Tag: monologues

There is one character, named Octavia, in the script for How to Tell a Devil.   She speaks from an old barn in the moonlight.  She asks “ the boys” if they know how to tell a Devil.   She says she knows and she knows what boys want.  She says there is something in the barn, that she hears whispering, and she points to an old hammock that also whispers.  She says she stopped going to church because she heard them whispering about how hard she took her little brother’s  death.  The voices in her head say that her little brother wanted her to run off with him, but she was scared her Daddy would find them and beat them, so her little brother enlisted and went off to the war in France where he drowned crossing a river.  Her father and two older brothers all had her and were surprised when her daughter had thick black curly hair, a big nose, and a deep olive complexion, the spitting image of the gypsy feller who ran the house of mirrors when the carnival was in town.  Her father and brothers said they ook the baby across the county line and left it on somebody’s doorstep.  But she later learned that they had killed the baby and buried it in the woods.  Then her brothers disappeared and she tells her father that she will make him some of the beef stew she made for her brothers before they left..But she put rat poison in the stew and the stew she made for her father was from their bodies.  She showed him the bones and the two heads she had hung from the rafters and used for batting practice.   Father started vomiting so she hit him over the head with the baseball bat, put the shotgun is his mouth and pulled the trigger.  She says she will show the boys the heads after they finish their stew.  She says  her Daddy taught her how to tell a Devil.  You put your hand between its legs and if you feel a snake there, it’s the Devil.

 Bianca, a young woman, tells us she is speaking from Venice.  We hear the sound of a cello playing  a Sibelius solo concerto.  The cello stops and lights come up on Bianca feeling as if someone is watching her.  She says her friend Desdemona attracted men like flies to cow flop.  They met at an acting seminar in Munich but she felt she had known her all her life, that she dreamed about her before she knew her.  She says the man has been following her since she got to Venice and then tells us that Desdemona suddenly disappeared; the police were polite but no help.   Then she got a postcard from Desdemon and she packed up and came here.  On the back of the card Desdemona had written Making the Beast with Two Backs.  Wish you were here.  There are times when she thinks she has seen her disappearing down one of those  narrow streets.  She says Desdemona had a recurring dream about a creature crawling out of the dark lagoon and dragging her into the water.  Bianca says that sometimes we want the people we love dead so we can own them forever.  She says she keeps getting lost in her dreams and that she is not what she is, that nothing is what it seems, and that something is wrong with everybody.  Venice is the portal to another dimension, the place where we come to die.  Or, she says, perhaps Desdemona isn’t real. Or she’s the person Bianca sees in the mirror.  She asks if we can see her, reflected in the mirror.  We hear the cello as the light fades out on her.

The Madness of King Ubu is a monologue for a large orange person who is surrounded by crash dummies.  Ubu tramps into the light and loudly says, “GOLD,” telling us that we thought he was going to say “shit” but gold is better.  He wants to build a golden tower with golden furniture and all the people will bow down and worship him.  In his kingdom the truth will be whatever he says it is.  He indicates the crash dummies as his Secretary of Farting, the Secretary of Masturbation, the Secretary of Gold-Plated Turds, the Secretary of Brain Death, and the Secretary of Horse Buggery.  People, he says, are stupid and they will believe anything if you keep screaming it over and over.  He picks up a stuffed animal cat, saying he loves nothing more than fondling a nice, soft pussy.  He thinks the crash dummies are whispering that he is a fat, stinking toad, and he puts on a hand puppet and does the voice of the puppet arguing with his own voice.  The voices call each other puppet until he rips the puppet off his hand and throws it upstage, the puppet voice screaming.  In his own voice he shouts he is the monster they see in the mirror that they have secretly wanted all their lives.  Out of breath, he staggers, telling us that he dreams that everything he touches turns to gold until he realizes that it’s shit and he is suffocating in it.  When he wakes up and realizes it was all a dream, he wonders how he can know what is real.  He says he could be the Emperor of nothing, or another crash dummy, or perhaps somebody else’s dummy.  He asks who wrote the puppet play he is in, and where will he or the audience be when the play ends.  “None of us will be real,” he says as the light fades out.

Mother Hubbard, an old woman, speaks to the audience from her kitchen in a circle of light surrounded by darkness in The Mother Hubbard Enigmas.  She says she heard noises in the cupboard that she thought were rats, but there was nothing there when she looked.  She says she put a bone for the dog in the cupboard and found that at night the bone had moved at least two feet.  When she left the bone on the kitchen floor it was gone in the morning.  She thought the dog was dead but then at night she heard it howling for a bone and heard laughing after she put tripe on the kitchen floor.  When she looked the tripe was gone but she could smell tobacco that her long-dead father smoked.  She put beer in a dish in a corner and heard the sound of lapping in the darkness.  When she came home with fruit she heard the sound of a flute but there was no one in the kitchen and what looked like an old wig was crawling across a cupboard shelf.  In the morning, she says, it was gone but there was one raisin which she decided not to eat.  Now at night she hears goats and a clip-clop sound on the floorboards.  She wonders if she could teach the dog to stand on its head and dance and play the flute, and they could run off and join the carnival.  She finds old shoes scattered around the house and thirty-year-old newspapers with half-finished crossword puzzles.   Everything is a mystery, but the more she thinks about it the more it seems to her that she never had a dog.  She hears a voice whispering in her ear that tells her to crawl into the cupboard and close the door behind her and never come out.

In Old Woman on the Subway we see the old woman seated on a moving subway car with flashing lights and hear occasional muted subway rattling.  She tells us that “we” have God tied up in the back yard with a long chain.  He snarls and growls and slobbers but the chain yanks him back hard.  She says if he ever gets loose he will “mess you up good.”  She tells us her second husband used to mess her up pretty good and now she can hear the radio stations on Mars on a rainy night.   She says the Devil lived in a big clock above the ice cream parlor in her home town and would come out at night and eat up your dog or your children or bite you bad on the leg.  The Devil has spikes on his penis that make you howl but then he bites your throat and blood gushes out.  She says the preacher back home had a penis like a cheese log but he got run over by a street car and they saved the penis for a door stop.  She likes the Martian radio broadcasts but the medicine the doctor gave her to help her think more clearly interfered with the broadcasts so she gave the medicine to the paper boy.  Doctors just torture you until all your money is gone and then they kill you, just like her third husband.  She wants to be buried in a telephone booth in case she needs to make some phone calls.  When she gets home, she says, she has to feed God raw meat.  She keeps him chained up to lure the Devil who has been after her all her life.  The Devil sits just out of range of God’s chain and torments him.  Maybe one day she will let God loose and he’ll bite the Devil in the crotch.  Sometimes she dreams about her baby but she has learned from the mice running around in the ceiling that you have to make sacrifices if you’re going to achieve anything in life.  When she gets home at night the house is empty and she feels sad.  But she looks out at God chewing on a bone and his eyes are gleaming.  He’s waiting.

The setting for Henry Miller Explains Women is a table at a bar late at night.  Henry is “bald, wears glasses, (and) has a Brooklyn accent.”  He begins by asking us what any man ever knows about a woman.  He says that any man who talks about women is digging his own grave, because whatever you say, you’re wrong.  Desiring a woman is like waking up in a coffin; you’re trapped inside.  Writing is something you do to keep from losing your mind while you’re suffering and being humiliated by women.  Nobody with a penis has ever been able to figure out women, not even Freud, who didn’t have a clue.  He tells us he left his first wife and child for June, who never got tired of sex and who supported him so he could write masterpieces.  She said that old men paid her at the dance hall to just sit and talk with her.  She denied taking drugs but somehow scraped up the money to send him to live in Paris and write.

In Paris, he met Anais who looked like a lovely, innocent child but who was insatiable for sex, foe everything.  She recorded everything in her diary but, he says, she ‘s the only person he’s ever met who is a bigger fucking liar than he is.  He thinks her Daddy, “a Fascist perfumed sleaze bag” probably taught her how to  lie.  He and she are an amalgamation of all the lies they’ve ever told.  If they can’t write, they don’t exist.  The important thing is to just keep moving, keep writing.  He says he was a bad writer until the part of him that gave a fuck what anybody else thought died.  He and Anais will never write a masterpiece because they’re both made of fragments and are always in the middle of something.

When he tells Anais that his grown daughter wants to see him, she says his daughter is very angry with him and asks him to promise not to sleep with her.  She says there are no limits.  He says Shakespeare had the problem of what to do with daughters.  He is terrified about going to see his daughter, but there is one true thing he can say about women:  nothing else means a god damned thing.

Part of The Anais Plays, Anais in the House of Mirrors  presents Anais, “a beautiful woman in her thirties or forties,” speaking to us from a room that looks out over her back garden.  She says everyone carries a private tragedy that she mourns all her life.  She says her father abandoned his family when she was eleven, and her mother crossed the ocean with her to live in New York, where she started writing her journal as a love letter to her father to persuade him to come back to them.   The house in New York was full of mirrors and she hoped that, in one of them, she would see her father looking over her shoulder and she dreamed that he came out of the mirrors to hold and comfort her.  She says she felt closest to him when he was spanking her, but if a parent abandons you nothing can ever make it right again.  She says her father locked “us children” in a room and beat her mother and then locked the mother up and beat the children.  She says she has a memory of her father doing something to her in the attic but she’s not sure if it’s a real memory, and her father, years later, said she was a liar just like him.  She tells us she was proud her father wrote to her as if she was an adult, speaking of all the women he was sleeping with.  Her diary was the only way she could make sense of her life.  When she turned thirteen, people started falling in love with her, first her cousin Eduardo—who really wanted boys—and then Hugo, whom she married.  Hugo’s hero, his old professor from Columbia, declined to sleep with her because he didn’t feel right about cheating on his mistress.  In Paris, she met Henry, whose writing overwhelmed her.  When Henry’s wife June showed up from New York, she fell madly in love with her.  June could make any man do anything she wanted but she thought Henry was a genius and supported him.  When she left, Anais says, she and Henry started doing it in every way it was possible to do it.  Hugo refuses to believe that she is unfaithful, but then reads her journal about having intercourse with Henry.  She says he read the red diary which is fictional; her green diary is the truthful one.  She tells us that Hugo came home unexpectedly while she and Henry were in bed, but Henry managed to crawl out a window.  After that, Hugo always told her exactly when he would be home, but she kept Henry there until the very last moment.  She went to see Eduardo’s French psychoanalyst who, the moment they got naked, started whacking her buttocks with a whip and talking like the villain in a dime novel about the circus.  She got the giggles and advises us never to giggle at a Frenchman with a whip.  She met one of his patients, Antonin Artaud, who fell hopelessly, miserably, in love with her so she slept with him, feeling she owed it to art.  So, now she says, she’s sleeping with four people but still hasn’t found what she’s looking for.

She says she feeds off chaos, sleeping with three or four different men a day, but then she got word from her father that he wanted to see her.  She tells him the most horrible thing a person can do is abandon a child.  He says the most horrible thing is to betray yourself.  She makes love with him and agrees that they have always belonged together.  She breaks up with Artaud and the French psychoanalyst and writes in great detail in her journal about how it feels to have intercourse with her father.  Her father asks her never to write about their incest in her diary but she says she can never betray her diary.  She talks to the psychoanalyst Otto Rank and then sleeps with him (although he looks like a frog), but he helps her understand that deep inside all betrayed children is the profound need for revenge.  She abandons her father the way he abandoned her.  She still wants to be loved but knows that love makes us miserable.  She says that her diary is all she is; the only truth is that she is what she writes.  She says that everything she’s told us is the truth, except for the lies, which were for our own good.  She has a dream that her father is knocking on her door in a rainstorm, screaming that he loves her and wants her to let him in.  She says he is an ugly little man, turns off the light and goes to bed.

     Humpty Dumpty  is performed by a large, round person, shaped rather like an egg, sitting on a wall.  He tells us he is celebrating the completion of a thirty-seven-and-a-half-foot wall, part of his plan to make The Other Side of the Looking Glass great again.  He says that he has nothing against the honest, hard-working rabbits coming to Wonderland who can contribute significantly to our way of life, but he doesn’t welcome rabbits from shit holes who bring their shit holes with them.  He says we have already wasted too much time exterminating the rabbits who were already here when we got here, where of course we have always been and always will be because God gave us this country.  He says he is in no danger of falling off the wall because his personal physician has certified that he is the most perfectly balanced egg in the observable universe; and, if he should ever fall, the White King, with all of his horses and all of his men, will put him back together.  He says he has a very cordial relationship with the White King because for many years it has been his great honor and privilege to wash his dirty money.  He says everything is a game and the point of the game is to win and rules don’t matter.  He says he won’t take any questions from that uppity Alice person and asks that the lizards take her out and punch her in the face if she gives them any trouble.

He realizes that nobody’s listening to him and says he feels dizzy and speaks of a dream in which he is falling and feeling intense heat and thinks God is making an omelet.  He wonders why God can’t go to the Waffle House like a normal person.  He says he is confused and doesn’t know which side of the wall he is on.  He says he doesn’t know where he came from and he doesn’t know who he is.  Then he says it is just a dream, that he’s just a character in a nursery rhyme.  He sees a strange dark shape above him and we hear the sound of a giant bird screeching and see a great shadow across the stage.  Humpty says that God in the form of a giant bird has come to give him his just reward and take him to the Waffle House.  Losing his balance, he falls over backwards on the upstage side of the wall, screaming.  We hear the sound of an enormous splat and the lights black out.

     Humpty Dumpty  is performed by a large, round person, shaped rather like an egg, sitting on a wall.  He tells us he is celebrating the completion of a thirty-seven-and-a-half-foot wall, part of his plan to make The Other Side of the Looking Glass great again.  He says that he has nothing against the honest, hard-working rabbits coming to Wonderland who can contribute significantly to our way of life, but he doesn’t welcome rabbits from shit holes who bring their shit holes with them.  He says we have already wasted too much time exterminating the rabbits who were already here when we got here, where of course we have always been and always will be because God gave us this country.  He says he is in no danger of falling off the wall because his personal physician has certified that he is the most perfectly balanced egg in the observable universe; and, if he should ever fall, the White King, with all of his horses and all of his men, will put him back together.  He says he has a very cordial relationship with the White King because for many years it has been his great honor and privilege to wash his dirty money.  He says everything is a game and the point of the game is to win and rules don’t matter.  He says he won’t take any questions from that uppity Alice person and asks that the lizards take her out and punch her in the face if she gives them any trouble.

He realizes that nobody’s listening to him and says he feels dizzy and speaks of a dream in which he is falling and feeling intense heat and thinks God is making an omelet.  He wonders why God can’t go to the Waffle House like a normal person.  He says he is confused and doesn’t know which side of the wall he is on.  He says he doesn’t know where he came from and he doesn’t know who he is.  Then he says it is just a dream, that he’s just a character in a nursery rhyme.  He sees a strange dark shape above him and we hear the sound of a giant bird screeching and see a great shadow across the stage.  Humpty says that God in the form of a giant bird has come to give him his just reward and take him to the Waffle House.  Losing his balance, he falls over backwards on the upstage side of the wall, screaming.  We hear the sound of an enormous splat and the lights black out.