Tag: monologues

The setting for Nick Lucifer at Club Hell is Nick’s “somewhat less than respectable but rather alluring and very atmospheric establishment, Club Hell.” The time could be the present or any decade from the 1920s to the 1950s.  Nick is a middle-aged gangster who speaks to us from his table, nursing a drink.  He describes being on top of the highest building in the city with the Old Man’s kid, urging him to jump.  Nick says he told the kid that he jumped and survived with just a limp.  But the truth, he says, was that the Old Man pushed him and he bounced off an awning, breaking his leg.  But that started the legend that he can’t be killed.  He calls the Old Man a psychopath, a destroyer who demands absolute obedience.  He talks about the Old Man knocking up a virgin and getting some poor stooge to marry her, and when his son grows up he lets the kid get murdered.  He talks, too, of Abe who is ordered by the Old Man to kill his own son.  But the Old Man called off the hit.  Nick says that he slept with Lil, the Old Man’s wife, but so did everyone else.  He also slept with the wife of the other son, who he saw lying naked in the garden.  He gave her an apple, not knowing that she and her husband would be thrown out of the garden.  Nick thinks the Old Man is a homicidal maniac who helped him set up his club so he would have someone to blame if anything goes wrong.  He says he heard from Johnny, the kid from Patmos, that something big is coming down the pike.  He says the Old Man is sick and may be dying.  When he dies, Nick plans to take over, franchising Club Hell.  But sometimes, Nick says, he thinks the Old Man isn’t real, that Nick just made him up because he was too scared to be alone.  But, he says, the floor show with naked girls will start in a couple of minutes.  He offers a toast to his imaginary silent partner, wishing him a long and happy death, but planning to bring a gun when he dances on his grave, just in case.  “You can’t trust a son of bitch like that.”

In Web we see a screen with a constant flow of images, speeding up as the play progresses with more and more images of spiders and spiderwebs.  In the darkness we hear a woman’s voice, “friendly, reasonable . . . not mechanical or robotic.”  The voice speaks in short sentences, telling the audience that “we” know everything about “you,” including the date of your death and what you are thinking.  The voice urges “you” to “stare into our magical glowing abyss” and never be alone again.  Blackness.

In Furnace, a 62-year-old man speaks to us from his basement, telling us that he finds background noise comforting.  He says that when he had to put in a new furnace it took him a while to get used to the slightly different, more complex, sound the motor made.  But the more he listened to the noise as he lay in bed the more it seemed like voices.  As the weather got colder, he would stop whatever he was doing when the furnace came on and he would listen to what seemed like a choir singing some kind of polyphonic music, but not all singing the same song.  He tells us he has been reading the Book of Daniel from the King James version of the Bible.  He says his wife always bought used books rather than new ones because she was interested in what people had written in the margins.  She didn’t write in her Bible but made little crosses beside a verse that struck her.  He realizes that, years ago, his wife aborted a child and that one of the voices he hears in the furnace sounds like the wail of a newborn.  He tells us he can’t eat meat since his wife died and that he doesn’t know who he is.  He says he always knew she was betraying him and then relates the Bible story of Nebuchadnezzar throwing three men into a furnace but seeing four, although three walk out unharmed.  He says his wife made a cross by the verse about the fourth man but he doesn’t know what it means.  He tells us that since he began hearing voices in the furnace he has been remembering his dreams.  He says his wife had been staying out late and drinking and that, coming home in the dead of winter, her car drove right into a tree.  He says he doesn’t know, will never know, if it was an accident or she drove into the tree on purpose.  He thinks he can hear her voice among the others in the furnace, trying to tell him something.  He woke up from a dream about her and realized that the voices in the furnace were the voices of the damned, burning in Hell.  But he can’t make out what she is trying to tell him.

Crocodile is a monologue for a young woman in her twenties, identified as Jenna.  The time is early in the 1920s and the location is a bedroom in Ohio with moonlight slanting through a window and a small table on which is a half-filled glass.  We hear a ticking clock and see Jenna sitting on the bed in a plain white nightgown.  She tells us that, because her sister convinced her that Captain Hook’s Crocodile was waiting in the dark under her bed, she has thought a lot about the Crocodile.  She says that Peter Pan cut off Captain Hook’s hand and threw it to the Crocodile who must have liked it because after that he followed Captain Hook everywhere.  She says this is the story of nearly everybody’s life, finding some person or situation that makes us happy, losing it, and spending the rest of our lives searching for it.  She says that perhaps there was nothing special about the hand, that the Crocodile was feeling particularly happy that day and mistakenly associated the happiness with the hand.  She says romantic love is nostalgia for an imagined happiness that we have misunderstood and misremembered, and so, she says, is obsession with revenge.  She says that all through her childhood she heard a clock ticking at night, the alarm clock her sister had put under the bed, but she thought it was the clock the Crocodile had swallowed.  She says her mother is evil, but that she has always been a good girl.  She says she attacked her husband with a butcher knife on their wedding night, telling us he married her for her father’s money and she married him to keep her father out of jail.  Her mother said she killed her father in the bath tub and that’s why she is locked up in this place.  She says her mother has smuggled her a special treat, icedgreen tea to soothe her nerves.  She picks up the half-filled glass and says that Tinker Bell drinks the poison without complaint.  She empties the glass and says she plans to haunt her mother until she walks the plank.  She asks us if we can hear the clock in her stomach, tick tock, tick tock, and we hear the sound of the clock again as the light fades on her and goes out.

A History of the Devil is a longer monologue spoken by a young woman, Maria.  She tells us she doesn’t believe in God but she does believe in the Devil.  She is waiting for a doctor to call her about her headaches and wonders why he hasn’t called.  She says she hears voices in her head that may be the Devil.  She knows her boyfriend, the conductor of the orchestra she plays in, is cheating on her.  She once called a phone number she had found in his wallet and a woman with a very sexy voice answered and in the background she could hear a piano playing one of the MephistoWaltzes that scared her as a child because, after her father left and she got sick, she and her mother had to move into her grandfather’s big old spooky house and someone always played that waltz late at night in an upstairs room she wasn’t allowed to enter.  Once she had heard the woman’s voice on the telephone, she had to find out what she looked like.  Maria talks about the irrationality of loving someone, saying that we know romantic love is neurotic, psychotic, and doomed, but we pretend we don’t know because love make us stupid.  Looking through her boyfriend’s address book, she finds the letter M and an address and decides to drive over there to look at the woman.  She says the house had an uncanny resemblance to her grandfather’s house, and she sat in the car with rain pouring down, enduring a terrible headache, until finally a little red car that expensive prostitutes drive pulled in front of the house and a beautiful woman got out and ran inside.  Maria drove off but says she can’t stop thinking about the woman who looks like her.  She follows the woman to a movie, then to a carnival house of mirrors.  She describes her nightmares about being trapped inside the mechanism of a clock and of having intercourse with the Devil.  Her keys disappear and she thinks the Devil has taken them only to find that a little black dog had dug them up.  She thinks the Mona Lisa is looking to her left because she has just seen the Devil in the mirror over her left shoulder.  She tells us that after her grandfather died she looked into the room she had not been allowed to enter and saw a big old clock and a painting of a horrible woman feeding a man with a spoon.  She describes two more nightmares—one about being trapped in an elevator and the other about being unable to change a horrifying television program—and says that she started hiding in the bushes outside the house where the woman plays the Mephisto Waltzes.  One night she saw the woman naked in front of a mirror and realized that she and the woman resembled each other more and more.  She sees the woman’s name, Maria, on her mailbox, and, after the woman turns out the lights, she climbs in the window and goes up to the bedroom and looks down on the woman.  She hears a voice urging her to kill the woman and thinks it is the Devil whispering in her head.  The woman wakes up and smiles at her like the Mona Lisa and she presses the pillow on her face until she stops struggling.  Maria says she doesn’t remember driving home and thinks it must have been a dream.  She thinks the Devil is coming into her house at night and moving the furniture.  Her dreams, she tells us, are getting more and more chaotic and she thinks the horrible woman in the painting is feeding the man rat poison.  She says her boyfriend is coming for dinner and perhaps she will put rat poison in his soup.  When she looks in the mirror she sees the woman looking back at her with an expression of infinite pity, but she seems to be looking past her.  Over her left shoulder she catches a glimpse of something grinning at her:  the Devil who is always there.

Yvette, an old woman, speaks to us from a circle of light in Listening, recalling her experiences as a child during WWII in occupied France.  She and Ernst, an older boy, had been left behind in the chateau when the Germans used it as their command center.  She and Ernst hid in the ancient, secret passages behind the walls where they listened to what was said.  Neither of them knew German very well, but at night Ernst would sneak out into the back garden and tell the Resistance what they had heard.  She says life was terrifying and exciting, living in the shadows, but one night Ernst did not return.  Her sleep pattern was disrupted and her head fell against the wall.  The Germans heard it, and one went to get an ax.  They were deciding where to smash into the wall when the telephone rang.  She could hear that something was wrong.  There was gunfire, a huge explosion, and the Germans forgot about the noise on the other side of the wall.  When she woke, she heard birds singing and realized the Germans were gone.  They had left plenty of food, so she decided to stay where she was until it was safe to come out.  American soldiers took over the house and then another family moved in.  She says she doesn’t know how long she has been living behind the walls.  She has grown very fond of the family.  The wife says food keeps disappearing from the pantry, but the husband says she’s imagining it and the daughter thinks it is a ghost.  She says she feels like a ghost, lurking in the dark, listening.

We hear “eerie hurdy-gurdy music” in darkness, then the sound of an elephant trumpeting, as Olmsted, “a distinguished-looking old man,” appears out of the fog in Portal.  The time is 1903 and the place is a house on an island in Maine.  Olmsted tells us that his associate, Vaux (pronounced to rhyme with “flocks”), has been found floating in Gravesend Bay.  Olmsted is convinced he was murdered, like Harry, Eliot, and Downing because they knew a secret.  Now he, Olmsted, has been kidnapped and taken to an island off the coast of Maine.  He says that when he and Vaux designed Central Park they made twenty gates, each at the exact location of a portal to another dimension, a series of labyrinths within labyrinths, gateways to inter-dimensional travel confounding all current understanding of time and space.  Those who have been murdered knew of these secret portals and the lords of the dark subterranean labyrinth live among us to protect the portals.  Olmsted says that the ego, what he imagines is himself, is only a surface beneath which is a hell of other hidden dimensions, “world upon world we cannot consciously, rationally know, which nevertheless determine how we behave and what we do and what we feel, who we love, who we hate, what we fear . . . .”  He says that perhaps he is mad, after all, and asks if we hear a sound, perhaps a door opening, a portal to another dimension.  He says the portal is before him and he hopes soon to have the courage to walk through it.

Inspector John Ruffing, an old man in 1940, speaks to us at night from a place on the south coast of England, near Rye, in Mermaid.  We hear gulls as lights come up on Ruffing telling us that he never liked the ocean and never learned to swim but he has been sent to the coast because of the war to look for “submarines, saboteurs, smugglers, ghosts,” although all he can think of is his dead wife.  He tells us that she loved what terrified her, and that, growing up near Land’s End, she and her two sisters would swim naked in the ocean at night.  When they were first married, she took him to the shore at night, took off all her clothes, and ran into the water, “like a savage.”  He stood knee-deep in the waves calling to her because she always swam out too far.  Restless, she heard voices, but never told him what they said.  He says the only times he was truly happy were when he was holding her, comforting her.  She was, he tells us, a “dancer on the edge of oblivion,” and he desperately wanted to save her but could not.  Walking on the shore at night he thinks he hears her calling to him.  She slipped out of the house one night, took off her clothes, went into the water, and never came back.  He says he does not believe she drowned herself, deliberately abandoning their child.  He asks us if we hear somebody out there in the water.  “Perhaps if I just walk out a little ways.”

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.”