[Beat.]
Anyway, how I became a Trotskyite. It was 1936, I was living in New York, and everyone in New York was a leftist. I would never have made a true Marxist—it’s something you have to take up early, like ballet—but then the Moscow trials began. Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Russian revolution, was accused of being a traitor, and thousands of people were sent to Siberia or executed for being in cahoots with him. It was a monstrous frame-up engineered by Joseph Stalin, it was completely unjust, but the truth is that when it began, I didn’t know a thing about it because I was off in Reno, getting a divorce from my first husband. When I got back—
    We hear the sound of argument and see a Village party. There’s a table with bottles and paper cups and a group of men intensely talking. One of them is
JAMES T. FARRELL .
    JAMES T. FARRELL : You can’t mean it—
    MARY : That’s James T. Farrell, who wrote
Studs Lonigan
—
    JAMES T. FARRELL : You can’t possibly read what Trotsky wrote and think there’s any way he collaborated with the Germans—
    All the following partygoer dialogue is meant to overlap
.
    PARTYGOER #1: But Holtzman testified he met with Trotsky at the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen—
    PARTYGOER #2: But the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen burned to the ground in 1912—
    PARTYGOER #3: So they couldn’t possibly have met at the Hotel Bristol—
    JAMES T. FARRELL : He’s being framed and he deserves a hearing. Surely he deserves a hearing. Mary thinks so, don’t you, dear?
    MARY :
[To the audience.]
I had no idea what they were talking about.
[To
JAMES T. FARRELL .
]
Come again?
    JAMES T. FARRELL : Trotsky—
    MARY : Trotsky—
    JAMES T. FARRELL : Deserves a hearing. Don’t you think?
    MARY : Has something happened to Trotsky?
    JAMES T. FARRELL : Has something happened to Trotsky? She wants to know if something has happened to Trotsky—
    MARY : I’m sorry.
    JAMES T. FARRELL : Trotsky’s been falsely accused of plotting with the Nazis to murder almost everyone in the Kremlin. Sixteen Bolsheviks have implicated him, and they’ve all been executed. Trotsky denies the