SCENE SCORE AND SCRIPT ANALYSIS

Closer by Patrick Marber

Scene 9, Act 2
Holly Harper

Alice

SECTION 1 Script Analysis

1. Time - The 1990s
2. Place - London, England
3. Inciting Incident Dan meets Anna and falls in love with her, beginning a loverswapping situation.
4. Climax Act 1, Scene 6 when Dan tells Alice hes leaving her for Anna and Larry
tells Anna he slept with a whore.
5. Antagonist Dan and Larry
6. Protagonist Alice and Anna
This section should be the same for both partners and anyone else who has another
scene from the same play. You may all work together on this section.
SECTION 2 Scoring the Scene
1. GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES
Alice is an stripper Scene 1, pg 15
Larry is a dermatologist Scene 4, pg 27
Anna is a photographer Scene 15, pg 16
Alice was in a car accident that gave her a scar on her leg Scene 1, pg 14
Dan was originally with a woman named Ruth whom he left for Alice
Scene 1, pg 15
Anna is older than Alice Scene 9, pg 67
Anna has slept with Larry to get him to sign divorce papers Scene 8, pg
58
Larrys birthday Scene 9, pg 63
2. CONDITIONING FORCES
Were in a crowded museum
Anna is still in love with Dan
Larry is sleeping with Alice
My plan just failed and Larry left without Alice
3. BEATS AND INTENTIONS
Provoking Moment Larry comments on Annas shoes, proving that he
still loves her and Anna has both Dan and Larry and I have no one.
Unit 1 The Hello/Beat Hows Dan?/Intention To provoke
Unit 2 The Jab/Beat I like your bed./Intention To guilt
Unit 3 The Tango/Beat Why dont you go back to him?/Intention To
subtly plead

4.
5.

6.
7.

Unit 4 The Fight/Beat She even looks beautiful when shes

angry./Intention To even the playing field
Unit 5 The Honest Moment/Beat Why did you do this?/Intention to
plead
Unit 6 The Chat/Beat Everyones selfish./Intention To relate
Unit 7 The Retraction/Beat So do we./Intention To refocus
Unit 8 The Win/Beat Buster?/Intention To leave Anna confused
OBJECTIVE
a. I want Anna to leave Dan so I can have him back.
b. I want Dan to be with me so I can feel significant.
OBSTACLES
a. Internal I am depressed and lonely. I am in love with Dan. I am afraid of
being alone. I feel lesser than Anna and Im afraid I cant compete.
b. External Anna is older and wiser than me. Dan physically left me.
What the BEST possible thing that could happen at the end of the scene? Anna
leaves Dan and he comes back to me.
What is the WORST possible that that could happen at the end of the scene?
Anna ignores my plead and stays with Dan. They get married, have children, and
I spend the rest of my life pining after someone unattainable and never find
happiness.

SECTION 3 - CHARACTER BIOGRAPHY

My name is Alice. Well, actually my name is Jane. Jane Jones. But no one here knows that. Not
anymore. I did a lot of shit in my past and I figured the only way to actually start over would a
completely new persona. When I was little my parents died. Well, theyre dead to me anyway. I
tell people they died in a car accident. Really bloody, quite tragic. Poor little orphan me was left
all alone to fend for myself with the only reminder of my happy previous life in the shape of a
question mark scarred into my leg. Everyone loves a good orphan story. No one loves the truth.
The truth that when I was ten my parents dropped me off at a facility for mentally disturbed
youth where I spent the next two years of my life. They said I suffered from bipolar disorder and
manic depression. I had daily group and individual therapy sessions in which they poked and
prodded for a reason behind my illness. They couldnt find one. As far as they were concerned
Id lived a happy childhood and had no reason to be so fucked up. Pardon my French. They
werent there for all the fights and tears and bruises. To this day Ive never said out loud that my

parents hit me. To everyone else they were a loving couple from Wales who died too soon and
left behind a broken child. Nobody knows about the weekly visiting hours that I spent alone in
my room at the institution. Or about the day I was supposed to be released and no one showed
up to claim me. And not a single soul who knows Alice knows about the time that Jane Jones got
picked up by a social worker and spent the next six years bouncing from home to home and
eventually wound up in a center for troubled teens for running away from my sixth home. The
day of my eighteenth birthday I left Jane behind in the center and Alice made her way to
London. I had no idea what my plan was, but Id known for some time that the city was my
destination. The people in the city reminded me of myself. Broken. Hopeless. They need other
people in close proximity, just like me. I spent the first month there living in a womens shelter,
where I fell into a really dark place. Without health insurance I couldnt afford my antidepressants or anti-psychotics. I went off the deep end. Thats when I saw the help wanted sign
in the window of Paradise Point. I knew it was a strip club. And I knew they werent hiring
waitresses or bartenders. I knew what I was getting into, but I waltzed right in and I danced and
I stripped and I may have slept with the owner. Ive been dancing at Paradise for 4 years now.
There are not really any health insurance options for the employees of exotic dance
establishments, so needless to say I never went back on my medication. It was the middle of
manic episode when I met Dan. He came into the club and paid for a Paradise suit. I stripped
down to my birthday suit for him. It wasnt love at first sight. I dont believe in conventional
love. But there was something about him. Something that made me want to throw myself in
front of a cab to get his attention. So, I did. And he came to my rescue. He put me in the back of
a cab with my head in his lap. I wasnt entirely coherent and I dont think he knows I remember
this, but he kissed me on my forehead and that was my first instinct that I might be able to love
him. Later, in the hospital I opened his briefcase and saw a sandwich with the crusts cut off and
I decided. I would love this man with all my heart. I had dated and slept with many men in my
lifetime, but I had never loved them. I had sealed my heart away since my first

institutionalization, so I never fell in love with anyone. I needed someone who made me feel
significant, without needing me to be anything. And Dan was that. And I loved him as much as I
could, but I mostly needed him. He gave me the feeling of invisibility that I had come to known
in my childhood home, in the centers, and in the foster system. I craved it. I needed it. I needed
to be hidden away from the world; I couldnt deal with it anymore. He added me to his insurance
after we had been dating for six months. He put me back on my anti-depressants and antipsychotics. I got better. Then he got bored. I could tell that I wasnt enough for him when he
started seeing a photographer for his book jacket frequently. No one needs six trips to a
photographer in one month, and those are just the ones I knew about. When he left me for Anna
I fell apart. I went off my medication. I tried to kill myself, but it didnt work. I drank myself
dizzy, but I still wasnt numb, so I did the only other thing I could think to do. I fucked Annas
ex-husband. And he was horrible and needy and he made me miss Dan more than I thought I
would ever be capable of. But, one thing he wasnt was stupid. He knew how messed up I was,
but he never tried to force me to go back on my medication. I watched the gears turning in his
mind as he diagnosed me with this and that, but he never even mentioned it. He let me dig
myself into my hole and I loved it. Eventually, when he and Anna got back together, Dan came
back to me. It was what I had always wanted, but without the medicine Dan wasnt what I
needed anymore. He was abusive, both physically and emotionally. He called me names and
made me feel even more insignificant than I already was. After four months I finally ended it.
For good. I wanted to be buried and invisible, but after I was I found it that when youre buried
you start to suffocate. So I chose to struggle to breathe above ground by myself instead. Because,
despite the fact that Alice wasnt strong and didnt have any self-value, I still knew that Jane did.
And I began to miss Jane. So I moved to a new address, got a new job, and got rid of Alice. I
tried to fight my demons because I figured I owed that much to the little girl that got locked in
her rooms for days at a time. I tried really hard for six whole months. But, eventually they got
the best of me. It was a normal day and I was walking down Madison when I got the sudden

desire that I had had the day I met Dan. And a cab was coming down the road and I stepped
right in front of it. But, this time there was no night and I was no damsel. I was just plain dead.
Looking back on it, Im not even the slightest bit disappointed in myself. The depression put me
in a haze of negative emotions all of the time in which I couldnt see a light at the end of the
tunnel. Those days it was a miracle if I even got out of bed. There were good days too, but most
of the good days occurred during my manic episodes. I would come to an all-time high, right
before falling off a cliff and landing on the bathroom floor covered in my own blood, waiting for
Dan to find me. Maybe that was the real reason I needed Dan, I thought I needed to be saved
from myself. But Dan wasnt there that day on Madison street and Im glad he wasnt. I fought
long enough and now, I am done.