The First Shovel
A Play in One Act and Four Scenes
Kenneth Lieberson
October 2018
Characters of the prologue and epilogue
Jennifer (Jenny), the breadwinner of the family, a bookkeeper, she rarely complains about her salary being a fraction of her male counterparts. She rarely complains about anything. Her anger is funneled into her second job. She is a skilled cabinetmaker, a trade she learned from her maternal grandfather. The theme of this play, hope, is something Jenny has for her children. Like Moses looking over into the promised land, she feels it is too late for her. Even for her husband, she sees glimmers of happiness, future success. Her parents were born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She has taught her children Spanish. She speaks to herself either in Spanish or with a heavy accent. Otherwise she speaks with no accent. They all speak English well and without accent.
Finnegan, (FINN) electrician, not exactly out of work, but definitely underemployed. He makes ends meet by seasonal construction work. When that’s not available he is a weekend substitute custodian at the local high school. The family is not living paycheck to paycheck but they feel a few emergencies would set them back irrevocably. Their pessimism, which they call ‘realism’ is overdone. It is a vestige of the grandparents’ having seen terrible times in the Great Depression. In fact they own their brownstone, have two tenants and are about to buy the brownstone next door. He was born in Dublin, Ireland. He has learned some Spanish. He never wanted his children to learn Gaelic. He sometimes wonders if he is less proud of his heritage than his wife of hers. He does not share his inner feelings very often. What he and Jenny do share is that they are both workers, builders of a better tomorrow. He speaks to himself and to the audience with a brogue. Otherwise he speaks with no accent. FINN although only having an 8th grade education, has read and continues to read voraciously. He learns from everything. He often underplays his role, making his sage views known when the moment is right.
Frank, a day before he turns 13, son of Jennifer and Finnegan. He delivers laundry, sometimes bags groceries. His is as good a student as Jane. He is however not as focused. He is a dreamer with too many talents. He is still at rare times an unruly, adolescent. He has remorse for his lapses into insensitivity but doesn’t dwell on it. As are all members of family, he is just too busy and not if the habit of endless self pity. He saw enough of that with his uncle.
Jane, 19, daughter of Jenny and Finnegan. No make up. Black rimmed austere glasses. Dull shapeless clothes. These barely hide the fact that Jane is extraordinarily beautiful. She has no use for her natural sexiness. She is practical, tough enough to get ahead as well as playful and loving to her family to whom she is devoted beyond measure. Despite her teasing of her kid brother, she is a good friend, his best friend in fact. She wants to help Frank in every way possible. She is his second mother. Their mother is too hidden and desperately driven to always be available when her family needs her in ways other than financial. Part of the reason Jane teases is to help Frank grow a crust so he would get less easily and less frequently hurt due to his - in his parents’s words “over sensitivity.” Jane is the first in her family to attend college. She is a sophomore at CCNY, a star student of electrical engineering. Her parents struggle to contain their pride in Jane’s accomplishments. She has a part-time job in an accounting firm. Although she is a secretary, everyone comes to her for help with the more complex math and tax filings. That she has a first rate mind is second to her nobility of spirit. She dresses modestly in what she calls “anti rape rags.” When she speaks to herself or to the audience it is with candor and vulnerability especially as she contemplates the perils of career being upended by marriage or worse still romance out of wedlock. She is no prude. Priorities for self betterment motivate her.
When the actors speak to the audience they are unheard by cast.
In ACT ONE
The same actors play the following roles:
Jennifer is MARY Lincoln
Finn becomes Abe Lincoln
Jane is The Ghost of The Oracle of Delphi
Frank becomes The Ghost of Ovid
Children of Abe & Mary
ROBERT
EDWARD
WILLIE
TAD
At the start of the play as we come from black, there is an almost imperceptible hi-hat note. This is repeated at first every 60 seconds. Very gradually a soft bass drum note is added slowly morphing into a very quiet backbeat. Most of the crescendo is subtle, in the minutes before the climax, the rate of increase in volume becomes palpable. At the climax of the play, the drumming is loud rock music, wailing electric guitars and gun shots are superimposed. Then there is sudden silence following by an explosion when the stage is shocked with blood red light.
There is a barely seen LED display: “Hate Crimes.” As the action progresses, the sign becomes brighter going from a dull green to a vivid red. The size of its font also gradually increases. At the climax it is blinking wildly as Klieg or police lights sweep the stage.
The audience is encouraged to read aloud the bullet points on screens appearing in the middle of Act One. The effect should be slightly noisy and vaguely unsettling.
A warm May twilight, 1959
88th Street & Amsterdam Avenue, New York City
PRELUDE
(Scene One)
JANE Frankie!
FRANK Call me Frank!
JANE I just like sticking it to you.
FRANK Well, stick your bobby pins in our radio. You always say you can fix anything as good as a man. I want to hear the ballgame.
JANE Ok Big Shot. I’ll have it fixed in a snap.
FRANK Today President Eisenhower came to that block dad calls a ‘hell hole’ on 65th street. I was back in the crowd. I heard a little of what he said... I wrote down what I remembered. (reading from a crumpled paper he pulls from his pocket):
‘At Lincoln Center, Americans will have new and expanded opportunities for acquiring a real community of interest through common contact with the performing arts.
American technology, labor, industry, and business are responsible for the twentieth century freedom of the individual--making free a greater portion of his time in which to improve the mind, the body, and the spirit. To them we are likewise indebted for the capacity to establish this Center. The lives of all of us will be enriched.
The beneficial influence of this great cultural adventure will not be limited to our borders. Here will occur a true interchange of the fruits of national cultures. From this will develop a growth that will spread to the comers of the earth, bringing with it the kind of human message that only individuals--not governments--can transmit. Here will develop a mighty influence for peace and understanding throughout the world. And the attainment through universal understanding of peace with justice is today, as always, the noblest and most shining ideal toward which man can strive and climb.’
JANE Damn! As dad would say, ‘You remember a whole hell of a lot!’
FRANK I take good notes.
JENNY Dinner!
SCENE TWO
JANE Pass the potato salad.
JENNY ‘Please...’ Please Pass the potato salad.
FINN (To audience) I’m back in Dublin. Four years old, me grandad going on and on of the Potato Famine finally ended five years after. Was in 1849. I’m going to be sick. Doesn’t Jenny know I can’t abide the thought much less the smell or taste of potatoes?)
FRANK Mom, at recess, Joel told me: in his religion when a boy turns 13, he’s considered a man. Why should it be any different for a Christian?
JENNY You are already a man in so many important ways.
FINN Right you are, Jenny. A man’s never been prouder of his children than I.
JANE (Gets up to make a mock speech.)
I think we’re all proud of each other. (All laugh.)
FINN Well, I’m proud and happy. Foreman says there’ll be lots of electrical work to do on 65th street and I’m the first one he’s a hiring.
JENNY Good to hear. What did you do in school today, Frankie-I mean Frank?
FRANK Shelter drill. I mean if Old Joe Stalin drops a couple of A bombs on Queens and Manhattan and sprinkles a few more on other boroughs, is getting under a desk and putting your coat over your head really going to help? The older kids think it’s a sick joke.
JENNY After the war with the first drill, everyone took it seriously.
FINN November 29, 1951, I remember it as though it were yesterday. The papers said only a hundred people died out of almost eight million people. Of course it was a drill. No one really died.
FRANK That’s why what Eisenhower said today is so important: ‘... a true interchange of national cultures... spreading the human message only individuals--not governments--can transmit... a mighty influence for peace and understanding throughout the world.
FINN (To audience) How’d ya raise a young man to keep his optimism yet be a realist?) (To family) Yes this Lincoln Center brings great hope.
JENNY It will help us but will it’s glories reach 88th street and Amsterdam Avenue much less the burned out parts of the Bronx and Harlem?
FINN It has a greater chance of reaching Tokyo and Lisbon.
JENNY (To audience) Mi marido habla la verdad. Como es posible mantenerse el optimismo a los menos por los jóvenes cuando afrontado con el barbarismo del mundo?
SCENE THREE
FRANK Great! Jane fixed the radio. Just in time to hear the end of a rebroadcast of President Eisenhower’s speech:
‘And so, as we break ground for the first of your great halls, the concert hall, the new home of New York's Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, I pay sincere tribute to your vision, your effort, your energy that is creating the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.
And now I understand we proceed with the ceremony by turning over the first shovel of earth.
Thank you very much.’
FRANK Gee! That was great.
JANE It was great. (To herself) Almost makes me want to change to a history major. That’s as practical as designing a transistor so high powered that there are no commercial applications. Well maybe not so bad. A little forward thinking perhaps. (To Frank) Hey Frank, since you love historical events so much, where would you start? Ancient Rome?
FRANK Nah, too egghead. Start with Honest Abe.
SCENE FOUR
JENNY What do you mean, you’re changing your major from electrical engineering to history?! How are you going to pay bills? Become an underpaid teacher? I thought you wanted to break out of the sexist caste system?
JANE It’s high time somebody around here starts thinking about more than where our next meal is coming from.
FINN (Coming in with his tools, having heard the conversation.) Allow me to interject an electrician’s point of view: Jane can bring a scientific mind to the great problems of our day.
JENNY (To herself) Otra vez, en efecto, mi marido tiene razón. (She starts to speak...
FINN Jane knows her own mind.
JENNY Too true. (Smiles warmly.)
JENNY Thanks Dad. I love you mom and dad.
FRANK (coming down the stairs.)
Hey don’t you love me too ?! Jane, aren’t we going to get one of your mock speeches about now?
CURTAIN
ACT ONE
LINCOLN Oh, great ghosts, are you there, are you here with me? I beseech you: help me see in this this time of darkness. It is not only Mary who is insane with grief. I am riven into a thousand splinters over the suffering of our great nation. Any man would be truly insane if he were not profoundly depressed by the greed, manipulative dishonesty, the grotesque insensitivity to the suffering of fellow people. Oh Oracle, you tell me that in 1877 a future President, Rutherford B. Hayes will have an astounding invention installed in the White House. To be called the ‘Telephone.’ You also tell me he will be more concerned with his personal success than in the people he governs and will undo our work- that because of him slavery will be replaced by a system of imprisoning Black men without cause, the jails renting these men to plantation owners who will treat them even worse than they treated their human slave property... it is not for me to despair. I must do the things that will help most people move towards peaceful and harmonious living, ending or at least minimizing needless and grotesquely unfair, unjust and inhuman cruelty.
Oracle, I summon you from the temple of Apollo at Delphi.
What I would give to know what happens in the far reaches of our battlefields.
ORACLE As Apollo destroyed the monstrous Python from the center of the earth, who rotted, his name Pytho being the original name of Delphi, hence my name Pythia, I am here to serve you.
LINCOLN (To himself) Does she always have to come out of her smokey arrival with the same pompous greeting?
ORACLE Ok, in the future, I’ll just say ‘Hi toots, what’s cookin’... You forget, Honest Abe, I can hear your thoughts. (Smiles)
LINCOLN A humorous oracle.
ORACLE Yes, I’ve been relaxing by reading Ovid. He’s very funny.
Did I tell you about one of your future presidents who asked me to predict the stock market? His greed was only matched by his dishonesty and maybe his being a genuinely bad person. Anyway, I prophecied ‘The tea leaves will fall.’ So he sold short. Not too smart. That meant people will pick up the leaves, more jobs will be created, the economy will boom. There was a great rally. He lost his shirt. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, he had lots of other shirts: some in Saudi Arabia, a few in Scotland, a couple in Florida. You know how it is with these robber-baron types... Schadenfreude- makes me smile. Even you need to lighten up, Abe. Just don’t go to the theater. I’m getting ahead of myself. Remind me to tell you about that after we save this country.
LINCOLN So it can be saved?
ORACLE Of course. But there will be blood, the shed of which has never been seen yet will be a trickle of what will come in future Ages.
LINCOLN My poor mind cannot conceive of worse deeds than those which engulf us now...
ORACLE Do not trouble over the future. Let us to the present attend. (She vanishes.)
LINCOLN The first step is to understand what the Confederates are thinking: They want to preserve their economy. Slaves to them are not people. This is an extreme case of how they think about women and the men who they employ, even their children are to be seen and not heard. Do they have friendships other than for business transactional purposes? Are they capable of compassion? Most likely yes if their greed and fears were addressed. Yet I sense these men will go to their graves more willingly than admit they have been wrong or see the justice in fairness or opportunity for all men and women of all races. This insight leaves me in despair as I see no opening for communication, no possibility of a meeting of minds. The frightened, man with illicit gains is enraged by jealousy - his fear of losing that to which he has grown accustomed. He will continue to subjugate the downtrodden even after they are legally emancipated. He will keep his heel on their windpipes for centuries. He will bend the law with his rich lawyers and political whores who want nothing more than a cut of his lucrative evil-pie. He will lie and repeat the lies in rabel-rousing ways. He will call religion and the name of God to his service. I may help for a day, a month, a year but the lot of the many will take long to be bettered. I cannot finish this work. I know this. I also know I must start it. Justice calls. My own personal tragedies must wait to be mourned in my bed alone or with Mary, my beloved.
ORACLE (Off, spotlight) Ok. So I’m a pretty good sentence starter. I want to try this one on somebody, but there’s got to be the right moment... hmm... let’s see... something about ‘Four score and seven years ago...’
LINCOLN Mary you are an excellent student of history. What do you think was the first spark of the Civil War?
MARY Even though it was far from the South, Shay’s Rebellion set the stage. As well as Shay and his band of farmers were wrong to threaten violence and as much right they had in their desperate attempt to get a fair deal from those whose greed blinded them for equity, they showed a great weakness: that the government- at least the local government could be challenged.
LINCOLN Yes, States Rights while important also showed the need for a stronger, more perfect union centered in a national government of one people. We are stronger together despite our differences than we are divided.
ROBERT Father, The Missouri Compromise showed politicians even from the north were more concerned with balancing political power than in the lives of the men women and children who were enslaved.
EDWARD Dred Scott and his wife were almost free. The five Supreme Court Justices whose families owned slaves not only said anyone who has even a drop of African blood is not a citizen and therefore not a US citizen, but they also overturned The Missouri Compromise
WILLIE True, but the effect was the opposite of what those slave owners wanted. The outrage of people of decency propelled father into the White House.
TAD To quote, father your summing up of the position of those who deny the humanity of any who are not exactly like them-that is white, Protestant men: “deny his manhood; deny, or dwarf to insignificance, the wrong of his bondage; so far as possible, crush all sympathy for him, and cultivate and excite hatred and disgust against him; compliment themselves as Union-savers for doing so; and call the indefinite outspreading of his bondage “a sacred right of self-government.”
WILLIE The raping of the African race has got to stop.
EDWARD Quite literally: slave owners, perhaps not all, think it is their right to force themselves on slave women.
ROBERT It sickens me.
WILLIE What about Jefferson and his slave family?
TAD Some say he loved Sally Jennings and their children.
WILLIE Jefferson was a widower. Sally was an educated woman. He was faithful to her for 40 years.
EDWARD Still, if these rumors are true, it was a grotesquely unequal relationship.
ORACLE (Seen only by Lincoln.) They’re true... and someday interracial marriage will be as common as to not raise an eyebrow.
LINCOLN I want a woman of African descent to be free and equal under the law. That said, I want her neither as a concubine nor as a wife.
MARY (Lightening the tension) That’s good to hear, Abe.
ORACLE (Aside) What’s with this drumming? Are we expecting the Emperor Jones for dinner. Let’s hope we have a golden bullet.
(Shouting from back stage, joined by shouts from around the House, as each of the following are highlighted with a few bullet points on monitors throughout the House- all characters and audience read aloud the lines from the monitors as they are drowned out by prerecorded shouts- the pace is at first slow. The shouts quickly build in frequency and volume:
John Brown’s Raid On Harpers Ferry
(Drumming, guitars, gunshots have reached a deafening volume. Police and Ambulence sirens have joined the cacophony. Flashing lights intensify the pitch. All characters notice the mayhem as though it came out of nowhere. Then there is a sudden silence. After 30 seconds of panicked frozen motion, there are 12 anvil beats rising quickly from inaudible to almost deafening. Then another silence of 15 seconds followed by an explosion.
Then 45 seconds of silence.
LINCOLN Extreme inequality... social and economic injustice incessantly magnified, a cancer of greed- jealously, violently... murdering to protect the greedily, evil-gotten gains: (beat) affluence has bred tyranny.
MARY God, religion, morality, ethics, twisted into horrific service, brother torn from and killing brother... honesty disavowed, calls to fear, bigotry and the worst human instincts. There is no sanity in these tortured times.
(No curtain.)
Postlude
Later that year: November 19
FRANK (huddled with his radio.) Hey, Jane listen to this anniversary broadcast of that Address Lincoln gave way back in 1863- might give you some ideas.
‘...our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’
(Overlapping: another radio, coming up from silence in a subtle, gradual crescendo of Eisenhower’s speech, a quiet low register flute is heard in the back of the auditorium, the musician gradually approaching the stage.
Here will develop a mighty influence for peace and understanding throughout the world... attainment through universal understanding of peace with justice is today, as always, the noblest and most shining ideal toward which man can strive and climb.’...And now I understand we proceed... by turning over the first shovel.
(A third radio, then entire cast, audience joining in reading from monitors.
‘the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’
(Image of Eisenhower turning over first shovel... fade to black.)
CURTAIN