Don Nigro

Pianos, a play in the Pendragon cycle, is set inside a barn in Armitage, Ohio, in 1908.  Myrtle Casey and her husband Willy, both 98, are talking about the barn being full of pianos that Willy has collected over the years.  Myrtle is tired of having cows in the house because there is no room for them in the barn.  She tells Willy they are a laughingstock of Pendragon County, that no one can play broken pianos, and that it’s dangerous to have pianos stacked forty feet high.  Willy says the pianos can be fixed and reminds Myrtle that she nagged him many years ago to get a piano.  She says it is dangerous for 11-year-old Jimmy.  She calls to Jimmy and we hear a sound like something running across a keyboard.  Willy doesn’t hear the sound but Myrtle thinks Jimmy is up on top of the pianos.  We hear another piano sound and Willy calls to Jimmy to come down.  He tells Myrtle that God is in the pianos, that music is God’s revelation, and the pianos are like a mountain one climbs to get to one’s salvation.  He goes off left to save Jimmy.  Myrtle warns him but we hear piano noises as, offstage, Willy climbs up, saying that he has had a vision and the ultimate revelation will come when he has climbed the mountain of pianos.  He shouts his readiness to receive the meaning of existence.  Myrtle looks up in horror, covers her face and screams as we hear a terrible cacophony of falling pianos.  Lights black out and we hear Willy’s voice in the darkness telling Myrtle that he heard God’s voice.  When he begins to describe what the Lord said we hear “an even louder cacophony of many, many falling pianos as Willy screams.”  Then silence and the sound of chickens clucking.

In The Baltic Sea, two old men, Kelso and Mott are huddled in the dim glow of a small fire in a tunnel deep beneath the city.  Kelso talks to Mott about the early tv show, What’s My Line?  Mott rattles off a series of surrealistic images.  Kelso says “they” come up from under the ground like slugs after the rain, using strange passageways under the earth and deep under the Baltic Sea.  Mott says the Baltic Sea is a gigantic hoax, perpetrated by the Lithuanians and inhabited by talking fish.  Kelso says he was forced into the sewers by the CIA and Mott continues his description of bizarre events.  Mott offers Kelso a drink from a bottle of the finest New Jersey wine.  Kelso says that God told him to emit gas, and Mott says he met God under the roller coaster at Coney Island.  Kelso says he knows things that could bring down the government and accuses Mott of being “one of them,” telling him he will kill him with a can opener.  But Kelso then says he doesn’t feel well and asks what could be wrong with him.  Mott says he poisoned him and Kelso falls over dead.

     The unit set for Darkpool (3m, 1w) includes an office with table and chairs, a bench in a rooftop garden, and the balcony of an apartment.  Dutch, 47, and Mick, 29, overseas operatives of Darkpool, discuss their responsibility for killing people in a war zone.  Mick thinks they will be punished but Dutch assures him they will be protected.  Max, 53, introduces the men to Justine, 30, a lawyer with a specialty in public relations.  Max tells the men that they will be taken care of because working for Darkpool means they are part of God’s family and have a special dispensation to take whatever measures become necessary.  He says democracy is an illusion, and the military are cannon fodder.  Darkpool is the muscle that multi-national corporations use to get and keep power.  Max says that when Jesus comes again he is going to be “one of us.”  After Max walks off, Justine asks Dutch to leave so she can talk with Mick alone.

     She invites Mick to dinner at her place as the lights fade and come up on Dutch and Max in the rooftop garden at night.  Max says that the Christian community needs to be ready to take back America from the secular liberal conspiracy that’s hijacked it.  This great crusade will promote the sovereignty of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior.  He says Dutch is in trouble because he didn’t follow his orders to neutralize all the inhabitants of a certain house in a certain village.  He warns Dutch about being too arrogant to follow instructions and the scene shifts to Mick and Justine sitting at night on her balcony.  Mick tells her that when he and Dutch were on their way to some little village, Dutch stopped and turned around and headed back, but they got lost and ended up in the middle of a traffic jam, hearing what sounded like hostile fire.  He and Dutch started shooting, thinking there might be suicide bombers.  Justine says she needs to edit his story to help a potential jury or the public in general understand it in a way that doesn’t shed negative light on him.

     In the fourth scene, Mick enters as Dutch is eating breakfast.  Dutch says that Justine’s job is to make sure that Mick won’t say anything that could hurt the company.  Light fades on them and comes up on Justine and Max drinking coffee.  Justine tells Max that she thinks Mick will be all right and Max warns her to be careful.  The scene shifts back to the rooftop garden where Mick tells Justine that, because of a childhood injury, he sometimes thinks he hears bees.  They talk about watching other people sleep and Justine tells Mick he must play the character of an innocent man.  Justine then talks with Dutch, telling him that she doesn’t like him but her job is to help him.  He asks her how long it has been since somebody really fucked her and she slaps him very hard across the face.  He grabs her by the neck and kisses her as Mick enters.  Justine tells Dutch that if he ever does anything like that again she will shoot him.  Mick says that he and Dutch shot real people, women and children and old people.  Max enters and tells Mick that there are no innocent people, just degrees of guilt, and that they are not murderers but global stabilization facilitators.  After Mick and Justine leave, Max tells Dutch that Mick doesn’t know how to play the game and could have an accident.  He also tells Dutch that Justine is his daughter and that the cleaner everything is, the closer one is to God.  Dutch responds that to worship God is to worship chaos and suggests that God wants zombies come back from the dead.  Max narrates how, in a swamp, he stared into a deep, dark pool of water and learned that God is the Devil.  Then he changes the subject by asking Dutch how his daughter is doing in Princeton, pointing out that she would be in financial difficulty if Dutch got sent to prison.  Max says he loves the rooftop garden, but it is so high up that someone might fall, or jump.  Justine enters to say that she can’t find Mick, and Max sends Dutch up to the roof garden to find him, telling his daughter that everything will be taken care of.

     Lights come up on the rooftop garden as Mick tells Dutch that he hopes that he can take Justine away to a nice, quiet place where they could settle down and have a couple of kids.  Mick says he shot those people because he was scared.  Dutch tells him that they will go to prison if he tells the truth, and when Mick says he has to tell the truth he moves to look over the edge of the garden, saying it is a long way down.  Mick thinks he hears bees and the lights fade and go out.

In Borneo, Harry, a large man of 40 with a deep voice, and Rita, a woman in her 30s with beautiful long red hair, are sitting in bamboo chairs on a verandah at night.  We hear occasional faint jungle bird noises and the sound of a film running through an old projector.  Harry speaks of re-editing a film and Rita mentions that she has been learning about poisons, adding that perhaps “he” could be persuaded to walk on to the rotted wharf and fall through the boards, a nail piercing his carotid artery.  Harry comments that that has been done before and says he is on the edge of an abyss.  She says he sits in the dark watching the same scenes over and over, and she thinks he should cut the nude scenes, telling him that she didn’t want to do them.  He speaks of editing the scene in which a jealous husband murders his wife.  She tells him that all he cares about is the film, that he worships death.  He replies that he is making a movie about a man who lives in Borneo with his beautiful wife but every take seems to have something wrong with it.  He begins to wonder if he actually murdered his wife or if he only imagined it, like a scene in a script that was never shot or was left on the cutting room floor.  Rita says that everything is devoured in Borneo and he says he is keeping in the nude scenes.

In Relativity, an elderly Albert Einstein and a middle-aged Kurt Godel sit on a bench in Princeton, New Jersey, in the autumn of 1954 as Kurt wonders why, in the movie, there are seven dwarfs and why he can’t remember their names.  Kurt is convinced that mathematicians are trying to poison him and suggests that the Wicked Queen has given Snow White a radioactive apple that makes the castle glow.  He says there may be an infinite number of parallel variations of the fairy tale.  Albert wants to go to one where they are not having this conversation.  Kurt says there are time loops in Albert’s equations that make it theoretically possible to visit the past.  Kurt thinks it odd that Albert sat down on their walk, and Albert tells him he should find someone else to talk to because he, Albert, can’t live forever.  Kurt says that since time is an illusion, there is no death.  Kurt says he has always been looked at as if he were some sort of insect.  Albert, who has fallen asleep, wakes up and tells Kurt that he needs to make new friends so he will not be utterly alone.  Kurt replies that he happens to like the illusion of Albert’s company.  Albert says he has been trying to work out a grand unified theory but has failed.  He tells Kurt that he cannot start over because he will be dead in two months.  Kurt says that Albert is his friend and he loves him.  That, he says, is not an illusion.  Albert says the name of the last dwarf is Happy.  Kurt says he doesn’t think so and Albert suggests that they walk, but the light fades on them before they get up.

Set in China, a long time ago, The Gatekeeper (2m) tells the story of Lao Tzu, an old man, knocking on a gate at the edge of the civilized world.  The Gatekeeper says he must pay a fee and when Lao Tzu says he has no money, the Gatekeeper says that nobody has ever wanted to go out the gate into barbarism and chaos.  Lao Tzu identifies himself and the Gatekeeper invites him into his lodge to warm himself by the fire and have something to drink.  The Gatekeeper says he remembers hearing Lao Tzu speak many years earlier.  Lao Tzu says he wants to go out the gate because he wants to die in a place where there is nothing.  The Gatekeeper pours more wine into Lao Tzu’s cup, saying that he had a dream in which he refused to let Lao Tzu through the gate until he wrote down his wisdom.  That, he says, is the fee.  Lao Tzu says his writing will be misconstrued and turned into dogma over which people will kill each other.  The Gatekeeper says his teachings make him happy and his words and images are beautiful, but Lao Tzu insists that there is nothing to be gained from writing, nothing to be gained from anything.  The Gatekeeper gets pen and ink and tells Lao Tzu he can go out the gate if he writes down his wisdom.  Lao Tzu refuses and the Gatekeeper pulls out a trumpet and blows it into Lao Tzu’s ear five times, but Lao Tzu still refuses.  They struggle over the trumpet and the Gatekeeper starts whacking Lao Tzu over the head with it until Lao Tzu collapses, dead.  The Gatekeeper says he will write down what he remembers of what Lao Tzu said and continues to write as the lights fade and we hear the sound of wind in the darkness.

     The Recollection of Green Rain, a short play for a man and a woman, is set in the kitchen of a small house by the woods in England in the late twelfth century.  Map, a writer, asks Agnes, a young woman, if she remembers the place she came from.  She speaks of caves and tunnels and of tending herds of animals like sheep, but different.  She says she and her brother, looking for strays, suddenly came up into a bright light and people found them and asked them questions in a language they didn’t understand.  Some people thought they were demons and wanted to burn them but others decided they should be baptized.  She says her brother died because he was different.  Like her, his skin was green.  Map says she isn’t green any more and she explains that at first they only ate a certain kind of raw beans but then learned to eat his food and now the only green left is in her eyes and they are changing color.  She says she remembers green rain and asks Map what he really thinks of her.  He tells her that he thinks she made up the story as a child and now believes it to be true.  He says he writes down the stories that people tell him and her story is fascinating.  She says she made a vow not to tell her secret name and if she breaks it she will be banished from the Green World forever.  She asks Map if he would like to come back with her.  When he asks if her husband would object she says that Sir Richard, who first found them in the Wolf Pit and who thought their language resembled Flemish, married her to a local man before she became pregnant by one of the village boys.  She asks Map if he wants to make love with her but he says he is a prebendary and can’t be running off with anybody’s wife.  She wants him to swear that, if he loves her, he will never write about her.  He swears and she says that for the rest of his life he will regret not running off with her.  She says Sir Richard desired her and she is still in his head.  Map says that around the time she and her brother were found there was a terrible massacre of Flemish immigrants that were taken to a dark place and slaughtered in the rain.  He says when a person is malnourished their skin can turn a sort of grayish color and perhaps hallucinations brought on by starvation and emotional trauma—She interrupts him, shouting that she is from the Green World under the earth and none of this is real.  She tells him not to touch her but says that when he is very old he will dream about her naked in green rain.  As they look at each other the light fades on them and goes out.

Piandello is a long one-act play for three men and four women set on the stage of a theatre late at night, with a table and chair where Pirandello sits writing and fragments of set and props and step units scattered haphazardly.  Il Duce looks into the darkness of the auditorium and asks Pirandello if he always stays after the play is over.  Il Duce wants more light so he can see himself posing in a mirror; Pirandello calls to Garibaldi and pools of light appear mixed with shadows and latticework patterns.  Il Duce says he keeps hearing owls and tells Pirandello that he has been selected to write the authorized biographical play about Il Duce’s life.  When Pirandello says that he may not be the best choice, Il Duce threatens to cut off his dick.  Il Duce then takes a prop violin and plays a bit of Pagliacci.  He says truth is about power and he wants to make fornication and ignorance great again.  Pirandello says his wife is seriously ill and Il Duce says that at least he has a mistress.  The Actress enters in a revealing nightgown hoping he doesn’t mind her coming to his room so late at night.  He says he loves his wife but she constantly accuses him of being unfaithful.  The Actress offers to comfort him but he says it would be better if they keep their relationship professional.  She leaves and when Il Duce asks him why he didn’t follow her back to her room Pirandello says that he couldn’t betray his wife.  The Wife calls from offstage and then enters, accusing him of fornicating with The Actress in the prop room.  She says that on their wedding night he just shook hands with her and went to sleep.  Il Duce asks what kind of Italian he is but The Wife says that he fathered their three children and that he is insatiable and can’t get enough of her.  He says he can’t let her go because she’s his wife and is not in her right mind.  She says that her father acted like a jealous maniac when Pirandello was courting her.  The Father-in-Law enters and tells her not to look Pirandello in the face.  He says the engagement was a terrible idea and thinks they should engage her to Mr. Pizzerelli’s grandson.  But she says she wants to marry Pirandello.  Il Duce pours wine into two glasses and gives one to The Father-in-Law.  The Wife calls Pirandello a fascist and accuses him of sleeping with his own daughter.  She says she is sending their daughter to Brazil and goes off screaming at Pirandello.  Il Duce says Pirandello wrote a play about a man who wanted to sleep with his daughter.  We hear the sound of dishes breaking.  Pirandello says it was the man’s step-daughter whom he didn’t recognize in the brothel.  The Father-in-Law wants to challenge Pirandello to a duel and Il Duce suggests salad forks as weapons but the Father-in-Law can only find dueling pistols.  Pirandello says that nobody knows what real means and Il Duce suggests that perhaps Pirandello did sleep with his daughter.  The Actress returns, dressed; when Pirandello says he needs her, she says he had his chance in the hotel.  She is startled to see Il Duce and Father-in-Law and Pirandello says he’s not sure they’re actually here.  Il Duce says that romantic love is an illusion, like a stage play, and tells The Actress that if she doesn’t want Pirandello he is available. The Father-in-Law asks Pirandello which pistol he wants and The Actress asks if the daughter was hiding under Pirandello’s bed in the hotel.  Pirandello says that if people keep mentioning her she is going to show up in this play.  The Daughter enters asking what her dead Grandfather, and that actress, and Mussolini are doing here.  Il Duce asks The Daughter if her father was able to keep his pants on.  Pirandello objects, saying he didn’t write this as part of the play, but Il Duce, “fierce and scary,” tells him to shut up.  He orders The Daughter to sit on his knee and asks her why she tried to poison herself.  She says her mother’s mental illness was part of it.  Pirandello tells Il Duce to let her go, but Il Duce asks her what really happened between her and her father.  The Mistress bursts in and tells The Daughter to get off Benito’s lap, calling her a filthy little slut.  The Daughter thinks The Mistress is Mrs. Mussolini, but Il Duce says that the Pope won’t let him get a divorce.  Pirandello tries to comfort The Daughter but The Wife runs in and pulls him away from her.  Il Duce tells The Father-in-Law he can shoot Pirandello after he finishes the play, and The Wife says the theatre is a brothel and everyone who works there is a prostitute.  She accuses The Father-in-Law of having his way with her when she was a child and now her husband has done the same thing to her daughter.  The Daughter tells all of them to stop and says she is going to Brazil.  The Mistress says she had a dream about bearded men with guns who caught her and Il Duce and shot them both.  The last word Il Duce said was, “Pirandello.”  Pirandello asks Il Duce if he ever read “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge,” suggesting that may be why he hears owls.  Pirandello says that perhaps while Il Duce thought he was writing his own play about Italy, he, Pirandello, was writing a play about him while an imaginary and/or dead God was writing a play about both of them, and these plays are part of an infinite number of plays playing on an infinite series of interconnected stages because time is everything happening at once.  The Wife accuses Pirandello of laying the groundwork for “this horrible man” to take power.  Il Duce tells The Daughter that death is the only truth.  The Daughter says she doesn’t know if her father molested her or if she just remembers her mother telling her that he did.  The Daughter speaks of coming out of the premiere of Six Characters that the audience hated and asks Pirandello if what she said was true.  When he says he knows what the truth is, she asks which truth, the one he wants to believe, her mother’s truth, or Il Duce’s truth?  Il Duce wonders what God’s final word will be when, so ashamed of the mess he’s created, he hangs himself off Owl Creek Bridge.  “Pirandello,” The Daughter says.

   Murder in the Red Barn is a longer one-act (2m, 2w) set inside a large old red barn with light shining through the broken slats, old pieces of furniture in the straw, and fragments of other locations.  The place is Suffolk, England, and the time is the late 1820s, “or perhaps a dream of that village in that time, dreamed in a more recent time.”  As the play begins we hear doves cooing and see Maria, 26, sitting in the straw, Will, 30, leaning on a post peeling a hard-boiled egg, Young Stepmother, 29, sitting on a wooden chair, and the Molecatcher, 50, drinking at a table.  Maria says all barns are haunted and that she is going to Ipswich to make a new life.  Young Stepmother relates a dream she has every night about something terrible happening in the barn and then asks Maria if she has been out again with Will, warning her that he cannot be trusted.  Maria says Young Stepmother loves her father’s money because she thinks he has found a bag of Roman coins, but her father is obsessed with moles.  The Molecatcher says that moles are tricky and philosophical and that his daughter is smart and imaginative.  Maria tells Will that she is pregnant and that he is the father.  Will says he took precautions by praying to the Lord before entering her “tabernacle.”  She says he will marry her or her father will kill him.

     Will tells the Molecatcher that Maria has gone to Ipswich, taken a job as a baker’s assistant, and is happy.  Young Stepmother says that she dreamed Maria was murdered  and put in a sack in the barn and buried in the straw.  She wants the Molecatcher to look in the barn.  Will asks Young Stepmother why she married the old man and she replies that he was kind to her.  Will thinks she would be happier in bed with him.  After the lights go to black the Molecatcher appears in the darkness with a lantern and Maria calls to him.  He puts the lantern down, looking at the straw, and asks if what he sees is a hand.

     We hear birds singing as lights come up on Maria telling Will that he was sent away for stealing pigs and the only reason he came back was because his brother Tom drowned.  Will says that being around her makes him happy.  The Molecatcher tells Young Stepmother that nobody except the killer knows how Maria died.  He says he knows that horrible unspeakable things are hidden under the earth.  Will tells us that he opened up a boarding house for young ladies in London where he does all the cooking.  He says that the Molecatcher and two policemen dragged him off to jail for killing Maria.  Will says that he and Maria argued and he remembers finding her in the barn, dead, and burying her.  He says thousands will come to see him hang and cut up his skin in pieces.  He says they are the subject of a penny dreadful, and Maria says her picture is on the cover.  Will picks up two dolls from the straw, identifying one as the Notorious Red Barn Murderer Doll and the other as the beautiful and tragic Maria doll.  Maria speaks of using milk as her beauty secret and dreaming she was drowning, while Will speaks his memories of making love to her.

     The Molecatcher talks to Young Stepmother about her dreaming that Maria was buried in the barn.  The Molecatcher says that Will is not in his right mind and Young Stepmother says that all men are murderers.  In an earlier time Will tells Young Stepmother that he is meeting Maria in the barn so they can run away to Ipswich or London.  Young Stepmother tells Maria that her children are dead and Maria describes how people came to the barn to collect souvenirs, leaving just a skeleton, and made up songs and plays about her.  She says she had three babies, one by Will’s brother Tom, one by the clockmaker who sent money, and one by Will, but all three babies died.  Maria says if you dig down far enough you come to the center of the darkness, that all God is, is darkness, but, she adds, he is famous.

     Set in China, a long time ago, The Gatekeeper (2m) tells the story of Lao Tzu, an old man, knocking on a gate at the edge of the civilized world.  The Gatekeeper says he must pay a fee and when Lao Tzu says he has no money, the Gatekeeper says that nobody has ever wanted to go out the gate into barbarism and chaos.  Lao Tzu identifies himself and the Gatekeeper invites him into his lodge to warm himself by the fire and have something to drink.  The Gatekeeper says he remembers hearing Lao Tzu speak many years earlier.  Lao Tzu says he wants to go out the gate because he wants to die in a place where there is nothing.  The Gatekeeper pours more wine into Lao Tzu’s cup, saying that he had a dream in which he refused to let Lao Tzu through the gate until he wrote down his wisdom.  That, he says, is the fee.  Lao Tzu says his writing will be misconstrued and turned into dogma over which people will kill each other.  The Gatekeeper says his teachings make him happy and his words and images are beautiful, but Lao Tzu insists that there is nothing to be gained from writing, nothing to be gained from anything.  The Gatekeeper gets pen and ink and tells Lao Tzu he can go out the gate if he writes down his wisdom.  Lao Tzu refuses and the Gatekeeper pulls out a trumpet and blows it into Lao Tzu’s ear five times, but Lao Tzu still refuses.  They struggle over the trumpet and the Gatekeeper starts whacking Lao Tzu over the head with it until Lao Tzu collapses, dead.  The Gatekeeper says he will write down what he remembers of what Lao Tzu said and continues to write as the lights fade and we hear the sound of wind in the darkness.

     In Relativity, an elderly Albert Einstein and a middle-aged Kurt Godel sit on a bench in Princeton, New Jersey, in the autumn of 1954 as Kurt wonders why, in the movie, there are seven dwarfs and why he can’t remember their names.  Kurt is convinced that mathematicians are trying to poison him and suggests that the Wicked Queen has given Snow White a radioactive apple that makes the castle glow.  He says there may be an infinite number of parallel variations of the fairy tale.  Albert wants to go to one where they are not having this conversation.  Kurt says there are time loops in Albert’s equations that make it theoretically possible to visit the past.  Kurt thinks it odd that Albert sat down on their walk, and Albert tells him he should find someone else to talk to because he, Albert, can’t live forever.  Kurt says that since time is an illusion, there is no death.  Kurt says he has always been looked at as if he were some sort of insect.  Albert, who has fallen asleep, wakes up and tells Kurt that he needs to make new friends so he will not be utterly alone.  Kurt replies that he happens to like the illusion of Albert’s company.  Albert says he has been trying to work out a grand unified theory but has failed.  He tells Kurt that he cannot start over because he will be dead in two months.  Kurt says that Albert is his friend and he loves him.  That, he says, is not an illusion.  Albert says the name of the last dwarf is Happy.  Kurt says he doesn’t think so and Albert suggests that they walk, but the light fades on them before they get up.

     In Borneo, Harry, a large man of 40 with a deep voice, and Rita, a woman in her 30s with beautiful long red hair, are sitting in bamboo chairs on a verandah at night.  We hear occasional faint jungle bird noises and the sound of a film running through an old projector.  Harry speaks of re-editing a film and Rita mentions that she has been learning about poisons, adding that perhaps “he” could be persuaded to walk on to the rotted wharf and fall through the boards, a nail piercing his carotid artery.  Harry comments that that has been done before and says he is on the edge of an abyss.  She says he sits in the dark watching the same scenes over and over, and she thinks he should cut the nude scenes, telling him that she didn’t want to do them.  He speaks of editing the scene in which a jealous husband murders his wife.  She tells him that all he cares about is the film, that he worships death.  He replies that he is making a movie about a man who lives in Borneo with his beautiful wife but every take seems to have something wrong with it.  He begins to wonder if he actually murdered his wife or if he only imagined it, like a scene in a script that was never shot or was left on the cutting room floor.  Rita says that everything is devoured in Borneo and he says he is keeping in the nude scenes.

  The unit set for Appledorn (1m playing two parts, 4w, but parts may be doubled), a part of the Pendragon cycle, consists of a few platforms, some steps, furniture, and a round wooden table DR.  The action takes place in Armitage, Ohio, from early to late 19^th century.  In darkness we hear French Annie singing “Au clair de la lune” as lights come up on Blossom Appledorn Wolf, 73, in 1883.  Blossom, who becomes younger and then old again in the course of the play, tells us that Appledorn was the name of a “wonderful village” her family came from before they moved to Ohio, but all she can remember is looking down a very steep staircase and her father warning her about falling.  She says that people called her simple-minded because of the fever that took her parents and because she was taken in as a five-year-old by French Annie to live in the Indian Caves out by Grim Lake.  French Annie continues singing softly as Blossom tells us that her stepfather, Jonas Grey Wolf, moved to the caves when he was old enough because he wasn’t comfortable about the half of him that was white.  When a trapper came by with Annie, she decided Jonas was the man she wanted and, after watching the trapper beat her, Jonas slit the trapper’s throat and took Annie to the caves.  Annie keeps singing softly in French as Blossom tells us she got along with their daughters but that the boy, John Paul, who was five years older than she was, wanted her.

     She tells us that when she was sixteen she went to pick blackberries on Ghost Hill and was struck by lightning.  We see a bright flash and then darkness and a huge thunderclap.  She says she had a vision of Appledorn but then realized she was back in the cave.  French Annie says she will not die but will live a long time and do wonderful things.  When Blossom began throwing up in the morning and began showing, Annie told her she was carrying a baby and so she married John Paul on whom she had taken pity once or twice, but she knew the child was not his but had been created by the thunderbolt.  Her narration is punctuated by Crow repeating the line, “Don’t fall down the steps.” She says John Paul didn’t want to marry her and never touched her again.

     She named her son James Jonas Wolf, and when he grew up he married Cally Murphy, and they had a son named John Arthur.  Blossom’s son was killed in the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864 and she grieved until she had a dream about the rain barrel.  Crow tells her to look in the rain barrel and when she does she sees her son being shot from behind by a man in a blue coat.  As she says she was visiting her son’s widow, lights come up on Cally.  T. H. Grim (played by the same actor who plays Crow) walks in and Blossom says she knew he was the man who killed her son.  Grim says that Cally’s husband died in his arms, making him swear to take care of her.  Blossom knows it was Grim’s face she saw in the rain barrel and realizes he shot his friend to get his wife.  When Grim leaves, Cally tells Blossom that he asked her to marry him.  Blossom tells Cally that she can’t marry Grim because he killed her husband.  Blossom says that the crow that whispers in her head since she was struck by lightning told her to look in the rain barrel.  Cally, angry, tells Blossom to get out of her house and stay away, telling her she should be locked up in a padded cell.

     Blossom tells us that Cally did not marry Grim and that he married Mary Louise Frost whose father had property that Grim wanted.  When the father threatened to disinherit Mary Louise if she married Grim, the father was found dead in a field with his neck broken.  When Grim started lusting after Mona, a cousin of Arthur’s, Blossom hears the crow whispering to her again to look in the rail barrel.  In the rain barrel, Blossom saw Grim doing things in the woods to Mona.  Blossom tells Mary Louise that her husband killed her father, her husband, probably his own parents, and plans to kill her.  Mary Louise doesn’t believe her and calls her a crazy old woman.  Blossom tells her to follow her husband to Witch Hollow where she will find Mona and Grim under the sumac tree.  Blossom tells us that Mary Louise did so and found them together.  We hear the sound of a ticking clock as Grim enters and Mary Louise appears with a large bowl of mashed potatoes containing her mother’s secret ingredient—love.  She puts gravy on the potatoes and agrees with Grim that she put rat poison in them.  She sits and eats some potatoes and then, as the light fades on them, Grim begins eating.  They remain in shadows as Blossom tells us they were found dead the next morning.  She says the whispering stopped but then started again, and we hear Crow warning her about falling and French Annie singing.  Blossom says she thought she saw Grim following her and she went to the top of the staircase and felt a cold hand push hard on her back and then she was falling.  Crow and French Annie repeat their refrain and Blossom says she was a young girl again in Appledore where everything smelled of apples.  French Annie sings the last quatrain of the song and the lights fade out.