A Play In One Act

(Thunder crashes, Charlie sits downstage left, enter Rosie through the bedroom door)


She was quiet like the calm of a storm and took center stage with a raging silence unbeknownst to Charlie. Her eyes like knives -- bloodshot and heavy -- with very little temptation in their color.

 
(The ceiling collapses revealing a multitude of corpses. A distraught collaboration of the unkindly nuances of Charlie and Rosie's marriage that had for years become a normal and removably uncultured kind of dance.)

 

"You wish to have a word with me?"

 

"I wish you to leave! ... Leave or I will.."

 

(Neither of them leave.)

 

(The corpses begin to rot before the audience’s eyes and finish rotting by the time sunset settles.)

 

"You left me with Adam, you left me with him. You left me and left me and left me and continue to leave me with people who only matter in their timing."

 

"But don't you love me? You love to love to love me with all your heart and Adam's."

 

If only time had settled faster and the rising tide of Clorox Bleach could wash clean the sins of marriages gone awry. Why do people fall in love? Why do people do anything? Why do couples married for 15 years suddenly stop going to Sunhee's for dinner and start buying brunch at Carmen's? What makes the idle heart turn true once more?

 

(There are no corpses anymore. The sound of a thousand failed marriages begins to drone in the background. It sounds like forks scraping on teeth, and angry slurping of undercooked pasta, and a women uncorking wine alone in her Livingroom, and the death of a child, and the screaming of tires on concrete, and the scanning of insurance cards by an overnight nurses, and loveless fucking, and staples holding together 15 pages of legal jargon, and the ringing of florescent lights, and toothpaste on toothbrushes on rotten teeth, and grocery shopping at 3 am on weekdays, and tears -- dozens of tears -- hitting the floor of an empty apartment.)

 

"I miss you. I mean, who you were."

 

"I don't."

 

"Be here in the morning?"

 

"I'm leaving now."

 

(They do not move. The set now opens to revel a pillar cast in blood red light with projections of happy people in happy marriages being happy in happy times. Rosie and Charlie take hands and begin to dance.)

 

Their dance wanders around the room with their feet landing off the beat and their arms swinging in tandem. You can see the discomfort in their skin as they touch and the wild fever that spreads through their bodies with each downbeat in the music. It is raw and beautiful and terrifying all at once and no one can see any of it because the lights have turned off.

 

"I wish I loved you."

 

"I know, I know. I know.."

 

"Will you kiss me before you go?"

 

(Their kiss is heard in the blackout)

 

"Goodbye?"

 

"Goodbye."

 

(They do not move.)

 

(Curtain..)