Orchard Hill

In a circle of light surrounded by darkness, Lil, a woman in her thirties, is on a couch, and Doc, a man in his fifties, sits in a chair by the head of the couch in the two-character play Orchard Hill.  Lil says that she is God’s wife, that there has been a lot of sexual intercourse, that they were married on Orchard Hill, although God said the marriage was never legal and so she married his son, Adam, instead.  Eve, she says, was his second wife.  She says God was already married to Ashtaroth who went mad “living with that gigantic control freak” and was put in the attic.  When Doc asks about her childhood, Lil says she remembers walking at night on a deserted road in the rain where God picked her up.  When Doc says he is there to help her, she wonders what sort of deep neurosis would lead anybody to want to pretend they actually derived pleasure from helping anybody.  Lil says when God wanted to get rid of her she went to another son, Lucifer, and persuaded him to seduce Eve on Orchard Hill.  Lil says God threw Eve and Adam out because sooner or later everybody disappoints him and he rejects them.  When Doc asks Lil what would make her happy, she says she wants Orchard Hill.  When Doc says it’s just down the road she says she can’t go back because Orchard Hill is a portal to another dimension, another existence.  When she tells Doc that he desires her he says that her compulsive sexualizing of her experience is evidence of some terrible trauma in her past.  She says the trauma is God who created this nightmare of cannibalism and horror.  Existence is a crime, she says, and God is the criminal.  Doc says he has a folder with information about a Lillian Knight, who is an assistant professor of literature at the University of Massachusetts.  The photograph, he says, looks suspiciously like her.  Lil says she has had to assume false identities and that the Lillian Knight who teaches a course on the Brontes and another on the Book of Genesis is a character, but that she, Lil, is real.  She says that maybe Doc is God in disguise, trying to persuade her that she is not who she is.  She says he cannot kill her because he still desires her.  When Doc says that time is up and they will have to continue this discussion in their next session, she tells him to come and touch her, worship her as he wants to.  God, she says, is love.