Tag: monologues

In the darkness on stage we hear crickets and the sounds of a woods at night, and then the lights for Panther come up on John Rose, a very old man, sitting on a fallen tree.  The year is 1988 and John says that there is something waiting for him in the woods.  He says that Jessie, his sister, long dead, told him to watch out for panthers.  He reminisces about the members of his family who have passed, saying he would have died himself if he had not promised Jessie that, if she could not live to be a hundred, he would.  He talks about seeing 21 wild turkeys, “like giant cockroach demons,” race across his back yard.  He tells us his dreams of uncovering a hole in the side of a hill that is a portal to some terrible place, and of being in a dark theatre and seeing a girl in black, speaking to herself in a strange gibberish as she moves past him to her lover sitting alone in the front row.  He feels warm breath near him in the darkness of the woods.  He has endured his hundred years.  He calls out “Jessie?” twice and the lights go to black.

In the darkness on stage we hear crickets and the sounds of a woods at night, and then the lights for Panther come up on John Rose, a very old man, sitting on a fallen tree.  The year is 1988 and John says that there is something waiting for him in the woods.  He says that Jessie, his sister, long dead, told him to watch out for panthers.  He reminisces about the members of his family who have passed, saying he would have died himself if he had not promised Jessie that, if she could not live to be a hundred, he would.  He talks about seeing 21 wild turkeys, “like giant cockroach demons,” race across his back yard.  He tells us his dreams of uncovering a hole in the side of a hill that is a portal to some terrible place, and of being in a dark theatre and seeing a girl in black, speaking to herself in a strange gibberish as she moves past him to her lover sitting alone in the front row.  He feels warm breath near him in the darkness of the woods.  He has endured his hundred years.  He calls out “Jessie?” twice and the lights go to black.

In Mulberry Street, Ben speaks to the audience about a story told by his grandfather shortly before he died about coming as an immigrant to Mulberry Street in New York and encountering a little girl afraid to go into the tenement because, she says, there is something in the dark of the hallway, two floors up, that whispers at her.  Little more than a boy himself, the grandfather agrees to precede the little girl up the stairs.  The light in the second floor hallway had burned out, and the grandfather heard something like a whisper as he stood in the dark, listening, trying to see, and suddenly felt that he had been in this situation before, back in Italy.  He remembered that the boys of his village, Savignano, would go down from their village and up the other side of the gorge to Greci, a village that was mostly Albanian.  When they were younger, they fought with the Greciboys, but as they got older they would sneak over to meet the Albanian girls.  They would meet the girls in an abandoned house halfway up the Greci side of the hill, a dangerous adventure because they might be caught.  One night the grandfather had walked to the abandoned house and heard a whimpering sound, strange and unsettling.  He had a choice:  he could go into the house or he could turn around and go home.  He recalled a story his mother had told him about David being told by the Lord to wait until he heard the wind stirring the tops of the mulberry trees where his enemies were hidden and then to kill all he found.  Perhaps the sound the grandfather had heard  was a ghost, or a girl, or an animal, or a trap.  He hesitated for some time then turned and went home, but he wondered if he’d done the right thing.  Going back in the daylight, he found the house empty except for a small pile of bones, perhaps from a small animal.  Now, in the hallway, he faces an uncannily similar moment of truth and this time he moves purposefully into the darkness.

A much longer monologue, Scarborough Fair, is spoken by Cheryl, a woman in her early twenties, recalling a short-lived love affair with the man she is speaking to, telling him what he remembers.  They each lived at the top of tower dormitories on a university campus and she describes the cooking and the music played in the basement of the dorms and the pitiful classroom situations with classes to large for their assigned rooms and the material presented through videotape.  She describes how they met in Psych class and realized they both worked in the library.  Her father, who taught at the university, had a study carrel on the top floor of the library. She says that she knew she was the girl inside his head the minute she met him.  She says their souls are burning together, that she will be burning in his head the moment he dies.  We learn that the man she is talking to is named Ben   Just when they are about to have intercourse in the library carrel, Cheryl tells Ben that if her boyfriend found out he would hurt Ben and she doesn’t want him to be hurt.  She tells Ben that she lives with this boyfriend but she doesn’t want Ben to leave her because it would make her insane again and probably kill her.  She says that sometimes she has had sex with other men, and women, when she was using drugs.  She and Ben make love in the library eventually, and in Ben’s red coach house where they would read Finnegan’s Wake in the afternoons and fall asleep   She recalls their experiences together and her appreciation of Duns Scotus.  When Ben was offered a scholarship to graduate school, he asked her if she wanted to go with him to Massachusetts.  He says he won’t go without her.  During the troubles over the Vietnam War, when the soldiers came on campus, Ben took her to his father’s house.  She says that he will leave her and forget her, finding her in other women.  She tells him that he will go to Massachusetts and never see her again but she will own him forever because he will always remember her.

In Sycorax, the woman speaks to her son, Caliban, about how being pregnant with him saved her life in Algiers, where men fear a woman’s mind more than anything.  Rather than kill her, they marooned her on the deserted island where she gave birth to him.  She says she cannot remember the spell that imprisoned Ariel in a tree.  She tells how when she was a girl Setebos entered her as a blue stream of moonlight and taught her sorceries, how to control the weather, control the flow of time, and fashion a robe of invisibility.  By opening herself to the devil Setebos (devils are masks of God), she gained power to do anything, but she tells her son that what the mind creates, even magic, is nothing but a pile of cuttlefish bones.  The ravens had overheard her boasting that she could control Setebos and reported this to him and he caused the men of Algiers to banish her.  She thinks Setebos fears silence, the silence that made all things, but she misses him and thinks perhaps she was the last love of a dying god.  She warns Caliban that people are coming to the island who will hate him, not knowing who or what he is.  She says she has seen a man on a ship with a child in his arms who will try to enslave Caliban with a book.  She urges Caliban to steal the book and copulate with the man’s daughter, peopling the island with Calibans.  Seeing a red flash in the sky she thinks Setebos has come to make love to her and she leaves, telling her son not to look for her, for if he does all he will find will be a pile of cuttlefish bones.

In Event Horizon, the Captain, a middle-aged man in a pilot’s uniform, addresses the audience as if they were passengers on a vehicle traveling in space, telling them that soon they will be arriving at the Event Horizon, the end of the observable universe, from which nothing can return.  Although all hopes and choices end, he says, they may draw some comfort knowing that somewhere in the Event Horizon there is everything that ever existed.  He says they are probably asking themselves why they didn’t have more sexual intercourse when they had the chance, but, he says, it would have been over before they knew what was happening, like everything else in their lives.  He does, however, thank the Flight Attendant, Sally, for a “magical layover” in Toledo.  He tells the passengers that they have always been completely at the mercy of circumstances far beyond their control or comprehension, that they have always lived on the edge of an abyss, in darkness, where every day is Judgement Day.  He hopes they have had a pleasant journey and as he is wishing them luck and thanking them, his voice stops and the lights black out.

Devoured is a short monologue spoken by Betty, 19, who lives in Pendragon County in east Ohio.  The year is 1938 and Betty makes a little girl doll as she speaks a “once upon a time” story about an old Swedish woman who lived in the woods and made dolls and had many dogs.  One day the old woman fell and broke her hip and the dogs devoured her and became wild.  Later, a girl walked into the woods with her little sister and thought she saw an old man motioning to them to go deeper into the woods.  The old man resembled a photograph she had of her grandfather, the man who had wanted to buy the old woman’s property to build a hunting lodge but who had been struck by lightning and became delusional.  She had been told that her grandfather, Judge Rooney, had died in 1889, but she thought he might still be alive and was beckoning her to go deeper into the woods.  The girl got very lost and realized that her little sister had disappeared.  The woods became foggy as the girl called out for her sister and tried to find her way out of the woods.  When she sat down in the thick gloom to rest, she thought she heard something moving in the bushes near her and reached out her hand to find a little pile of bones.  In the morning her father found her lying in a field near her house but they never found her sister.  The girl makes dolls now, Becky tells us, and can only make out shadows in a world that looks to her like a wilderness of thick dense fog.  She and the doll look out into the darkness.  The doll has no eyes.  Light fades and goes out.

Olive, a waitress in Psalms of Scattered Bones, speaks to us about her boyfriend, Jacob, who, she says, was vain, a liar, carried a straight razor, didn’t believe in God, and thought that life was Hell.  She says that the sex was exciting although she laughed when he made love to her because it made her happy.  She tells us of passing an old house on her way to work at the restaurant and noticing an old man looking out at her from a window at the top of the house.  He was there, looking at her, every day when she walked to work and every night when she walked home, no matter how late.  Sometimes she heard the sound of an old player piano, out of tune and skipping parts, and sometimes she smelled stew meat cooking.  She says she teased Jacob about her having another admirer, and sometimes he would walk home with her and see the old man, whom he hated, looking down.  Jacob became convinced that the old man had lots of money and decided to kill him.  One cloudy, windy night, Jacob decided to kill the old man, but first he took Olive into the shadows of the ruined garden behind the house and made love to her and held her until she fell asleep.  When she woke up, naked and very cold, she saw the old man looking down at her.  She grabbed her clothes and ran home but Jacob wasn’t there and she never saw him again.  But she remembers two things about that morning:  the smell of roasting flesh, and, in the garden, the sight of hundreds and hundreds of bones.

In The Rat-Catcher’s Tale, Nanny, an old woman in a circle of light on a dark stage, speaks to the audience as if they were children, telling them a bedtime story “with a very happy ending.”  She proceeds to narrate the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin who rid the town of rats by playing his pipe and leading all the rats into the river.  But the mayor refused to pay the piper’s fee and at night the piper came back, played his pipe, and led all the children of the town into a mountain cave that was filled with rats.  The people could hear the children screaming as the rats devoured them.  When the people dug into the mountain they found “a great many little piles of bones.”  Nanny wonders if the children liked the “nice” story and tells them (us) that she is not really their Nanny but the Queen of the Rats who, with her subjects, is going to eat the members of the audience.  The actor makes several choking noises and seems to pull the head of a squeaking rat from her mouth.  The lights go to black but we hear the sound of squeaking in the dark.  (Nigro adds a note to the effect that no live rat should ever be used in this production and suggests how the desired effect may be achieved.)