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BLUE MOON · written by Robert Kaplow · 2025
Scene 12 of 26 · ≈ 5 min on screen · Act two
On the opening night of Oklahoma!, lyricist Lorenz Hart drinks through Sardi's while chasing one last renewal with Richard Rodgers and the young woman he adores, but both are already moving beyond him.
Hart leaves the show that displaced him for his Sardi's habitat, where wit and remembered greatness keep fear at bay.
Hart needs Elizabeth to choose him and Rodgers to need him, while drink offers the quicker form of consolation.
Hart drinks, romanticizes Elizabeth's youth, prepares a fake psychic card trick, and notices E. B. White eavesdropping nearby.
Hart recognizes E. B. White and recruits the writer as the ideal witness to his claim that Elizabeth is ineffable.
Over drinks, Hart and White talk language, mortality, and the twenty-year-old muse Hart insists transformed mentorship into enchantment.
This scene
Marty plays the opening of "Over There." The guys join in.
SINGING
"Over there, over there, send the word, send the word over there. That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming, the drums drum-drumming everywhere... We'll be over, we're coming over, And we won't come back till it's over Over there."
HART
You know what the Yanks really sang in the great war? We won't come back, we'll be buried over there! And they were.
ANDY WHITE
Total number of deaths in the Great War: thirty seven million... I think maybe the adjective "great" should never precede the word "war."
HART
Amen to that. What does God think when he looks down on his creation and sees that under the Noblest of Motives we sent thirty seven million people to their grave?
ANDY WHITE
That's why it's raining all the time. God is weeping.
HART
Well I'm a patriot. I am.
(to Morty)
I mean, you're a soldier. God bless you. But how many are going to die this time around?
ANDY WHITE
Will we even be able to put a number on it?
MORTY RIFKIN
I'm on leave. Taking care of my mother.... She's more terrified than I am.
HART
When do you ship out?
MORTY RIFKIN
In two weeks they're sending me back to that hotbed of enemy activity: Bradley Beach, New Jersey. I'm teaching Morse code at the Hotel Grossman.
HART
Ah, Bradley Beach, where enemy agents stroll the boardwalk disguised as elderly Jewish women in furs.
Pause.
EDDIE
I used to play hide the sausage with a girl knew a girl from Bradley Beach.
MORTY RIFKIN
Oh yeah?
ANDY WHITE
Did you read that piece in Life about Guadalcanal? That before the battle, the soldiers were skipping silver dollars in the water? Instead of stones. 'Cause they knew they were never coming back....
Pause.
EDDIE
I couldn't enlist. My eyes.
HART
What's the matter? They open?
He reaches into his pocket, pulls out a Playbill, and hands to White.
HART (CONT'D)
Speaking of people who are not coming back, I would like you to read this. It's from the By Jupiter playbill.
White begins reading to himself.
HART (CONT'D)
Out loud!
He reads to everyone as Hart delights over each phrase.
ANDY WHITE
"Rodgers and Hart: They're as different as a dachshund and a dromedary.
One likes opera and home life; the other goes for night clubs and people. One is married and has two children; the other is single and supports bartenders.
HART
You're welcome Eddie.
ANDY WHITE
The little fella (that's Larry) smokes cigars, big, black, small, brown--any kind; while Dick (that's Rodgers) only uses cigarettes. One goes to bed about four-thirty every morning; the other never dissipates."
HART
Perfect verb! Right?
ANDY WHITE
"Despite their physical and temperamental differences, however, their intellects complement each other like ham and eggs. Their individual songs number well over a thousand.
EDDIE
A thousand songs?!
ANDY WHITE
They disagree violently, but they never fight, and in the twenty-odd years they've been practicing their craft they have never worked with anyone but each other...
HART
(to Eddie)
Until now...
Andy looks up at Larry, who takes a drink.
ANDY WHITE
Impressive.
HART
I wrote it myself. And not one single mention of Blue Fucking Moon. I sent Elizabeth some of my sheet music. No response...I don't get it.
EDDIE
She's a bitch.
HART
That's what they're gonna put on my tombstone.
EDDIE
She's a bitch?
HART
Lorenz Milton Hart. He Didn't Get It. And people will come to my gravesite and say, "You know what? I didn't get it either."
MORTY RIFKIN
I definitely didn't get it.
EDDIE
Hey, Larr, I get it!
HART
So listen, Elizabeth and I--had a weekend. We actually did. One passionate, transcendent weekend. End of last summer. Before she went back to Yale. It's the closest I've ever felt in my life to pure selflessness. It was nuanced. It was deep.
EDDIE
How deep exactly?
HART
Listen, clown. I met her, and the first thing I said to her was: "Excuse me, but you have the best style of anyone in this theatre." I wish I had a photograph of that moment--I wish I had a photograph of every moment I've spent with her. I'm having trouble getting this right. I'm trying to pin down... Oh Andy, help me. What's the right word?
ANDY WHITE
...enchantment.
HART
And you know how hard that is.
Hart gets more intimate. The others lean in to hear.
HART (CONT'D)
I couldn't believe that it was me she wanted to talk to. I kept looking around the theatre: there must be somebody else she's interested in. But no! She's plunking herself down in the theatre seat right next to me. As close as modesty will allow. And my heart is actually racing. And I don't ever feel this way.
HART (CONT'D)
Not for men or for women. But she's wearing this yellow sundress. And it is hot in the theatre. And she's talking to me for hours! Bare leg draped over the armrest. And I know this sounds like I'm some middle-aged putz with a crush on a pretty co-ed--and maybe that's what it is. But, you know something, maybe that's not what it is. Sometimes I feel--and don't laugh--after a lifetime of blindly colliding into strangers, we've finally found a friend.
ANDY WHITE
Maybe that's the definition of enchantment.
HART
One light-filled weekend! I've gotta finish telling you this before she comes back. Are you listening to me?
EDDIE
Yeah, she got her legs draped over the thing.
HART
It was as if all the love lyrics I had ever written had, like some sort of verbal ectoplasm, suddenly taken human form.
EDDIE
Ecto what?
A group of people enter noisily. Hart looks around with apprehension. The play has clearly let out; the after-party is beginning.
HART
(to White)
That might be her mother. She cannot hear this.
EDDIE
What about me?
HART
You're just an extra.
EDDIE
OK, but I still get paid, right?