I'll Be Seein' Ya: A Play: with The Insolvencies

By Jon Robin Baitz

Two searing, incisive plays from Jon Robin Baitz, Tony Award nominee and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Allie Murchow, a retired Hollywood makeup artist, is stuck inside her apartment, stuck in her daydreams of bygone celebrity and glamour, and stuck on hold with her pharmacist. She tries to make sense of the Los Angeles outside her windows, the LA of 2020, but she can’t hear herself think over the echo of sirens and her chatty brother’s interjections. I’ll Be Seein’ Ya, written by Jon Robin Baitz, the author of Other Desert Cities and Vicuña, is an unflinchingly funny new play that takes on our anxieties and delusions and reveals new truths about our strange reality.

In The Insolvencies, two men—one younger, one older, one a professor, one a former student—recall their relationship and the time they felt “the piercing sting of simply being seen.” A study of sex and pleasure, of justice and shame, this short, stirring play completes the affecting pair of new works from Baitz, “the American theatre’s most fascinating playwright of conscience” (Michael Kuchwara, Associated Press).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jan 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9780374607722

Jon Robin Baitz

Jon Robin Baitz was born in Los Angeles in 1961, and grew up there, in Rio de Janeiro, and in South Africa. His plays have been extensively produced on and off Broadway and throughout the world. He is the author of The Film Society, The Substance of Fire, Three Hotels, A Fair Country, The Paris Letter, and Other Desert Cities. He created the ABC TV show Brothers & Sisters, which ran for five seasons from 2007 to 2012, and the miniseries The Slap. He is a Tony nominee for the Broadway production of Other Desert Cities, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Guggenheim fellow, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters award winner.

Book preview

I’LL BE SEEIN’ YA

Characters

ALICE MURCHOW—in her seventies

MR. SPENCER STILL—an Asian man in his twenties

DORSA YERUSHALAIM—Iranian, in her seventies

JAPHY MURCHOW—Alice’s brother, of indeterminate age

Place

The agitated and unsettled Los Angeles of summer 2020.

The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself.

—JOAN DIDION

Note

Given that theater was essentially shut down because of the worldwide pandemic, many of us who work in it, instead of postponing productions entirely, made filmed versions of new plays for theaters to stream. We rehearsed this play on the stage of the Kirk Douglas Theatre in October 2021 for three weeks and filmed it there with three cameras during a week in November.

It was directed by Robert Egan, and the cast was Christine Lahti as Allie, Justin Kirk as Japhy, Sussan Deyhim as Dorsa, and Christopher Larkin as Mr. Still.

My brother, the protean composer Rick Baitz, wrote the exquisite score, another happy collaboration between us.

For me, it reaffirmed all the qualities I love in making theater—the process of lifting music out of silence, the odd tension between performance and reality, the magic created by lighting and sound. And it incorporated the control afforded by filming, a strange and very specific hybrid made possible by a hallucinatory and unrelenting virus that forced theater artists to find new ways of putting on shows in barns, as it were.

[SCENE I]

All the Old Familiar Places

Summer 2020

An open-plan apartment off Pico and Robertson Boulevards in Los Angeles, in what is known in architectural vernacular as the dingbat style. The neighborhood is a polyglot middle-class mix of immigrants and races. Realtors optimistically list flats here as Beverly Hills adjacent. Old Jewish and Persian residents, Somali restaurants, low, horizontal buildings, young people sharing apartments, and the retired on fixed incomes.

ALLIE MURCHOW, of the last category, is putting on makeup in front of a vanity mirror. The hair is blond. I’ll Be Seeing You plays very softly from a telephone’s speakerphone, an instrumental hold music version, soporific and anodyne.

Someone knocks on the front door …

WOMAN’S VOICE

(Middle Eastern accent)

Allie, darling? Are you there? Allie— It’s Dorsa! Please, if you are there? I’m going to try and make it to the market. You want some lamb shanks or some bananas? Or they may have that super-soft toilet paper?

ALLIE

I’m fine, Dorsa. Thanks, honey. I’m good.

DORSA

… Well—you can text me if you change your mind. I think they have organic lamb shanks—good for the skin?

ALLIE

I’m okay for organic lamb shanks and that super-soft toilet paper, sweetie. Also good for the skin …

DORSA

Okay … wish me luck.

ALLIE

(calm, to herself, as she works on her eyes)

Good luck. The eyes are the hardest part, always. And. Huh. Smoky eyes? Please. Now? That’s in again? But I was doing it when we worked at Robinson’s department store at the Beverly Hilton in the salon; I did it back in ’73. And that was—I mean, I did Goldie Hawn, I did Dyan Cannon. Remember? Eydie Gorme and—what’s her name? From that show—Bewitched—Elizabeth Montgomery! Smoky eye. Hah. Please, everything from my time. It’s all in again, like they just discovered it.

MR. STILL (ON SPEAKER PHONE)

Your call is very important to us here at Nick Stein Pharmacy. Please stay on the line for a pharmacy specialist.

ALLIE

(laughing)

I’ve been on the line for half an hour. Jesus, what’s a girl gotta do to get a refill and some Yves Saint Laurent Touche Éclat All-Over Brightening Concealer