Cheap Speech
 a play by Camille Roy
 2002, published by Leroy
 designed by Renee Gladman
 58 pages, Handbound using Japanese Binding
 only $10.00

Order direct from the publisher!

Cheap Speech is a wicked comedy of love and nausea. Sydney, an abstract-novelist-queer is living on Wanda's sex work earnings. Wanda has a bad case of stripper's disgust. They quarrel and hurtle apart, through urban undergrowth, each bolted to a separate flaw in the social texture. There's a multiple personality somewhere, a baby, and a theater--plus a Romanian refugee who has been boiled in history. In this urban jungle, anyone you meet can flash a sentence and reel across the stage, and the sadist is melancholy, the effect of too much sex, power, torture, and poetry.

Produced and directed by Rachel Levitsky at St Mark's Poetry Project, NYC, May 2001.

Excerpt from Cheap Speech:

Sydney
You are only my toy-to-be-adored. In my room, when there's no one around, I rub words on your mouth. [runs her finger across Wanda's lips] It's the friction that I like. [leers] Just you & me, baby. THAT'S my aesthetic.

Wanda
I'm insatiable. You like that.

Sydney
Yeah! [sits back down on the bench]

Wanda
[morose] So why do I get bored? It's not the insatiable part-that's alright. I guess. I guess it's alright. But it's not where I'm AT. [Wanda sits down on the bench takes out a compact & a lipstick, lifts up the veil on her yellow hat and puts on lipstick] I redden my lips. [applies lipstick] And I do it for a reason. [looks at audience] Say why. [knocks Sydney's leg] Say why.

Sydney
[bored] Why.

Wanda
Because the dead ones are out there [gestures at audience] and I'm glamorous. I get to be. That's the way it is. [walks towards audience] And the money's so easy I can't stop. Easy money. It's a fat dream, soft enough to sleep on. I like to sleep once in awhile. But what I don't understand is, why are you dead? Sweetheart, watch this. [She begins to rock on her hips like a stripper and unbutton her sweater]

Sydney
Baby, don't do that. Please.

Wanda
Why?

Sydney
Everyone will know what you are.

Wanda
How are they gonna know? They'll just think I spent a lot of money on my underwear.

 

back