Free All New People by Zach Braff

Great upbeat music plays as the audience filters in. A scrim covers the stage. As the house lights go down:
    Something like the song ‘The Buzzards of Bourbon Street’ by Gaelic Storm kicks in loud. The curtain rises to reveal
Charlie ,
thirty-five, standing on a chair with an extension cord fashioned as a noose around his neck. He smokes a cigarette.
    We’re in a high-end Long Beach Island, New Jersey beach house. It is the dead of winter. We see snow outside the windows. An unlit fireplace is stage right. On a downbeat of the song, lights are full up and the music changes to sound as though it’s coming from a stereo in the home.
    Charlie
looks for a place to ash his cigarette, but realizes his reach is limited by the noose. He stretches as far as he can for the ashtray on a nearby counter and tosses it in.
    Suddenly,
Charlie
hears the ‘bwoop-woop-woop’ of a car alarm being turned on. His eyes register his confusion; ‘Who the fuck could that be?’
    Emma (
off stage
)     All right then, Mr Goldberg; well I just got to the house and I’ll put all the lights on for you and get the heat started so you’ll be able to have a look at the place without freezing yourselves . . . great, and you have the directions? All right, see you in a bit.
    Charlie
wrestles with what to do. Just as he begins to try and loosen the cord from around his neck . . .
Emma
enters bundled up. She sees
Charlie .
    Emma       Oh my God!
    In a scramble to get the noose off of him,
Charlie
loses his footing on the chair and knocks it over. He begins flailing around, swinging from the noose.
    Emma       Oh my GOD!!! Oh my GOD!!
    Emma
runs over and picks up the chair and helps
Charlie
steer his legs back on to it.
    Emma       Oh my God! What the fuck is wrong with you?! What the fuck is wrong with you?!
    Charlie       Who the fuck are you?!
    Emma       Who the hell are you and why are you trying to kill yourself in the middle of one of my summer rentals?!
    Charlie       This is my parents’ beach house. You have no right to just barge in here without knocking.
    Emma       It’s the middle of winter at the beach! No one’s sposed to be here. I’m trying to rent the place for your parents! I certainly didn’t think anybody was gonna be in here trying to hang themselves! To
Riverdance
music!
    Charlie       I’m not trying to hang myself!
    Emma       Really?! Just going for a little swing then? Just gonna dangle by your neck for a bit and think things over?
    Charlie       Would you please just get the fuck out of here?!
    Emma       No I will not! You know, you might start off with a brief thank you to me for saving your life.
    Charlie       I didn’t ask to be saved. What I want, is some fucking privacy!
    Emma       Look, I don’t wanna be insensitive.
    Charlie       Try a little harder.
    Emma       I have no idea what’s going on with you or what your current situation is. It does seem a bit like you might be trying to hang yourself with an extension cord, but I’m fully aware that things aren’t always what they seem to be: book by its cover . . . tranny in a trouser suit . . . You may very well have been trying to . . . wire up some Christmas lights when you . . . tripped and got all tangled up in that extension cord. But if I don’t rent a house for next summer soon, I’m gonna be fired and they’re gonna try to send me back to bloody fucking England because I don’t have a Green Card or a visa and there aren’t too many jobs I can get. Pretty soon I’ll be right up there with you, accidentally hanging myself whilst merely trying to be festive. So would you pleasedo a stranger a tiny kindness before you die