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committee.]
As far as I’m concerned, that was the first-act curtain.
    MARY : But first Sarah Lawrence. It’s 1948.
    LILLIAN : I suppose I have to get the tea.
    MARY : I got the porch.
    LILLIAN
goes offstage and returns pushing a table with a large silver tea service of cups and saucers
. MARY
arranges the women in the
ENSEMBLE .
She calls in
HAROLD TAYLOR
and places him to the right of
LILLIAN
’s chair
.
    LILLIAN : There were many more people than this.
    MARY : We don’t have many more people.
    LILLIAN : Well, then use some of the men to fill in.
    Some of the men in the
ENSEMBLE
sit with the women
.
    Where was I?
    MARY : Over there.
    LILLIAN
walks to her chair
.
    Are you ready?
    LILLIAN : Are you ready?
    MARY : All right. Stephen Spender invited us to speak—
    LILLIAN : I don’t think so. Harold Taylor, the president of Sarah Lawrence, invited us to speak. Not that it matters.
    MARY : You’re talking to the students when I come in. Stephen is there.
    STEPHEN SPENDER
waves hello
.
    You’re out on the sunporch at the president’s house—
    STEPHEN SPENDER : No, no, that’s not right—
    MARY
and
LILLIAN
look at
STEPHEN SPENDER .
    It wasn’t at the president’s house—
    MARY : Where was it, then?
    STEPHEN SPENDER : It was at
my
house—
    MARY : On Stephen Spender’s sunporch, then—
    STEPHEN SPENDER : We didn’t have a sunporch.
    MARY : It was definitely on a sunporch. So it must have been at the president’s house—
    STEPHEN SPENDER : I’m positive it was at my house—
    LILLIAN
stands
.
    LILLIAN : Never mind. What am I saying?
    MARY : You’re talking about John Dos Passos.
    As
LILLIAN
sits back down:
    LILLIAN : You have to explain who John Dos Passos is—
    STEPHEN SPENDER :
[By way of explanation.]
A famous novelist and radical—
    MARY : You were saying that John Dos Passos had gone to Spain during the Spanish civil war and turned against the loyalist cause because he didn’t like the food in Madrid. And you didn’t notice me, probably because I looked quite young at the time. I couldn’t bear it. All those lies, so smooth, as if they were coming out of a tube. And you were so clever. You weren’t being hostile at all. “Oh, that Dos,” you were saying—
    LILLIAN :
[Repeating.]
“Oh, that Dos.” Like that?
    MARY : Just like that. “He did love his food.”
    LILLIAN :
[Repeating.]
“He did love his food.”
    MARY : Is it coming back to you?
    LILLIAN : No. It doesn’t sound like me at all.
    MARY : And I interrupted. And I said—
[To the
STUDENTS ,
heatedly.]
“John Dos Passos didn’t turn against the loyalists, he turned against the communists. And it wasn’t because of the food in Madrid—it was because one of his closest friends in Spain, an incredibly brave man named Andres Nin, had justbeen tortured and murdered in a communist prison by Stalinists, that’s why.”
[She has moved herself to tears.]
    LILLIAN : Were you actually crying?
    MARY : I was very upset. And then you jangled the bracelets—
    MARY
signals for the bracelets to descend. They do
. LILLIAN
looks up to see them
.
    LILLIAN : But I never wore bracelets.
    MARY : Of course you wore bracelets.
    LILLIAN : You must have me confused with someone else.
    MARY : There are pictures of you wearing bracelets—
    LILLIAN : Nonsense. Get those goddamn bracelets out of here.
[They vanish.]
    STEPHEN SPENDER :
[Thinking it over.]
I’m starting to wonder if I was even there—
    MARY : Of course you were there—
    LILLIAN : Maybe he wasn’t—
    STEPHEN SPENDER :
[To
MARY
]
I do remember that afterwards she said we’d arranged the entire episode so we could redbait her.
    MARY : Well, how could we have red-baited her? How could we have arranged for her to say something so perfectly idiotic?
    LILLIAN : Are you the only person who’s allowed to say that people sometimes do serious things for shallow reasons?
    MARY : But in his case, it wasn’t true.
    LILLIAN : How do you know? How do we know why anyone does anything? In