a 3 page play--first draft

The Question by Adam Szymkowicz adamszymkowicz@yahoo.com Characters: GINA STU Setting: Someplace unromantic. A dirty apartment, a fast food joint, a dentist office. Something like that. Time: Now. (GINA is thinking. STU stares at her.) STU So? GINA It’s unfair of you to bring this up. It’s unfair here and now. Everyone’s suffering and I can’t even have any sympathy for them although I have felt from time to time, these windows of feeling for people not like me far away. But even those windows are gone and I march in and out of our world like a zombie on a track and then you come in with your thoughts. STU It’s been four years, Gina GINA I feel everyday I want to cut my hands off or photocopy myself to death. Get caught in the fax machine, the paper shredder. Or the electric stapler. It’s easier to talk to the phone callers or my well-coifed and varied bosses if I swallow antidepressants in expectation of a full day of people throwing stacks of papers at me. STU But— GINA Five years ago I was chasing down suitors like they were wild beasts. And I caught most of them. Most of them I caught. Men, women, men and women. And I fucked regularly, some might say constantly. Sometimes on lunch or cigarette breaks. Always or often with some regret. STU Gina— GINA And the gallons of coffee I drank. Between lines of coke. And tabs of acid. Shrooms. Lots of pot. And the mystery pills my roommate brought home and hid between her toes. I was hung over or strung out all the time. I was always so tired. All the time tired. But that was before my life with you. STU I know, but— GINA And you . . . You have bad breath all the time. You never wash the dishes and when you do, they come out with hair on them and you leave the dirty sponge in the sink. Sometimes you get drunk and you say the most horrible things to my friends, to your friends, to strangers. You temp all day. You are two hundred and twenty thousand dollars in debt from a questionable education. You’re always on the internet. STU What’s wrong with the internet? GINA You hate yourself seventy to eighty percent of the time. The other twenty to thirty percent of the time you hate me. Recently you piled all your laundry into a sort of a nest where you now sleep instead of in the bed with me. STU I have a bad back. GINA You don’t wash. Your face is scratchy when you do touch me, which you rarely do. You never say I love you anymore. And you wear those goddamn pants every fucking day. Except when you come home and walk around in those ratty-ass boxer shorts you probably took from your dad’s hamper last time we visited your folks. STU They’re mine. GINA And it’s not just one or two of these things. It’s a collection of these tiny infractions and flaws and gaps in what there is and what there could be—not that I know or could tell you exactly what could be because everything seems pretty bleak and nothing seems possible in any way. I guess I’m trying to say I think I’m not happy right now. STU OK. (Pause) But what does that mean? Do you want to get married or what? (Pause) GINA I don’t know. Let me think about it. STU OK. Cool. (GINA thinks. STU stares at her.)