The Indian Wants the Bronx

Book excerpt: THE STORY: An East Indian gets lost on his first day in New York as two teenage punks find him waiting at a lonely bus stop. He cannot understand English, and the boys have some fun with him-at least it starts out as fun. But little by little, as the minutes go by and the bus doesn't come, they get bored; then annoyed; then vicious. It is the very pointlessness of their brutality that makes the play-with its awful final image of the Indian jabbering into a dead phone-so disturbing. We are convinced that this is exactly what would happen at this particular bus stop on this particular night; we see, again, that violence in the big city is as much a child of ennui as of anger. And, as the nightmare spell of the play takes hold, and the boys torture their victim with increasing relish, we are brought to a shocking awareness of how thin the veneer of civilization can be-of how close beneath the surface of all men lurks the primitive impulse to hurt and humiliate those whose very helplessness and inability to communicate can only frustrate and enrage.