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    Vicuña: A Play
    Vicuña: A Play
    Vicuña: A Play
    Ebook84 pages1 hour

    Vicuña: A Play

    By Jon Robin Baitz

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    About this ebook

    A play centering on the tensions between a political demagogue and the tailor who makes his suit

    In his Upper East Side atelier, a bespoke tailor, Anselm Kassar, is persuaded by the vulgar real estate mogul turned presidential candidate Kurt Seaman to make him the perfect suit. A suit to “stun them” at the final debate before the election, a suit for him to wear while he takes on his unnamed female opponent. Kassar agrees to make Seaman a suit with magical powers of persuasion, to allow him to “close the deal with the American people.”

    Over the course of three fittings for this exorbitantly expensive and totemic vicuña suit, Seaman cajoles and spars with the tailor and his young Muslim apprentice, Amir. Amir’s challenges to Seaman and Seaman’s daughter Srilanka over the dangerously xenophobic and inflammatory rhetoric coming out of the campaign make the fittings increasingly volatile in the genteel atelier. Vulnerabilities are exploited masterfully by the candidate, in the manner of a true sociopath with a perfect instinct for other people’s weaknesses.

    Coming out of an election season that laid bare the rage in much of America, Jon Robin Baitz’s Vicuña is an astute satire of what—or who—it takes to bring those anxieties to the fore.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateApr 10, 2018
    ISBN9780374717339
    Vicuña: A Play
    Author

    Jon Robin Baitz

    Jon Robin Baitz was born in Los Angeles in 1961, and grew up there, in Rio de Janeiro, and in South Africa. His plays have been extensively produced on and off Broadway and throughout the world. He is the author of The Film Society, The Substance of Fire, Three Hotels, A Fair Country, The Paris Letter, and Other Desert Cities. He created the ABC TV show Brothers & Sisters, which ran for five seasons from 2007 to 2012, and the miniseries The Slap. He is a Tony nominee for the Broadway production of Other Desert Cities, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Guggenheim fellow, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters award winner.

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      Book preview

      Vicuña - Jon Robin Baitz

      PROLOGUE

      (Two men, AMIR and ANSELM, on forestage in tight light. The space is unknowable, undetermined, almost nowhere. Upstage, KURT SEAMAN, barely lit, a ghostly presence.)

      AMIR (reading a bloodstained newspaper): Apparently, once upon a time, not that long ago, a man, a simple, decent man …

      ANSELM:… a cultured, cosmopolitan man, who meant no harm to any living soul …

      AMIR:… died in the nation’s capital, on the night of the inauguration that changed it all. It says here, Having been set upon by thugs! Epithets were hurled!

      ANSELM: Sieg heil, y’all! I bet that’s what the thugs yelled? Because they say that sometimes. Thugs.

      AMIR: Correct! But why target this particular man so viciously? His skull. Broken like an egg. Collapsed.

      ANSELM: Hmm. Was he a citizen…?

      AMIR: Apparently.

      ANSELM: A Jew?

      AMIR: Can’t tell.

      ANSELM: Foreign, an immigrant, a person of color?

      AMIR: Seems so, yes, from the name.

      ANSELM: Ah! Well then, the softest target imaginable, eh?

      AMIR: Yes. It would be really useful, as with all crimes, all murders, to understand what really triggered this attack …

      ANSELM: Yes. To really understand what happened to this poor bastard.

      AMIR: And. Therefore … to understand what is happening now. So. We’ve got to go back, in order to go forward.

      ACT ONE

      SCENE ONE

      (Early October in Manhattan. A bespoke men’s tailor shop on the Upper East Side. It is late afternoon and we are on the second floor of a brownstone in the Sixties. Some street sounds waft up. Large casement windows give out onto the city. An elevator to the ground floor. A drinks cart.)

      (There are two men in conference. ANSELM KASSAR, a tailor, a suit maker, with a shock of flowing white hair and an accent out of some part of Europe we cannot pinpoint precisely, is in a suit and very good shirt, tie, and suspenders, but not wearing the jacket, as he is working. His client is KURT SEAMAN, a man in his early sixties, exuding power.)

      ANSELM: You need it when?

      SEAMAN: For the final debate, November second.

      ANSELM: Kurt, are you insane? That’s three weeks away!

      SEAMAN (cuts him off): Anselm, please. I only have twenty minutes. Can we not debate this? I have people downstairs—my daughter, her fiancé, Secret Service—all waiting!

      ANSELM: Are you stark raving mad? I don’t do twenty-minute fittings.

      SEAMAN: Anselm, just measure me!

      ANSELM: A suit normally, the normal number of fittings, the process, it’s at least three fittings, and then many, many adjustments, small ones, corrections and more corrections. And you are asking that this be done in three weeks!

      SEAMAN: Jesus, Anselm, I know you made a suit for President Reagan in less time than that.

      ANSELM: Mr. Reagan, he was president. You are not. For a president, you push others aside, and people understand. My clients understood that for Ronald Reagan, they must wait.

      SEAMAN: Anselm. It’s for the final debate watched by millions! Come on! Picture it: I walk across the stage, I sit on a stool, every network around the world on me. As I cut her to shreds and then win! A great giant cataclysmic operatic huge fucking triumphant win. And in your—in your attire!

      ANSELM: The last time I made a suit for you, black tie, gorgeous, to wear to the Met Gala, but on TV you were wearing a white jacket—white—and then you never came

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