Fable with Plot Summary

Fable:

The Stonewater Rapture is a story of teen lust, religion, and rape. The story begins with the two characters, the male, Whitney and the female Carlyle coming into Whitney’s house after and youth ministry election. At the meeting Whitney was elected President and Carlyle was elected Secretary. Carlyle is a very religious girl, she is stern in her beliefs but she is also eighteen, and very curious. She is also somewhat popular and is very energetic. Whitney is more pensive, his father is a preacher and he want Whitney to follow the same path, but Whitney has no intention of being a preacher. Whitney is not popular as school, he is skinny and rather quiet, but would like to be popular and be on the football team. When arriving home Whitney is depressed about being elected President and feels it seals his fate, his father has filled out seminary applications for him, his father has even written his essays. Carlyle feels that Whitney should his calling as her mother says. After talking for a bit Carlyle realizes Whitney parents are not home and they go out to the porch, where they have a conversation about Thelma Pewler a pimple faced girl with a clubbed foot that is now pregnant by the captain of the football team. He had sex with her on a dare and was paid fifty dollars. Carlyle tells us that the boy wouldn’t help Thelma at all and his parents just gave her money to get rid of it. Thelma then ran away from home to save the baby. Carlyle suggests they, being the youth ministry raise money for the birth of the baby. To Carlyle this is a serious subject; to Whitney he doesn’t believe it at all. They also discuss the fact that now being President of the Youth Ministry, Whitney will never make the football team. Carlyle wonder why he wants to be on the team, all the guys are mean to Whitney and call him names and pulls horrible pranks on him. Also they talk about a boy in their class that might be gay and that once in the locker room he was getting undressed next to Whitney and part him was touching Whitney and other boys saw and the coach had to assign him to a team because no one would pick him. Also Whitney tells that while he was in the locker room shower one day the football boys put porn pictures of men in his locker and then ripped off his towel when he looked at them. The Audience should be able to get from this the other boys think he is gay and are trying to prove it. Carlyle then goes into telling of a dream she had about angels and them being naked but her not being afraid, and them telling her she was being saved for the heavenly host and she was his. This story is very important to the plot, later on. During the conversation Carlyle suggests they go inside because of the misquotes, and says Whitney has to leave the door open, and Whitney says “ why? I wont rape you!” this is a very important line in the play, it is a foreshadowing to later events. They then go inside and Carlyle then says it’s a sin to waste and asks him to shut the door and turn out all of the lights except for one lamp. After they are sitting in the barely lit room Whitney asks to kiss Carlyle and she offers him her cheek, he then says the comic line of “You’re not my Grandmother” then she tells him to sit on his hands and then she allows him to give her a kiss. This is both their first kiss in life, they are nervous and awkward. After the first kiss there is a moment of nervous chatter from Carlyle about decorating for a party the football team is throwing and it is not school sponsored and might not be chaperoned but would be good practice since she was selected to decorated for the school parties. Following this chatter Whitney asks again to kiss her, she allows this, but Whitney moves his hand to her leg, Carlyle then asks him to move it and he moves it up. In this part of the play Whitney begs Carlyle just to let him touch her breast saying that he will die if he doesn’t do anything with a girl. After lots of pleading Carlyle says he can touch her breast for five seconds, during this five second he flexes his hand on her breast and she slaps his hand away they try again with Carlyle counting and then she asks if she was counting too fast and then Whitney Counts. While Whitney is counting the scene takes a sexual turn, they are kissing and groping till it is too much for Carlyle and she feels if they had gone any further he would have tried to have sex with her. They yell at each other and then Carlyle goes to leave but comes back in to kiss Whitney but he resists and she grabs his face and kisses him fiercely on the lips, thus exciting him again but she gets away from his grasp and runs out of the house.
In the next scene Carlyle arrives at Whitney house, two weeks have past since their kiss. Carlyle arrives in funeral clothes; one of the ladies from the Home has past away. Whitney answers the door, really not wanting to be bothered but also misses her. She asks to come in and he allows it, his parents are not home, but she seems to not be this as bothered by this as she was before. She even says it is better they are not home. Carlyle and Whitney talk about the fact he hasn’t been at school and how he didn’t make the football team. Also someone taged his dad’s car with the word Fag. Then Carlyle starts to tell him about the unchaporoned party she decorated for, the one for the football team she tells of how beautiful the decorations turned out. Whitney asked who was there and she listed off the names which were the whole football team, Whitney asks where the girls are. Carlyle says she was told they were to arrive later. Carlyle then tells that the boys toasted her with some tangy punch which Whitney suggests was spiked. They toasted her over and over again and one boy named Micheal kept whispering things into her ear about how she was beautiful and would be so popular if she wasn’t so religious. Then another boy got angry and said he was out and he wanted his money back, then the other boys threw him out. Then she started to tell how the boys started touching her and ripping at her clothes. Whitney stops her at this point and starts to call the police because he knows exactly what happened next, but she stops him saying that couldn’t have happened because what would that make her. Then she starts to tell him how she was wrong the boys were hurting her they were angels and they were preparing her for the heavenly host, she was his, she told how they used their belts to tie her down for him. Also the punch was not punch but the blood of Christ. She is then crying saying that is what happened it couldn’t be the other way because that would make her a Thelma Pewler and a football whore. Whitney holds her through this and is enraged by every word she says. Then she says that she loves him and wants him to be her Joseph, and that they should get married. He fights this saying he is not good enough for her and that she deserves better and she says she is the one not worthy of him because she is pregnant. She then goes into saying that the other boys were right about him and that he might be a Fag as they say and he can’t be with girls. This Pisses Whitney off and he trys to convince her this isn’t true until finally he says he will be her Joseph but they baby is his and not Gods and she has to accept that. She then leads him off into the trees in the back yard and says that she needs to make him her Joseph what she means is he needs to have sex with her, he resists alittle still and she takes off his shirt and says he needs this he needs to know he can do this. The very last lines in the play are Carlyle telling Whitney “ you look like an Angel, like an Angel”.


Plot Summary:

The Stonewater Rapture
Author(s):Doug Wright
Set on the front porch and in the living room of a conservative Texas home, the play tells the story of two teenagers whose sexual awakening has been severely hampered by the fundamentalist fervor that runs like power lines through the Bible Belt. A comic first scene, set on the porch of Whitney’s home, details his attempts to seduce the puritanical Carlyle after he’s just been elected president of the Youth Ministry at the Church picnic. Carlyle coyly refuses his advances, citing everything from teen pregnancy to hellfire and damnation as reasons to abstain. In a dramatic second scene, Carlyle seeks Whitney’s help after she has been the victim of a sexual assault. Rather than face the grim reality of her experience, Carlyle transforms the attack from an act of violence to a vision of glory, in which the bodies of her assailants become the angels torn from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and the alcohol they forced upon her becomes the blood of Christ. As Carlyle’s delusions grow, Whitney must convince her of the unfortunate truth. Together they struggle to wed their simplistic religious doctrine with the often painful complexity of the real world.
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