Out of Gas on Lover's Leap

The play I chose for “Show and Tell” is a two person play I did for my directing class at Southeastern Louisiana University, Out of Gas on Lover’s Leap. Out of Gas was written by Mark St. Germain and was written around 1985. The first production was at the WPA Theatre in New York staring Melissa Leo and Fisher Stevens and directed by Elinor Renfield (St. Germain). To my knowledge, there is no actively running production of this play, but you can purchase the script from Amazon.

Out of Gas is the story of two lost souls in the form of rich, bratty teenagers. Mystery “Myst” Angeleeds is the daughter of a washed up pop singer who follows in the footsteps of her mother’s promiscuous ways and Chauncey “Grouper” Morris is the son of a U.S. senator, slightly geeky and is an outsider at school because of it. The play starts with them on the hood of Grouper’s car after their high school graduation from a rich boarding school for trouble teens. They are drinking and smoking pot as the give details of their plans for the future. But as they plan for the future, the past starts biting them in the butt, such as Grouper’s suicide attempt and both of their parent’s ignore them, thus causing them to act out in hopes to garner their attention. They eventually make love while being stuck up there, but the bliss is short lasting as Myst reveals she’s pregnant with another man’s child and plans to get rid of it. They both try to plan a future for themselves in vain, but they feel their sorrows are too deep and they end up jumping off the cliff holding hands.

One of the choices the playwright makes that I find interesting is the fact that these are two obviously spoiled rich kids; we shouldn’t be feeling sorry for them. They have money, a great education, and a bright future ahead of them, but what the playwright does shows that just because someone’s lives a privileged life, it does not mean everything will work out fine. Both children may have all the money they would want and need, and are provided well when it comes to material needs, they are severely deprived of parental affection. When Grouper tries to commit suicide by hanging himself on a basketball hoop, his father doesn’t come to check on him. Myst acts more like a grown up than her own mother, who when she’s in company of her daughter and others, she just treats her like a sister. Myst is so starved for her mother’s attention (as her mother) that she self-mutilated herself as a child, and despite the surgeries and pain she had, she claims it was the best time of her life. Myst and Grouper both hate their parents and try to emulate them, and it’s so disheartening to see their lives so destroyed by the very people who brought them into the world.

Another choice I found compelling and I predicted it when I first read it, was the motif of Myst’s condition. From the beginning, she complained about not feeling good, and would sometimes refuse alcohol and drugs from Grouper had my alarm bells going “She’s Pregnant!!!” Several times during the play she would start on the topic of kids and would be nervous about Grouper’s response.  When she finally reveals her pregnancy, she says she plans on getting an abortion, and that is the true reason why her mother was coming down and takes her to France, so they could get the pregnancy terminated.