"Saint Joan" by Bernard Shaw

HI.

IT’S SHANNON.

So you may not know this,

but I have a BA in History.

(I know, random, right?)

Therefore:

I love doing history pieces (inaccurate though they often are).

This week’s play is by Bernard Shaw, who we’ve seen before for Heartbreak House, writing one of History’s greatest, most notable women. Joan of Arc. She was 17, schizophrenic, and led France to victory during the Hundred Years’ War. This in 1429, when women weren’t allowed to own property, much less lead an army. She was (rather famously) burned at the stake in 1431, and later canonized by the Catholic Church. What a woman! Now, there’s something interesting to consider here: Shaw is English. Joan of Arc led the French to defeat England at this point in the war, and therefore by English playwrights is often (literally) demonized. Shakespeare does this when writing her in Henry VI Part I. Shaw refrains from it, and paints a very sympathetic Joan in this play. But he’s still writing from an English perspective, so in performance, adding… insanity? to her might not be uncalled for. Just something to think about.

SAINT JOAN

By Bernard Shaw

#herstory, ammirite?

We enter the play in 1429 with Captain Robert de Baudrincourt, a swaggering squire. His chickens are not laying eggs, and Baudrincourt’s oft-berated servant claims that the cause is a local maid who has taken up at Baudrincourt’s door and won’t be turned away. Already the soldiers are loyal to her. Baudrincourt demands to see her, and Joan enters, young and docile, asking for an escort of three soldiers and a horse to get to Charles, the defeated Dauphin. Her voices have told her that God has commanded her to help Charles drive the English from France. Eventually, Robert gives in. The scene skips to the Archbishop and the rest of the court, arranging a deception for Joan -- she’ll have to spot Charles, even though he’s swapping places with one of his nobles. She does so easily, and the population and Charles are convinced that it is a miracle, giving the reluctant prince the courage (with God) to go to war. He sends Joan to Orleans, and the west wind that had been plaguing the French for months suddenly disappears upon her arrival, earning her a loyal friend in Dunois, Charles’s general. But pride begins to overtake Joan, and as she crowns Charles at Rheims and gains power through her popularity and visions, the members of the court begin to turn against her, most specifically the Archbishop, who vows against her as she demands more battles. She is captured by the English, who try her for heresy after debating the nature of it. She is brought to court, and under the pain of their torture, agrees to sign a confession admitting that her voices are of her own invention. When she learns of the prison sentence still in store for her, she accepts death at the stake in favor of it. They sentence her to burn at the stake and follow her offstage. Warwick reenters alone, and is soon met by the repentant Chaplain and Lavenau, who bear witness to Joan’s generosity, even as she was burning. The final scene is 25 years later, on the night that Joan has been cleared of the charges that burned her, as King Charles (now the Victorious) dreams that Joan and many of the others appear to him, asking Joan for forgiveness. She forgives them one by one, and they are joined from a priest from the 1920s, who announces Joan’s canonization. Joan recognizes that saints can work miracles, and offers to rise from the dead. All characters in the room, including Charles, despising having professed to love her, ask her to remain dead. Joan’s final words are “...”

We are looking at the only woman in this play:

JOAN

Joan actually has two great speeches in this play, one at the end of Scene 5, and this one. This is the final scene. Joan has surrendered the only thing she has left -- the truth of the voices she believes comes from God. Tortured to the edge of sanity, she has finally admitted to preserve herself that the voices are of her own invention, that she lied about being led by God, and that her preference of dress, hair, and warlike spirit are sins. She has given up everything, signed listlessly away. And then they condemn her to perpetual imprisonment: “the sorrow of bread and the affliction of water”. She tears up her confession, and says:

JOAN: Light your fire: do you think I dread it as much as the life of a rat in a hole? My voices were right. Yes: they told me you were fools (the word gives great offence) and I was not to listen to your fine words, or trust in your charity. You promised me my life, but you lied (indignant exclamations). You think that life is nothing but not being stone dead. It is not the bread and water I fear. I can live on bread, when have I asked for more? It is no hardship to drink water if the water be clean. Bread is no sorrow, water no affliction. But to shut me from the light of the sky and the sight of the fields and flowers, to chain my feet so that I can never again ride with the soldiers or climb the hills, to make me breathe foul, damp darkness and keep from me everything that brings me back to the love of God when your wickedness and foolishness tempt me to hate him. All this is worse than the furnace in the Bible that was heated seven times. I could do without my warhorse, I could drag about in a skirt, I could let the banners and the trumpets and the knights and the soldiers pass me by and leave me behind like they leave the other women if only I could hear the wind in the trees, the larks in the sunshine, the young calves crying through the healthy frost, and the blessed, blessed church bells that send my angel voices floating to me on the wind. I cannot live without these, and by your wanting to take them from me, from any human creature, I know that your counsel is of the devil, and mine is of God.

Powerful. I'm so into it.

And there you have it! Enjoy! As always, read the play (you can get the .pdf of it online!) and post your version!

Once again, this has been
SOMEONE MONO-BLOGGING

and

I’M SHANNON.

ENJOY!

Proof, by David Auburn

HI.

IT'S SHANNON.

This is a very smart, moving play made into a movie in 2005 starring Gweneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins, and Jake Gyllenhal. I'm not 100% in love with the casting of the movie, but the play itself has some very well-written scenes and excellently characterized arguments. A teacher I had once told me that fight scenes are all about characters trying NOT to fight -- just like crying onscreen is about trying NOT to cry and playing drunk is about trying to sober up. It's the conflict of resisting the impulse that makes a character compelling, and this play has some brilliant scenes which flourish by merit of that struggle.

PROOF

By David Auburn

Proof tells the story of Catherine, the brilliant, math-minded daughter of an even more brilliant mathematician (Robert). Her father's brilliance dissolved into lunacy not long after a mathematical discovery that made him famous. Catherine was left to care for him, quitting school and living in their Chicago home while her sister Claire moved to New York and got a job to fund their father's care. At the onset of the play, Robert has died. Hal, one of Robert's students in later years, is at the house, going through the graphomaniacal scrawls Robert wrote in in a series of notebooks. He asks her out, but an argument ensues. The next day is the funeral, and Claire, Catherine's sister, has come in from New York to take control. At the funeral, Hal and Catherine hook up, and he spends the night. She gives him a key to a specific drawer in her father's study. The next morning a hungover Claire breaks the bad news: She is sure she knows best and suspects that Catherine, who inherited Robert's genius, might have inherited some of his tendencies towards insanity as well. She urges Catherine to return to New York with her, and confesses that she's already sold their father's house. Catherine (understandably), is furious. Hal comes out, amazed and bearing a notebook -- the proof in the notebook is a mathematical discovery beyond belief. Catherine reveals: she wrote it. Claire and Hal refuse to believe her -- it doesn't end well. The next day, Claire rebukes Hal for his behavior towards Catherine, but urges him to take the notebook and investigate it at the University. The following morning, Catherine prepares to leave with Claire to go to New York -- she is resigned and has no choice.  Hal comes to see her off, and asks him to please, please explain the proof to him. She accepts, and the play ends.

We will be looking at

CATHERINE

(Claire’s also a great part)

This scene happens at the beginning of the play, during Hal and Catherine’s first fight, and he’s asking to continue to come back and go through her father’s notebooks, claiming that someone needs to know whether or not Robert was actually insane, or whether there’s genius in one of the books that could be published.

HAL: Please. Someone should know for sure whether ---

CATHERINE: I LIVED WITH HIM. I spent my life with him. I fed him. Talked to him. Tried to listen when he talked. Talked to people who weren’t there… Watched him shuffling around like a ghost. A very smelly ghost. He was filthy. I had to make sure he bathed. My own father.

HAL: I’m so sorry I shouldn’t have…

CATHERINE: After my mother died it was just me here. I tried to keep him happy no matter what idiotic project he was doing. He used to read all day. He kept demanding more and more books. I took them out of the library by the carload. We had hundreds upstairs. Then I realized he wasn’t reading: he believed aliens were sending him messages through the dewey decimal numbers on the library books. He was trying to work out the code.

HAL: What kind of messages?

CATHERINE: Beautiful mathematics. Answers to everything. The most elegant proofs, perfect proofs, proofs like music.

HAL: Sounds good.

CATHERINE: Plus fashion tips, knock-knock jokes -- I mean it was NUTS, okay?

HAL: He was ill. It was a tragedy.

CATHERINE: Later the writing phase: scribbling, nineteen, twenty hours a day… I ordered him a case of notebooks and he used every one.

I dropped out of school… I’m glad he’s dead.

HAL: I understand why you’d feel that way.

CATHERINE: Fuck you.

The last line of this monologue is optional, but since so much of it is directed at someone not in the scene, I thought it would be good to kind of clue back into Hal as your scene partner at the last moment. Take it or leave it. :)

As always,

Buy, Read, Post!

This has been

SOMEONE MONO-BLOGGING

and again,

I’M SHANNON

ENJOY!

The Shape of Things, by Neil LaBute

HI.

IT’S SHANNON.

Neil LaBute was one of the most controversial playwrights of the 2000s. In theatre school I either had teachers who handed him out to everyone saying “He writes like real people talk about things you’ll be able to relate to. Do it!” or refused to let us bring in so much as a monologue, saying “His characters are non-redeemable and he uses profanity in lieu of good writing”... Yeah, well, everyone’s a critic. I love LaBute. I’ve written papers on him, directed plays of his, and used this monologue time and time again. So I say go for it. He’s pretty identifiable, but if you can really do one of his pieces, go for it.

Therefore I bring you

THE SHAPE OF THINGS
by Neil LaBute

WARNING: This play is all about the twist, and I’m going to give it away in the paragraph below because it’s relevant (if not necessary) to the monologue. Please please please read the play instead. Here! (http://amzn.to/1RS5nNn) That’s a link to the Amazon page where you can buy it. Buy it and read it and don’t read the paragraph below. Trust me, the monologue I’ve chosen will be self-evident.

The play is about Adam, a nerdy, sweet literature major (MA) at an unspecified midwestern university who meets a young graduate art student, Evelyn at his job as a security guard at the art museum. She’s in the middle of defacing a statue, and instead of arresting her, Adam gets her number. They start dating. Slowly he begins to work out, loses weight, cuts his hair, dresses better, gets a nose job, and, in general gets a little darker, more interesting, and less nice. His relationship with his best friend’s girlfriend, Jenny, gets a little ambiguous. Evelyn, though evidently alright with the changes, confronts him about Jenny, and in defense he proposes. Before responding, she invites him to her thesis presentation. It’s him. His changes have been her project over the year, and the ways in which he has become more appealing overall are evidence of her ‘sculpting.’ At the end of the presentation, she rejects his proposal. He confronts her, and her argument is “it was real to you, therefore it was real. It wasn’t to me, therefore it wasn’t. It’s all subjective, Adam. Everything.”

Yeah. What a bitch, right?

I love this part, I love this play, I love the complete turn around it does and the ways in which everyone is wrong but no one is wrong.

So of course

EVELYN

This is the presentation monologue. She’s just spent the entire play making this man into exactly who she wants him to be and she knows that that’s not ‘okay.’ This is her reason, her defense, her thesis that she’s given up her life for the past year to prove. And she, in her mind (I won’t speak for yours or even mine), is right.

EVELYN:

And yet, open any fashion magazine, turn on any television program, and the world will tell  you  he's only gotten more interesting,  more desirable, more normal. In a word, better. He is a living,  breathing example… of our obsession  with the surface of things, the shape of them. Not bad, huh? And ladies he is available. This was a completely startling and unexpected gesture, but obviously, I can't accept. You can examine the stone and setting further when it's placed  in the exhibit.

As for me, I have no regrets, no feelings of remorse for my actions, the manufactured emotions - none of it. I have always stood by the single and simple conceit that I am an artist, only that. I follow in a long tradition of artists who believe that there is no such concept as religion, government, community, or even family. There is only art; art that must be created whatever the cost. With that in mind, I present to you my untitled sculpture and supporting materials tonight. Thank you.

Yeah, it’s kind of horrible. Amazing, but horrible. I’m not sure what it says about me that I adore this part (she’s kind of a modern-day Hedda Gabler), but I do. As with Sarah Ruhl last week this will not be the last LaBute play on the docket for this blog, but if you’re impatient, here are some others I’d recommend: In a Dark Dark House, Fat Pig and reasons to be pretty. The one thing I’ll say about LaBute is that if you pick him, make sure you’re casting yourself correctly. The casting director or teacher could put a lot of stock in which LaBute character you think you are.

Once again, this has been
SOMEONE MONO-BLOGGING

and

I’M SHANNON.

ENJOY!

Seminar, by Theresa Rebeck

HI.

IT’S SHANNON.

So this is one of my favorite plays, by another fabulous lady playwright, Theresa Rebeck. She’s very popular, and very, very good. My other favorite play by her, which has great female parts (and is sadly but expectedly a little overdone by girls looking for monologues) is Spike Heels, which I am certain you will see on this blog at some point (despite its being overdone). This one, however, is even better. It’s about writers, and (at least to me) treads that perfect, delicate line of pretentious, yet human. Its a writer writing about writers writing, and doing so masterfully.

UGH.

I love this play.

So.

My gift to you this week:

SEMINAR

by Theresa Rebeck

(you’re welcome)

Seminar is about four young writers who take a class with a well-renowned writer/editor, Leonard, in hopes of launching their careers. Douglas has a famous uncle, Izzy has a rampant sex drive, Kate has one story she’s been working on for six years, and Martin has… well we don’t know what Martin has because he won’t show it to anyone. Kate and Martin are old friends who clearly have a thing for each other. The play takes place over the course of several scenes, all (except the last) in Kate’s parents’ fabulous-and-rent-stabilized Upper West Side apartment. In the first scene, Douglas is pretentious, Leonard tears apart Kate’s story, and Martin falls for Izzy’s sexuality. In the second, Douglas and Izzy might be sleeping together, but then Leonard reads Izzy’s story, using it as a tool to get in her pants (which pisses Martin off), and despite Kate being quite upset, Martin convinces her to let him live with her in the apartment. The next week, Leonard calls Douglas a whore (for selling out his connections and writing style), Izzy tells Martin she’s not sleeping with Leonard and kisses him, which upsets Kate even more. The next scene, Martin and Izzy are a furously-copulating couple, Kate turns in a story to Leonard (which he likes) that she’s written under someone else’s name, and Douglas tells Martin that Leonard was once condemned as a plagarist. The following week, Leonard reads Martin’s story and (after offhandedly mentioning to Martin that Izzy’s been cheating on him) tells him he’s brilliant and offers him a leg up in the world. Martin rejects him, calls him a bunch of names. Leonard ends the class for good. In the next scene, we’re in Leonard’s apartment: Martin knocks, looking for his money back for the uncompleted sessions. Kate is in the apartment already, now sleeping with Leonard. She and Martin make up (sort of), and she leaves. Martin finds Leonard’s writing on his desk and realizes he actually is kind of a genius. Leonard offers to help Martin again, Martin accepts.

It’s wayyyy better than that I promise. It’s so smart and so quick and so wordy and the characterization is freaking brilliant. I highly recommend both the parts of Kate and Izzy. And Martin. And Leonard. And if you’re a Douglas, I think he’s got a good speech in there too.

That said, I’m definitely a

KATE

so that’s who we’re looking at today.

This monologue comes at the part of the play where Kate has turned in a new piece of writing to Leonard without telling him she wrote it… and he liked it. VICTORY! Her first story, about an over-educated white girl pining on the themes of Jane Austen, didn’t go over well to say the least so she furiously started her first story in years: the memoir of a transvestite Cubano gang member who she “knows from Bennington” (her endlessly-referenced alma mater). It was a hit with Leonard, and Kate is now telling everyone about that fact. At this point in the story her relationship with Martin is very strained because he’s living in her apartment and fucking Izzy’s brains out on a regular basis… in the living room. She’s frustrated, but has been channeling that frustration into writing and the result is a win. It’s a big moment.

KATE: Yes I did and Leonard loved it. Fucker. Stupid fucking mother fucker. A Cubano transvestite gang member. And he loved it! Asshole.

DOUGLAS: You wrote it?

KATE: OF course I wrote it! His biggest objection to me is that I’m a rich white girl. Maybe if I’m not a rich white girl we can find out if I can write.

(... skipping a lot of text, where Martin pipes up, Kate shuts him down, and basically no one gives Kate the reaction she’s looking for, so...)

Well done, Kate! you not only pulled one over on Leonard who everyone in the room thinks is a flaming abusive BUTTHOLE, you came up with a terrific piece of writing! We know you’ve been feeling shitty about yourself because of the way Leonard treated you and you’ve been really nice to let MARTIN and IZZY use your apartment as a FUCKING LOVE NEST and well done, well done you must feel a lot better: that piece you wrote about the Cubano transvestite gang member is really smart and edgy and funny, you’re a writer after all. Well done.

(then, playing her part)

Thanks, thanks you guys. Thanks!

This whole play is genius and hilarous and smart. I actually can’t say enough good things about it (clearly), so go check it out. Also, as if the text itself weren’t enough, Alan Rickman (RIP) played Leonard when it appeared on Broadway in 2011 (legend has it that Rebeck wrote it for him, which I can totally buy.) I saw Jeff Goldblum play the part, personally, and it was fantastic. So imagine Rickman’s gorgeous voice when reading the text and it only gets better. Izzy’s got a good monologue to Martin later in the play, as well, when she tells him of course she was sleeping with Leonard the whole time. Check it out!

And as always,

if you choose this monologue

buy/read the whole play

and post a video of it here!

Thanks guys!

Once again, this has been

SOMEONE MONO-BLOGGING

and

I’M SHANNON.

ENJOY!

"Killers and Other Family" by Lucy Thurber

HI.

IT’S SHANNON.

(You know, recently it’s been only me so maybe I should kill that.)

(... Eh.)

(Another time, maybe.)

This is one of my favorite current playwrights working today. The current League of Theatre Women Playwrights Working in New York Right Now (as I concisely call them) is super strong and interesting and writing super cool stuff. Annie Baker is one of them, as is this amazing woman: Lucy Thurber. Many of Lucy Thurber’s plays kind of work like: “take someone you probably grew up next door to and then imagine if their lives were super fucked.” Her characters are wounded and dynamic and strong and very, very interesting. I highly recommend not just this play but Ashville and Scarcity, as well. Check her out. It’s real.

KILLERS AND OTHER FAMILY

by Lucy Thurber

This play is about a woman who has finally escaped from her past only to have it walk in her front door. Elizabeth is a Ph.D candidate two weeks from finishing her dissertation, living with her girlfriend, Claire. Elizabeth’s brother, Jeff knocks on the door unexpectedly with their childhood friend Danny in tow. Elizabeth is enraged that Jeff has brought Danny into her home, and it’s revealed that Danny continually raped her when she was younger, and that Jeff knew about this. Jeff begs Elizabeth for money -- the two boys are on the run because Danny has killed a woman, and they’re headed to Mexico to escape. He goes into the bedroom to sleep and Danny and Elizabeth have sex -- the consensuality is confused at best. End Act 1. In Act 2, Claire comes home, surprised to find people in her apartment but thrilled to finally meet Elizabeth’s “family and friends.” She and Danny have a conversation in which she’s revealed to be a suburban child of privilege: a sharp contrast to the rural poverty Elizabeth grew up in. The meeting of the four escalates, and Elizabeth reveals both her past with Danny and what transpired that morning. Claire attempts to leave, and Jeff bars the door as Danny jumps her in jealousy over Elizabeth’s love. Elizabeth pulls him off, calms him down, and finally convinces him to leave and turn himself in. Jeff leaves with him, and Elizabeth and Claire huddle on the couch. End of play.

It’s hard to read

Everyone is desperate

The stakes are very, very high.

So we’re looking at our protagonist

ELIZABETH

Elizabeth is in the middle of a crisis -- she’s managed to wrestle her way out of poverty into education and a life she can be proud of, and her past has waltzed its way into her apartment. She knows at this point that Danny has killed someone, and she’s just revealed to Claire that she has slept with Danny again, earlier that day. Everyone (Jeff, Danny, Claire) is in the room, and tensions are high. Elizabeth loves Danny -- like a smoker who has stopped smoking but suddenly has a cigarette -- her relationship to him is like an addiction that she knows is unhealthy but has no power over once he’s in the room, and it all has to do with her past. Claire has just confronted Elizabeth with a clear question: “What’s going on here?” and “What is the shit going on between you and this guy?”

ELIZABETH: I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m gonna make them leave, I promise,I will -- you have to give me a chance. There’s something wrong with me. Can you see? I never did change. I just moved pieces of me around. It all depends on what you present first and how hard you believe in it.

CLAIRE: Elizabeth --

ELIZABETH: Danny likes to play games. Danny always hated that I went to college. He just wanted me home. I liked college, though, it was my favorite time. Of course, I’m having trouble remembering right now --

CLAIRE: Elizabeth what are you talking about?

ELIZABETH: Oh, I’m sorry. I always talk to you in my head. I’ve been talking to you all day and I already explained everything but -- now when you’re here I don’t know how -- He likes to be told stories. That’s how it always starts. When I was little they were only fairy tales from school… Sometimes when I was little and he would sit me on his lap, I’d pretend his face was mine. If you look at us the right way we look just the same. Of course all I really wanted was for him just to hold me. That’s why I didn’t mind when he started kissing me, because I wanted to be held so badly.

(... long break of conversation between the four of them, but I really like this final line…)

ELIZABETH: You know how scary it is to wake up and find out you’re just where you left yourself? Years and years pass and it’s all just the same. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do it. I really believed it was impossible for me to do it.

Oof.

I like this monologue. It’s got a good shape to it, is contemporary, and no one knows this play. So good luck! As always, if you use it please buy/read the whole play and post anything you come up with on our page!

Once again, this has been
SOMEONE MONO-BLOGGING

and

I’M SHANNON.

ENJOY!

August: Osage County by Tracy Letts

EAT THE FISH BITCH!

Here, we have a crazy, dysfunctional play about a crazy, dysfunctional family.  Everyone is crazy in their own way, because everyone is trying to find a way to cope.

Violet, the matriarch, is diagnosed with cancer.  She copes by popping pills.  Beverly, her husband, drinks.  "That's the bargain we've struck"  he says.  In the prologue, he and Violet argue about hiring Johnna, a young Native American woman, for extra help around the house.  The prologue (and later the play) end with quotes from the T.S. Eliot poem 'The Hollow Men.'

A tragic event brings the family together- Beverly has disappeared.  Violet's daughters- Barbra, Ivy, and Karen,their families, and her sister Mattie Fae all arrive to support her.

Jean, the youngest of the bunch, is Barbra's daughter.  They suspect suicide.  Jean copes just like her father- she smokes weed.  When Johnna doesn't stop her from smoking, Jean opens up to her about the family drama she's been through. (This is when the monologue occurs.)

At the end of the act the Sheriff  (and Barbra's ex) tells the family that Beverly's body has been found- he drowned.

In act two, the fights escalate and eventually get physical.  Karen's fiance Steve slimily teases Jean about smoking pot.  This teasing, and the families fighting, escalate through the entire act. Nothing is resolved.  Jean and Steve smoke together, and by the end of a shared joint, Steve turns off the light and the audience hears nothing but heavy breathing.  Johnna, noticing something is wrong, turns on the light and beats Steve with a skillet.  The family rushes in, no one knows what happened, and everyone starts screaming at everyone else.

And then we arrive at the fantastic dinner scene.  Violet and her daughters are attempting to have dinner, during which Ivy hopes to confess to her mother that she is in a relationship with Little Charles, her dopey cousin.  What she does not know is that Little Charles is actually her half-brother.  Barbra does know this, and tries to shut down the conversation, eventually screaming at her mother to eat the fucking fish.  Despite her efforts, all is revealed.  Ivy leaves in shock and despair.  The play ends with Barbra leaving, Violet calling out for her daughters, and when no one comes, to Johnna and they quote the final lines of T.S. Eliot "this is the way the world ends... and then you're gone..."

The title comes from a poem by Howard Starks-

Dust hangs heavy in the dull catalpas;

the cicadas are scraping interminably

at the heart-thickened air—

no rain in three weeks, no real breeze all day,

In the dim room,

the blinds grimly endure the deadly light,

protecting the machined air,

as the watchers watch the old lady die.

“I’m eighty-six,” she said: “it’s high time—

now John’s gone.”

And to the town’s ne doctor

“You’re a good boy,” (she had a great-grandson

who was older,) “so don’t fiddle around.

When fighting was needed, I fought –

But I’m all fought out.”

and later—

“John left when he was due—well—I’m due now,”

“I promise, “ he whispered;

I’ve learned when right is right.”

Now, her daughters sit – – and her grand-daughters –

and at night, her grandsons- –

and her pampered sons-in-law.

One of these, not known for eloquence – –

or tears—said, last week,

“Ola, chance gave me a mother,

but God gave me two.”

She smiled at that,

“yes, I had one boy; god gave me seven more.”

She lies under the sheet,

Thin as one of her old kitchen knives,

honed by years and use to fragile sharpness,

but too well-tempered to break just yet.

It’s two days since she spoke—

“Don’t cry, Bessie;

puppies just die, that’s all.”

(A girl again,

gentling baby sister.)

All the watchers can do

is wipe her dry mouth with gentle wetness.

They watch her old hands and murmur—

How many biscuits

and pans of gravy?

How many babies soothed

and bee-stings daubed with bluing?

How many lamp-wicks trimmed?

How many berries picked?

words circling

as her quiet breath winds down to silence.

No sobs, for she was due, but tears, a few,

selfish ones,

before the calls, the “arrangements”

to put her to bed, beside John,

on the dusty hilltop.

Standing there,

we look up from the dry clods

and the durable grey stone,

upwards—

expectantly—

westwards—

where the clouds grow dark.

JEAN'S MONOLOGUE

Mom and Dad don't mind.  You won't get in trouble  or anything.

I just mean that they don't mind that I smoke pot.  Dad doesn't.  Mom kind of does.  She thinks it's bad for me.  I think the real reason it bugs her is because dad smokes pot too and she wishes he wouldn't.   

Dad's a lot cooler than mom really.  Well, that's not true.   He's just cooler in that way I guess.  

He's fucking one of his students which is pretty uncool if you ask me. Some people would think that’s cool, like those dicks who teach with him in the Humanities Department because they’re all fucking their students or wish they were fucking their students.  “Lo-liii-ta.”   I mean I don't care and all.  He can fuck whoever he wants and that's who teachers meet, students. He was just a turd the way he went about it, and didn’t give mom a chance to respond or anything.  What sucks now is that mom’s watching me like a hawk because she thinks I’ll go on some post-divorce freak out and become some heroin addict or shoot everybody at school or God forbid, lose my virginity.  I don’t know what it is about dad splitting that put mom on hymen patrol.

Mom freaked when she got the call from Aunt Ivy this morning, just like… freaked.  I’ve never seen her like that.  I couldn’t get her to calm down.  It was weird.  I guess it’s not weird that she freaked out, but like, to see your mom freak like that, like you’ve never seen before, y’know?  And we’re real close.  So imagine you see your parents one day just totally lose their shit just like ‘whoa.’

Don’t say anything about Mom and Dad splitting up okay?  It’s kind of low-key.