BEYOND THERAPY
by Christopher Durang
STUART

Hello. What’s on your mind this week? Dammit, I don’t feel like dragging the words out of you this week. You pay me to listen so talk, damn it. (pause) I’m sorry, I’m on edge today. All my patients are this way. None of them talk. Well this one guy talks, but he talks in Yiddish a lot, and I don’t know what the hell he’s saying. How was your week? Another series of lonely, loveless evenings. I’m still here, babe. Just kidding. Now, we’re reaching the richest part of our therapy and already I see results. But I think you’re entering a very uncharted part of your life just now, and so you must stay with your therapy. You’re going out with homosexuals, God knows what you’re going to do next. Now I’m very serious. I’m holding out the life line. Don’t turn away. You’re a very sick woman, and you mustn’t be without a therapist even for a day. What do you mean your discontinuing your therapy? You’re obviously afraid of a real man. You go ahead and leave me, and you know what’s going to happen to you without therapy? You’re going to become a very pathetic, very lonely old maid. You know what’s going to happen to you? You’re going to break off with that clown in a few days, and then you’re not going to go out with men anymore at all. Your emotional life is going to be tied up with your cats. Do you know what she does in her apartment? She keeps cats! Some guy she almost married last year wanted to marry her but he was allergic to cats and so she chose the cats! You’re gonna end up taking little boat cruises to Bermuda with your cats and with spinster librarians when you’re fifty unless you decide to kill yourself before then! And all because you were too cowardly and self destructive and stupid to keep yourself from being an old maid by sticking with your therapy. (hysterical) You’re a terrible terrible patient.