Lipstick and Cigarettes, A Short Play by Dwight Storring

Nov 152011
 

Here is a little street theater, a charming bijou, something concocted out of the air for the delectation of passers-by. Lipstick and Cigarettes was originally performed last year, June, 2010, at Asphalt Jungle Shorts VI, a drama festival in Kitchener, Ontario (the place where they invented the Blackberry, in case you didn’t know). Lipstick and Cigarettes, like all good theater, rises in silence and resolves itself in silence, and in between it seems, on a tenuous line of dialogue and the slightest of actions, to imply epic motions of the spirit—the drama of age and youth, a girl’s passage into womanhood, temptation and the Fall, and the joyful exuberance of life.

Dwight Storring is an old friend from dg’s newspaper days. In the mid-1970s, he was a photographer at the Peterborough Examiner when dg was the sports editor (a place and time immortalized in dg’s novel Precious). Now Dwight lives in Kitchener (did I tell you about the Blackberry), about a 50-minute drive from the farm where dg grew up. He is a digital media artist and producer who dabbles in many disciplines including playwriting. The photo above shows Jessalyn Broadfoot playing Angel. Dwight was a resident artist playwright at Theatre and Company during the 2005-06 season. He is currently exploring the connection between story and place through the Latitudes and Longitudes Digital Storytelling Project and his work with community agencies where he teaches the creation of personal narratives as a fundamental part of daily life.

dg

Lipstick and Cigarettes

By Dwight Storring

 

Characters

Evelyn – a woman, approaching 60.

Angel – a girl in her early teens or at least appears to be.

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The play opens in a small green space in downtown Kitchener. The space nestles up against the spiraling ramps of a parking garage – Kitchener’s Guggenheim.

Angel perches in the tree that arches over the benches in the park. She is dressed crisply in a gingham dress with a white apron over top, her hair in braids. She is iconic.

Angel sings an old jazz standard to herself, perhaps “It Amazes Me” or “I Walk a Little Faster.”

Evelyn, dressed in her housecoat and slippers, trudges into the parkette lugging a cheap, battered suitcase.

Evelyn places the suitcase on a bench and starts unpacking it. She joins Angel in the song. She removes a slinky red dress and drapes it gently over the bushes followed by a slip. She sets out a pair of matching shoes. The clothes have all seen better days.

She carefully sets out a bottle of wine and two glasses. She opens the wine, pours a glass and takes a drink.

 

Angel

Took you long enough.

Evelyn ignores her and continues to sing.

Angel

Took you long enough!

Evelyn continues to ignore her while she waltzes her glass of wine around the park.

Angel

Hey you. Evelyn, remember me?

I’ve been waiting here forever.

Evelyn bursts into loud peels of laughter as she dances.

Angel

Are you laughing at me … Stop … stop it, come on. Where have you been?

Evelyn

Trying to bring her laughing under control.

Sorry.

Angel

Stop it, stop it, stop it … Stop it … right now! Momma’s probably crying her eyes out wondering where I am and you’re laughing your ass off!

Evelyn

Still laughing.

Poor Momma. As if.

If you’re so worried about Momma, what’re you doing here?

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God’s Flea: A Play — Diane Lefer

May 262011
 

It’s a pleasure to introduce the first play ever published on Numéro Cinq, God’s Flea by Diane Lefer (wise friend, former colleague at Vermont College of Fine Arts—in the mid-1990s, when I had a radio show, I interviewed her, still have that tape). God’s Flea is an uproarious piece of political folk theater. Set on the Arizona-Mexico border, it borrows from the tradition of carpa, a Mexican popular theatrical form something like vaudeville, full of stock characters, slapstick, broad comedy and topical comment. But it also draws plot inspiration from a 19th century Colombian short story which, in turn, draws its inspiration from folktale and legend. This is the kind of theater you don’t see on Broadway, but it makes you think about what theater is and should be. It speaks to the people, the impoverished (lots of those around these days) and oppressed; it speaks of miracles and saintliness; it tells a joke, reveals horrors, pronounces a moral lesson. Jesus and Death and Sheriff Arpaio are characters; the good man at the center of the story is a gambling addict. The staging is quick and breathless, using lighting to switch scenes; actors change costumes onstage, on-the-fly. It’s a treat. (And don’t miss Diane’s earlier contributions to the magazine: her story “The Tangerine Quandary” and her “What it’s like living here [Los Angeles]” essay.)

—dg

Tomás Carrasquilla Naranjo was a 19th-century Colombian author and his story “En la diestra de Dios Padre” (In the right hand of God the Father) became a classic. It’s about a humble and saintly man whose generosity to Jesus and St. Peter (in disguise, of course) earns him five wishes. I love it that the story is written in rural vernacular. I don’t relate to its piety. So when Fernando Castro asked me to create a contemporary adaptation in English, I was relieved when he agreed with my plan to transfer the action to the US-Mexico border, make the greedy sister the main character, and create a version atheists could accept while retaining the underlying values of Catholic social justice teachings. Instead of Sunday School lesson, my genre model was carpa, or Mexican vaudeville, a style known for using comedy, stock characters, and physical humor to address sociopolitical issues. In this case, immigrant rights—a movement I’ve been involved in for years.

—Diane Lefer

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God’s Flea

a play by Diane Lefer

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inspired by the classic Colombian short story,
“En la diestra de Dios Padre” by Tomás Carrasquilla Naranjo

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DOÑA GOLOSITA, greedy middleaged woman, played by a cross-dressed male, and not an attractive sight in spite of her oversize chichis

PERALTA, her brother, humble and pious, played by a cross-dressed woman

Two INTERROGATORS in ski masks

Note: INTERROGATOR, played by female, also plays SHERIFF ARPAIO, JESUS, DEATH; the other, male, also plays ST. PETER, MARUCHENGA (the maid), DIEGO (the gardener), CABBIE, CONGRESSWOMAN

Time and Place: Today. The Arizona-Mexico border.

Set: A swivel chair (the torture chair). A trunk. A kitchen counter or shelf upstage.

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The Barnum Museum

Jan 152010
 

I’m reading Millhauser as part of my exploration of short stories that seem to disobey the rules.  My question–my thesis, perhaps–seems to hinge on the question, what is a short story?  In “The Barnum Museum”, the narrator appears to be a 3rd person plural, ‘we’, but at times the closeness of the narration feels much more like first.   Even though nothing about the narrator is ever revealed as a character, there is a strong sense of ‘voice’ about this narrator.  I think Millhauser in particular does this really well…hides his narrators without making them characters.  In reading James Wood’s chapter on narrating in How Fiction Works, I was struck by the idea of ‘free indirect’ narration, a concept akin (I think) to stream of consciousness.   This topic came up in Jess Row’s lecture at residency.  The thing is, I don’t think Millhauser is doing this even.  He’s almost using ‘close-omniscience’ as a narrative voice.  Speaking collectively for his village but not really allowing the reader access to this narrative presence.  Of course that’s just one aspect of this story that shakes it free of the confines of traditional short story structure.  I was also listening to a podcast of Jeffrey Eugenides reading the Harold Brodky story, “Spring Fugue,” in which Eugenides and Deborha Treisman discuss whether or not Brodky’s story is in fact a story, or a prose-poem.  Eugenides says that he doesn’t think it matters that much (though he does think it is a story.)  I wonder what others think about this.  When does a story stop being a story?  In the Millhauser story, there are no main characters, other than the invisible, plural narrator and the museum itself.  Yet it does move like a story.  There is tension, drama, movement through time.  I’m not looking for anyone to write the thesis for me, but I am interested to know what others thing about the weird stories out there.  I know these lines are getting blurrier with time, but is there still a line?   By the way, the NewYorker fiction podcasts are great, and free, on Itunes if you haven’t been there before.

—Richard Farrell

Checking In & Recent Readings.

Jan 132010
 

I read Julio Cortazar’s “Axolotl” yesterday.  In this story, a man visits a Parisian aquarium and becomes captivated by a strange species of salamnder until he becomes one.  Though the story is unusual, there were clearly desire-resistance patterns built into the structure and it seemed to follow a logical (albeit odd) progression.  This pattern seemed less clear in Leonard Michael’s story, “In the Fifties.”  I’m curious to see how that story comes apart on closer readings.  I’ve also been trying to make my way through Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose.  Here are some gems from chapter 1: Quoting Spencer…”The merit of a style consists in precisely this: that it delivers the greatest number of ideas in the fewest number of words.”   “The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition.”  This idea was particularly interesting.  My children do this all the time.  They try to describe something they don’t understand or have a word for.  Tolstoy calls it (according to Shklovsky) “seeing for the first time.”   Shklovsky is more dense and harder to understand in chapter two.  I’ve also been reading Leon Surmelian’s “Techniques of Fiction Writing: Measure and Madness.”  This is an older book but very thorough…a few quotes from him.  “Plot dramatizes the idea.”  “Pain is the difference between what we expected and what we discovered, what we hoped for and what we got, the difference between illusion and reality.”    “Desire would cease to be desire without pain.”  I’m wading in to Calvino, Angela Carter and Millhauser’s “The Barnum Museum” today.

—Richard Farrell