THE BOAT BEYOND THE CEDARS

 

THE BOAT BEYOND THE CEDARS

A Play in Four Acts

* * *

"And though the last lights off the black West went / Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —"— Gerard Manley Hopkins

"The sea is our mother. We do not own her. We return to her."— Makah Proverb

— Page Break —

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

PAUL O'REILLY — A Catholic country boy from South Dakota who rises from poverty to become a technology billionaire. Charismatic, generous to a fault, and quietly terrified of silence. He is fifty at the play's opening, though the play traverses fifteen years of his life.

MARGARET O'REILLY — Paul's wife. Intelligent, composed, and carrying a grief she has never named aloud. She loved Paul before he had anything, and that history both sustains and frightens her.

EILEEN — Paul's eldest sister. Practical, deeply loyal, and the family's unofficial historian. She is the one who kept letters, who remembers birthdays, who prays rosaries in the kitchen before anyone wakes.

THOMAS HALE — Eileen's husband. A former mechanic of rare skill who has become, in Paul's orbit, a man of elegant idleness. He is kind, ashamed of his kindness, and increasingly prone to long silences.

RUTH — Paul's second sister. Sharp-tongued and spiritually restless, she converted to Eastern Orthodoxy after years of searching and has never fully explained why. She sees more than she says.

DANIEL MERCER — Ruth's husband. A man of great dignity and no money, which in this family amounts to a wound. His bitterness is the bitterness of a man who knows himself well but cannot forgive what he knows.

CLARA — Paul's youngest sister. Dreamy, compassionate, and the one member of the family who seems to live partly in another world. She is an artist who has stopped painting. She is the one who sees the Boatman.

MICHAEL O'REILLY — Paul's older brother. He was a farmer, then briefly a failure, then a resident of paradise. He is the most silent man in the family and the most haunted by it.

SEAN O'REILLY — Paul's younger brother. Volatile, genuinely funny, and wounded in the particular way of men who were once the funniest in the room and now suspect the laughter has moved on without them.

THE CHILDREN — Four nieces and nephews (BRIDGET, LIAM, ANNA, and CORMAC), ranging in age from eight to seventeen over the course of the play. Also JOSEPH and GRACE, Paul and Margaret's children.

ELIAS CROWFEATHER — An elderly Makah cook whose presence seems to exist at the edge of ordinary time. He was hired through ordinary channels but arrived by no means anyone can clearly remember. He has worked on the island for decades, though the island has been in Paul's possession for only six years.

MIRIAM CROWFEATHER — His wife. Quiet, observant, and possessed of the rare gift of saying the truest thing in the fewest possible words. She speaks perhaps thirty lines in the play. Each one lands like a stone in still water.

FATHER BENEDICT — A Benedictine priest, formerly the O'Reilly family's pastor in South Dakota. He is seventy, half-deaf, and maintains an attitude of serene incomprehension toward the modern world that may or may not be genuine.

THE BOATMAN — A silent figure who may or may not exist outside the imagination of the people who see him. He is neither frightening nor comforting. He is simply very old. He wears clothes that suggest no particular era. He never speaks until the final scene.

* * *

SETTING

A cedar-lined island in the San Juan Islands, Washington State. The play takes place between 2002 and 2012, though time on the island moves strangely. The island has no name in the play. The family calls it simply "the island." Maps show it as Point Vashon Reach, but no one uses that name.

The stage is divided throughout into three zones: the warm interior of the mansion (the lit world), the shoreline and cedar forest (the threshold world), and the western cove where the boat appears (the outer world). These zones may bleed into one another. The lighting designer should resist easy symbolism.

— Page Break —

A NOTE ON THE PLAY

This play began as a question: what happens to a family when one of its members escapes poverty so thoroughly that the escape itself becomes a kind of exile? Not for the one who escaped — he is still there, still trying, still hosting Christmas and buying everyone plane tickets — but for those who arrived safely in his harbor and found, to their horror, that safety had taken something from them they could not name.

The boat is not a symbol. Or rather: it is a symbol in the way all real things are symbols, which is to say it is first a boat. It rocks. It has seawater in it. A rosary. The wood is old. It arrives and departs by its own logic. If a production tries to explain it, the play will die. If a production trusts it, the play will breathe.

Elias and Miriam Crowfeather are not magic. They are Makah. The distinction matters enormously. They are old in the way places are old, and they know things the way people who have been paying attention for a very long time know things. They should not be played as mystical. They should be played as the most practical people on the island.

The children are not incidental. They are the reason. Every argument the adults have, every silence, every broken dish and unopened letter — it passes through the children and becomes the future. Directors should resist the temptation to keep them offstage. They should be present, playing cards, reading, staring at the water, overhearing everything.

Finally: this is a Catholic play in the way the Pacific Northwest is a Catholic landscape — which is to say the faith is everywhere present and nowhere acknowledged, living in the bones of the people and the fog off the water and the particular way a candle looks at two in the morning when you cannot sleep and are not sure what you believe but light it anyway.

— Page Break —

ACT I

The Island of Temporary Kings

"Where we love is home — home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts."— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Scene One

A vast cedar-lined island near the coast of Washington State. Summer, 2002. Evening fog drifts over black waters. A large modern mansion stands among ancient trees, its floor-to-ceiling windows pouring warm light into the dark. The distant cry of gulls. The stage is divided between the warm glow of the house and the cold silver shore.

At rise, ELIAS and MIRIAM prepare food in silence in an outdoor kitchen near the tree line. ELIAS sharpens a long knife slowly, methodically, as though the sound itself is important. MIRIAM arranges fish on a cedar plank without looking at what she is doing, her attention somewhere out over the water.

At the far western edge of the stage, barely visible through the fog, an unmanned wooden boat rocks gently against the shore. The audience may not notice it at first. That is intentional.

ELIAS

The sea returns what men try to abandon.

MIRIAM

Or what they forget.

ELIAS

No one forgets anything.

MIRIAM

That is why people grow old.

Pause. ELIAS draws the blade slowly across the whetstone. The sound carries.

ELIAS

The boat was not there yesterday.

MIRIAM

It was.

ELIAS

I would have seen it.

MIRIAM

Some things wait until we are frightened enough to notice them.

Lights shift toward the mansion. Through the great windows we see, as if in a diorama, the O'Reilly family assembled for the first time in years. PAUL stands among them with a glass of wine. He is charismatic, exhausted beneath the surface, trying very hard not to appear lonely. He has the bearing of a man who has spent years learning how to fill a room and has recently begun to wonder if the room is filling him back.

The family: EILEEN, now fifty-three, with the particular stillness of a woman who has learned to absorb weather. THOMAS, her husband, hands too large for the wine glass, smiling with slightly too much effort. RUTH, forty-seven, reading something on her phone even now, her free hand moving along the crucifix at her throat. DANIEL, Ruth's husband, standing near the window, staring out. CLARA, forty-two, perched on the window seat, watching the fog. MICHAEL, fifty-six, the oldest, quiet as a barn in winter. SEAN, thirty-nine, talking at high volume about something that happened to him in an airport. THE CHILDREN drift in and out.

PAUL

To South Dakota!

ALL

To South Dakota!

PAUL

To frozen tractors and collapsing barns and our father, who believed every personal computer was possessed by Satan Himself and would tell you so at length while you were trying to watch football.

Laughter.

MICHAEL

He also thought microwave ovens caused communism.

CLARA

And that jazz music opened portals to some kind of moral underworld.

SEAN

To be fair, he had heard a lot of bad jazz.

PAUL

He may have been right about jazz.

More laughter. DANIEL does not laugh. He turns from the window.

DANIEL

Funny thing about portals.

A small silence. People still smiling but paying attention now.

PAUL

What?

DANIEL

Once you walk through one, nobody lets you go back.

The laughter drains from the room like water from a bath. RUTH watches her husband carefully. MARGARET looks at Paul.

EILEEN

Daniel's been drinking philosophy again.

DANIEL

No. I've been drinking dependence.

He holds up his wine glass with a slight, complicated smile.

MARGARET

Daniel—

DANIEL

No, let's say it plainly. We all live here because Paul became a king. Let's say that. Let's say it out loud and then go back to laughing about South Dakota.

PAUL

I'm not a king.

DANIEL

Then why does every roof above every one of us belong to you?

The room is very still.

THOMAS

(quietly, to no one in particular)

The man just wanted to have a toast.

DANIEL

I know. And I'm grateful. That's the problem, isn't it? I am genuinely grateful and I resent being grateful and I resent resenting it, and at some point all of that just becomes the furniture of a life I didn't design.

PAUL starts to speak. DANIEL raises a hand — not hostile, just honest.

DANIEL

Not tonight. Let's not do it tonight. Someone asked about South Dakota.

He moves to the window. Outside, the fog thickens. A foghorn sounds, distant, mournful.

SEAN enters carrying fishing gear, tracking water across the marble floor. EILEEN watches this with the expression of a woman who has stopped saying anything about tracked water.

SEAN

There's a boat on the western shore.

MICHAEL

What kind of boat?

SEAN

Old. Wood. No running lights, no engine noise.

THOMAS

Coast Guard?

SEAN

No markings. No anchor line. Just sitting there.

CLARA

Maybe someone's stranded.

SEAN

No footprints on the beach.

RUTH

Then how did it get there?

SEAN

That's what I'm telling you. That's exactly the problem.

Silence. The children have gathered in the doorway, listening. CLARA goes to the window and looks out. The fog is complete now.

Outside, ELIAS stops sharpening his knife.

Slow fade to black.

* * *

Scene Two

Late that night. The shore. Most of the mansion lights are out. The fog has lifted slightly, and the moon gives the water a pewter sheen.

PAUL walks alone near the shoreline with a glass of whiskey he has barely touched. The unmanned boat is visible now, rocking gently, perhaps forty feet from shore, though no one anchored it there. Its wood is very old — cedar planks, hand-fitted, clearly made by someone who knew what they were doing.

THE BOATMAN appears briefly at the stern. He is not alarming. He simply stands there, looking not at Paul but at something behind him. He may be a trick of the fog. The audience is not certain. Then he is gone.

PAUL

Hello?

No response. Just water.

PAUL

If there's someone on that boat, I can send a dinghy. You don't have to swim.

A gull screams once, very close, and is gone.

PAUL wades in to his knees — he is wearing expensive trousers and doesn't seem to notice or care — and reaches the boat. He looks inside. Seawater, six inches deep. And in the bow, coiled in the water like a thing washed up from some other century: a wooden rosary. He picks it up. He knows it. He drops his whiskey glass in the water.

PAUL

(barely audible)

Mother of God.

ELIAS

(from behind him, on the shore — he has appeared silently)

The sea keeps strange priests.

PAUL spins. He is genuinely frightened, which he will not admit.

PAUL

Jesus. Elias. Don't do that.

ELIAS

I wasn't doing anything. I was here.

PAUL

How long have you been standing there?

ELIAS

A while.

PAUL

(holding up the rosary)

Whose boat is this?

ELIAS

Depends who's asking.

PAUL

I'm asking. I own this island.

ELIAS

No one owns islands.

PAUL

I paid for it. I have a deed. There are lawyers involved.

ELIAS

That is not the same thing.

Pause. The boat rocks.

PAUL

You think I've forgotten where I came from.

ELIAS

No.

PAUL

Then what?

ELIAS

I think you remember exactly where you came from. I think you've built this whole place — the house, the flights, the money, the family here where you can see them — so that where you came from can never find you.

PAUL

That's called success.

ELIAS

Sometimes.

Pause.

PAUL

That rosary was my mother's.

ELIAS says nothing.

PAUL

She's been dead for eleven years. We buried it with her. I specifically remember watching them close the casket.

Long pause.

ELIAS

Things that belong to the dead have a way of coming back when the living need them.

PAUL

That is not a comforting statement.

ELIAS

No.

A wind rises from the west. The boat slowly begins to drift away from Paul, out toward the open water, moving against the current. By the time Paul turns to watch it, it is nearly invisible in the fog.

He stands holding the rosary.

ELIAS is gone.

Blackout.

* * *

Scene Three

The following morning. The kitchen. Early light. EILEEN and MIRIAM are making bread. This is not a domestic scene — it is something more like a ceremony. EILEEN kneads with the focused physicality of someone who learned to bake before she learned to read. MIRIAM shapes loaves with a kind of absolute precision.

The rest of the house is silent. Through the window, the water is very still and very gray.

EILEEN

I don't like the boat.

MIRIAM

The bread needs more water.

EILEEN adds water.

EILEEN

Did you hear what I said?

MIRIAM

I heard you.

EILEEN

And?

MIRIAM

Liking it isn't the point.

EILEEN

Then what is the point?

MIRIAM

Understanding what it's asking for.

Pause. EILEEN keeps kneading.

EILEEN

I know what it's asking for. It's asking Paul to stop running. It's been asking him that his whole life and he hasn't listened.

MIRIAM

He's listening now.

EILEEN

How do you know?

MIRIAM

He was on the shore at three in the morning holding his mother's rosary.

EILEEN stops kneading.

EILEEN

How do you know about the rosary?

MIRIAM shapes a loaf and says nothing. After a moment, EILEEN goes back to kneading.

EILEEN

He was the one who got out. You understand that? We all wanted to get out — from the farm, from the cold, from the particular smell of poverty that's compounded out of diesel and boiled potatoes and things that were never fixed because there was no money to fix them. We all wanted it. But he was the one who actually had the thing that made it possible. Whatever it was. Intelligence, will, some specific craziness that looks like vision until it is vision.

She pauses.

EILEEN

He brought us all here because he was afraid of what happened to people who got out alone. He'd read too much Fitzgerald. Or maybe just the right amount.

MIRIAM

And now?

EILEEN

Now he's afraid of what's happening to us inside the getting-out.

MIRIAM

(sliding the loaves into the oven)

Then he sees clearly.

EILEEN

Seeing clearly doesn't help if you can't do anything about what you see.

MIRIAM

It helps more than you think.

The oven door closes. Outside, the first gulls of morning begin to circle. Somewhere in the house, a child laughs.

Slow fade.

— Page Break —

ACT II

The Weight of Bread

"Bread that must be divided is already holy."— Anonymous

Scene One

Three days later. Morning. The long breakfast table. Rain strikes the windows in waves. Everyone is present but the pretense of ease has worn thin. DANIEL and MICHAEL drink coffee in silence at opposite ends of the table. SEAN reads the newspaper with the concentration of a man who is not reading the newspaper. CLARA draws something in a sketchbook she keeps closing. THE CHILDREN eat cereal and pretend not to be listening. They are listening.

MICHAEL

I had a dream.

CLARA

About what?

MICHAEL

The farm. The old place.

PAUL

(appearing from the kitchen with coffee)

Pop's farm?

MICHAEL

The whole property. The house, the north field, the machine shed. Everything was flooded. Not a little flooded — completely under. The grain silos were gone. There was just this flat black water and the top of the silo cap sticking up like a hat.

EILEEN

That farm never flooded. Even the year it rained for six weeks. The drainage was—

MICHAEL

I know. But in the dream it did.

Pause.

SEAN

Dreams are just memories wearing masks and walking into walls.

DANIEL

No. Dreams are indictments.

RUTH

For what?

DANIEL

For what we've left. For what we've traded away. For surviving our own cowardice dressed as choice.

A long pause.

THOMAS

Paul gave us all this because he loves us.

DANIEL

I know he did.

Beat.

DANIEL

That's not the problem.

PAUL

Then what is?

DANIEL sets his coffee cup down very carefully.

DANIEL

You made us safe. That's real and I'm grateful and it matters. My kids eat. My wife isn't working three jobs. The gratitude is real, Paul, I need you to hear that.

PAUL

I hear it.

DANIEL

But you also made us unnecessary. You removed the problem that was the reason we existed. Does that make sense? A man who can't protect his family — a man who doesn't even get the chance to try protecting his family because the protection is already there and it's not him, it's you — that man doesn't disappear. He just becomes furniture.

MARGARET

Nobody here thinks of you as—

DANIEL

I'm not talking about what you think of me. I'm talking about what I think of me. In here.

He taps his chest once. Not for emphasis — just as fact.

DANIEL

When your daughter was sick last winter. Anna. The pneumonia.

RUTH

Daniel—

DANIEL

Let me finish. When Anna had pneumonia, I didn't even call the insurance company. I called Paul's assistant. Because that's the number I had. That's the number that gets answered. And she was fine, Anna was fine, the doctors were wonderful, there was a private room and someone brought us dinner, and the whole time I sat there thinking: what kind of father am I if my daughter's wellbeing begins and ends with a phone call to my brother-in-law?

Silence. BRIDGET, the twelve-year-old, is staring at her cereal.

PAUL

You're a good father.

DANIEL

I used to think so.

He stands and takes his coffee and goes to the window. After a moment, PAUL gets up too and stands beside him. They look out at the rain together. The BOATMAN is briefly visible through the rain, at the edge of the cedar forest. PAUL sees something. His hand tightens on his mug.

Then the rain intensifies and whatever Paul saw is gone.

Fade.

* * *

Scene Two

That afternoon. PAUL finds CLARA sitting alone on a rock near the tide pools, sketching. The rain has stopped. The air smells of cedar and brine. He sits beside her without being invited, as only family can.

PAUL

What are you drawing?

CLARA

The boat.

PAUL

From memory? It's not there now.

CLARA

It's always there. We just can't always see it.

She shows him the sketchbook. The drawing is precise and slightly wrong in a way that is hard to name — the proportions are right, the construction is right, but the boat in the drawing seems to be in two places at once, or possibly in no place at all.

PAUL

When did you stop painting?

Pause. CLARA closes the sketchbook.

CLARA

You noticed.

PAUL

I notice. I just don't always say.

CLARA

About two years ago. I'd start something and then I'd look at it after a week and it would look exactly like what it was — a painting. Not a thing in the world. Just a painting of a thing. And I couldn't figure out how to get back to the place where a painting could be the thing itself.

PAUL

I don't understand the difference.

CLARA

I know. That's okay.

Pause. They watch the water.

PAUL

Am I wrong to have brought everyone here?

CLARA considers this for a long time.

CLARA

No.

PAUL

But?

CLARA

There's no but. You did a real thing for real reasons and real things have real consequences. Daniel isn't wrong. Thomas isn't wrong. You aren't wrong. That's the whole terrible situation. Nobody's wrong.

PAUL

That should feel better than it does.

CLARA

Yeah.

She opens the sketchbook again.

CLARA

Do you know what I think the boat is?

PAUL

What?

CLARA

I think it's the question we've all been carrying and haven't let ourselves ask. And it's sitting on the shore waiting for someone to climb in.

PAUL

What question?

CLARA

Whether love is enough. Whether what you built here is what we actually needed, or just what we could receive.

Long silence. The water moves.

PAUL

I found Mother's rosary in it.

CLARA stares at him.

PAUL

I know.

She takes his hand. They sit that way for a while.

Fade.

* * *

Scene Three

That night. The western shore. RUTH stands staring at the water. She has been there for some time. MIRIAM appears beside her — not arriving from anywhere in particular, simply there.

MIRIAM

You should not come here at night alone.

RUTH

Why?

MIRIAM

The dead walk more honestly after sunset.

RUTH

Do you actually believe that?

MIRIAM

Belief is a small thing. A canoe in a large ocean.

RUTH

Then what matters?

MIRIAM

Attention. Paying attention. It's all anyone can really do.

RUTH turns her crucifix in her fingers.

RUTH

My husband hates my brother.

MIRIAM

No.

RUTH

He's making a whole identity out of—

MIRIAM

No. He hates himself as he exists in your brother's shadow. Your brother himself he doesn't know what to do with. You cannot hate something you cannot see, and Paul is invisible to Daniel because Daniel can't stop looking at the distance between them.

RUTH considers this.

RUTH

Can shadows disappear?

MIRIAM

Not while there is light.

RUTH

So Paul has to become smaller.

MIRIAM

Or Daniel has to find his own light.

Pause.

RUTH

He was good, you know. Before. He was the kind of man who could look at a broken engine and understand it in ten minutes. He had a gift for fixing things that had stopped working. And then everything stopped needing to be fixed. Paul had people for that.

MIRIAM

What did Daniel do before his hands had no work?

RUTH

He played guitar. He coached Liam's baseball. He made dinner on Thursdays. He was — present. In the room. Not distracted.

MIRIAM

And now?

RUTH

Now he is the most distracted man I know and the room is right here.

The boat appears on the water, drifting slowly.

RUTH

What is that boat?

MIRIAM

A question your family carries.

RUTH

What kind of answer arrives in a boat with no one inside?

MIRIAM

Usually the dangerous kind.

The BOATMAN appears at the stern of the boat, very still, looking toward shore. RUTH sees him.

RUTH

Who is that?

She turns to MIRIAM.

MIRIAM is gone.

RUTH looks back. The boat is empty again.

She stands alone on the shore.

Blackout.

— Page Break —

ACT III

The Year the World Broke

"Everything I had built I had built on sand. I had not known it was sand. That is not an excuse."

Scene One

Autumn, 2008. Six years after Act I. The mansion is the same and different. Slightly worn. The art on the walls has changed — less expensive, more personal. Newspapers are scattered everywhere, their headlines visible: LEHMAN BROTHERS COLLAPSES. GLOBAL MARKETS IN FREE FALL. TECH SECTOR BLOODBATH.

Several lights flicker, though this may be atmospheric. Televisions in multiple rooms silently display stock tickers in collapse. The children are older now. BRIDGET is eighteen and doing her college applications at the kitchen table. She reads the newspapers with the focused alarm of someone who has just understood that the world is a real place.

PAUL sits alone at the long dining table surrounded by financial documents. He has not slept. He has not, it appears, changed his clothes. He reads quietly.

PAUL

(reading)

"Liquidity collapse... cascading exposure... structured finance instruments... emergency restructuring of core holdings..."

He laughs softly — not with humor but with the specific laugh of a man who has just seen something he should have seen years ago.

PAUL

There it is.

MARGARET enters in a robe. She has been awake too, but differently — she has been reading, or praying, or sitting quietly in the way of someone who learned long ago how to wait.

MARGARET

You haven't slept.

PAUL

I built a cathedral out of electricity.

MARGARET

The company can recover.

PAUL

Some of it can. Not all of it.

He sets the papers down. He looks toward the dark windows.

PAUL

I thought I'd built something that was fundamentally different. Something that existed in a different category from the farms and the failed businesses and the — the grinding, terrified economics of where we came from. I thought intelligence was a kind of immunization.

MARGARET

Against what?

PAUL

Against becoming our parents.

Long silence.

MARGARET

And did it?

He looks at her.

PAUL

No.

MARGARET

Then we begin again. That's all.

PAUL

Margaret—

MARGARET

Your mother began again four times. Different kind of difficulty, I know. But the architecture is the same.

PAUL

I gave everyone a life they never would have had.

MARGARET

And they were grateful and they resented it and they loved you through both of those things and they will again.

PAUL

That's not the — Margaret, paradise removes the soul's muscles. I watched it happen. Thomas doesn't know what to do with his hands anymore. Michael reads fishing catalogs and doesn't go fishing. Sean drinks less than he used to but for worse reasons. I did that.

MARGARET

You didn't do it. It happened.

PAUL

I built the conditions.

MARGARET

Then the conditions are changing.

From outside, foghorns echo. Then SEAN bursts in, wearing a rain jacket, clearly having just run from the shore.

SEAN

The boat's back.

PAUL

What?

SEAN

The wooden boat. The one from the summer six years ago. It's back on the western shore. And Paul —

He stops.

PAUL

What?

SEAN

This time there's someone in it.

Blackout.

* * *

Scene Two

The western shore. A violent autumn storm — real violence, rain horizontal, the cedars bending. The entire family has gathered with lanterns and flashlights. THE CHILDREN are there, despite efforts to keep them inside — BRIDGET has simply refused to stay in, and the younger ones have followed her.

The boat is against the rocks, hard in. Inside sits a soaked elderly priest in a black raincoat, holding a broken lantern with both hands as though it is still lit. He is alive. He is calm. He is completely bewildered about where he is.

PAUL

Father Benedict?

FATHER BENEDICT

(recognizing him slowly, like a man surfacing)

Paul O'Reilly. I do apologize for arriving like Lazarus. It isn't the effect I was going for.

PAUL

How did you get here?

FATHER BENEDICT

I genuinely don't remember.

They help him out of the boat. He is seventy, half-deaf, and soaked through, but his dignity is entirely intact — the specific dignity of men who have made peace with the universe.

MICHAEL

Were you in a storm? Did your boat lose power?

FATHER BENEDICT

I remember being in Rapid City. I remember thinking I should come. And then —

He looks at the boat. He looks at the water.

FATHER BENEDICT

There was a crossing. Someone was with me.

ELIAS

(from the edge of the group)

The sea remembers for you.

FATHER BENEDICT studies ELIAS carefully, with the expression of a man searching his memory.

FATHER BENEDICT

I know you.

ELIAS

No.

FATHER BENEDICT

From somewhere. A long time ago.

ELIAS

Another century, perhaps.

FATHER BENEDICT

(returning to this)

I came because Paul wrote me a letter.

PAUL

I didn't write you a letter. I've been meaning to — I've been — no. I didn't.

FATHER BENEDICT

Then this is more interesting than I thought.

He reaches into his soaking coat and produces a water-damaged envelope. The family gathers around the lantern light.

PAUL opens it. Inside, one sentence, in his own handwriting on his own letterhead — the stationery he uses for personal correspondence, that almost no one has seen.

He reads it silently.

He reads it again.

RUTH

What does it say?

PAUL turns the letter around. The audience can read it if the staging allows: "Please come before everything disappears."

He trembles — very slightly, the way buildings tremble before an earthquake.

CLARA, at the edge of the group near the trees, looks past everyone.

CLARA

There's someone there. Among the cedars.

Everyone turns. The BOATMAN stands among the trees, at the edge of the light. For the first time, multiple people see him — or think they do. He is simply there: ancient, patient, looking at nothing in particular.

Then a wave crashes against the rocks and when the spray settles—

He is gone.

The family looks at each other.

FATHER BENEDICT

I think I need dry clothes and possibly some whiskey, if this family still keeps whiskey.

SEAN

We definitely still keep whiskey.

They move toward the house. PAUL remains a moment, looking at the boat.

He touches the bow. The wood is centuries old. He could swear he can feel it breathing.

He follows his family.

The boat rocks alone.

Blackout.

* * *

Scene Three

Later that night. The house. PAUL and FATHER BENEDICT sit by the fire alone. The storm continues outside. The priest has dry clothes — someone's — and whiskey. He is listening with the particular quality of priests who have learned that silence is doing something.

PAUL

When I was a child, I believed God was fair.

FATHER BENEDICT

Most children do.

PAUL

When did you stop?

FATHER BENEDICT

Believing He's fair?

PAUL

Yes.

FATHER BENEDICT

I never stopped. I just changed my understanding of what fairness was.

PAUL

How?

FATHER BENEDICT

I used to think fairness meant equal distribution. That if you worked and prayed and tried, things would go proportionally. That the universe was a just accountant. Then I watched enough people suffer who had done everything right, and enough people flourish who had done everything wrong, and I realized that fairness isn't proportional. It's relational.

PAUL

I don't know what that means.

FATHER BENEDICT

It means God isn't keeping a ledger. He's keeping a conversation. The point isn't that the suffering is proportional to the sin. The point is that nothing — not success, not failure, not grief, not abundance — nothing goes unreceived. Everything is held. That's what I mean by fair.

Pause. The fire shifts.

PAUL

I'm losing the company.

FATHER BENEDICT

I assumed something like that.

PAUL

And the island, probably. And the house in Marin. And the — it's a lot of unraveling.

FATHER BENEDICT

And your family?

PAUL

They'll be fine. Financially, I mean. There's enough held in trust, enough that's — I didn't put everything in the company. But the life. This.

He gestures at the house.

PAUL

This specific shape of things ends.

FATHER BENEDICT

And you think that's your fault.

PAUL

Isn't it?

FATHER BENEDICT

Paul. You gave your family six years on an island. They will argue about it and resent it and cherish it and be defined by it for the rest of their lives. That's not failure.

PAUL

It might be.

FATHER BENEDICT

No. Failure is not trying. What you did is something else.

PAUL

What?

FATHER BENEDICT

I'm not sure yet. I think we might need several more winters before the word for it becomes clear.

Outside, the storm is passing. The wind drops. Through the windows, the moon appears briefly over the water.

Fade.

— Page Break —

ACT IV

Scattering

"Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. / Just keep going. No feeling is final."— Rainer Maria Rilke

Scene One

Winter, 2012. Four years after Act III. The mansion is nearly empty. Furniture covered in white sheets. Boxes everywhere, labeled in different handwritings. The art is down. The walls show the ghosts of frames.

Snow falls softly outside. The cedars carry it in silence.

The family moves through the rooms doing the work of departure. THE CHILDREN are grown now, or nearly — BRIDGET is twenty-two and doing the heavy lifting with the practiced efficiency of someone who has accepted what is happening. LIAM, at seventeen, carries boxes without speaking. ANNA and little CORMAC fold blankets in the corner. JOSEPH and GRACE, Paul's children, are off at college and not here, which is its own kind of statement.

MICHAEL

Funny.

EILEEN

(not stopping her packing)

What?

MICHAEL

When we arrived here, I thought this place was the future. I thought: this is what a good life looks like when the person who had the vision finally gets the tools.

THOMAS

And now?

MICHAEL

Now it feels like a memory that happened too early. Like we lived something we weren't supposed to live for another twenty years, and now we have to go back and live the twenty years first.

CLARA

Will anyone buy it?

PAUL

(from somewhere in the room, surrounded by papers)

Some investment consortium. They want to turn the mainland side into a corporate retreat. Team-building. Kayaking. Carefully guided nature experiences.

SEAN

For rich people.

PAUL

Well. Everyone rich is poor in a more expensive way. Maybe it'll do them good.

Soft laughter. Real laughter, this time — the kind that has been marinated in sorrow and come out the other side.

DANIEL enters from the back hallway carrying the last of a large load. He is different. Not happier, exactly, but more present — the way a room is different when a window has been opened.

DANIEL

I found work in Oregon.

This is not news to everyone, but the formality of saying it aloud in this room makes it new.

RUTH

Doing what?

DANIEL

Construction. A company that rebuilds old structures. Historical restoration, mostly. There's more of that work than you'd think.

THOMAS

That's a good trade.

DANIEL

It uses my hands.

Pause.

PAUL

You don't have to go, Daniel. There are options still—

DANIEL

I know there are. I'm going anyway.

Not hostility. Just clarity.

PAUL nods. Something passes between them — not forgiveness exactly, since there was nothing that specific to forgive, but the acknowledgment of a long difficulty that is not over but has changed shape.

DANIEL

You know the strange thing?

PAUL

What?

DANIEL

I spent years angry at you. Genuinely, uselessly angry. Building a whole internal legal case for why my problems were your fault. And when I finally stopped—

PAUL

When was that?

DANIEL

Maybe a year ago. Maybe the night Father Benedict arrived in that boat.

Beat.

DANIEL

When I finally stopped, I looked around and realized you were the only person in this family who had been trying the whole time. I'd been sitting in the corner building resentments and you were running around trying to hold all of it together with both hands. That's —

He pauses.

DANIEL

I'm sorry I wasn't better company for it.

PAUL looks away. He is a man who can handle almost anything except being understood.

PAUL

You don't owe me—

DANIEL

I'm not paying a debt. I'm just — saying the thing. You built this island because you were afraid.

PAUL

Afraid of what?

DANIEL

That love scattered is love lost.

Long silence. The snow falls.

PAUL

Maybe I was right.

DANIEL

No.

PAUL

No?

DANIEL

Families are supposed to scatter. That's the design. You plant seeds in the same field and they fight each other for light. You scatter them and each one gets its sun. What remains is the — the scattering itself. The act of having been a family.

PAUL

The remembering.

DANIEL

Yes.

BRIDGET, pausing near the doorway with a box, has been listening. She nods very slightly to herself and keeps moving.

LIAM watches her go. He is seventeen and this is, without his knowing it, forming him.

Slow fade.

* * *

Scene Two

The following morning. Departure day. The house completely empty now — the sheets off, the boxes gone, the rooms strange with their own echoes.

Goodbyes are happening in multiple places at once: at the dock, in the driveway, in the kitchen where EILEEN and MIRIAM stand across from each other in the empty room as though this is a ceremony of some kind.

EILEEN

Where will you go?

MIRIAM

We are already where we will be.

EILEEN

I don't understand that.

MIRIAM

I know.

Pause.

EILEEN

You were kind to us. Elias was kind to us. In the way that — not many people are kind to families like ours. We aren't always easy.

MIRIAM

Easy families are boring families.

EILEEN

That's generous.

MIRIAM

It's accurate.

MIRIAM takes EILEEN's hand for a moment. Then releases it. Then she is gone. Not departed — simply gone, the way things that have always been in a place go when the place ends.

EILEEN stands in the empty kitchen alone for a moment. She touches the counter. She says a prayer we cannot hear.

She leaves.

* * *

Scene Three

Final evening. The shore. The last boat for the mainland has been and gone. All the family has left.

Only PAUL remains. He stands at the waterline. He has his coat on. His suitcase is somewhere. He is not ready to leave but he is out of reasons to stay.

The mysterious boat waits in the fog — exactly where it was the first night, ten years ago.

ELIAS and MIRIAM stand nearby, in that way they have of being present without having arrived.

PAUL

Was any of this real?

ELIAS

Which part?

PAUL

The boat. The rosary. The letter I didn't write. Father Benedict arriving out of fog. The — all of it.

MIRIAM

You still think reality is the opposite of mystery.

PAUL

Isn't it?

ELIAS

Reality is what persists when the explaining stops.

PAUL stares out at the ocean. The water is very still. The moon is up.

PAUL

I failed them.

MIRIAM

No.

PAUL

I built a paradise that didn't hold. I made promises—

ELIAS

You made a place. Places end. That's what places do.

PAUL

Then what do people do?

ELIAS

They carry the place with them. In the body. In the hands.

PAUL

Daniel hated it here.

MIRIAM

Daniel will spend the rest of his life telling his children about it.

PAUL

Is that good?

MIRIAM

It is true. Truth comes before good.

Long pause. The water.

PAUL

I lost everything.

ELIAS

No one loses everything. To lose everything you would have to lose your memory, and you are a man of very specific memory.

PAUL

What did I keep?

ELIAS points not at anything visible but toward the dark forest — the interior of the island, the cedars.

And from there, faintly, barely: echoes. Not played for effect but genuine traces — laughter, an argument in the kitchen, a child calling from the water, someone playing guitar badly and well, EILEEN saying grace, SEAN telling a story that keeps going wrong, MARGARET saying his name in the particular way she says it when he is in trouble and she loves him anyway.

Not a ghost sequence. Just sound. The island remembering.

ELIAS

That.

The BOATMAN appears clearly for the first time — fully visible, fully present, standing at the bow of the boat. He is neither frightening nor comforting. He is simply ancient, the way certain landscapes are ancient: without apology, without hurry, worn into his shape by more time than can be imagined.

He looks at Paul. Not beckoning. Not warning. Simply seeing.

PAUL

Am I supposed to go with you?

BOATMAN

Everyone is.

The first time he has spoken. His voice is not supernatural. It sounds like someone who has been quiet for a very long time.

PAUL

Now?

BOATMAN

Not yet.

Pause.

PAUL

Then why come here? Why come to this island, this family?

BOATMAN

To remind you that the island was never yours.

PAUL

Then whose was it?

The BOATMAN considers this for a long time.

BOATMAN

Everyone who loved someone on it.

Snow begins falling into the ocean. It disappears the instant it hits the water, but for a moment each flake is visible — individual, brief, exact.

The boat slowly drifts away from shore, moving into the fog.

PAUL watches until it disappears.

He stands alone.

ELIAS and MIRIAM are gone.

Church bells ring from somewhere impossible — from the interior of the island, from the water, from the sky. Three times. Slow and clear.

PAUL stands alone.

He is smiling very slightly. Not the smile of a man who has solved anything. The smile of a man who has understood that some things are not for solving.

He picks up his suitcase.

He walks toward the dock.

Behind him, one light — a single lamp in an upper window — remains on for a long moment.

Then it goes out.

Blackout.

— Page Break —

EPILOGUE

A single spotlight. CLARA, much older now — perhaps sixty. She addresses the audience directly. Not performing. Simply telling.

Behind her, barely visible: the outline of the island in fog. Or maybe a painting of the island. Or maybe a memory of the island. The lighting designer must decide, and every choice is correct.

CLARA

People ask whether the boat truly existed.

I've heard a hundred versions of that question. Did the priest really arrive that way? Is there a record? Has anyone looked at the tide tables for that night in October, 2008, because the currents don't — no. People want to know if it was real.

I tell them that is the wrong question.

The right question — the question that took me thirty years to find, and another ten to be willing to ask — is this:

Why do human beings build islands around the people they love?

She pauses. Not for effect. She is actually thinking about it.

We say it's protection. We say it's generosity. Paul said it was generosity and he was right and he was wrong in the way that people are both right and wrong about the best things they do.

But I think — and this is just me, Clara, the one who stopped painting for four years and then started again and never stopped after that — I think we build islands because we know the truth that we cannot say out loud, which is that family is temporary. Everything we call home is temporary. The people we love will become old or sick or distant or dead, and we will too, and the house will be sold and the children will be strangers to each other for years and then suddenly, at a funeral or a wedding or in a dream, not strangers anymore.

And we build islands because if we could just get everyone on the same piece of land, surrounded by water, we could stop time. We could make the temporariness false by sheer insistence.

Paul couldn't.

Nobody can.

But here is what I think about on the mornings when I am very old and it is very early and the light is coming in at that particular angle that makes me feel like I'm eleven again:

He tried.

He really tried.

And we were all there. Actually there, on an actual island, in the actual Pacific fog, arguing about real things with people we actually loved. The island was temporary. The love was not.

She looks toward the back of the stage.

I still dream of that island. The cedars. The fog. The particular smell of the kitchen when Miriam was cooking and the whole house was warm and it was raining and there was nowhere to go and nothing to do and you could hear everyone you loved just on the other side of every wall.

And sometimes, just before waking, when I'm most myself and least defended — I see a boat drifting along the western shore.

And someone is in it.

She looks at the audience.

I am not afraid of that anymore.

The light holds on her for a long moment.

Then — very slowly — fades.

Blackout.

END OF PLAY

* * *

PRODUCTION NOTES

ON THE BOATMAN

The Boatman should not be played as Death. He is not an allegory. He is something older and less dramatic: the simple fact of passage. Productions that play him for menace will find the final scenes collapse into gothic sentiment. Productions that play him as merely symbolic will find he has no weight. He should be played as a very old man who has been doing the same work for a very long time and is neither tired of it nor romantic about it. Think less Charon, more the ferryman who has taken millions across and knows every face is the same face in a different light.

ON THE BOAT

The boat should be a real boat, or as real as the theater's resources and ingenuity allow. The magic of its appearances depends entirely on the audience believing it is made of actual wood. A painted flat, however beautifully rendered, will not carry the metaphysical weight the play places on it. The boat should look old enough to predate Paul's family by centuries. The rosary inside it should be a real rosary.

ON THE SOUND DESIGN

The sound of water should be present throughout the play at a level just below conscious hearing — not constant, not obvious, but there. The audience should notice its absence before they notice its presence. The foghorns should be recorded from actual Puget Sound, if possible. The church bells at the end of Act IV should sound like a specific church — something with history and imperfection — rather than a generic bell. The echoes in the final scene should be recorded by the actual cast, in an actual room.

ON THE CHILDREN

They should be cast as young as their union and insurance rules allow. They should be present in scenes where adults are having difficult conversations. They should not be directed to react to those conversations. They should be given something real to do — drawing, playing cards, reading, looking at the water — and trusted to absorb the room without performing absorption. Children on stage are at their most powerful when they are simply being in the world while the world is doing its worst and best.