Rumors

Act One

The play opens with Chris Gorman, an elegantly dressed woman in her mid-thirties, waiting by the telephone inside a renovated Victorian home. Her husband, Ken Gorman, a lawyer, pounces out of an upstairs bedroom: someone is bleeding in the room Ken has just left. The phone rings. Dr. Dudley has kindly left his seat at Phantom of the Opera on Broadway to return the Gormans’ urgent call regarding his patient, Charley Brock, whose telephone this is. Chris begins to explain that as they were arriving at Charley’s house, they heard a loud sound, like a gunshot.

Before she can go any further, Ken rushes out, again, and tells his wife to keep quiet. We learn, as Ken makes up excuses, that Charley tried to shoot himself, but that the bullet only grazed his ear. Nobody knows the whereabouts of Myra, Ken’s wife. But Ken does not want anyone to know about what happened, so Chris quickly lies to the doctor, who ducks back into the theater. Chris, then, hangs up the phone. As she talks