4000 Miles and After the Revolution

Two Plays

Amy Herzog

• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781559367165
• Print ISBN:
  9781559364225
• Subtopic: American Drama

"After the Revolution is a smart, funny and provocative play. . . . Herzog deftly avoids simple-minded polemics in favor of richly detailed people who are as ready to examine their relationships as they are their consciences."—Variety

"A funny, moving new play . . . 4,000 Miles is a quiet meditation on mortality. But it's hardly a downer: Ms. Herzog's altogether wonderful drama also illuminates how companionship can make life meaningful, moment by moment, in death's discomforting shadow."—The New York Times

Known for delicately detailed character studies that subtly balance humor and insight, Amy Herzog is swiftly emerging as a striking new voice in the American theater. After the Revolution, an astute and ironic drama about how society appropriates history for its own psychological needs, was heralded by The New York Times as one of the Ten Best New Plays of 2010. Herzog's other critical hit, 4,000 Miles, is a quiet rumination on mortality in which twenty-one-year-old Leo seeks solace from his feisty ninety-one-year-old grandmother Vera in her New York apartment.

Amy Herzog received the 2011 Whiting Writers' Award and the 2008 Helen Merrill Award for Aspiring Playwrights. Her plays have been produced or developed at the Yale School of Drama, Ensemble Studio Theater, Arena Stage, Lincoln Center, The Actors Theatre of Louisville, New York Stage and Film, Provincetown Playhouse, and ACT in San Francisco. Her newest play, Belleville, premiered at Yale Rep in fall 2011.

After the Revolution

Act One

Scene 1

May 1999.

Vera’s apartment on West 10th Street, early evening.

The mood is ebullient, though everyone is tired.

BEN: So it’s this program, kids from the projects in Roxbury are bused out to our school, there’s grant money in it for us and it allows our superintendent to pat herself on the back but she doesn’t actually take / any responsibility for—

MEL: It’s a scandal, it’s / really—

BEN: So these kids get a bus ride, but they don’t get help buying textbooks, or paper, they don’t get computers—they’re supposed to use our computer lab but then they’d miss their / bus home—

MEL: And then they’re penalized / for—

BEN: And then it’s a big surprise they aren’t passing their classes. Our principal calls a meeting, all these kids and their parents, half the parents don’t show, / big surprise—

LEO: Right.

MEL: They’re working three jobs, they’re gonna come out to the suburbs because their kid’s not passing math? I mean this is / their biggest—

LEO: God.

BEN: So the principal is standing up there / lecturing—

MEL: This guy is—he should not be in education, he has this / punitive—

BEN: The sense is we are giving your children this opportunity and they are / squandering it—

MEL: Which is—

BEN: And you can see these parents, the ones who have missed their shift at—Rite Aid or—to be here, they’re just glazing over, I mean, they’re so / alienated—

MEL: So Ben stands up, / I wish I was there.

BEN: I had been kind of hiding in the—so I stand up and I say my name is Ben Joseph, and I teach history and social justice here, and I’m a Marxist, and I don’t think the problem is your children, I think the problem is our society the product of which is this school. I’m sorry that we have failed you, and I want to work with you and your children for change.

MEL: I wish I had been there.

LEO: And the principal?

MEL: Forget / it.

BEN: Furious. Goes white. Tries to bring the conversation back to personal responsibility.

MEL: But in the meantime Ben has them working on a list of / —what was it?

BEN: I said this meeting shouldn’t be about us telling you what we need, you should be doing the talking, what do you need?

LEO: Good for you, bro.

MEL: What Benji’s not telling you is that he told these kids at the beginning of the year that if they wanted extra help after school and they missed their bus, he would drive them home, you know, forty-five minutes to—and a lot of them took him up on it.

(Brief pause.)

BEN: And what about you, how were your classes this semester?

LEO: My—I was on sabbatical, I didn’t tell you that?

BEN: But you didn’t travel? . . .

LEO: Nah, just stayed home to work on the book.

BEN: The same one?

MEL: Don’t say it like that.

BEN: Like what? I said / it neutrally.

MEL: It takes a long time to write a book. It takes me a long time to read a book.

LEO: The answer is yes. Same one.

(Brief pause.)

Sammy’s been having a big season, you know, with the baseball, so it’s been good to be around for that, especially since Beth is working again.

BEN: Well. Standing offer. Trade for a day. Anytime you want to come to Brookline and teach six periods a day I’ll swing over to Tufts and do one of your sociology lectures.

(Vera has entered. She is sprightly at eighty-two, but fragile, and maybe a little off balance.)

VERA: Has the grad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• After the Revolution
• 4000 Miles
• About the Author