“Styrofoam”
A Short Play
(The lights come up to two men inside of a apartment living room)
SAM: (is putting his books in a backpack, getting ready to leave) I’m going to class Bumdog.
BUMDOG: (sitting reading a newspaper) Great, see you later Sam.
SAM: You know we are allowed to bring a guest. Why don’t you come with me?
BUMDOG: (annoyed as he is trying to read his paper) I don’t want to go to your writing class Sam, I keep telling you.
SAM: Ok. I just think you’re missing out. Why don’t you come to just one class?
BUMDOG: (flatly) No.
SAM: (innocently trying to understand) Why not? You’re a writer; I think it would be very beneficial for you.
BUMDOG: (he sighs heavily and puts down his paper, realizing his not going to be able to continue reading until he ends this conversation Sam wants) Youre right. I’m a writer. I write therefore I am (pausing then finishing the sentence)…not going to go to a writing class.
SAM: I don’t understand what you have against the writing class.
BUMDOG: I don’t need to learn how to write, I already learned how to write. I don’t need a class to teach me how to do something I already learned how to do.
SAM: You already learned how to write? I thought you said you drop out of school in the 7th grade.
BUMDOG: I did.
SAM: Then what school did you learn how to write?
BUMDOG: (shouts) Grammar school!
SAM: Grammar School?
BUMDOG: (confidently) Yeah grammar school. That’s where they taught me how to read and write. Once you learn how to read and write, you know how to write. And if after you learn to read and write, you still don’t know how to write then basically you just don’t know how to write period.
SAM: But if you take classes on writing it can improve your writing.
BUMDOG: (with assurance) The only thing that can certifiably improve your writing is writing. The only good thing about a writing class is that it makes you write. It makes you practice writing. But if you practice on your own then the class is superfelous.
SAM: (corrects him) Su-per-flu-ous.
BUMDOG: Thank you
SAM: (catching him) See that’s what you need serious work on: your grammar and speech.
BUMDOG: You’re right. As soon as I save up enough money I’m going to buy a dictionary.
SAM: But a teacher can help with that, look (takes out a page from his notebook). These are the corrections he made on a scene I wrote last week. (Gives it to Bumdog)
BUMDOG: (Takes it and reads it. Then looks up confused) this is a whole scene?
SAM: Yeah
BUMDOG: Its three lines.
SAM: Yeah.
BUMDOG: That’s your whole scene? three lines?
SAM: Yeah
BUMDOG: How many scenes does the play have? ten thousand?
SAM: Its not the length that matters it’s the quality. Most of the plays Ive written are only 2 or 3 pages. And they’re really good
BUMDOG: Ill bet they are. How can you fuck up a play in 2 pages? (inquisitive) And what does your teacher think about these two page plays, and 3 line scenes?
SAM: He thinks they’re great.
BUMDOG:(already coming to a conclusion) Hhhmm. And how much do you pay for this class?
SAM: $220 a month
BUMDOG: (drawing it out) Hhhmmm. And how many people are in this class?
SAM: About 20
BUMDOG: Hmmm. And I’m sure he thinks all they’re stuff is wonderful too?
SAM: Well he is the teacher; he is supposed to be encouraging.
BUMDOG: I think you’re being scammed.
SAM: I’m not being scammed.
BUMDOG: This is like one of those ads in the back of a magazine where they say “send us in a sample of your writing so we can tell you if you have any writing talent”, and you send in something, written in three different colors of crayons, and they send you a letter saying you’re the next Ernest Hemingway. “And send us $300 in single unmarked bills for our course, which we only allow qualified writers of your caliber to take.”
SAM: (shakes his head) That’s not what’s happening at all.
BUMDOG: (serves) It sounds like one of those cheap Reader Digest con jobs they use to milk ambitious suckers.
SAM: (returns) The teacher is a very highly respected professor from USC.
BUMDOG: (volleys back) It sounds like one of those highly respected USC con jobs they use to milk ambitious suckers.
SAM: I don’t think you have any idea what you’re talking about.
BUMDOG: (changes the pace of the conversation) Do you know a guy named Wolfram von Eschenbach?
SAM: No
BUMDOG: (takes note of his ignorance and explains) OK, Wolfram von Eschenbach wrote “Parzifal” one of the greatest works of the Middle Ages, Wagner based his opera on it. To his dying day he bragged that he had never learned to read or write.
SAM: What’s the point?
BUMDOG: Well if you don’t get the point from that right away, this conversation is pointless.
SAM: You’re trying to say that he didn’t take any writing courses but he was still a great writer.
BUMDOG: (cheering) There you go! That wasn’t too hard to admit, was it?
SAM: Writing class can bring out the talent that’s already there.
BUMDOG: (reinstates) Everything you need to learn about writing you learn in grammar school, if you don’t know how to write by then, then you just don’t know how to write.
SAM: You said that before.
BUMDOG: So I did.
SAM: So if someone doesn’t know how to write when they get out of grammar school they don’t have any talent?
BUMDOG: I wouldn’t say grammar school. Id give them till high school. If after that they still don’t know how to write, then they just don’t know how. And if they do know and still go to college then they should learn something practical, like medicine, or law, or how to tend sheep.
SAM: There are allot of writers who didn’t realize they knew how to write until they got into college.
BUMDOG: There are even more writers who didn’t realize they knew how to write until after they graduated college with a degree in medicine. Again having never taken a writing class they whole time they were in college! Chekov and Celine for example.
SAM: So you think if you have talent in something you don’t have to learn anymore?
BUMDOG: Quite the opposite, to be good at anything you have to learn all the time. That goes without saying, not just writing, but life in general. But that’s an individual process; some people go to school for years without a single damn thing sinking into their brains, and other people learn faster on their own, then any organization can teach them.
SAM: So why do you take art classes?
BUMDOG: (insisting) I don’t take art classes, I take drawing classes.
SAM: Ok why do you take drawing classes?
BUMDOG: Because unlike writing, I don’t know how to draw! And I’m so lazy I know Ill teach myself much slower then someone else will.
SAM: What about all the great artists who’ve gone to art school? You don’t think they didnt know how to draw either? You think they were slow and lazy too?
BUMDOG: They went to art school to learn things that they didn’t learn in regular school. Like mixing paint, perspective, and most important practice. If they taught how to draw noses and eyes and ears back in kindergarten like they taught how to draw ABC’s, then all those great artists would not have to have gone to art school. And even still, look at all the great painters who didn’t go to art school, who were self taught. If they taught me drawing in grammar school I wouldn’t have to be taking a drawing class now. As it is, they didn’t, so I am.
SAM: What about actors? Almost all the great actors have had some form of acting class.
BUMDOG: Again acting is something else they don’t teach in school, although they should. You have to go to acting school because that’s the only place where you can learn the rudimentaries of acting, which could very well take years because there are about a thousand different theories on what exactly the rudimentaries of acting really are. And even then there is a case to be made for people who are just naturals. But I do agree with you, I don’t know of any of the great actors who didn’t have some training in acting, or were just born into acting families. But acting classes also serve as a necessity in and of themselves to actors. Because unless you’re constantly working, or you go into cafes every day pretending that you’re a different Tennessee Williams character, you’re not going to be able to practice acting any where else but a acting class. Me I’m a writer. They taught me how to write in school. And all I need to practice it is something to write with, and something to write on
SAM: Well I think if you have talent, a writing class can bring it out.
BUMDOG: (exploding) How many times are you gonna say that?! Now who’s fuckin repeating themselves! Of course you think writing classes help allot! You go to three different writing classes a week! A playwriting class, a short story writing class, and what’s that other one you go to? “How to write science fiction screenplays on the right side of the brain” or some shit like that!
SAM: (shouting back angrily) The class is called “Improvisational Dramatic Action in Existentialist Epic Theater”!
BUMDOG: (after a pause to absorb all that info) Yeah well I was close. It’s just all elitism.
SAM: How can you call me an elitist?
BUMDOG: Because you’re like all those people who go to college so they can write like Hemingway, all the while completely blocking out the fact that Hemingway never went to college! In fact he never finished high school! But all these people still go to college thinking that’s part of what it takes to be a writer, but the evidence completely contradicts that.
SAM: What evidence?
BUMDOG: If you look at a hundred of the greatest writers of all time you’ll see only a faction of them have ever actually finished college, in fact the only two I can think of is Joyce and Wolfe. The vast majority were in college less then two years: Steinbeck, Faulkner and Kerouac. And writers like Bukowski, Jack London, and Eugene O’Neil didn’t even finish a year of College. Then theres a large section of writers who never step foot in a college, unless, ironically, they eventually get jobs there as professors of literature: Mark Twain, Hemingway, Jean Genet, Hubert Selby Jr., Walt Whitman, William Blake-
SAM: Yeah but imagine how much better they would have been if they had completed their education.
BUMDOG: (shaking off his statement, he counters) Even the writers with the most completed educations will tell you they became good writers not because of their education, but in spite of it. In fact any truly great teacher will tell you that there comes a point where you have to unlearn everything that you’re learning. William Blake once said, “I hold knowledge to be wrong. Its eating from the tree of good and evil. That was Plato’s mistake.”
SAM: (contemptuous) That’s silly.
BUMDOG: (looking over at him shocked and incredulous) William Blake was silly? This from a college educated man who writes three sentence scenes? (after a pause, he shakes off his amazement, and gets back on the subject) All right look at Shakespeare. The greatest writer of all time and he only had a 6th grade education-
SAM: (stopping him) Now we’ve been through this before. Its been well established that William Shakespeare didn’t actually write those plays. There is no way someone with a 6th grade could have possible wrote-
BUMDOG: (Cutting him off) Yeah, yeah I know you think it was really Edward De Vere or Francis Bacon or the Queen of England or some other over-educated, blue blooded, bastard really wrote the Shakespearean plays. But again, you HAVE to think that! The same way you HAVE to think that these playwriting classes can teach you how to write plays.
SAM: obviously for certain people writing classes help and for others it doesn’t.
BUMDOG: (brushing him off) Thank you. Now you go your way and Ill go mine.
SAM: (after a pause, decides to continue the conversation) And you think you have the kind of talent that doesn’t need a writing class? Like Whitman or Hemingway or Twain.
BUMDOG: (Is taken back by the truth of Sam’s conclusion. Then looks down in uncomfortable self-contemplation) Wow, when you say it like that it makes me sound like a pretty conceited, arrogant bastard.
SAM: (trying to play off his statement innocuously) I’m just repeating what you said. And that’s what I’m hearing.
BUMDOG: (looks up and projects his uncomfortableness into anger against Sam) Yeah well I think its arrogant to think that you can buy writing ability with two hundred and twenty dollars a month! Or for that matter twenty thousand dollars a year at some ivy league country club! It doesn’t show anything but conceited confidence in the power of money and classism!
SAM: (offended) I didn’t say anything like that.
BUMDOG: (mocking Sam’s previous statement) “Yeah well that’s what I’m hearing.”
SAM: (changes moods and tries to bring down the tension in the conversation) I’m just saying for me personally writing classes have helped me write some good plays.
BUMDOG: (takes a deep sighs, then lets out what hes wanted to say for a long time) Sam, I don’t think you’ve written any good plays.
SAM: (looks at him with angry confusion) You don’t?
BUMDOG: (calmly, but in his anger determined to be honest) No. To be honest I don’t think you have any ability to write plays. I’ve read your plays. They don’t make any sense, although that could be a plus. I hear those kind of plays are in vogue these days. And you also don’t know how to write dialog, you write good sentences. You’re the only writer I know who can get four sentences out of three words. And to you three sentences is a scene. And three scenes, with three sentences in each of them, is a whole play. That’s not play writing, that’s newspaper comic strip writing. Now I do think you can write poetry. Because that’s basically what those plays come out as, short poems at their best. At they’re worst they’re comic strips. But as short plays they don’t work at all.
SAM: (stoic) I don’t agree.
BUMDOG: (shrugs his shoulders) Ok.
SAM: (after a pause, he goes after Bumdog) Have you ever written a play?
BUMDOG: No
SAM: But you think you have talent for it?
BUMDOG: (he smiles and puts his hands together and looks up at the ceiling as if praying) “Lord forgive me my sin of vanity”, but Yes.
SAM: You think you could write a better play then me?
BUMDOG: (now playfully) My, my do I feel a challenge in the air?
SAM: No I’m just asking a question.
BUMDOG: Ok, to answer your question, theres no doubt in my mind I could write a better play then you. Even though I’ve never written one before, no education, bad grammar and all. Now what?
SAM: Ill tell you what; lets each give each other a word that we have to write a play on.
BUMDOG: What do you mean?
SAM: You give me one word, and Ill have to write a play about it. Then Ill give you a word and you write a play on it.
BUMDOG: Alright.
SAM: I did this once in a writing class in New York. The guy gave me the word “Gutter”. And I wrote a great play on it.
BUMDOG: (sarcastically) This is basically a rhetorical question; but how long was this “great play”?
SAM: One page.
BUMDOG: One page eh? And it had three acts not doubt.
SAM: No. But it was really great.
BUMDOG: One page is not a great dramatic play. One page is a great grocery list.
SAM: (impatiently) You want to do this or not?
BUMDOG: Yeah. So what are the rules?
SAM: Just that it has to be done in a week.
BUMDOG: And the play, it has to be specifically about this word?
SAM: Well it has to be in there somewhere. Do you wanna make any rules? I mean do you wanna put any restrictions on the length of the play.
BUMDOG: (more sarcasm) No. God forbid I should deny the world one of your three paragraphs epics.
SAM: Ok. (Gives him a notebook) write down a word you want me to do a play on. (Bumdog takes the notebook, thinks for a few seconds then writes something down, and gives it back to Sam. Sam reads) “Dreamweaver”?
BUMDOG: Yeah.
SAM: Ok that’s cool.
(Sam then looks down on the pad with a pen in his hand. He sits there looking at the pad for about 20 seconds when Bumdog finally asks)
BUMDOG: Are you gonna write down the word?
SAM: Yeah.
(Bumdog shrugs then wait for say another 30 seconds at which point he asks again)
BUMDOG: Are you thinking up a word?
SAM: Yeah.
(Bumdog then waits again with Sam staring down at the blank piece of paper. Bumdog mean while catches the sight of a newspaper and seems interested in an article and starts to read it. A minute grinds by, when Bumdog finally jumps up and shouts out)
BUMDOG: WHAT THE FUCK IS THE WORD!?
SAM: (startled raises his hands in front of Bumdog) Ok, ok-
BUMDOG: (screaming over at Sam) IM FUCKING SITTING WAITING FOR YOU TO WRITE THE FUCKING WORD DOWN! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?!?
SAM: (trying to calm him down) Alright, alright! (with that he starts writing. When he is finished he gives it to Bumdog)
BUMDOG: (takes the pad and reads the word) “Styrofoam”?
SAM: Yeah
BUMDOG: (confused) Like the cups?
SAM: Yeah.
BUMDOG: I give you “Dreamweaver”, and you give me “Styrofoam”?
SAM: What’s wrong with that?
BUMDOG: (he talks slowly as if trying to explain it to himself) I give you a word that you can write about the spirits of the night with, the gods of sleep, you can write about someone visiting their pastlives in their unconscious state, and you take five minutes to give me “Styrofoam”????
SAM: (calmly retorts) It’s a poor craftsman that blames his tools.
BUMDOG: (Bumdog looks at him for a few moments with something of a new understanding, then sighs heavily) Go to class Sam, learn something.
SAM: (Looks at his watch) Actually, I am running late. (Starts putting his books in a back pack. Before he heads out the door he turns to Bumdog) Good luck with the play.
BUMDOG: (Unenthusiastic) yeah thanks. (Sam goes out the door. Bumdog then looks down on the piece of paper contemptuously and shakes his head) “Styrofoam”. (Then he tears the piece of paper up, throws it to the side and picks back up his newspaper to read).
