"Melancholy Play" by Sarah Ruhl

HI.

IT’S SHANNON.

Remember that League of Theatre Women Working In New York Right Now that I talked about in the Lucy Thurber, Killers and Other Family blog? Well, this lady is another one of those, probably one of its most famous and founding members. If you’ve never read one of her plays, you’re wrong: go to a bookstore, buy a copy of all of her plays, and read everything she’s ever written right now. Her style is very distinct -- a realm of melodrama that very few writers since Chekhov have actually managed to pull off -- and well worth having in your arsenal.

So without any further ado I present

MELANCHOLY PLAY

by Sarah Ruhl

This is a melancholy little play about melancholy. It’s slightly absurd (or maybe ‘heightened’ is a better way to put it), and highly compelling. It tells the story of Tilly, a bank employee whose melancholy is so severe that everyone she meets falls in love with her -- her therapist, her hairdresser, her tailor, her hairdresser’s girlfriend -- but she’s so melancholy she can’t love them back, or at least not in the way that they wish to be loved. Then, one day, on her birthday, she gathers them all together and feels so much love for how beautiful they are during a game of duck duck goose that she becomes irreversibly happy, and they’re all distraught because the Tilly they loved has gone. Then the hairdresser who was in love with her, Frances, drinks the precious vial of Tilly’s last melancholy tears turns into an almond (okay this one I can’t actually explain, you literally just have to read the play for this to be justified) and they all gather together and travel to the land of melancholy. The end.

… That was a terrible summary. But trust me, it’s amazing.

Sadly

(get it? Melancholy?)

we’re going to be looking at

TILLY

Tilly is melancholy. That’s her defining trait. This is a monologue delivered to Frances and Joan (the hairdresser and the hairdresser’s girlfriend), after Frances has fallen in love with Tilly and brought Tilly home to meet Joan (a nurse). This is a monologue done entirely without irony, or if there is any, it’s a self-reflective sort of irony from Tilly’s perspective, not the actor’s. Sarah Ruhl’s notes in this play say “do not be afraid of sincere melodrama” and I think this monologue is very much the height of that. We have to find Tilly’s melancholy as sexy as Frances and Joan do, or else the play as a whole doesn’t function.

TILLY: That’s funny. Everyone is always asking me: Tilly, are you still in therapy? I say something like: I had a bad day. And they say: Tilly, are you still in therapy? I go to therapy and my therapist falls in love with me. I have to be careful.

JOAN: How so?

(Tilly moves towards the audience

her speech becomes a public speech

stirring music from Julian)

TILLY:

I’m not particularly smart.

I’m not particularly beautiful.

But I suffer so well, and so often.

A stranger sees me cry --

and they see a river they haven’t

swum in --

a river in a foreign country --

so they take off their trousers

and jump in the water.

They take pictures

with a water-proof camera

they dry themselves in the sun.

They’re all dry

and I’m still wet.

Maybe my suffering is from another time.

A time when suffering was sexy.

When the afternoons, and the streets,

were full of rain.

Maybe my tears don’t come from this century.

Maybe I inherited them from old well water.

(the music stops)

Wait.

Am I acting weird?

...So good, and so difficult to pull off.

I wish I’d seen the original production of this play in 2002. But alas, I did not. Enjoy everyone! This will not  be the last Sarah Ruhl play I post up here I’m absolutely certain, but if you’re digging her style, definitely check out some of her other works: Eurydice, In the Next Room (The Vibrator Play), Dead Man’s Cell Phone, Clean House are some of her Broadway-running, Pulitzer Prize nominated plays, and I recommend her translation/adaptation of Uncle Vanya, as well.

Yeah.

Miss Ruhl is the real deal.

Anyway! Good luck! Enjoy! And if you use this monologue read the play and post for us! We’d love to hear from you!

Thanks so much!

Once again, this has been

SOMEONE MONO-BLOGGING

and

I’M SHANNON.

ENJOY!