MABLE: Sally, take me up to my lookout spot. Take me up there.

(SALLY goes to the wheelchair, pushes MABLE stage left and out onto lookout ramp. She stops wheelchair at very edge of ramp and stays with MABLE. Pause. Dog keeps barking off and on. LIZ remains still. MABLE looks out over audience to L.A.)

He’s forgot his dog.

SALLY: Sounds like it.

MABLE: Now we’re stuck with it.

SALLY: Yeah. (Pause.) We could turn it loose.

MABLE: Coyotes would get it.

SALLY: Yeah.

(Pause.)

MABLE: We could shoot it.

SALLY: Yeah.

MABLE: Dump it over the edge.

SALLY: Probably start stinking, though.

MABLE: Yeah.

SALLY: Neighbors would get alarmed. Murder or something.

MABLE: Drug retribution.

(Pause.)

SALLY: Do dogs smell like humans?

MABLE: When they’re dead, you mean?

SALLY: Yeah.

MABLE: Sweeter, maybe.

SALLY: Sweeter?

MABLE: Maybe.

SALLY: Like dried blood, you mean?

MABLE: Like—death. You know.

SALLY: Then we all smell alike, I guess. Dogs and humans.

MABLE: There must be some difference.

SALLY: What is it?

MABLE: What?

SALLY: The difference.

(Long pause. Nothing happens.)

Mom?

MABLE: What?

SALLY: How come you saved me when you knew I was doomed? When you knew it was hopeless. How come you kept me going?

(Pause.)

MABLE: What are mothers for?

(LIZ starts singing. Very simple. No accompaniment. Lights start fading very slowly as MABLE and SALLY just stand there.)

LIZ: (A capella.)

I want to come to life

I do

I do

I want to come alive

I do

I do

This swimming in the dark

Is tearing me apart

I want to come to life

I do

I do.

(Dog keeps barking intermittently as lights fade slowly to black. Lights up for curtain call. After first bow, “Choctaw Bingo” by James McMurtry comes on loud and clear and continues as audience leaves the house. The barking dog is drowned out, but if the song ends before the last member of the audience has left, the dog comes back—in the distance.)

About the Author

SAM SHEPARD

• Heartless •

Sam Shepard was the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of more than fifty-five plays and three story collections. As an actor, he appeared in more than sixty films and received an Oscar nomination in 1984 for The Right Stuff. He was a finalist for the W. H. Smith Literary Award for his story collection Great Dream of Heaven. In 2012 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, received the Gold Medal for Drama from the Academy, and was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame. He died in 2017.

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