One of the lovelier short passages...

... in contemporary American drama sits at the end of Lanford Wilson’s 1978 play, Fifth of July.

Fifth of July follows Kenneth Talley Jr., a gay paraplegic Vietnam veteran, over the course of a weekend in which he’s deciding (among other things) whether or not to start a job teaching English at his former high school.

As the play opens, we find Ken “listening to a small portable tape recording. The recording is of a boy who speaks with great hesitation, mangling words so badly nothing is intelligible to us. Ken listens, makes notes, rubs his eyes and head.”

Only at the very end of the play do we hear the transcript that Ken (who has accepted the teaching job) has made of the boy’s speech. It’s a science fiction story:

“After they had explored all the suns in the universe, and all the planets of all the suns, they realized that there was no other life in the universe, and that they were alone. And they were very happy, because then they knew it was up to them to become all the things they had imagined they would find.”

Happy holidays everyone!