Alysse Aallyn

Category: #Family

  • Rough Sleep – a play by Alysse Aallyn

     SCENE XV – STAGE APRON 

    CHASE

    This can’t be real, Jazz. It isn’t real. It’s some planet we’re not on.

    JAZZ

    But it makes perfect sense. It answers all the questions. You know in your heart that was his plan all along.

    CHASE

    It can’t be real because my Mom is dead. Years ago. She killed herself the first Christmas I didn’t come home.

    JAZZ

    (Keeps trying to go back)

    But I saw her. I We were there. How can it not be true?

    (He tries to hug her – she resists)

    Don’t touch me! I don’t feel like touching ever again.

    (CHASE sits on the edge of the stage)

    CHASE

    Corso loves games – he’s always up for the latest thing. He can even claim he told us! We fell for it like puppies jumping for a biscuit.

    JAZZ

    So that part’s real? Our sex archetypes all over the cloud?

    CHASE

    Sexsomnia is real. He was way ahead of me.

    (beat)

    I should have guessed. It’s always the worst thing he can think of. Welcome to my nightmare.  

    JAZZ

    I don’t want details.

    CHASE

    But we need to see – Everyone needs to see – just how the magician operates.

    JAZZ

    You’re right – magic is the important thing. There was magic all along, in spite of Corso.

    CHASE

    All he cares about it is cash and control. He honed the perfect weapon to take life hostage. 

    JAZZ

    How ironic that the moment we stop believing, magic appears! 

    CHASE

    Only toddlers believe. And toddlers are ill-equipped for these frolics. Where’s the magic in that?

    JAZZ

    Seeing your Mom was magic.

    CHASE

    Dark magic, you’ll agree. What were they thinking? Russian-Irish could never work!

    JAZZ

    My combination’s Portuguese-Swedish. Your Mom said she forgave you. 

    CHASE

    She didn’t!

    JAZZ

    She did. I heard her. What was it like to see her again?

    CHASE

    Amazing and frustrating – the way it always was. 

    JAZZ

    Admit we got the most wonderful bath!  For a few minutes we saw how happy we could be.

    CHASE

    A ritual cleanse. Did seem like it was working.

    JAZZ

    I felt such peace, like nothing could hurt us ever. 

    CHASE

    Then my Dad showed up.

    JAZZ

    So now I know him, too. I experienced them through you.

    CHASE

    In the house that never got finished. I pushed my Dad into bankruptcy. I destroyed my family.

    JAZZ

    You did not.

    CHASE

    If you’re going to be my soulmate you’ve seen the house of horrors where you have to live. Nobody could blame you for walking out.

    JAZZ

    Where would I walk to?  Seriously.  I thought the more worlds we saw the more paths – the more choices we would have, but the maze leads only two places – sickness and murder or – each other.

    CHASE

    But what if we resist?

    JAZZ

    Are we back to murder? A life for a life?

    CHASE

    Surely you see the appeal?

    JAZZ

    I think when you want to kill Corso it’s really your dad you want to kill. 

    CHASE

    Wow! Free therapy! Bzzzt! No. My Dad I can get away from.

    JAZZ

    Apparently not.

    CHASE

    Once and done.

    JAZZ

    Finding crime scenes should not be inspiring us to create more of them.

    CHASE

    Why not, if everyone’s doing it?

    JAZZ

     Jails are full of defective reasoners.

    CHASE

    So I’m a defective reasoner, am I?

    (JAZZ sits beside him)

    JAZZ

    Seems like. I’m stuck with you and you’re stuck with me.

    CHASE

    But I don’t get it – if death doesn’t free you, what does?

    JAZZ

    Why couldn’t you tell me about her?

    CHASE

    I can’t even go there.

    (long pause)

    JAZZ

    If you can’t go there I can’t see where there is to get to. 

    CHASE

    Sexsomnia is like sleepwalking.  They –

    JAZZ

    Would you stop it with trying to rationalize the irrational? It makes me feel so alone.

    CHASE

    (Holding her – she lets him)

    We can’t have that.

    (They start to kiss)

    Maybe it hasn’t happened yet.

    JAZZ

    What part?

    CHASE

    The video Corso’s trying to create. If he hasn’t finished it, he hasn’t released it.

    JAZZ

    But what we did. It’s out there, alive, wandering the cloud. 

    CHASE

    Maybe not. 

    JAZZ

    I like this Chase better.  So let’s get rid of it and warn the others.

    CHASE

    Are you sure they’ll care?

    JAZZ

    Someone will.

    CHASE

    They may prefer secrecy, or destruction. But people don’t believe without evidence.

                               JAZZ

    Our suffering is the evidence.

                      (She pushes him away)

    You wanted this to happen.  You twisted my life into evidence for your crime scene. You used the rest of us as bait.

    CHASE

    I swear I had no idea he’d go this far. But if it’s real we’ve got to face up to it. Destroying the evidence doesn’t cancel our suffering.

    JAZZ

    Without the video, we don’t remember. If we pass it along, Corso wins – whoever we pass it to.

    CHASE

    It isn’t “gone” just because we can’t remember. Haven’t what we’ve been through shown us that? It becomes a negative hallucination.

    JAZZ

    I feel sure I don’t want to know what that is.

    CHASE

    It means is not seeing the obvious. 

    JAZZ

    Forgetting is almost as good as innocence.

    CHASE

    That’s what Corso counted on.

    JAZZ

    Help me.

    CHASE

    I’m trying.

    (the distance between them is growing. They reach out their arms to each other but it’s too late. CHASE fades into darkness)

    JAZZ

    I want to forget! Help me forget!

    CORSO’s voice

    I stand at the ready to assist my adorable Jazz.

  • Rough Sleep – a play by Alysse Aallyn

    – KITCHEN set, bar with overhead wineglass and pot rack, burners steaming ( ZOYAorchestrates the food)

    ZOYA

    Stevie, could you open the wine and let it breathe?

    (Clutches her own throat)

    No one wants a strangled wine.

    CHASE

    Jazz drinks any kind of wine.

    ZOYA

    Jazz? What kind of name is that?

    JAZZ

    It’s a nickname. My name is Jasmyn Suzino.

    ZOYA

    (Thawing. She is cautious and protective, not mean)

    If you’re important to my son I’m so glad you’re here.

    CHASE

    She’s very important to me. 

    ZOYA

    I hope you like Welsh rarebit and Coquille Saint Jacques.

    JAZZ

    Sounds delicious. I hear you do your own cooking?

    (CHASE takes bottle and opener from his mother.)

    ZOYA

    Love is the main ingredient, I always say. Red or white?

    (She pulls down wineglasses from the overhead rack. There are several bottles of wine.CHASE opens them one after the other. JAZZ looks a little scared as if she might have to drink all this)

    JAZZ

    Oh, whatever.  May I have ice, please?

    CHASE

    (Being a Farrell)

    No.

    ZOYA

    Oh, for heavens sake let her have whatever she wants!  Lemon, sugar! Anything! This is a party!

    (Slaps out an ice bucket)

    CHASE

    Taste it without ice first.  It’s Christmas wine from Lebanon.

    JAZZ

    Wow.  Delicious.  You’re right….forget the ice.

    (JAZZ sits at the bar – ZOYA blots the corner of JAZZ’s mouth with a napkin, lays napkins down.  What with spoons and potlids, she gives an impression of sacred priestess juggling sacred tools)

    CHASE

    Mom made all this lace herself.

    JAZZ

    Awesome. Exquisite.  I didn’t know humans made lace.

    CHASE

    Mom was beaten into submission by nuns. You propitiate the gods by giving them lace. 

    ZOYA

    (Raps him sharply with a spoon)

    Stevie, you heretic! What will our guest think?

    CHASE

    “Make our damn lace or be consumed by the Holocaust!”

    ZOYA

    Stevie! Oh, what’s the use? You’ll never change. I forgive you.

    JAZZ

    Uh, the flowers on that cake look almost real.

    ZOYA

    I love making sugar flowers.  Those are lilies and camellias.  I wore them at my wedding.

    CHASE

    Mom studied pastry making at the Cordon Bleu in Paris. 

    ZOYA

    It was just a summer course. Canapés or crudités?

    CHASE

    Crudity always.

    JAZZ

    (To CHASE)

    Paris!  Were you there?

    CHASE

    Naw.  I was just a bullet in my father’s bandolier in those days.

    ZOYA

    Oh, Stevie!  You’re such a silly! How I love you! No, he’s never been to Paris.  We’ve not been back. That was our honeymoon, so long, long ago.

     (Seems like she might cry) 

    It’s so hard to keep the rarebit from separating. 

    (sniffs – offers a plate)

    Duck pâté?

    JAZZ

    Er, sure.

    (ZOYA and CHASE toss off their wine, he refills their glasses.  JAZZ holds hers against her chest. ZOYA reaches down a platter)

    ZOYA

    I love to cook! Following a recipe to make things right. I wish people ate more, but they’re always on such weird diets. Cyanne’s a vegan who won’t eat gluten.  Everything’s changed. I used to pick my own watercress but now I’m afraid of the fisher cats. 

    CHASE

    Fishers eat squirrels, mom, not people.

    ZOYA

    Somebody needs to eat those squirrels. They’re too assertive. But it’s the fisher cats who scream – like someone being murdered.

    CHASE

    They’re nocturnal, Mom.  And watercress is out of season.

    ZOYA

    (Fighting back tears)

    So how does your family celebrate grand occasions, Jasmyn? I’m sure it’s something more splendid than a homely family party.

    JAZZ 

    (nervous)

    We make a lot of toasts.

    (She lifts her glass. ZOYA and CHASE both drain their glasses and immediately refill as if that’s what etiquette requires)

    ZOYA

    Stevie, you say the blessing.

    CHASE

    You’re going to have to stop calling me that, Mom.  My name is Chase.

    ZOYA

    But that’s a stupid name.  It doesn’t mean anything.  Steven was your grandfather’s name.

    CHASE

    But he’s gone. You want me to be gone?

    ZOYA

    I’m praying you never leave again.

    (Lifts her glass)

    Zemlya pukhom!

    CHASE

    It’s your birthday, Mom.  We toast to you.

    (He raises his glass)

    ZOYA

    (Abashed, almost frightened.)

    No more bad luck.  I’m not fit to catch God’s eye. Dolgaya zhizn!

    JAZZ

    What’s that mean?

    CHASE

    Long life.

    JAZZ 

    Long life!

    (They drink. A moment of happiness. Enter CUTTER FARRELL dressed as if for wild weather.  CUTTER slowly removes outer gear but continues to play with belt – appraising the group as if wondering who to use it on. He is a cold, cold-eyed man, a paler, blockier version of CHASE. Accepts drink from placatory ZOYA)

    CUTTER

    Filthy night. What have we here?

    ZOYA

    Stevie brought a friend to my birthday party! Isn’t that exciting?

    CUTTER

    (Takes drink, cranes his neck insultingly)

    Little Stevie brought a date?  Where is he? I don’t see him.

    (JAZZ steps up bravely and offers her hand)

    JAZZ

    Hi, I’m Jasmyn Suzino.

    (CUTTER takes her hand and presses it to his chest, looking her up and down at his leisure)

    CUTTER

    Where did this dark-eyed beauty spring from? Be still my loins.  I’m Cutter Farrell, young lady. Pleased to make your acquaintance.

    JAZZ

    (Awkwardly)

    I go to school with Chase. Er – Steven.

    CUTTER

    Bet you met him yesterday.

    (JAZZ reacts as though this might be true. CHASE steps forward, detaches JAZZ’s arm)

    CHASE

    Pick on someone in your own weight class, Dad.

    CUTTER

    And that would be you? I’ve heard braggadocio but I’m getting tired waiting.

    ZOYA

    (Panicky)

    Please don’t fight. It’s my birthday.

    CUTTER

    I don’t like surprises.  That’s all.

    (Pops some savory in his mouth and drains half his drink)

    So. Suzino.  What kind of a name is that?

    JAZZ

    It’s Portuguese.

    CUTTER

    Is there a Dad in your picture?

    JAZZ

    (After a beat)

    Not really.

    CUTTER

    That’s the Portuguese in him. We Irish, now, keep families together. We hang on till every lost dog is drawn and quartered.

    (ZOYA snaps tensely at CHASE who is eating)

    ZOYA

    (Spanks his arm with her lace napkin)

    Don’t double dip, darling!  It’s disgusting!

    (Blots her forehead)

    I’m sorry.

    CUTTER

    (Poking freely among the crudités tray)

    When’s dinner?

    (ZOYA clatters pot lids hopelessly)

    ZOYA

    Half an hour.  Forty-five minutes.

    CUTTER

    Just enough time for a private pow-wow.  Bring your drinks, kids. You’ll need them.

    CHASE

    No thank you.

    CUTTER

    I’ve got a business proposition for you. Come along now:  fair’s fair.  You’ve got to give me a chance to get my money back. All the cash I spent on you…

    CHASE

    I’m not putting my money into any of your schemes.

    (CUTTER takes JAZZ’s arm)

    CUTTER

    Fine.  Then your little girlfriend and I will have a sit down. You stay out here with Mummy the way you always preferred, Jasmyn and I will have a heart to heart and find out what’s what.

    ZOYA

    (Desperate)

    Cutter, please! 

    CUTTER

    You cook, dumpling, I’ll entertain our guests.

    ZOYA

    By arguing?

    CUTTER

    I only stand up for what’s mine.

    (To CHASE who’s sliding unwillingly off his barstool)

    You’re going to want to see this.  Believe me. It’s the next biggest thing, and I’m offering you a buy-in on the ground floor.

    CUTTER’S DEN- SCENE XIV.  Macho and dark; leather furniture, deer head, creels and powder horns, gun rack

    CUTTER

    So, what are you studying in this college of yours?

    JAZZ

    We’re participating in a research experiment.

    CUTTER

    I’ll bet you are. Anything to do with the Internet?

    JAZZ

    The Internet?

    CUTTER

    (Shaking his head as he looks at CHASE)

    Where do you get these girls?  You haven’t heard of the Internet, young missy? The World Wide Web?

    JAZZ

    (Blushing but controlling herself at a warning look from CHASE)

    It has nothing to do with that.

    CUTTER

    (Studying her speculatively)

    Well, I can’t answer for how they behave in Portugal, but it’s possible you were pimped out without your knowledge. 

    (Picks up a video controller. CHASE and JAZZ stares stupefied at a screen that flickers dancing shapes over their faces)

    CUTTER

    Look what your boyfriend got you into! It’s a game, see? You can make them do any combination, anything you want.

    (Struggles with his controller)

    How do you make this thing go frame by frame?

    JAZZ

    Oh, my God. It’s US!

    CHASE

    Turn that thing off!

    (CHASE lunges for his Dad, they tussle, CUTTER playing “keep away” with remote)

    CUTTER

    Wait, wait –the good part is coming up! 

    (CHASE succeeds in dashing controller to floor, screen light goes off)

    Here’s a fine thing for a father to have to see! You could at least ensure they disguise the faces – but you all make yourselves so recognizable with those tattoos. Nice birthday gift for mommy, wouldn’t you say?

    (CHASE lunging – they are full-on wrestling)

    CUTTER

    This idea’s worth millions – unless you sign away your rights – AGAIN. But that’s what you do, isn’t it? Anything rather than take dad’s advice! Why don’t you hit me, since you’ve been longing to. Go ahead – hit your father!

    (CHASE manages to turn off screen, throw remote, pushes CUTTER away)

    CHASE

    Come on, Jazz, let’s get out of here.

    CUTTER

    I suppose you’ll claim that was art. 

    (Heavy fake Irish accent)

    Will you be taking it around to the festivals now?  Put it up for the booby prize?

    CHASE

    You’re dead to me.

    (Dragging JAZZ away)

    CUTTER

    I’m dead to you, you spineless party pooper? I’m dead to you?

    (ZOYA appears holding a wine opener pushed to her neck)

                               ZOYA

    I’m dead to everyone and nobody noticed! Nobody even noticed!

    (JAZZ tries to go to her, CHASE pulls her away downstage – lights off on FARRELL RESIDENCE)

  • Rough Sleep – a play by Alysse Aallyn

     SCENE XI – FARRELL RESIDENCE.  (ZOYA, festively dressed excitable little woman with dyed hair teeters forward on high heels)

    ZOYA

    Stevie!

    (She clutches CHASE, kissing him everywhere)

    Oh Stevie, Stevie, I was so afraid you wouldn’t come.

    CHASE

    Miss your birthday?  How could I possibly?  And I brought a friend.

    (JAZZ waves nervously)

    JAZZ

    (Awkwardly extending plant)

    Happy Birthday.

    (Painfully obvious this is way too big a plant for this tiny person)

    ZOYA

    (Making no move to take it)

    Oh, my. That looks so…interesting. Well come in, come in.

    ( JAZZ unloads plant on hall table, looking around, awed. ZOYA regards plant apprehensively.)

    ZOYA

    I suppose I’m ancient, dry and prickly just like this plant. Does it come with directions?

    JAZZ

    It’s a Christmas cactus. It’s going to have three blooms.  See?

    ZOYA

    (Without enthusiasm)

    Lovely.

    (Clings to CHASE)

    It’s so wonderful to see you!

    (She squeezes him)

    Look how tall you’ve gotten.

    CHASE

    (hugs her)

    Good to see you, Mom. You’re looking well.

    JAZZ

    Sorry I’m not dressed for a party.

    CHASE

    Jazz had kind of a disaster. Somebody jumped out of her dorm room window.

    (JAZZ and CHASE exchange looks)

    ZOYA

    How terrible! Were they badly hurt?

    CHASE

    (With relish)

    Killed, Mom. Dead.

    (His mother backs away, looking at the pair of them)

    ZOYA

    Do they give you an automatic A and send you home?

    CHASE

    Urban legend, Mom. You’ve got to stop believing myths.

    (His mother strikes him lightly on the arm)

    ZOYA

    I never know when you’re teasing.

    CHASE

    If Jazz could borrow something of Cyanne’s…?

    ZOYA

    (Recollecting she’s the hostess)

    Of course, of course.  Cyanne has way too many clothes. She’s always shopping. You look about the same size.  She’d say yes but she’s away at college.  She’s pledging my sorority. Quick drink before you freshen up?

    (An expression almost of panic)

    Because I’ve got to get back – back to the kitchen.

    (Backs away as if dragged – exit)

    CHASE

    My Mom always bakes her own birthday cake.

    JAZZ

    Why didn’t you tell me your mother hates plants?

    (Gestures)

    All these plants are fake.

    CHASE

    Mom says growth’s a lot of work. 

    JAZZ

    (Mimes looking at family photos on the walls)

    That you as a baby?

    CHASE

    The very same. Aren’t I adorable? You can’t tell which is me and which is Cyanne.

    JAZZ

    You all look so happy.

    CHASE

    Appearances can be deceiving.

    JAZZ

    So your real name’s Stevie.

    CHASE

    Steven.  Now that you know it, forget it. Just another thing that’s gone.

    JAZZ

    You could have told me. 

    CHASE

    Who knew we’d end up here? I’ve never been good at telling people things. The vortex assumed control.

  • Rough Sleep – a play by Alysse Aallyn

    (BEX appears in a spot on the TOWER LIFT, holding a pair of binoculars and a shotgun.  Scans the stage)

    CHASE

    (Holding JAZZ close)

    You’re making me feel incredibly powerful 

    (They kiss with increasing urgency. BEX appears to focus on them. He racks his gun angrily, climbs down, his spot dissolving.  JAZZ and CHASE’s “shadows” explode hugely against the back wall, seeming to rise up in the air)

    JAZZ

    Feel that?

    CHASE

    I do. Don’t fight it.

    JAZZ

    Who’s fighting it?  You’re the one fighting it.

    SCENE X – SWAP MEET. (When the lights come up the curtain has fallen and JAZZ and CHASEstand outside it, hand in hand, staring into the audience.)

    JAZZ

    Where are we?

    CHASE

    Looks like a swap meet. But all they’re selling is Christmas stuff.

    JAZZ

    That’s weird.

    CHASE

    Especially since I hate Christmas.

    JAZZ

    Who could possibly hate Christmas?

    CHASE

    It never lives up to its billing.

    (RAD appears, pushing a shopping cart. Sets up a table and starts laying out junk)

    RAD

    Hi, guys! Long time no see. You in the market for a knickknack?  Ganja? Electronics?  Jewelry? 

    CHASE

    Is this your gig?

    RAD

    Gotta have a side hustle – gotta get the scratch. You’d be amazed what some people just throw away. How about a nice Christmas cactus? I did have a shotgun but I sold it.

    CHASE

    You sold a shotgun? Who to?

    RAD

    Biker dude from out of town. He said if it didn’t work he would come looking for me.

    JAZZ

    Does it work?

    RAD

    Let’s hope so. Just passing on whatever I find.

    CHASE

    We don’t want anything.

    JAZZ

    Speak for yourself. I’d love a Christmas cactus. 

    (RAD reaches into the depths of his cart and produces an unflowering – apparently dead plant – JAZZ takes it)

    CHASE

    Great. It’s dead.

    JAZZ

    It is not. It only blooms once a year.  Says here, this one’s going to have three blossoms.

    RAD

    Can’t go to the party without a present.

    CHASE

    What party?

    RAD

    Isn’t life a party?

    JAZZ

    So far. 

    CHASE

    More like a bribe for the deadboat captain. So we poor ghosts don’t get shoved into steerage.

    RAD

    That’ll be a hundred bucks.

    CHASE

    A hundred bucks!

    RAD

    This is a rare, one time offer. Not shown on TV. I’ve got bills.

    JAZZ

    Blood money, remember?

    CHASE

    If that’s what you want. You got giftwrap?

    (RAD  produces pink foil and a massive ribbon)

    JAZZ

    Wow. This says “Happy Birthday.” Do we know anybody born in December?

    CHASE

    My mom.

    JAZZ

    Oh, my God! Hide!

    (She drags CHASE down the stage steps to cower behind the stairs. BEX appears with a shotgun, racking the slide. RAD hastily packs up. Both exit offstage)

    JAZZ

    See that?

    CHASE

    He’s gone now. Let’s find the party.

    JAZZ

    Anything to get away from here.

  • Rough Sleep – a play by Alysse Aallyn

    (At Hadleigh Hall, a body lies under a tarp)

    SOLIZ

    They’re not letting anyone in. Do you know who lives in Room 824?

    JAZZ

    Actually, I live there.

    SOLIZ

    Oh, you do, do you? Well, some guy fell out your window.

    JAZZ

    Just like your dream!

    SOLIZ

    (threateningly)

    I don’t know what you’re talking about.

    CHASE

    Some guy? Who?

    SOLIZ

    Unidentified.  You can’t see him, he’s under a tent.

    CHASE

    Can’t Jazz collect her stuff?

    SOLIZ

    Come back later. It’s chaos over there.

    (SOLIZ frees them from tape; JAZZ and CHASE lurch off downstage)

    JAZZ

    This is Soliz’s dream. I remember if she doesn’t.

                               CHASE

    Except this was a guy.

    JAZZ

    Let’s hope it was Bex.

    CHASE

    So now you’re pro-violence?

    JAZZ

    Who’s saying I pushed him? It would be so unlike me.

    CHASE

    So, no going home for you.

    JAZZ

    Hadleigh was never my home.

    CHASE

    Well, you can camp out at my place while we figure out what to do with this new corpse.

    JAZZ

    Makes me harder for Bex to find. On the other hand when he does, he’ll just get madder.

    CHASE

    We’ve got enough problems without worrying about satisfying his unsatisfiable psyche. We’ve got three dead bodies!

    JAZZ

    And God knows how many crime scenes. Explain exactly why soulmating requires detective work?

    CHASE

    Maybe nature is one big crime scene. Red of tooth and claw.

    JAZZ

    You and your classical education.

                               CHASE

    Voilã! Here we are at my place.  

    SCENE VIII – Lights go up on CHASE’S APT – disheveled male bedroom/kitchenette

    JAZZ

    This is definitely a crime scene.

    (Throws herself into a low-slung chair)

    CHASE

    (Sitting close)

    You expected harp music? Hey, you admitted your life was a crime scene too. 

    JAZZ

    I guess I thought the point of soulmates is all the hard work would be magically be done.

    CHASE

    So no going over the past trying to understand and explain the mess? Wouldn’t that be nice!

    JAZZ

    Why can’t we just escape the mess?  The mess would no longer matter. We could rise above the mess.

    CHASE

    Your fantasy forgets about the demons. If we’ve unleashed demons –

    JAZZ

    Who’s to say we unleashed them?  I’m not responsible for Bex.

    CHASE

    Yet he’s out there, rampaging. At least I know I’m responsible for Corso.

    JAZZ

    But Corso’s using your involvement to keep his rampage going. Oh. Touché. I see what you mean.

    CHASE

    We’re dissociating. Living each other’s nightmares.

    JAZZ

    At least we’re braving hell together.

    (they touch hands) 

    CHASE

    If it’s purgatory, graduation’s a possibility.

    JAZZ

    We’re on a multiple universe scavenger hunt! 

    CHASE

    A time and space jigsaw puzzle!

    JAZZ

    We need to get to the crime scene before the crime happens.

    CHASE

    How would we know it was a crime scene?

    JAZZ

    Tell me what you know. What Corso did to you.

    CHASE

    God! You know I don’t want to talk about it.

                               JAZZ

    What specifically are you afraid will happen if you talk about it?

    CHASE

    That this whole thing would shatter right in front of me. I would wreck – whatever this is happening between us.

    JAZZ

    Maybe we’re meant to reveal, not repair, each other’s real selves.

    CHASE

    Let’s talk about your fears and malfeasance. That’s more fun for me.

    JAZZ

    Somebody increased power by sucking out ours. We’re going to reclaim it. Tell your soulmate what Dr. Corso did to you. 

    CHASE

    If you know, aren’t you ruined too? How can I stay with someone who knows this disgusting thing about me?

    JAZZ

    I guess we’ll just have to see.  We need to free ourselves to be with each other. 

    CHASE

    But there’s the difference, right there – you left Bex,  I pursued Corso. I came after him. 

    JAZZ

    You are so competitive. If you need to be “worst”, prove it.

    CHASE

    He was a teacher at my choir school. Latin, of all things. We spent an eternity on the Aeneid. God, I hate talking about this. I haven’t talked about it since I was fifteen, with the lawyers and judges.

    JAZZ

    He molested you?

    CHASE

    Between my ninth and thirteenth years. He had a way of making us compete to be “the favorite”. If you could just get on that easy street, life became golden. Finally I saw what a prisoner I was. Mustered up the courage to get the hell out of there.

    JAZZ

    Jesus.

    CHASE

    Great pillow talk, huh?  And that’s not the worst of it.

    JAZZ

    How could it get worse?

    CHASE

    I brought him other boys.  Whatever he wanted.

    JAZZ

    You were a kid.  None of this could possibly be your fault.

    CHASE

    Yet here I am. Still a slave.

    JAZZ

    But you found your soulmate.

    (They hug)

    How did it end?

    CHASE

    It hasn’t ended. I mean, the sex thing ended when Corso met my sister – my twin sister – and decided he was ready to branch out. He was like, deliver her or else.  That woke me up. I went home and refused to go back to school.  I finally told my parents.

    JAZZ

    And?

    CHASE

    They pretty much behaved the worst they possibly could.  First, they didn’t believe me. My dad has always been a total bastard making fun of me for singing in a high voice and wearing a lace collar and Mom was sort of a “the church can do no wrong” nut. You know, like, who are you going to believe, a priest or your own lying eyes?  They just couldn’t take it in.  But then a kid at school hanged himself and things started to snowball. Corso got kicked out. People started suing. My dad smelled a payday. The other families accepted settlements not to squeal. Everybody settled except my father. He was holding out for the Big Money that was going to make all his dreams come true.

    JAZZ

    Then what?

    CHASE

    What always happens with my Dad.  He was having such a good  time holding the whip, he waited too long. The minute I turned sixteen, I got legally emancipated. I could prove that Dad was hitting me – I had the sense to record him – so the judge refused to give Dad the cash. Dad declared bankruptcy and I finished high school on my own. Living at the Y.

    (Restless pacing)

    So on top of everything else, I’m singlehandedly responsible for the destruction of my family.

    JAZZ

    Scapegoating. People need someone to blame, it’s another form of hostage-taking. This isn’t your fault.  Time to forgive yourself.

    CHASE

    Oh, that’ll be easy. Walk in the park.

    JAZZ

    I’m still here.

  • The Dalingridge Horror – a play by Alysse Aallyn

    (Leonard & Virginia Woolf in the Conservatory at Dalingridge Hall)

    VIRGINIA
    If only I could trust you.

    LEONARD
    You can.

    VIRGINIA
    But these drugs turn my brain to cotton wool. There’s a pattern behind the cotton wool, if only I could find it. Did you know the Duckworths, that incestuous race, were cotton merchants? Coining money from the cotton wool that packs me now. If only I could fight back! But my will is so fragmented. My theory is that we all live so dishonestly, unconsciously, disconnected and detached. You are such a stranger! Everything about you is different. That must be why I married you.

    LEONARD
    Tell me everything, Virginia. Tell me what you fear, so we can kill it.

    VIRGINIA
    Where does one begin? Last night I looked in the mirror beneath a pitiless light and suddenly a dreadful animal face showed itself behind me. He bellowed, he stared, his nostrils flared. The pig’s snout broke the mirror until my thighs ached. How could one forget the thrusting of that ugly snout, the snout that meant starvation, pain and death? The purple foaming stain. Somehow it was all my fault. Roars of laughter at my expense. Dream or was it a memory? All that’s left is hopeless sadness. Being dragged down into a pit of absolute despair. Powerlessness. Paralysis. That’s what I remember.

    LEONARD
    Begin at the beginning.

    VIRGINIA
    The beginning is insomnia. I lie awake at night listening to a senile old man gasping, croaking vile indecencies. I thought it was Father, having a fit of the horrors. But the nurse said it was only a cat. Or perhaps the beginning was the whooping cough. I think I knew happiness before I became so ill. The grownups laughed with me, not at me. Whooping cough steals the breath – none of us could breathe. The atmosphere was tangled, matted with emotion. All the children came down with it, all of us gasping. Mother ran from bed to bed until her skin was paper thin and the bones stood out. I used to wonder if Mother had traded my life for hers, until I remembered she preferred the boys. Women serve, men are served.

    LEONARD
    But all of you recovered.

    VIRGINIA
    They threw me into a tank with Gerald, the alligator. Drowning. I knew I must not sink. Couldn’t get my head above the whirlpool.

    LEONARD
    Go on.

    VIRGINIA
    They covered the mirrors when Mother died. I was thirteen. Vanessa was sixteen, Thoby fifteen. Stella was twenty-five, quite grown up. George was twenty-seven, Gerald twenty-four. Adrian was twelve. No one told me what was happening. I was taken to her bed to say good bye but Mother seemed reproachful, so condemning and stern. She said, “Hold yourself straight, little Goat.”

    LEONARD
    Why were you called Goat?

    VIRGINIA
    I was Goat because I couldn’t control my purple rages. The others hated that he talked to me and gave me books. He didn’t allow Stella to read Cousine Bette but said it couldn’t harm me, because I had read Gibbons on the fall of Rome.

    LEONARD
    Did everyone have nicknames?

    VIRGINIA
    Adrian was Wombat, Nessa was the Saint. Thoby was the Goth because he fought. Mother advised self-control to everyone but Father. My mother had two characters, I think. Her real self, and the Angel in the House. Stifler and the life-giver. And to this day I have the oddest feeling that I’m two people, too.

    LEONARD
    Are you talking about the poet Coventry Patmore’s Angel in the House?

    VIRGINIA
    Yes. Wasn’t she so popular? Singing, “Sacrifice. Sacrifice yourself.” I caught her by the throat and killed her. It was self-defense. I had to kill her or she would have killed me.

    LEONARD
    Your mother died of pneumonia, Virginia. Don’t feel guilty, Children are disgustingly violent, every one of them. It’s a wonder anyone lives to grow up. I’ve decided brute strength is the enemy of thought – that’s why bullies rule and why we must all be pacifists and abjure force, even though it goes against our natures. Tell me, was this “angel” thing why Nessa was called Saint?

    VIRGINIA
    No. That was because she was too proud to tell a lie. We hid from Father in the garden, and when he demanded, Didn’t we hear me calling? We all said No. Only Nessa said Yes. I told her she was an old fraud.

    LEONARD
    Goat is the worst name, I think.

    VIRGINIA
    No, that was Stella! She was the Cow, because she brought the milk.

    LEONARD
    These nicknames are strangely degrading.

    VIRGINIA
    I named myself Miss Jan. I so longed to be someone else. Laura was the worst of us but she was called Her Ladyship of the Lake.

    LEONARD
    How old was Laura and why on earth was she called that?

    VIRGINIA
    Laura was exactly Gerald’s age. But she was gone by the time mother died. Sent away, because she wouldn’t mind. Father said she was the Giver of the Sword because she forced him to punish her. Then she screamed so he had to punish her more. When Maitland was writing Father’s life he said that everything about Laura would have to be suppressed. Everyone hated Laura.

    LEONARD
    Why did you hate her?

    VIRGINIA
    Temper tantrums. We all had temper tantrums, but hers were worse. Father was still having them, but Mother could calm him.

    LEONARD
    So, Laura went to an asylum?

    VIRGINIA
    When I was ten. Until then she lived with a governess at the top of the house. At night, we heard her howling like an animal.

    LEONARD
    Did your parents ever say what exactly was the problem?

    VIRGINIA
    Mother said she was wicked. Father said she was perverse. Thoby thought she wouldn’t stop touching herself. I read all Father’s letters when I helped Maitland with his book. Father begged Mother to marry him to help with Laura.

    LEONARD
    But she couldn’t help, could she?

    VIRGINIA
    Abominable system, family life. It goes from ignorance and indifference to denial and contempt, open attack and ultimate destruction. None of it was Mother’s fault. She was always visiting the poor and making them clothes. I always thought the poor knew how to enjoy themselves better than we do, because we are cooped up, day after day while they walk out freely.

    LEONARD
    Did you ever visit Laura?

    VIRGINIA
    Once I went with Stella. Laura spoke only gibberish. The only comprehensible sentence was, “I told him to go away.” I couldn’t go back because that was where I saw the deformed men.

    LEONARD
    I don’t understand why Stella was The Cow. Wasn’t she a young, beautiful girl?

    VIRGINIA
    I thought her lovelier than Mother. She was so pale, so white, she looked like cow parsley by moonlight. I don’t think Mother loved her, really. She was Mother’s loyal handmaid. Stella taught us our letters. She was supposed to look after Father when Mother was gone, and Mother was absent a lot.

    LEONARD
    Where did your mother go?

    VIRGINIA
    Nursing the sick. Mother loved nursing the sick, she said they were easier than the well. She seemed always so far away, in her mind. When we spoke to her she looked through us as if she didn’t see us. While Mother was gone, Stella stood in for her.

    LEONARD
    Didn’t Stella have a life of her own?

    VIRGINIA
    She turned down proposals, I know that. Mother didn’t want her to marry. Cousin Jem was obsessed with her – we children were frightened of him.

    LEONARD
    Cousin Jem? Wasn’t he the mad cousin?

    VIRGINIA
    Yes, but before he was locked up, he conceived a passion for Stella. He would run into the house, shouting, while Stella fled up the front stairs. He pursued her, bellowing, right to the nursery where he speared our toast on his swordstick. I thought he looked like a tormented bull. Father said to tell him Stella wasn’t home, but Mother said she could never bar her door to Jem. She said she loved him and he needed us because he was banned from all his clubs. Once he abducted me and Mother.

    LEONARD
    He abducted you?

    VIRGINIA
    Yes, funny, I’d forgotten it till just this moment. I suppose that’s how memory works. He took us to his rooms because he wanted me to pose for him. Mother didn’t want to go, but she couldn’t stop him. As he painted, he declaimed his own poetry:

    “if all the harm that were done by men
    were doubled and doubled and doubled again
    squared and raised to the power of ten
    there wouldn’t be nearly enough, not near
    to keep a small girl for a tenth of a year.”

    LEONARD
    And you were a small girl.

    VIRGINIA
    I was. The smallest. I never saw the picture.

    LEONARD
    How did you get away?

    VIRGINIA
    Did I get away? I don’t remember. I always stammered when I told him Stella wasn’t home so he knew I was lying. When he grabbed me by the collar I thought of the Ripper Man who had been in all the papers. This is what they must have felt, those women, when they were grabbed by Ripper Man. I’m afraid I wet myself and Nurse was angry. She punished everything I did, but I never listened to her. Nurse claimed all emotions like fear, dread, disgust – come from desiring the wrong food or not moving one’s bowels. Children must accept whatever’s given. If you show a preference, then that’s the very thing you’re not allowed to have. It’s as bad for a girl to cry for what she wants as for a boy to land a blow. Yet we did both, because Nurse was nobody.

    LEONARD
    Cousin Jem was taken away to the madhouse. That was a good thing, surely.

    VIRGINIA
    Where he starved himself to death, and that’s what I shall do if ever you lock me up in one of those places.

    LEONARD
    Go back to your mother’s death.

    VIRGINIA
    I didn’t know what had happened until I saw the nurses crying. I thought they were pretending and we should laugh at them but everyone pulled a face. I went to kiss Mother but she was cold as iron. I never touch iron without thinking of her. Father caromed off people and walls, seeking anyone to wail against. It was like being shut up in a cage with a wild beast.

    LEONARD
    My family was rigidly quiet when my father died. Stiff upper lip, get on with it, try harder, everyone must buckle down. That sort of thing.

    VIRGINIA
    A family is a conspiracy, driven by uncontrollable lusts. I saw a man sitting with mother’s corpse but the others saw no one there. We became unmoored, entering a time of hopeless suspense, muddle, mismanagement, battling the stupidity of those in power. It was as if a finger had been laid upon our lips, sentencing us to a sultry, opaque miasma that choked us and blinded us. Father shouted at Stella if she didn’t stock his writing paper or ordered too much fish. I knew it really was because she couldn’t tell him he was a first-rate writer, as mother always did. Stella had no mind and nobody respected her. Poor father was haunted by fears that he only had a third-class mind.

    LEONARD
    And did he, do you think?

    VIRGINIA
    His ego crippled him. Self-assertion is so loathsome. Father began writing The Mausoleum Book. About death. He wailed from the top of the stairs, “We perished, each alone.” Nothing is to be dreaded so much as egotism. Stella tried her best to rescue us. I wasn’t kind to her because she dragged me to the dentist and ordered all my clothes. I couldn’t bear standing for inspection while being stuck with pins. She was made me wear stays for the first time. Then Stella fell in love.

    LEONARD
    With Jack Waller Hills. Did you like him?

    VIRGINIA
    I did then, but I realized later he was a terrible old Fascist. He used to say, “the weak are wrongdoers who foul the nets.” I know he meant me, that I was a weak wrongdoer. In the end, he was a typical man who liked to have his way. He always put his great hoof down. But at first, he seemed the only truth-teller we had ever met. I was thirsty for knowledge, and he knew things. He taught me how to sugar trees for moths, how to collect and mount butterflies, how to take pride in killing beautiful things. He told me everything about sex, about “street love”, common love, why it is that women can never walk alone. I was so shocked. I asked, What about honor? He said men never think of honor, that they had women constantly, so all their talk of purity is nonsense. Every man has his whore. Every woman except the cheap ones must be locked up tight. Yet they call women fallen! Men are the whores. It makes no sense to me.

    LEONARD
    It does sound mad.

    VIRGINIA
    The night Jack proposed a tramp broken into the garden. Thoby threatened him, shouting at him to go away. We were always frightened of tramps – it seemed they could get in anywhere. I was afraid one had invaded the house and was lurking and leering, waiting to pounce. But it was only Jack. When Father found out about the engagement he tried to stop the wedding but Stella had her own money so he could do nothing. He postponed the wedding until Stella agreed to buy the house next door so that she could still take care of him. During all this Nessa and I were forced to chaperone. You can’t think how awful it is to sit between a couple whispering and trying to touch. I was so angry at Stella I broke my umbrella in half.

    LEONARD
    Child chaperones? Whatever will they think of next?

    VIRGINIA
    I know! I often think I’m the only one who isn’t crazy! Stella and Jack convinced the aunts that Nessa and I could accompany them properly to Bognor but immediately we got there they sent us two out into the rain so they could be alone. We were soaked to the skin!

    LEONARD
    Was there no one who could speak for you?

    VIRGINIA
    The old aunts were the worst of the lot. They curdled our brains with their falsehoods and their pieties. The wedding was the most horrible ordeal. Nessa and I resolved to be Stoic and show no emotion, as if it were nothing touching us. If ever you show feelings you are treated like a beast at the zoo and will never escape the cage. Thus we were buried beneath obligations, under torrents of uncomfortable clothes, awkward visits and unspeakable rituals. I think we are to be congratulated, you and I, that we sidestepped that whole mess so neatly.

    LEONARD
    Yes, the registry office is so much better. It’s over so fast. But after the wedding?

    VIRGINIA
    The happy couple went to Italy, and we were left alone with Father. He was awful to Nessa, how I hated him! He shouted at her as he’d shouted at Stella. But Nessa stood up to him, she was a rock, she didn’t care. That’s when she summoned up her supreme indifference. It’s the bane of all who love her.

    LEONARD
    But Vanessa had no money of her own.

    VIRGINIA
    No. If Stella hadn’t given us allowances we would have had to beg Father for every penny. And then Stella and Jack came home early because Stella was ill.

    LEONARD
    What was wrong with her?

    VIRGINIA
    Violet Dickinson told me Jack must have hurt her with his violent lovemaking. That he broke her somehow. But Violet was just a spinster, so what could she possibly know? The doctors called it appendicitis but you know what cretins they turned out to be. They couldn’t operate because of the baby – she was pregnant, of course. On the night she died, I was sleeping in her new house – in her dressing room in fact –

    LEONARD
    You were sleeping in Stella’s dressing room?

    VIRGINIA
    Yes, I’d been so ill, you see. I always got ill when people went away. But Stella was dying so they sent George to fetch me. George the over-fed pug dog, fat as a louse, beady-eyed as a rat. He wrapped me in Stella’s fur cape and carried me back to Father’s house.

    LEONARD
    And then?

    VIRGINIA
    Stella died and Jack was left bereaved. Now we had two widowers wailing. The men in our family hardly waited for the bodies to be buried before turning to their next victim. I remember Jack holding my wrist on one side so tightly he left bruises, and George holding me on the other side. I was trapped, you see, I couldn’t get away. George won so Jack settled on Nessa. They actually wanted to marry! I couldn’t believe it. I told Nessa, you can’t be serious! She said, “So you’re against me too,” and gave me a look that broke my heart. But she knew they couldn’t marry because of the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Act.

    LEONARD
    They could have married in France.

    VIRGINIA
    That’s what they say about everything, that “the French get away with it.” Luckily it all blew over because Nessa was granted a place at the Slade. Then I was quite alone. George pounced immediately and began ordering clothes and jewels to release me into society. I was the sacrificial offering to his violent gusts of passion and his mean little piggy brain.

    LEONARD

    And then?

    VIRGINIA

    And then Father began to die and I went mad a little. After he died, I went mad a lot.

    LEONARD

    Well, it isn’t any wonder, from what I’ve heard. If you are mad then so am I.

    VIRGINIA
    You can’t think how long I’ve waited for those words!

    (she reaches out a hand to him – he clutches it and kisses it)

    LEONARD

    Dearest! You will always be my only love!

    (they gaze at each other, both trembling with pent-up emotion)

    VIRGINIA
    But darling, if Dr. Craig consigns me to deepest darkness you will have to marry someone else. You can’t waste your life waiting for me.

    LEONARD
    That won’t happen. Craig says our future’s what we make of it.

    VIRGINIA
    Oh, honey mongoose! Let’s make a pact right now to rise above the nay-sayers. You have given me all the best things I have ever had in life, rescued me from the cliff edge again and again. You have been absolutely perfect to me, and I have been disgraceful to you. You work so hard and I do nothing. It’s all my fault. I was mad and angry before I met you and I am madder and angrier right now. I want you to know that I do want to cuddle you but I don’t know how to show it. In spite of my vilest imaginings I’ve always known that I love you and that you love me.

    (he leans his face towards her, she awkwardly moves closer and they kiss delicately)

    LEONARD
    Virginia, I promise not to ever push you any farther than you want to go.

    VIRGINIA
    Oh honey! And I promise to follow all your rules; early bed, milk for breakfast; just so long as I can always read and write.

    (they embrace)

    LEONARD

    If ever you cease writing I shall divorce you immediately.

    VIRGINIA

    (laughing awkwardly as if she has forgotten how)

    It’s a bargain. Oh, darling, shall we really have our own press and print all our own work?


    LEONARD
    Yes, and some of your friends if they are good enough. You decide.

    VIRGINIA

    And can I have a bulldog, too? I’ve always wanted a bulldog pup.

    LEONARD

    Certainly, my pet.

    VIRGINIA

    And can we live in London? A new house all our own?

    LEONARD

    Not London but perhaps some leafy suburb.

    VIRGINIA

    Leonard! Suburbs!

    LEONARD

    Think of the bulldog, Virginia. He must have a healthful life.

    VIRGINIA

    You’re right of course, Leonard. You are always right.

    LEONARD

    Bulldogs need a place to roam.

    VIRGINIA

    Fresh air and food. Lots of good red steak.

    LEONARD

    May I order dinner now, Virginia? Surely, it’s time.

    VIRGINIA
    Yes, Leonard.

    (She clutches his hand fiercely while with his other he rings the bell) CURTAIN – END

  • The Dalingridge Horror – a play by Alysse Aallyn

    (Curtain. Lights up on Scene 3, CONSULTATION ROOM of DR. CRAIG. LEONARD sits, head in hands.)

    DR CRAIG
    Glad to see you, Mr. Woolf. I am eager to hear your opinion of the progress of our patient.

    LEONARD
    Virginia and I have been talking and I must admit she does not sound altogether mad to me.

    DR CRAIG
    My dear fellow, insanity of the mind merely means whatever derangement disables a person from thinking the thoughts, feeling the feelings and doing the duties of the social body in, for, and by which he lives. Insanity is nothing more than a want of harmony between the individual and his social medium. That individual sadly becomes a social discord of which nothing can be made.

    LEONARD
    She speaks frequently of her home life where her brothers took advantage of her.

    DR CRAIG
    You are referring to her delusions. You will have noticed that patients, particularly intelligent ones, are very cunning as they seek to involve their caregivers into sharing their beliefs of persecution and misfortune. It is much better not to allow oneself to re-hash a history that must remain forever uncertain but to forcefully insist on a calming, healthful daily regimen starting now.

    LEONARD
    Surely, you’ll agree that being resentful of bad treatment hardly constitutes insanity.

    DR CRAIG
    My dear sir, your wife is under doctors’ care because she tried to take her own life. We are obviously not dealing with a healthy person here. No, taken by themselves, delusions do not necessarily indicate insanity but when they are found in conjunction with broad evidence of failure to conform one’s general conduct to the ordinary rules of life and society such a diagnosis must be made. Clearly such an obligation places great responsibility on the keen insights and experience of professional men rigorously educated to the highest standard and admitted by the demanding qualifications of the Royal Society of Medicine. As a man of the world you must know that is always very common for weaker beings to resent those on whom greater fortune has been showered and to feel their gains are somehow ill-gotten. This resentment stirs up a host of fantasies that must be very firmly rejected. Successful work never leads to this disorder but unsuccessful work shows a very different etiology.

    LEONARD
    But in the case of Virginia’s upbringing –

    DR CRAIG
    Mr. Woolf, in every case the instinctive impulses of children must sooner or later clash with the social regime, to the infant’s sorrow and momentary discomfiture. Elders must be recognized as the authority in such matters or chaos would result. Therefore, no airing of childhood wrongs can ever constitute a fruitful line of inquiry.

    LEONARD
    It seems the situation was so severe that Dr. Savage was consulted at the time –

    DR CRAIG
    My good fellow, it would be better for you to face the fact that delusions never require any other support than the conviction of the deluded. A man may believe, for example, that his head has been opened, his brains removed and some other substance substituted. That is a very common delusion, I can assure you.

    LEONARD
    Virginia is an intelligent woman. I believe she must be handled intelligently. I may even say she has a touch of genius. In fact, I believe she is the only true genius I have ever met.

    DR CRAIG
    Are you arguing that geniuses are in some way above or beyond the law, Mr. Woolf? I certainly hope you are not.

    LEONARD
    Her family was considered the highest intellectual intelligentsia of their day. It seems obvious to me –

    DR CRAIG
    What is obvious to me, is that the degree of education and the social status of the person whose conduct is under consideration are indeed important facts, for habits that would be decidedly eccentric in the upper classes may pass unremarked in the lower reaches of society. The sex of the patient is even more critical to diagnosis. Outbursts of emotional weeping in men, for example, are a symptom of grave import but among women occasion no remark. Any woman’s effort to escape her true femininity places her moral hardihood at peril. Imagine some up to date woman adopting a divided skirt under the belief that it is a healthier form of apparel and permits greater freedom of action. Very well. But should she indulge in so subversive a notion as to think that male attire is even more hygienic and to actually carry her belief into practice, the arm of the law will at once reach out to warn her. If the warning is not heeded, society will place her in safekeeping until she has learned to conform to the ideas of the majority. This is the situation in which your wife finds herself at the current time. Before her marriage, I am given to understand that your wife frequented a rather louche artistic bohemia. Now that she is a married woman you have acquired a unique opportunity to place her feet on a more secure footing. I understand you have rejected the possibility of committing her to an asylum but want to give her another chance in the wider world. It is accordingly crucial that you not indulge her in useless analysis of who or what was at fault in her upbringing but encourage her to commit to a fresh new life, with you, where she submits to a healthful pattern which you will lay out for her.

    LEONARD
    What you say makes a good deal of sense, but Virginia has always had her own ideas about everything. Her reading alone, even from childhood has been voluminous. I think I can say that she’s read everything and everybody.

    DR CRAIG
    Now I think you are laying your finger on a much likelier culprit in your wife’s hysteria than the boyish behaviors of exuberantly boisterous, youthful males. Most women’s minds are simply not capable of absorbing and processing the histories and theories of men who lived in more pernicious times. As a Cambridge graduate you do not need me to point out which books might be especially dangerous. We may even disagree on which authors have a nihilist or even Bolshevik bent. But if you are committed to keeping your wife out of the asylum you must make it your life work to supervise your wife more closely in future. I understand there is family money?

    LEONARD
    Some money. We will both need to seek employment.

    DR CRAIG
    I think you will find your wife far too fragile for the hurly burly of economic exchange. These patients are frequently considered brilliant in conversation. But on inspection this seeming brilliancy will be found in large measure to be due to the unconventional nature of their chatter. Patients such as your wife are often considered more entertaining when ill than when in health for through loss of control they make remarks which the healthy would fear to utter. A sane person is inhibited in both speech and action. I think you must reconcile yourself to having a saner, healthier but possibly duller wife who partakes of a less unsettling society.

    LEONARD
    But can it ever be right to subject an intelligent person to regimes designed for the mad?

    DR CRAIG
    My dear sir, there is really no distinction between physical disease and mental disorder. Mrs. Woolf must learn to practice equanimity and you are the best judge of how to assist her in that course. In any given individual where nothing more than exaggerated and uncontrolled normal characteristics may constitute mental disorder, we realize how narrow is the margin between those whom we call the sane and the insane. You are her husband. Have faith in your power to exercise benevolent dominance. It is a husband’s obligation.

    LEONARD
    But Virginia is so sensitive! I am concerned –

    DR CRAIG
    I cannot suggest too strongly, my dear sir, that you focus more on your wife’s bowels than on her brains. Constipation is not only a common symptom of the insane, it is the rule rather than the exception. Another symptom which appears early and which stands out in strong relief, is hypersensitivity. To me this is the symptom of all symptoms which may occasion unsoundness of mind.

    LEONARD
    Virginia becomes so excited when I approach her –

    DR CRAIG
    I will prescribe Hyoscynamine. It is a wonderful relaxant which has given excellent results in quieting the most difficult patients.

    (Lights out.)

  • The Dalingridge Horror – a play by Alysse Aallyn

    (In the Conservatory at Dalingridge Hall)

    VIRGINIA
    Go away, Leonard. I can’t bear to hear you lie to me.

    LEONARD
    I’m not lying when I say I want you to get well more than anything I’ve ever wanted in my life.

    VIRGINIA
    Don’t bother making me feel guilty, I already know I’m wasting your life. If only I weren’t so stupid a Mandrill, so unworthy of her poor, virtuous outsider Mongoose who is so thin, who trembles so much and who tries so hard. You have headaches too, you suffer from recurring malaria. Why should you toil so that I can be idle? I know these doctors’ bills are crushing us. Nessa sold the silver, I sold the jewelry, Thoby sold the Thackeray letters. What’s left, Leonard? Will you scheme with them to isolate me until there’s nothing left?

    LEONARD
    I can earn money writing. I’ve proved that. You can earn money writing, you’ve proved that. But to get back in the fight we must be hardy and strong.

    VIRGINIA
    I should never have married you. What kind of a wife can I ever be? Save yourself, Leonard. It’s too late for me. Let the wind blow, let the poppy seed itself, let the carnation mate with the cabbage. Let the swallow build her nest in the drawing room where the thistle thrusts between the tiles. Let all civilization be like broken china tangled over with blackberries and grass.

    LEONARD
    That you demand so much of existence, still fighting as you sit among George’s flowers, shows you’re feeling better. What we must do is keep up the strengthening. A few more days, Virginia.

    VIRGINIA
    But how can I return to you? There’s the undisputed fact of my sexual cowardice. Perhaps it’s really nothing but my terror of real life that keeps me in this nunnery. I tried telling my parents but they didn’t want to hear. Parents have forgotten their own childhood. Or they don’t want to remember.

    LEONARD
    What did you try to tell them? You can say anything to me.

    VIRGINIA
    I saw the spirits of evil as soon as I could speak, but because I was a girl child I was not supposed to know. Each child hugs its vice, brooding over the swollen vein, the bruised flesh that was white and sweet but yesterday.

    LEONARD
    I told my parents that life is unquestionably vile and humanity’s nothing but an ant heap. Parents never want to hear that.

    VIRGINIA
    That’s what I love about you, Leonard. You at least will speak the truth. Sometimes.

    LEONARD
    It’s a fallacy to think that children are happy. They’re not. I never suffered so much as when I was a child. Children never forget injustice. But here is the heart of it, Virginia. What we write depends upon what we think. What “spirits of evil” did you see?

    VIRGINIA
    Going to practice Dr. Head’s talking cure on me, are you? Is that the plan? I could make up a dozen stories – I see a dozen pictures. But when I open my mouth I am locked up and shut away. What is my true story? Something lies deeply buried. Shall I grasp it or let it mortify in the depths of my mind? I want to describe the world seen without a self. But I am afraid that there is no future. There are no words.

    LEONARD
    There are words, and there is a future we shall make. Tell me. Tell me everything.

    VIRGINIA
    When I was young, I dug furiously to uncover myself. When I discovered that I was me and not anyone else it seemed a wonderful achievement. Once I sat beside my stepsister Stella on roots as hard as skeletons, and the next day she was a skeleton. It’s strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners or in dreams. Don’t you remember that morning at breakfast when I saw my mother? You said she wasn’t there.

    LEONARD
    I saw nothing.

    VIRGINIA
    Cambridge educated everything but your eyes. What is the hope of talking to you? That was the morning was when I first became aware of the enemies who change but are always present; the forces we must fight even though we suffer terribly becoming separate bodies. Don’t you recognize the enemy advancing against us, pawing at his pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy.

    LEONARD
    Marriage is the opposing force against death. A marriage of true minds can fight all enemies. Once upon a time we shared our thoughts, and fell in love. I needed someone who could hold her own, and there you were. You are the only wife I ever wanted, the only woman I have ever loved. Please, Virginia, I want you to come back to me.

    VIRGINIA

    (dazzled)

    Oh to be a wife, to be wanted, would be so complete! Is it possible, Leonard, after the terrors, the disgusting dangers we have seen?

    LEONARD
    If it isn’t I don’t want to live either.

    (She holds out a hand to him. They clutch hands briefly)

    VIRGINIA
    Sit down, Leonard. You look silly on your knees.

    (She looks away. LEONARD sits)

    VIRGINIA
    I used to make the family laugh. They thought me clever. But when I chased the evil spirits through a hole in the escallonia hedge, I resolved to tell the exact truth and write down the phenomena I’d seen. But no one believed me, and at that moment the laughter turned against me. I said, must not we find some way to get outside ourselves, to give our brains a wider scope? My parents declared God was dead and the world empty and meaningless. Father said to be weak is to be wretched. He said that Society is a ravenous appetite, and Nature is a state of war. You’ve laughed at me behind my back, I know you have. You, my own husband, want to get rid of me, to lock me up forever and steal my money.

    LEONARD
    I love you, Virginia. Maybe it’s a bad thing to love you as much as I do – it cuts me off from the outside world. But the outside world is worthless and your world is so rich. When I went away to school for the first time I was shocked and appalled by the horrifying corruption of dirty-minded schoolboys. It marked me. Then I realized all of humanity are mean, nasty, untruthful, cowardly, and cruel. Perhaps I’ve been searching for a world that doesn’t exist.

    VIRGINIA
    Perhaps we both have.

    LEONARD
    If you will care for your health – if you will allow me to care for your health – you’ll recover. As you’ve recovered before.

    VIRGINIA
    Nessa won’t rest till I’m brought low. When she was ill with typhoid Savage wanted to put her in a home but I backed her up! I told Savage I would care for her. Now look at what she’s done to me. You betrayed our secret, telling Nessa I’m a frigid failure as a wife. She told Clive and now everyone knows. They’re all laughing, jeering. plotting behind my back. You were sent to Ceylon to break the natives and now you’ve been sent to break me. I have been derided, insulted, sacrificed and betrayed, by all of you.

    LEONARD
    Virginia, I am on your side. My eyes were opened in Ceylon. I was an anti-imperialist wallowing in the fleshpots of imperialism. But I changed. Now I support the independence movement with all my heart. All problems can be solved by science and logic, Virginia. It was I who was a failure as a husband. It was my marital duty to arouse you but you seemed so afraid of me. At my wit’s end, I asked your older sister for help.

    VIRGINIA
    Does she offer lessons in humiliation? She knows how better than anyone. Is it my fault that I hate my legs being pried apart? I should never have married you, but I couldn’t bear to remain a spinster. I was struggling at everything, and you seemed so different. You said you liked women. You said you admired women’s minds.

    LEONARD
    It’s true. Women feel more deeply, think more deeply, talk more deeply.

    VIRGINIA
    Yet men demand obedience. You want me to obey you but I never will. You know nothing about me. Did you know that before I tried to die I read a book? Would you like to know which one?

    LEONARD
    Which book did you read?

    VIRGINIA
    It was your book. Your book that I read.

    LEONARD
    My book?

    VIRGINIA
    Your book about me.

    LEONARD
    (a gratified author, in spite of everything)

    You read The Wise Virgins? What did you think?

    VIRGINIA
    So you admit it’s about me!

    LEONARD
    Virginia, please. I’d love to discuss my book with you.

    (She hesitates, turning away her face, then facing him with rage)

    VIRGINIA

    You locked me away so I’d never find out!

    LEONARD
    You were ordered rest cures long before you met me! I don’t believe in guilt or blame. Honestly, I wanted you to read my book as soon as you were well.

    VIRGINIA
    I won’t be stamped and stereotyped. You have publicly lampooned me as a frozen, dowdy, fussy, futile woman.

    LEONARD
    Not true at all. I called you my Aspasia.

    VIRGINIA
    “Cold and snowy, like the rocks.” You said.

    LEONARD
    I’m a bad writer. I agree. I’ve got nothing of your genius. I can never explain what I really want to say. If it’s any comfort to you no one else likes or understands it either. Sales are awful. All I was attempting to do was contrast the world of a poor Jew from Putney with the rarified aristocratic Olympus for which he yearns.

    VIRGINIA
    You hold my world in contempt because you can never be a gentleman.

    LEONARD
    Virginia, you hold “your world” in contempt.

    VIRGINIA
    And then the hero marries the other girl. The stupid, cow-eyed one! It’s a betrayal.

    LEONARD
    It’s just a bad novel, I’ll give you that. Don’t laugh at me. Not everyone is born with your gifts. Consider my perspective. Any rational mind must inevitably face disillusion and depression. I tried to show how poor Harry just couldn’t escape his past. He couldn’t but I think we can. I probably shouldn’t have published it but Arnold was willing and I couldn’t bear to waste all that work and all that suffering.

    VIRGINIA
    What can you, a prizewinning Apostle from Cambridge, an imperialist potentate of a subject country, possibly know of real suffering?

    LEONARD
    Virginia, I’m a Jew from Putney. All my life I’ve been spat upon. Job is the only book of the Bible I ever understood. Who ridiculed who first? I trained myself to avoid personal feeling. Admit you despised me. Your set. You made me into a joke.

    VIRGINIA
    My set despises everyone. That’s what we do. It’s self-defense, from growing up amongst the most monumental hypocrites.

    LEONARD
    You despised me personally. Be honest. You hated kissing me. You could barely bring yourself to marry me.

    VIRGINIA
    But I did it, didn’t I!

    LEONARD
    You wanted to shock them. You were competing with Nessa to see who could be most scandalous.

    VIRGINIA
    I wouldn’t dare compete with Nessa. Competition is a male thing. It’s a brutal, endless game. I think all competition should be abolished.

    LEONARD
    But it’s all you ever do! Your flirtation with her husband –

    VIRGINIA
    (cringes visibly)

    Oh God, not that. Somehow that memory turns a knife in me more than anything. How it catches at me, the fangs of that old pain. I know I lost Vanessa forever. She will never forgive me. I simply couldn’t comprehend why she married such a strange, intolerable creature with his twitching pink skin and a jerky laugh. Before Clive, Nessa and I drifted together on a sea of seducing half-brothers,
    hiding together beneath the dining room table. We spoke a special animal language.

    LEONARD
    But you were no longer children. Vanessa waited till twenty-eight to marry.

    VIRGINIA
    Who would willingly grow up? I never wanted to. As soon as you’re pushed out of the nursery, the happy moments vanish. Vanessa was the bowl of golden water that brims but never overflows. I lie prostrate at her shrine and still she won’t forgive me. When she brought home friends from the Slade they laughed at me behind the door. You can’t think what it feels like, having one’s self so thoroughly extinguished.

    LEONARD
    I do know it. That was my exact experience at both St. Paul’s and Cambridge. St. Paul’s was a disgusting brothel, but at Trinity I met G. E. Moore. He taught me how to ask the important questions.

    VIRGINIA

    And what are the important questions?

    LEONARD
    The most important question is why. Why can’t Vanessa forgive a mere flirtation? She must know by now that Clive sets out to bed every woman he meets. You at least resisted him.

    VIRGINIA
    But I did wrong. Clive and I made common cause against my sister, his own wife. Some things should be sacred.

    LEONARD

    Wasn’t it true that he respected your intellectual work more than he could ever appreciate Vanessa’s daubs?

    VIRGINIA
    Leonard! How can you!

    LEONARD

    If it’s the truth, shouldn’t we say so?

    VIRGINIA

    I tried speaking the truth, yet here I am locked up among the imbeciles. And weren’t we just arguing whether all imbeciles should be killed?

    LEONARD
    You’re hardly “locked up with the imbeciles” at Dalingridge Hall!

    VIRGINIA
    You’re wrong. In this castle beats the very heart of idiocy and evil. Aren’t you the one who said the most dangerous imbeciles are running the nation? Here I am at home among the hunters, where the miner sweats and dies and maiden faith is rudely strumpeted.

    LEONARD
    But you used to love George! He told me you’d make an adorable wife.

    VIRGINIA
    Perhaps I’ve been given too much time to think. Get a sense of proportion, the doctors keep telling me. So now I stare for the first time into the very mouth of doom. Look your last on all things lovely.

    LEONARD
    Virginia, if you don’t want to be called crazy, you really must explain yourself. Whatever do you mean?

    VIRGINIA
    George behaved little better than a brute. He never let me alone for a moment. That he was the pet of duchesses hardly excuses him. And yet it was Gerald who broke my hymen, when I was six years old. It’s a painful process. and now I freeze like ice. Give up on me, Leonard, there’s no awakening the dead. I’m ruined by incest, I’ve even desired my own sister. I’m locked up because I stew in murder, just as Laura did. I long to slice Gerald’s fat, transparent flesh, to take a rifle and shoot George directly in his smug, piggy face. Or could I bag him with a net and killing bottle? And why shouldn’t I turn on my tormentors? I suffered, I was helpless, why should I be the one forced to writhe with shame? I longed to be petted but instead was trapped in a cage with lions as sulky and angry as they were ferocious. I’m just a little monkey and little monkeys are too easily squashed and trampled. It’s too late for me, Leonard. My body is spoiled forever by George and Gerald.

    LEONARD
    (shocked)

    George? Gerald? These are pillars of society, your own half-brothers! It’s so unbelievable.

    VIRGINIA
    George drowned us in kisses, me and Vanessa. Each kiss was an amputation. I used to sign my work, “One of the Drowned.” Oh, those horrible parties! The oppressive gatherings of Stephenses ground one to a pulp. Because I wanted to discuss Plato I was told I had no conversation. George was so angry! After I removed my ball gown and stripped off my gloves and stockings, he would come into my room and lock the door.

    LEONARD
    But how can any of this be true? How could nobody have noticed it?

    VIRGINIA
    Everyone did notice it. People contrive to bend it to the conventional heroic shape because he kept insisting on the purity of his love. I saw him kissing Countess Carnarvon behind a pillar at the opera! And now she’s his mother-in-law. I asked to join the British Sex Society, dedicated to the study of parent/child incest, but they wouldn’t let me in. Now that you know, you’ll have to spit in George’s face at the club.

    LEONARD
    We don’t belong to the same clubs.

    VIRGINIA
    Then when you thank him for this execrable house, challenge him to a duel. Will he at least feel some regret? Will he take the pigeon gun and blast himself instead? Then the aristocracy will hate me because it’s all my fault. Yet is it not a noble work, letting light in upon the evil Duckworths? Probably he’ll feel nothing. Possibly some vague imbalance.

    LEONARD
    Let’s try to be objective, Virginia.

    VIRGINIA
    If only I could! What a luxury that would be! How I hunger for the objectivity of beloved Macaulay or the stern analysis of cherished Carlyle. Lockhart’s ten volume Life of Scott was the best present I ever received. Reading relieves all my pain, but they won’t let me read anything here. In spite of them I’m continuing to learn. Only life itself matters, nothing but life – and the process of discovery, the everlasting perpetual process, and not the thing itself at all.

    LEONARD

    Virginia, I am speechless.

    VIRGINIA

    Now you know how it feels. I used to think it would be enough to have someone share my loneliness. But if no one believes me, the solitude is total. The Duckworths are guilty of nameless atrocities, and you’re complicit. You locked me away here, so I couldn’t speak. As soon as I open my mouth they try to destroy me. It’s a conspiracy of hush.

    LEONARD
    If this is something you’ve only just remembered how can it possibly be true? It sounds mad.

    VIRGINIA
    I don’t think memory is always at the forefront, Leonard. There’s only so much a human being can bear. Memory comes and goes. One requires tools to think with, to make sense of one’s experience, and these tools are alternately dull and sharp.

    LEONARD
    Well, there are some things no one wants to think about.

    VIRGINIA
    It’s clearer in my mind than the bad, stodgy meal I was force-fed yesterday. Our summer place at St. Ives, in the dining room; I must have been six years old. Eighteen-year-old Gerald lifted me up to a high ledge and explored my private parts. I fought and I struggled but I couldn’t get away. I could see his face in the dining room mirror. It was the face of a demon. I’ve seen that face since, on the drooling men who expose themselves in the park. Now I no longer look in mirrors. I can’t cross a puddle. The depth looks back at me, concealing malicious, hairy arms to reach out and grab. I can’t go forward, I am stuck in the loop of the six, no power even to lift my legs.

    LEONARD
    The loop of the six? I don’t understand.

    VIRGINIA

    I was learning numbers. Six was my number. But I couldn’t close the loop.

    LEONARD

    This was Gerald you say? But Gerald is your publisher!

    VIRGINIA
    I know! If I am not a madwoman, then the world itself is mad. What was I to do? I wrote a book and my incestuous brother was a publisher! Who else would even look at my work? When I delivered my manuscript to Gerald I was in such acute despair – so near the precipice!

    LEONARD
    Did you tell anyone?

    VIRGINIA
    I told Nessa and she told Dr. Savage. Who is an idiot, as you well know.

    LEONARD
    I can’t believe it. Gerald seems so – so – well, ordinary. So completely controlled.

    VIRGINIA
    Get out of here! I’m sorry I told you. I wish I was dead!

    (She is tearing at her own throat – he rushes forward to hold her hands down, lifting her body out of the chair)

    The use of force is all you know!

    LEONARD
    Virginia, I love you.

    (He kisses her neck, she becomes a dead weight. He lowers her carefully into the chair, arranges a blanket on her knees)

    VIRGINIA
    When you touch me, I feel nothing. My body goes dead. That’s how I froze when George came into my room, night after night.

    LEONARD
    Oh, Beloved!

    VIRGINIA
    Don’t. He called me that. I don’t want to be loved, I want to be believed.

  • The Dalingridge Horror – a play by Alysse Aallyn

    (Scene 2. The Conservatory at Dalingridge Hall. VIRGINIA sits slackly in an old-fashioned wheeled chair, gazing into nothingness.)

    LEONARD
    How are you today, Virginia? Sleep well?

    VIRGINIA

    (galvanizing)

    How can there be sleep for those of us who see the flesh melted off the world? Have you come to gloat over the shattered splintered fragments of my body? You care nothing for what they do to me! You macerate my soul. With sleep comes horrible dreams. I was trapped in a drainpipe with the savage hairy man who squats, gobbling and belching, dabbling at my entrails. Soon I will be shrouded in snail slime sticky from the hollow stalk.
    Get away from me! I don’t want to see you!

    LEONARD

    (humbly)

    I’ve brought chocolate creams. You used to love those.

    VIRGINIA
    You are a shadow. You torment me with shadows of the people I might have been, all my unborn selves. Go away, Leonard. Your cause is hopeless.

    LEONARD
    No cause is hopeless as long as we can talk.

    VIRGINIA
    I have nothing to say to you. Your kind disgusts me.

    LEONARD
    You can’t realize how utterly you would end my life too if you died or ever dismissed me. Aren’t I still your precious Mongoose? Aren’t you my beloved Mandrill?

    VIRGINIA
    Any real relationship between men and women is unattainable. It’s all nonsense and lies.

    LEONARD
    Weren’t we going to create our own special relationship? A real marriage, unlike everyone else’s, a vital, living thing. That’s what we promised.

    VIRGINIA
    And then you brought me to George’s house, you traitor.

    LEONARD
    Officialdom requires certification following suicide attempts! You’d be a ward in chancery! This is the only way!

    (He seems about to sit down, she stops him)

    VIRGINIA
    If you sit I’ll start screaming and I won’t stop.

    LEONARD
    I’m so afraid of the future, Virginia, if you can’t get strong.

    VIRGINIA
    You want me to tolerate filthy fingers stuck down my throat! That’s what it comes down to, isn’t it?

    LEONARD
    Is eating chocolate creams so terrible?

    (He offers the box)

    VIRGINIA
    Don’t come near me.

    (He sets the box on the little table, kneels)

    LEONARD
    I would grovel to you and kiss your toes if you would only listen to me, Virginia. Aren’t you better now? Aren’t you getting stronger? Look, you’re free and out of your straps. You’re sleeping some and eating a little. Have the hallucinations gone away?

    VIRGINIA
    I’m terrified of sleep. I’m terrified of chloral and the nightmares it provides. When I wake at night and understand all the terror, violence and unreason still presiding over the universe it is worse than death. I am nothing. I am nobody. I am I-less.

    LEONARD
    Didn’t you always say that only writing that brings order to madness? You called art humanity’s one defense.

    VIRGINIA
    Art is a conspiracy among the civilized. Yet how can we call people civilized who insist on enslaving half their populace? Behold myself, empty-handed and force-fed, by your order. I know I have a good mind, but you have surrendered me to the very people bent on destroying it.

    LEONARD
    Civilization is largely humbug, Virginia. That may be the only thing I’ve learned. I always felt I’m playing a part upon a stage. You’re the only honest person I’ve ever met and now you’re at risk. I just want you to get well, Virginia, so we can plan our hundred books.

    VIRGINIA
    You care nothing for my plans! Shall I ever write again one of those sentences that gives me the most intense pleasure? For years now, people jerked wires to make me jump like a jack in the box when all I want is peace. I long to be ten miles beneath the sea. Here I am stuck in polar ice, harassed by barbarians.

    LEONARD
    Your ice drifts toward home.

    VIRGINIA

    I have no home.

    LEONARD

    You will get well and our life will become possible again. As soon as you gain weight and master some calm and some cheer, we are free!

    VIRGINIA
    Calm and cheer in a world like this one! Don’t treat me like some retarded infant. When we walked together at Asheham you inveighed against the world as a stupid, corrupt brothel.

    LEONARD
    And I still believe that. I wanted to go into politics but politics is brutal and discouraging. Now I think I must change the world through workers’ cooperatives. We must stand up against all the evils that we see.

    VIRGINIA
    You said writers are born to be unhappy.

    LEONARD
    I fear to some extent that must be true. It’s harder on you, because you’re a sensitive, poetic writer. But if we swear to support each other –

    VIRGINIA
    My punishment is unending. Mother didn’t approve of school for girls. Boys should go everywhere and know everything, and girls should stay home and know nothing. All my brothers were sent to school, where I must say they did horribly. George and Gerald were incurably stupid and Thoby jumped out a window rather than write his prep. But I learned Greek! I learned Latin! I read every book in Father’s library, all on my own! And here I am, sentenced to Bedlam for it.

    LEONARD
    When you have seen the squalor that I have, you will realize that Dalingridge Hall is no punishment, Virginia.

    VIRGINIA
    It’s a punishment for me. Think of its owners, in their smug pride, rulers of the universe. How can you of all people, abide them? But they seduce even you with their privilege, luxury and glamor. What is the use of the finest education in the world if it teaches people not to hate force but to use it? Why can’t we learn the arts of understanding people’s lives and minds? All that the professions preach is worship of the sacred tree of property.

    LEONARD
    The doctors say you pushed yourself too hard.

    VIRGINIA
    Is that what you really think, that diving deep is dangerous? Go away, Leonard. I can’t bear to hear you lie to me.

  • The Dalingridge Horror – a play by Alysse Aallyn

    Following her honeymoon Virginia Woolf attempted suicide and was sent to recover at her half-brother’s estate, Dalingridge Hall.

    CHARACTERS

    Virginia Woolf: a sensitive young artist having a breakdown

    Leonard Woolf: her new husband, nervous, forceful, an “outsider”

    Dr. Craig: bluff, elderly, genial, doctor to the wealthy

    Dr. Hyslop: a fashionable eugenicist

    Two orderlies: rough & tumble Cockneys ALF & BOB (orderlies & doctors played by the same actors)

    (Scene 1: Dalingridge Hall, An ostentatious faux British castle with all the updated luxurious mod-cons. A pair of white-coated orderlies maneuver a stretcher into a sickroom.)

    ALF
    Hold up a mo, let’s have a fag.

    BOB
    Buckle her in, and then we’ll have a fag.

    ALF
    Now that’s right stupid, that is. Tie her up, the job is done. No time for a fag then.

    BOB
    Oh, right. I get you. Where can we stow her? She’s heavy.

    ALF
    Tall as a man and strong like one, so they say. Prop her up over here. Careful, now, you got me shin!

    (They lean the stretcher against the wall facing the audience. Fumble with cigarette packs. ALF sits on the bed.)

    BOB
    I don’t like her looking at us.

    ALF
    Oh, she’s well out of it. Off to dreamland. Took the mickey out of her, they did.

    BOB
    So what’s up with this one? Trying on hats and ordering jewelry too much for her?

    ALF
    I heard it was her honeymoon what sank her!

    BOB
    Oh, Lord!

    (they both guffaw)

    BOB
    Wonder it doesn’t happen routine-like, what with the shock and all. I mean, she’s not used to seeing the farm animals getting frisky in the spring. She’s not walking to church with the village lads. She’s not sharing a bed with the brothers and sisters. So everything seems right and proper until the big night and then –

    ALF
    All hell breaks loose!

    (they laugh uproariously)

    BOB
    So, you seen the husband?

    ALF
    Oh yes, he was hanging about. Wringing his hands.

    BOB
    So what’s he look like, then? One of them muscle-bound rowing blues?

    ALF
    No, no, no. Nervy bloke. Just back from the East where he’d been sorting out the blacks.

    BOB
    Oh, Lord! Used to carrying a big stick is he?

    (they gasp, cough, laugh and fall about)

    VIRGINIA

    (groggily)

    What is this place? What vast forces of good and evil dropped me here? I burn, I shiver. I turn, I tumble, I am stretched. I am nailed like a stoat to the stable door.

    ALF
    Oh my jugs and jiggers, she’s coming out of it. Look here, you take that end.

    BOB
    Hold her up, hold her up!

    ALF
    She’s heavy, I’m telling you. They feed them women up like Strasbourg geese. Look sharp now.

    BOB
    There’s hell to pay if she’s not buckled in.

    (They get her on the bed. Much buckling and strapping.)

    VIRGINIA
    Who are you? Where am I? I have been diving through seas of horror to come up rotting in dirty ditchwater. Don’t touch me!

    (She starts struggling when it’s too late. She’s already buckled in. The men rest, gratified but exhausted.)

    ALF
    Nothing to fear, my lady. You’re all right now. You’re safe here at Dalingridge Hall.

    (His last words reverential)

    VIRGINIA
    Dalingridge Hall! Now the agony begins, horror has seized me with its fangs! I am turned, I am tumbled, I am stretched and everyone pursuing!

    (She starts screaming)

    ALF
    Hypo! We need a hypo!

    (ALF and BOB rush about panicked. Enter LEONARD. Exit orderlies.)

    LEONARD
    What is it? What’s happened?

    VIRGINIA
    Dalingridge Hall! They’ve taken me to Dalingridge Hall!

    LEONARD
    Virginia, your brother Sir George and his wife Lady Margaret have kindly lent us this splendid mansion. They’re staying up in London and have left it all to us. Up to date comfort. Plenty of servants – French chef – the food is magnificent. Eleven bathrooms! Spotless, hygienic, – the nurses are impressed I can tell you.

    VIRGINIA
    Now this monstrous ugliness is explained. I hear the crack of antlers as if the beasts of the forest are rearing, plunging among the thorns. One has pierced me. One has driven deep within me. You have left me to undergo this squalid humiliation served out like soup by greedy, casual scullions, coarse, ogling, brushing, destroying everything, smearing even our love with impure fingers. “What is this secret sin, this untold tale, that art cannot extract nor penance cleanse?” Don’t you understand? ALL DEATHS ARE ONE DEATH.

    LEONARD

    Would you like to see Sir George?

    VIRGINIA

    George! That obese alligator who used to roll me round my bed of an evening as if I were a minnow shut up in a tank with a frenzied whale. I would rather touch a decaying dogfish than that man’s body.

    LEONARD
    Hush, Virginia. George is an Adonis, a true man of the world, adored by great ladies and parliamentarians alike.

    VIRGINIA
    George has the eyes of a sow! Or is it an elephant? Sows look so much like elephants on the Duckworth side of the family. He used to fondle me so I couldn’t read my Greek. The very locusts deform the trees with their lusts.

    LEONARD
    George claims chastity until hi marriage. That’s more than I managed.

    VIRGINIA
    What liars men are! George was a pig, snuffling, rolling, grabbing, calling me Beloved. How he tortured both of us, me and Vanessa alike, Greek slaves in the harem promised him by Eton. He smothered us with caresses until Nessa told Dr. Savage and Dr. Savage made him stop. George told Dr. Savage he was only comforting us for the illness of our father.

    LEONARD
    Virginia, you’re romancing. Dr. Head says longing for adult attention creates a wish-fulfillment leading to ideas like these. He says the only way out is the talking cure.

    VIRGINIA
    So it’s wish fulfillment that has trapped me in George’s house? Dr. Head is another booby, Leonard. We were right to dismiss him. He knows nothing.

    (she grabs him)

    Don’t you understand that we are poured to the very edge of the abyss, Leonard, where we shall be broken together into nothingness and flames? Help, help! Get me out of this thing!

    LEONARD
    Dearest, you threatened to harm yourself, remember? You attempted suicide.

    VIRGINIA
    You left the veronal unlocked. I thought it was an invitation. My father praised the Duke of Bedford for having the courage to shoot himself. Surely you longed to be rid of me. I’m a bad bargain all around.

    LEONARD

    No Virginia, no. I love you. I moved heaven and earth to save you.

    VIRGINIA
    But I’m already dead, Leonard. I am certainly in hell. Fallen in a duck pond and strangling in duckweed! Quack, quack!

    LEONARD
    Virginia, why do you reduce me to madness too? If you could only comprehend how insane you sound.

    VIRGINIA
    You can’t think what a raging furnace it is to me, madness and doctors and being forced. I am bent like a tree under a remorseless gale. The crass blindness that poisons childhood still threatens bitter storms. Children will be trodden under. Speech is false. The demand to submit must always be returned with cries of pain, hate and rage because that’s all they understand.

    LEONARD
    You were violent, Virginia. You attacked your nurses. Don’t you remember?

    VIRGINIA
    I was defending myself. They attacked me! Forcing food down my throat. I will go down with my colors flying. Father used to say, “Face the inevitable with eyes wide open.”

    LEONARD
    You vomited on Lily and you struck Susan with a platter of cold meat. You must eat to gain weight, Virginia. Then the voices will subside, the doctors say. That’s why they’ve ordered a rest cure.

    VIRGINIA
    Those doctors! My life is a constant fight against doctors’ follies. That cretin, Savage? He’s not fit to be about. Borrowed from another century.

    LEONARD
    Four doctors and all of them in agreement. You know this, Virginia. You chose Head yourself – because Roger Fry recommended him – Vanessa suggested Craig and I found Hyslop.

    VIRGINIA
    Really, a doctor is worse than a husband. I’ve given up expecting doctors to listen to reason. If only those pigheaded sawbones could see I speak the sober truth without excuse! Alienists know absolutely nothing. Their vanity is as profound as their ignorance. What does their “treatment” amount to? It is all eating and drinking and being shut up in the dark, sequestered with lunatics.

    LEONARD
    The food here is delicious. May I bring you some?

    VIRGINIA
    Once when we travelled by train to St. Ives the lemonade spilled on the sandwiches and turned them into mush but Nurse still made us eat them and I was sick and then I was punished. Leonard, don’t you see that when I am weighted with food I can no longer make the moments flow together. I become an excreter, an excretion. No, of course you don’t see. You’re in a conspiracy, plotting against me. I see your grinning, I know your subterfuge, I hear you sneering behind my back.

    LEONARD
    Virginia, the people who love you are trying to decide what’s best for you. I’m trying to make the best decisions I can.

    VIRGINIA
    You’re punishing me for disappointing you. For being a bad wife.

    LEONARD
    When you’re well, you admit you’ve been mad.

    VIRGINIA
    My sister wanted to be rid of me. While she threw away our father’s possessions I lay in bed and heard the birds singing Greek.

    “What bird so sings, so yet does wail?
    Tis the ravished nightingale
    Jug, jug, jug, tereu she cries
    And still her woes at midnight rise.”

    LEONARD
    You’re hurting yourself with all this wild talk. No one can understand anything you say.

    VIRGINIA
    People know very well enough but it’s a secret. King Edward spewed the foulest possible language amongst the azaleas and yet they crowned him. “Swallow, my sister, O Sister Swallow,” I sing. If I become king of the lunatics shall I escape molestation? God, I wish I were dead. I will soon have to jump out of a window.

    LEONARD
    These violent oscillations, Virginia! If I could only get you to see! A whirlwind brings madness in its wake!

    VIRGINIA
    How long can any man love a woman without driving her mad? How long can I protect my clean visions from the odious masculine point of view – from the egotism of men? You crack my brain like a thrush cracks a snail – hammer, hammer, hammer.

    LEONARD
    I am not your enemy, Virginia.

    VIRGINIA
    Then who else is? Why shouldn’t I be frightened? I wanted to spend my life innocently indifferent among the trees and rivers but instead men expose themselves whenever I step out doors. I saw a woman pinned beneath a car and horses falling in the street. Outside our scullery a man cut his own throat. His jowls were whitened as codfish. The human face is hideous. What are you doing? Don’t touch me!

    LEONARD
    Trying to loosen your straps. You’re getting excited. Doctor!