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Contemporary American Monologues for Women
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• Monologue books for actor’s auditions have always sold well. • These are the first published by TCG, which is drawn from over 100 plays published by TCG.—includes THE contemporary American Playwrights • TODD LONDON WRITES FOR New American Theatre • ABSOLUTE MONOLOGUES: EUROPEAN CLASSICS FOR WOMEN (0-948230-73-8. sold 900 copies at short discount!) • BASIC STOCK FOR ANY DRAMA SECTION
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Theater1
âLISTEN TO YOUR
NIGHTMARESâ
A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY
Zillah Katz is out of time with the play around her: it unfolds in Weimar Germany in the early thirties; she is alone in America, talking to the audience, circa 1990. In her âcompletely convinced, humorless, paranoicâ mind, however, the Hitler years and those of Reagan and Bush are connected, as theyâre both times of ascendant evil. In the authorâs words, Zillahâs a âcontemporary American Jewish woman. 30s. BoHo/East Village New Wave with Anarcho-Punk tendencies.â When sheâs not exhorting the audience, sheâs obsessively firing off letters to the powers of evil.
ZILLAH: German lessons. Listen:
âDas Massengrab.â Mass grave.
âDie Zeit war sehr schlimm.â Times were bad.
âMillionen von Menschen waren tot.â Millions of people were dead. People try to be so fussy and particular when they look at politics, but what I think an understanding of the second half of the twentieth century calls for is not caution and circumspection but moral exuberance. Overstatement is your friend: use it. Take Evil: The problem is that we have this eventâGermany, Hitler, the Holocaustâwhich we have made into THE standard of absolute Evilâwell and good, as standards of Evil go, itâs not badâbut then everyone gets frantic as soon as you try to use the standard, nothing compares, nothing resemblesâand the standard becomes unusable and nothing qualifies as Evil with a capital E. I mean how much of a Nazi do you have to be to qualify for membership? Is a twenty-five-percent Nazi a Nazi or not? Ask yourselves this: itâs 1942; the Goerings are having an intimate soiree; if he got an invitation, would Pat Buchanan feel out of place? Out of place? Are you kidding? Pig heaven, dust off the old tuxedo, kisses to Eva and Adolf. I mean just because a certain exactor-turned-President who shall go nameles sat idly by and watched tens of thousands die of a plague and he couldnât even bother to say he felt bad about it, much less try to help, does this mean he merits comparison to a certain fascist-dictator anti-Semitic mass-murdering psychopath who shall also remain nameless? OF COURSE NOT! I mean I ask youâhow come the only people who ever say âEvilâ anymore are southern cracker televangelists with radioactive blue eye-shadow? None of these bastards look like Hitler, they never will, not exactly, but I say as long as they look like theyâre playing in Mr. Hitlerâs Neighborhood we got no reason to relax.
I never relax. I can work up a sweat reading the Sunday Times. I read, I gasp, I hit the streets at three a.m. with my can of spray paint:
REAGAN EQUALS HITLER! RESIST! DONâT FORGET, WEIMAR HAD A CONSTITUTION TOO!
Moral exuberance. Hallucination, revelation, gut-flutters in the nightâthe internal intestinal night bats, their panicky leathery wingsâthatâs my common sense. I pay attention to that. Donât put too much stock in a good nightâs sleep. During times of reactionary backlash, the only people sleeping soundly are the guys whoâre giving the rest of us bad dreams. So eat something indigestible before you go to bed, and listen to your nightmares.
A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY
ZILLAH:
Dear Mr. President,
I know you will never read this letter. Iâm fully aware of the fact that letters to you donât even make it to the White House, that theyâre brought to an office building in Maryland where civil-servant types are paid to answer the sane ones. Crazy, hostile lettersâlike mineâthe ones written in crayon on butcher paper, the ones made of letters cut out of magazinesâthese get sent to the FBI, analyzed, Xeroxed and burned. But I send them anyway, once a day, and do you know why? Because the loathing I pour into these pages is so ripe, so full-to-bursting, that it is my firm belief that anyone touching them will absorb into their hands some of the toxic energy contained therein. This toxin will be passed upwardsâit is the nature of bureaucracies to pass things verticallyâtill eventually, through a network of handshakes, the Under-Secretary of Outrageous Falsehoods will shake hands with the Secretary for Pernicious Behavior under the Cloak of Night, who will, on a weekly basis in Cabinet meetings, shake hands with you before you nod off to sleep. In this way, through osmosis, little droplets of contagion are being rubbed into your leathery flesh every dayâin this great country of ours there must be thousands of people who are sending you poisoned post. We wait for the day when all the grams and drams and dollops of detestation will destroy you. We attack from below. Our day will come. You can try to stop me. You can raise the price of stamps again. Iâll continue to write. Iâm saving up for a word processor. For me and my cause, money is no object.
Love,
Zillah.
Zillah.
MARISOL
In present-day New York City, the world has turned violent, terrifying, unrecognizable. Apples are extinct, the color blue has disappeared from the sky, cowsâ milk has gone salty, and no one has seen the moon in nine months. An angel appears in this nightmare landscape, âa young black woman in ripped jeans, sneakers, and black T-shirt. Crude silver wings hang limply from the back of Angelâs diamond-studded leather jacket.â She has, until now, been guardian angel to Marisol Perez of the Bronx and, as she details below, saved Marisolâs life many times. Sheâs giving up her charge, though, in order to lead the angelsâ revolution against God. Heâs the one, she claims, whoâs brought the world to ruin. Sheâs talking to the sleeping Marisol.
ANGEL: I kick-started your heart, Marisol. I wired your nervous system. I pushed your fetal blood in the right direction and turned the foam in your infant lungs to oxygen. When you were six and your parents were fighting, I helped you pretend you were underwater: that you were a cold-blooded fish, in the bottom of the black ocean, far away and safe. When racists ran you out of school at ten, screaming I turned the monsters into little columns of salt! At last count, one plane crash, one collapsed elevator, one massacre at the hands of a right-wing fanatic with an Uzi, and sixty-six-thousand-six-hundred-and-three separate sexual assaults never happened because of me. Now the bad news.
I canât expect you to understand the political ins and outs of whatâs going on. But you have eyes. You asked me questions about children and water and war and the moon: the same questions Iâve been asking myself for a thousand years.
The universal body is sick, Marisol. Constellations are wasting away, the nauseous stars are full of blisters and sores, the infected earth is running a temperature, and everywhere the universal mind is wracked with amnesia, boredom, and neurotic obsessions. Because God is old and dying and taking the rest of us with Him. And for too long, much too long, Iâve been looking the other way. Trying to stop the massive hemorrhage with my little hands, with my prayers. But it didnât work and I knew if I didnât do something soon, it would be too late. I called a meeting. And I urged the Heavenly Hierarchiesâthe Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Principalities, Powers, Virtues, Archangels and Angelsâto vote to stop the universal ruin . . . by slaughtering our senile God. And they did. Listen well, Marisol: angels are going to kill the King of Heaven and restore the vitality of the universe with His blood. And Iâm going to lead them.
FAT MEN IN SKIRTS
Phyllis Hogan, âan attractive and sophisticated woman in her 40s,â has just, following the crash of her plane, been stranded on a deserted island with her strange son, Bishop. Everyone else has died. When Bishop complains that heâs starving, she sends him after the only food on the island. âHereâs a knife,â she says. âGo back to the plane and cut the arm off that nun. Bring it back here and Iâll cook it and weâll eat it.â He returns holding the nunâs armâstill clutching a rosaryâtriumphantly aloft. She steps toward the audience and speaks.
PHYLLIS: Lately, I have been having a recurring dream. When I was a little girl, we lived in a part of Philadelphia called Society Hill. In an apartment. Down the hall from us lived a Mr. Antonelli. Mr. Antonelli worked at the Museum of Natural History. And he was big. He was a big man. Mustâve weighed three hundred pounds. He was the fattest human being Iâd ever seen, close up. But he was well-groomed. And on certain nights of the week, Saturdays, I think, Saturdays mostly and Thursdays, Mr. Antonelli would dress as a woman and go wherever three-hundred-pound men who dress as women go, to seek whatever they can mistake for love. Heâd put on a skirt and a blouse, sometimes a mumu-Bloody-Mary-type thing. And a lot of makeup. He wore a wig, a reddish kind of Ethel Merman affair. And always lovely matching jewelry sets: green rhinestone earrings, green rhinestone bracelets, brooches. He got all dolled up and went off to seek others like himself (although I canât imagine there were many others like Mr. Antonelli; three-hundred-pound transvestites are pretty much on their own in the world, I should think). When I was six, I was going to a friendâs birthday party on Saturday, and I was wearing the sweetest little powder-blue jumper, and Mr. Antonelli got into the elevator with my mother and me. He looked down at meâthis great mountain of gelatinous white flesh, and said, âMy goodness, what a sweet little blue dress you have on.â And I said, âYou could borrow it sometime, if you want, Mr. Antonelli.â I was six, and the concept of Junior and Misses sizing had not yet been made clear to me. Well, my mother squeezed my hand so tightly I thought my fingers would snap off. Once on the street, she explained to me that I must never, ever speak to Mr. Antonelli again. If he spoke to me, I was to nod politely. But I was neverâunder any circumstancesâto speak to him again. And I was certainly not to get into the elevator with him. My mother explained to me that Mr. Antonelli was a freak. That he should be locked up. Forgotten about. That Mr. Antonelli, although not to blame him for his condition, was nevertheless, the lowest form of the species, a creature to fear, and his parents, poor souls, must have a terrible burden to bear. Now. In my dream, Iâm a little girl again. And Iâm wearing my little powder-blue jumper. The one I wore that day. Only, Iâm not on my way to any birthday party. Iâm on a field trip with my class from school. Weâre at the zoo. Riding the monorail and laughing. The sun is shining, balloons fill the sky and we have cotton candy for lunch. We go to the reptile house and the polar-bear cage and the tigers are sunning themselves. Then we go to the monkey house. But there arenât any monkeys. There are, climbing the jungle gym, picking salt from their hair, dozens and dozens of fat men in skirts. Huge fat men, with matching jewelry sets, swinging from limb to limb, laughing in no language. And everyone laughs and points. And then they turn around. All the monkeys. All the men turn around at once. They turn around and look at me, right at me. And they all have the same face. And itâs Bishopâs face. They all have my sonâs face.
TENEMENT LOVER:
No Palm Trees/In New York City
The narratorâs monologue is one of several self-contained stories i...
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Acknowledgments
- Contents
- Introduction
- An Actor Chooses: An Interview with Nancy Piccione
- 1. âListen to your nightmares.â
- 2. âMy life with him.â
- 3. âEverything in its place.â
- 4. âWhy donât you talk to a psychiatrist?â
- 5. âMy first masterpiece.â
- 6. âThings you kids donât know.â
- 7. âAre you alone?â
- 8. âThe art of diningâ
- 9. âOne home to the next.â
- 10. âI thought my heart would burst.â
- 11. He got sick
- 12. âDo business with the Devilâ
- 13. âWhat do you teach?â
- 14. âBring back memories!â
- 15. âYou wait your whole life for something good to happen and then it does!â
- 16. âDreaming ahead.â
- 17. âWorld without end.â
- Further Reading
- About the Author