The first act opens in Mark Cohen and Roger Davis’s industrial loft apartment in the part of Manhattan known as Alphabet City. Roger enters and plugs his electric guitar into an amp. Posters on the wall show that Roger was once a musician with a rising career. Mark, along with the rest of the company, enters. Mark sets up a video camera and speaks to the audience, explaining that it’s Christmas Eve and they’re poor, with only an illegal wood-burning stove for heat and all their electric devices plugged into a single extension cord. In the empty lot next door, there is a tent city.

Shifting the camera to Roger, who is tuning his guitar, Mark sings that he is trying something new and shooting unscripted. He introduces Roger, who spent the last six months getting sober and withdrawing from heroin. Mark asks Roger to talk to the camera, but Roger is cut off by the phone ringing. Their outgoing message is just Mark and Roger saying, “Speak” (3). Mark focuses the camera on the answering machine. Mark’s mother leaves a message to say that the family will miss him for Christmas, expressing sympathy that his girlfriend, Maureen, broke up with him to date a woman.