Sweet Bird of Youth: Act One, Scene One Summary & Analysis

Chance Wayne awakes in the Royal Palms Hotel and hears flapping bird wings outside the window. Next to him lies an elegant middle-aged woman. When a knock sounds on the door, Chance tells Fly—a hotel employee—to enter, and Fly gives him a remedy for his hangover, which is causing his hands to shake. Chance then goes to the window and opens the shutters, and for the first time the audience fully sees his face: “he’s in his late twenties and his face looks slightly older than that; you might describe it as a ‘ravaged young face’ and yet it is still exceptionally good-looking.” When Chance tells Fly that he’ll add a tip for him on the check, Fly says, “Thank you, Mr. Wayne.” Surprised that Fly remembers his name from when he used to come to local dances, Chance tells him to forget that he has seen him.

Apparently, Fly used to wait tables at the ballroom where Chance went to dances on Saturday nights with Mr. Boss Finley’s daughter. Before long, Fly exits, and a “business-like young man” named George Scudder walks into the room. Scudder reveals that the hotel’s assistant manager called him and told him that Chance had come back to St. Cloud. “So you came right over to welcome me home?” Chance asks, but Scudder ignores him, pointing out that his “lady friend sounds like she’s coming out of ether,” to which Chance replies: “The Princess had a rough night.” He then explains that his companion is “traveling incognito.” “Golly,” says Scudder, “I should think she would, if she’s checking in hotels with you.”

Getting to his point, Scudder asks Chance why he’s returned to St. Cloud. “I’ve still got a mother and a girl in St. Cloud,” Chance answers. “How’s Heavenly, George?” Scudder deflects this question, saying they’ll talk about that later and glancing at his watch—he has to be back at the hospital soon, since he’s now the chief of staff. As such, he rushes on, asking Chance again why he’s returned. Finally answering, Chance says that he heard his mother is sick. “But you said, ‘How’s Heavenly,’” Scudder points out, “not ‘How’s my mother,’ Chance. Your mother died a couple of weeks ago…” He explains that they tried to notify Chance, but that he moves around the United States too much, so they weren’t able to track him down. In his absence, the church took up a collection for her expenses and buried her with a nice headstone.

Scudder tells Chance he ought to talk to the Reverend if he has any questions, but Chance merely says, “She’s gone. Why talk about it?” Changing the subject, Scudder says he hopes Chance received the letter he wrote soon after Chance left town, but Chance claims he’s never seen it. Asking Chance to sit, he says, “In this letter I just told you that a certain girl we know had to go through an awful experience, a tragic ordeal, because of past contact with you. I told you that I was only giving you this information so that you would know better than to come back to St. Cloud, but you didn’t know better.” When Chance asks if Scudder’s referring to Heavenly Finley, Scudder refuses to disclose names, merely saying that he came to warn him to leave St. Cloud before the girl’s father and brother heard that he was back in town.

Getting ready to leave, Scudder says he’ll speak to Dan Hatcher—assistant manager of the hotel—and tell him that Chance and his snoozing companion will soon checkout of their room. When Chance demands that Scudder give him more details about what has happened, he simply replies: “There’s a lot more to this which we feel ought not to be talked about to anyone, least of all to you, since you have turned into a criminal degenerate, the only right term for you, but, Chance, I think I ought to remind you that once long ago, the father of this girl wrote out a prescription for you, a sort of medical prescription, which is castration. You’d better think about that, that would deprive you of all you’ve got to get by on.”

Responding to Scudder’s remark about castration, Chance says, “I’m used to that threat. I’m not going to leave St. Cloud without my girl.” Still, Scudder insists that Chance doesn’t have a girl in St. Cloud. “Heavenly and I are going to be married next month,” Scudder says before suddenly leaving the room. Perturbed, Chance makes a phone call to somebody named Aunt Nonnie, and he asks her what happened to Heavenly, but she hangs up without giving him any information.

At this point, the Princess starts to stir and then suddenly bolts upright and gasps, asking for help and demanding to know who Chance is. “I don’t remember who you are!” she laments, but Chance assures her she’ll soon remember and calmly fetches an oxygen mask from her bags. Once he sets her up with the mask, he says he’s surprised she’s still having these “attacks of panic,” since he thought his presence would calm her. “Give me a pill,” she demands, and when he asks what kind of pill, she says, “A pink one, a pinkie, and a vodka…” Chance then goes to the phone and calls Mr. Hatcher, trying to explain that they can’t check out because Miss Alexandra Del Lago is “suffering from exhaustion.” As he says this, the Princess shouts: “Don’t use my name!”

The Princess insists that Chance hang up the phone. When he does, he tries to tell her what Hatcher said, but she’s uninterested, saying, “Please shut up, I’m forgetting!” Accepting this, he tells her he wishes he too could simply forget things at will. As he says this, he extracts a tape recorder and sets it up on the floor before returning to the bed, where he sits down next to her. When she asks what he’s doing, he lies and says he’s looking for his toothbrush. She then discards the oxygen mask, and Chance asks her why she won’t see a doctor. “I don’t need them,” she states. “What happened is nothing at all.” She then describes her frequent panic attacks, claiming they’re nothing more than “adrenalin” getting “pumped” into her blood.

“You’re full of complexes, plump lady,” says Chance. “Why do you call me that? Have I let go of my figure?” the Princess asks. “You put on a good deal of weight after that disappointment you had last month,” he admits, but she feigns ignorance, hitting him with a pillow and saying she doesn’t remember any “disappointment.” “Can you control your memory like that?” he asks. “Yes,” she replies. “I’ve had to learn to. What is this place, a hospital? And you, what are you, a male nurse?” To this, Chance explains that he takes care of her but that he’s not a nurse.

The Princess tries to get a better look at Chance, saying that she doesn’t mind “waking up in an intimate situation with someone,” but that she prefers to know what that person looks like, at least. Unfortunately, though, her glasses broke, so she can’t quite make him out. “Your voice sounds young. Are you young?” she asks. “My age is twenty-nine years,” he replies. He also tells her he used to be the “best-looking boy in this town.” This prompts her to finally put on her broken glasses, look at him, and say: “Well, I may have done better, but God knows I’ve done worse.” She then feels his chest and is pleased with what she finds.

The Princess wants to call the manager to ask where she is and who she’s with, but Chance tells her to calm down, pulling her to himself on the bed. As she lies against him, she muses, “It gives you an awful trapped feeling this, this memory block….I feel as if someone I loved had died lately, and I don’t want to remember who it could be.” Chance then asks her if she remembers her own name, but she says she feels like there’s some reason why she prefers to keep this secret. “Well, I happen to know it,” Chance says. “You registered under a phony name in Palm Beach but I discovered your real one. And you admitted it to me.” To this, the Princess says, “I’m the Princess Kosmonopolis.” “Yes, and you used to be known as…” Chance says, but the Princess cuts him off.

Chance helps the Princess piece together how they met. She says the last place she remembers traveling to is Tallahassee. He confirms that they drove through that city and she decided to get blackout drunk in the backseat while he drove them out of Texas on the Old Spanish Trail. “I didn’t stop here,” he says. “I was stopped.” When she asks if a cop stopped him, he says, “No. No cop, but I was arrested by something.” The Princess then goes to the window and looks out at the ocean, which suddenly jars something loose in her memory. “Oh God, I remember the thing I wanted not to. The goddam end of my life!” she shouts, slouching back to the bed and ordering Chance to get out “the stuff.”

When Chance fetches “the stuff,” he says, “This isn’t pot. What is it?” As he sets to rolling a joint, the Princess explains, “What is it? Don’t you know what it is, you beautiful, stupid young man? It’s hashish, Moroccan, the finest.” As a follow-up, he asks how she got it through customs when she came back to the United States for her “comeback,” and she explains exactly how she smuggled the drug into the country. She then turns to the audience and says, “For years they all told me that it was ridiculous of me to feel that I couldn’t go back to the screen or the stage as a middle-aged woman. They told me I was an artist, not just a star whose career depended on youth. But I knew in my heart that the legend of Alexandra Del Lago couldn’t be separated from an appearance of youth…”

Continuing her monologue, the Princess says that there’s “no more valuable knowledge than knowing the right time to go,” which is why she retired from show business. This, she says, is when she discovered hashish and other drugs that help her “put to sleep the tiger that raged in [her] nerves.” Indeed, she claims that she couldn’t “get old with that tiger still in [her] raging,” so she chose to numb that internal turmoil with drugs and “young lovers.” “Me?” Chance asks, and she says, “You? Yes, finally you. But you come after the comeback.” Going on, she explains that when she went to the screening of her cinematic comeback, she saw that the “screen’s a very clear mirror.” Seeing her face blown up unforgivingly on the screen, the audience gasped, and she heard them whisper, “Is that her?”

Proceeding with her story about her cinematic comeback, the Princess explains that she stood up in the theater and ran out. Because she was wearing a long dress, though, she tripped down a set of stairs, and when people helped her up, she simply fled. “Flight,” she says, “just flight, not interrupted until I woke up this morning…” Looking at the hashish joint, she says, “Well, sooner or later, at some point in your life, the thing that you lived for is lost or abandoned, and then…you die, or find something else. This is my something else…”

“Princess,” Chance says, turning his attention to the hashish, “don’t forget that this stuff is yours, that you provided me with it.” He then goes on to reiterate the fact that she smuggled drugs into the country. “You had a fair supply of it at that hotel in Palm Beach,” he reminds her, “and were asked to check out before you were ready to do so, because its aroma drifted into the corridor one breezy night.” The Princess shrugs this off, saying she’s sure that she must not have introduced the drug to Chance. In fact, she suddenly remembers that drug use was what “brought [them] together” in Palm Beach. “When you came in my cabana to give me one of those papaya cream rubs,” she says, “you sniffed, you grinned and said you’d like a stick too.”

Apparently, Chance gave the Princess a false name—Carl—when they first met, and this makes her suddenly suspicious of him. However, he reminds her that she too has been using a fake name. Acquiescing, she says, “Yes, to avoid getting any reports or condolences on the disaster I ran from.” As she goes to the window, The Lament—a strain of plaintive “thematic” music that periodically plays throughout the production—issues faintly from above. Finally, Chance articulates what, exactly, he wants out of his relationship with the Princess. “You said that you had a large block of stock, more than half ownership in a sort of second-rate Hollywood studio, and you could put me under contract,” he says. Apparently, when she first said this, he had her sign a notarized contract. Still, though, he wants to make sure she follows through.

Chance says that he has been conned too many times to fully trust things that might still be “phony.” In response, the Princess admits that she could technically still get out of the contract if she wanted to. “Do you have any talent?” she asks, referring to his acting skills. “I’m not as positive of it as I once was,” he says. “I’ve had more chances than I could count on my fingers, and made the grade almost, but not quite, every time. Something always blocks me…” As he says this, The Lament fades back in, and the Princess asks him if fear is what holds him back. “No,” he says, “not fear, but terror.”

“Chance,” says the Princess, “come back to your youth. Put off this false, ugly hardness and…” Before she can finish, he says: “And be took in by every con-merchant I meet?” She then insists that she’s not a “phony,” prompting him to ask what—in that case—she wants from him in order to go through with their deal. Smiling, she calls him to the bed, saying that they ought to “comfort each other a little.” He then reveals that he has recorded their entire conversation, replaying the moment when she admitted that she was in possession of smuggled drugs. Understanding that she’s been blackmailed, she asks Chance what he wants. He then urges her to sign traveler’s checks over to him, but she refuses, saying that first he must have sex with her.

The Princess says she’ll help Chance on the condition that he never mention death or her failing health. Furthermore, he must always give her what she wants (sexually) without question or hesitation. “I have only one way to forget these things I don’t want to remember and that’s through the act of love-making,” she says. “That’s the only dependable distraction so when I say now, because I need that distraction, it has to be now, not later.” Chance then asks if she’s ashamed to demand this sort of thing, and she says, “Of course I am. Aren’t you?” In response, he admits he is, too. Nonetheless, they close the shutters and get into bed together.