Don Nigro

From the note before Lagoon we learn that the character, Meredith Cherry, 18, lives in Armitage, a small town in east Ohio, in the autumn of 1954.  She tells us that the Creature from the Black Lagoon, who is always in her dreams, is now in town, having migrated from one body of water to another, and ending up in Grim Lake.  At night he crawls out of the lake and sneaks across town to her house.  She thinks he must love her to have left his Lagoon for her, or else he really wants to eat her.  She used to hear him at night fumbling in the kitchen but he has started coming upstairs.  Lying in bed pretending to be asleep she hears the door creak open and squishy footsteps on the carpet and feels his breath on her.  In the morning, she says, there are wet spots on the carpet and in the bed and bits of water grass.  She says she thinks about the Creature all the time, ever since she first saw him at the Drive In Movie from the back seat of Jim Rainey’s Chevy.  She says so far the Creature has been a gentleman and she wonders if he senses that she is pregnant.  Some nights, when he doesn’t come, she walks around downstairs, looking for him.  When she goes for long walks in the dark she can hear the Creature following her.  She says she tries to read her future in the tarot cards she was given at the curiosity shop.  She wonders if Ben saw her on the sofa with Jim Rainey on top of her when she was babysitting.  She says her mother made her father’s life a living hell and now she will do the same when she tells him she is pregnant.  Jim told her not to worry but they found him the next morning cut to pieces on the railroad tracks with a duffel bag full of clothes.  They said he had been drinking but she knows the Creature pushed him in front of the train as he tried to leave town.  She says the Creature is the voice in her head, telling her to walk into the lake, and then she would never have to tell her father.  But she says she can’t because of the stranger inside her, although it must be very peaceful in the dark water at the bottom of the Lagoon where her beloved monster waits for her.

The time of Gringonneur is 1392.  We hear dogs yapping, barking, howling as the painter Gringonneur tells us that the King of France wants him to design a pack of tarot cards like the ones he stole from a gypsy girl.  The King gives the cards, wrapped in a scarf, to Gringonneur, telling him to make a clean version of them and destroy the old ones.  When the painter starts working on the new deck, he finds that the faces on the cards are appearing in his dreams and he can’t get them out of his head.  He hears from the Queen that the King has gone mad and wonders if the madness came from the cards.  He thinks the cards are alive, illustrating some principle of order which is a diagram of the lunacy inside God’s brain.  He says that sometimes he is fine for months, but then his head is on fire again and he runs wildly, lost, through the labyrinth of the palace.  He says he is all the people on the cards and that “the ultimate act of love is to willingly share the madness of another.”  He offers to read our fortune, but all he sees is “unfathomable darkness.”

In Queens, Alice, a girl of 16, sits at an old wooden table shuffling an old pack of cards.  She tells us that her father told her to watch out for the face cards but she studied them over and over until they started talking to her and she now knows all their secrets.  She tells us that the Queen of Hearts loves the Jack of Spades “hopelessly,” that the Queen of Diamonds is rich but unhappy and feels empty, that the Queen of Spades brings death to all who love her, and that the Queen of Clubs is melancholy.  She says that it feels as if they are being played by someone, shuffled again and again in different combinations where relationships are ripped apart and they find themselves pressed in back and front by strangers.  But the cards don’t know the rules and can be replaced at any time by newer versions of themselves.  The Kings, she says, are the fathers of the Queens and have sexual intercourse with them.  The Jacks are the Queens’ brothers and also have intercourse with them in a “really dirty soap opera” that changes every time you shuffle.  She says her father told her that little girls who talk too much get their throats cut with a playing card.  She says she wondered it that was true and found out it was.  She says her father had a lot of blood in him.  She says that’s why they put her in “this place,” but she doesn’t care because she lives inside the deck of cards in her head.  But you have to keep shuffling or you start thinking and lose the game.

Marina is a 24-page monologue written in a free verse format about the Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva as she is deciding in August, 1941, whether or not to take her own life.  The play is dedicated to, and was first performed in New York City on June 15, 2013, by the Russian actress Tatyana Kot.  In darkness, we listen to Scriabin’s Etude  #12, Opus 8, and as the music ends the lights come up on Marina, a woman in her forties.  Nigro writes that the set “could be” a room with a red lantern, a wooden table and chair with an old pack of tarot cards, a length of rope on an old trunk, and a blue wooden rocking chair on which is placed a little girl doll.  “But,” he writes, perhaps the stage is bare and Marina is in a circle of light.  Her first lines are disjointed recollections of images from her past and she says she has blank spaces in her head.  She tells us the French police keep asking her about poisoned chocolates.  She says she is the child of her father’s second wife who plays the piano.  We hear the sound of a piano playing, very softly, Scriabin’s Etude #11 in B flat minor, Opus 8, and Marina says she hated practicing on the piano because the exercises were mechanical and stupid and she wanted to feel, when she played, the way she felt when she listened to Tschaikovsky or Scriabin.  She says her mother burned her love poems because she knew that words can kill.  She thinks marriage is a good thing but says that it is a sin to think that you ever really know another person.  She tells us she has seen the Devil, like a Great Dane, sitting on her sister’s bed, and she loves him.  She needs every day to be a madness, a catastrophe, a fatal rhythm of passion and despair, the rhythm of sex and art.  Love is self delusion, truth is a traitor, and we all end up in Hell, with nothing.  She tells us she criticized her daughter’s drawing and would not let her play the piano.  She says she never knew her husband and that writing is something that happens to you, like love.  She says she was unfaithful to her husband before and after a five-year separation during the war and revolution.  She speaks of Mandelstam and Pasternak and Rilke and says that being in love with a new person is much more inspiring than being in love with the same old person.  Still, she never stopped loving her husband; she just loved other people as well.  She says women are better lovers because they know what to do.  She says she has been in love with the dead poet Pushkin since she was a little girl.  She tells us that if we haven’t struggled to feed our children with no money in a cold city in time of war we can’t presume to judge her for reaching out for a little happiness.  When she was two years and ten months old her daughter Irina died of starvation in the orphanage where her friends convinced her to put her so she wouldn’t die of starvation.  After the war and revolution she went into exile in Czechoslovakia and then Paris.  All Russians in exile, she says, are dead souls, but then she tells us that is not true.  She says the French police tell her that her husband is a spy, an assassin who used poisoned chocolates.  Her husband went back to Russia with her daughter and sister and they all beg her to come back but soon after their return they are all arrested.  She survives by translating the work of others but she knows if one writes to please somebody else the soul dies and then the writer dies.  She says she and other writers were shipped to the country but that she doesn’t want to die.  She says if you listen you can hear somebody playing the piano and we hear again Scriabin’s Etude #11.  She tells us she returned to her childhood home but it had been taken apart and used for firewood.  The house was gone but the Devil was sitting in the ruins waiting for her.  She says there are no more words, only a hook and a coil of rope.  In her dream her mother plays the piano in an empty house.  “From this point on, your life begins.”  Light fades and goes out and the music ends in the darkness.

Meredith Cherry, 29, sits in a rocking chair by a window in a mental hospital in A Child’s Garden of Flesh-eating Plants, speaking to her daughter, 10, whom we do not see.  She tells her daughter that anything she says may be the blathering of ghosts who are always whispering obscenities in her ear.  She lists a series of absurd rules and tells the girl her father was pushed under a train by the Creature From The Black Lagoon in the autumn of 1954.  She says her daughter looks like a picture of her and she says she remembers an educational film called ‘A Field Trip to a Fish Hatchery.”  She got very sad as she watched the thousands of little fish swimming in huge overcrowded tanks and realized that she and the children with her were also being raised so somebody, God, could eat them.  She says she started screaming to let the little fishes out and her Grandfather had to take her away from school.  She tells her daughter that God and Satan are insane Siamese twins, that the garden God planted is poison, and the plants will eat her flesh.  She tells the girl to run and hide and stay away from water.  She asks if the girl can hear the sound of the train in the night and the light fades out.

     In Palimpsest, Ben, in his sixties, speaks to us from his study at night, defining palimpsest as “dark scribblings, half erased, partially obscured by later scribblings,” equating them with love as a collage of superimposed images of past lovers creating unexpected meanings.  He realizes that “every love is a mosaic made of fragments of old loves,” the only constant being his pain, his being alone in a reality that has no relationship to what he desires or loves.  He says he is driving a friend on New Year’s Eve through a blizzard.  His friend, a 26-year-old Mexican woman, is “absolutely enchanted” by the snow while he is trying to keep the car on the icy road.  “Analogy,” Ben says, “is the key, to thought and to creation.”  When the woman asks if he believes in anything, he says he is drawn to animism, the sense that everything around us is alive.  He tells us he is driving her to the airport so she can spend New Year’s Eve with someone she loves.  “For a moment,” he says, “I am in touch with what I have felt in other lives.  Women I have loved.  Some now dead.  There are layers and layers.  The snow falls.  The spirits are all around us.  We move through them in silence, like a dream.”