Act I
The scene is one of those Riverside Drive apartments, in a place called New York City. It is up in the neighborhood of One Hundred and Sixteenth Street, and once it was pretty good. It’s a bit run down now, and since people began moving to the East Side the neighborhood has become somewhat déclassé—not more so, however, than Paul Sears , the tenant of this particular apartment.
We see the living-room, if you can call it living. There is a piano, because Paul Sears is a composer. The rest of the furniture is what you might imagine, or worse.
Paul , a commonplace-looking man in his middle thirties, is at the piano when the curtain rises. He is in his shirt sleeves and is alternately hitting a few discouraged keys and making probably meaningless notations on the music sheet in front of him. He lacks one finger of being a two-fingered piano player. He is laboriously going over the same phrase again and again. And if you had never even heard it once, it would be too often.
Lucille , his wife, comes on from the rear rooms of the apartment. A spare but still attractive woman, on whom three years of marriage with Paul Sears have left their mark. She looks around for something. Finds it. It turns out to be a copy of the Graphic . She drops listlessly into a chair and starts to read. Paul continues torturing the piano.