by: Kelvin Keraga

 

 

Cast of Characters:

Since the characters do not share their names with each other, they may be listed as follows:

The One on Stage [Charlie in script]: Older woman, age 40’s-70’s.

The One Who Enters [Gina in script]: Woman in her 30’s

Note: Either character can be played by either sex or with alternate sexual orientations, and with alternate names for Ray and Mark to suit the relationships.

 

 

Setting:

A cemetery.

Time:

Middle of the night. Summer, Full moon.

 

 

Setting:

Cemetery. Tombstones old and new, but anonymous: no names visible. A moonlit night, the tombstones luminous with pale blue light. The area is a mix of shadows and light. In the back of the stage a statue of an angel: a tall handsome man with long hair, his arms forward in a gesture of welcome. The statue has lost some of its features to erosion over time, but the face is still strong and attractive.

At Rise:

As the play begins Charlie is sitting on the ground next to a tombstone, her hand on her head, lost in reminisces about her lost husband. She is wearing somewhat formal clothes. Behind her, Gina approaches the statue, and she does, Charlie hears her, stirs and turns to watch her. Gina is dressed as if meeting a lover for a night out. Gina climbs up the base of the statue, until she is next to him, her feet next to the angel’s, one hand on his shoulder, her face staring directly into his. She whispers something to the figure. Then she leans forward and kisses the statue. A long searching kiss. After, she rests her forehead against the angel’s forehead. Then she pulls back and studies the face for a moment. She climbs down, pivots around, and sees Charlie watching her. She freezes.

 

CHARLIE

I’m sorry I startled you. I didn’t mean to.

 

(Charlie stands up, shakes herself off. She laughs politely.)

 

CHARLIE

You scared me a bit too. I wasn’t sure you were real.

 

(Gina looks up at the statue and over at Charlie)

 

GINA

Sorry, I know I wasn’t supposed to…you…you work here? Or what? Who…?

 

CHARLIE

No, no. My husband is buried here. Right here.

 

(Charlie points to the tombstone next to where she had lain.)

 

GINA

Your husband?

 

CHARLIEs

Yes. Mark.

 

GINA

Oh.

 

(Pause.)

 

GINA

Sorry.

 

(Gina pulls her cloak tight and watches Charlie carefully.)

 

GINA

How did your husband die?

 

(Charlie looks at her, a little surprised at the question).

 

CHARLIE

Oh, um…the cancer, Leukemia. Mark died three years ago.

 

GINA

Oh. Sorry. Must have been hard.

 

CHARLIE

Well. I took care of him best I could, I guess. For a while anyway. But then…I don’t know. I just got to a point where I couldn’t think of the right things to say to keep him alive anymore. Just couldn’t find the right words in time.

 

(Charlie looks up at Gina.)

 

CHARLIE

Oh, I’m sorry.

 

(Pause. Charlie points to the statue.)

 

CHARLIE

You kissed it.

 

GINA

I kissed him, yes.

 

CHARLIE

He reminds you of someone?

 

GINA

Not quite. No. My boyfriend…I lost my boyfriend in the Middle East four months ago.

 

CHARLIE

Oh. Sorry. A soldier?

 

GINA

No. No, a photojournalist.

 

CHARLIE

I’ve heard of that happening. A few times. Don’t remember the names though, I’m afraid. I’m sorry.

 

GINA

“A few times?” Wow. In five years, over 300 journalists killed in the Middle East. All their lives, all their work, all reduced to three little words. “A few times”.

 

CHARLIE

I’m sorry. I should know better. Sorry for them all, sorry for your boyfriend.

 

GINA

Yeah, well. Sorry for your husband too.

 

(Pause.)

 

CHARLIE

How did your boyfriend die?

 

GINA

The van he was traveling in was caught in crossfire. Street battle. They said. I wondered if that was just a diplomatic explanation for something more…deliberate. Something directed at him, not just something he stumbled into accidentally. But I don’t know. I’ll never know. A sealed casket came back from Syria and that sealed casket is buried in his hometown in Massachusetts. That’s all I know.

 

CHARLIE

You sound like you don’t think he’s really dead.

 

GINA

Now I know. But for a long time I couldn’t stop pretending that he was still alive somewhere.

 

(Gina glances at Charlie)

 

GINA

You’re lucky you could be there when your Mark died.

 

(Charlie considers for a moment, decides to ask.)

 

CHARLIE

Why did you kiss the statue?

 

GINA

Ray…my boyfriend…told me to.

 

CHARLIE

He told you to?

 

GINA

Well, in a way he did. In a dream.

 

CHARLIE

Ahh. You dreamed about him.

 

GINA

Oh yes. A vivid dream. It was very real. It was Ray. He was sitting in a wicker chair on my back patio, like he used to. Near the sunflowers. He stayed over when he was Stateside. So it wasn’t quite our place. But it was going to be.

 

(Pause.)

 

GINA

In the dream he told me to come here during the full moon. He told me to kiss the statue. “Kiss the stone angel.” So I did. Full moon tonight.

 

(Gina doesn’t look up at the sky, though; she looks at the statue. Charlie looks up at the moon.)

 

GINA

So now I can join him.

 

CHARLIE

What?

 

GINA

That’s what the dream meant. It became so clear to me. He’s calling me to join him. To be with him. Now I will. Tonight.

 

CHARLIE (to herself)

Oh god no. Not again.

 

GINA

What?

 

(Long pause. Charlie paces, considers.)

 

CHARLIE

What was Ray like?

 

GINA

His name was Ray Wittinger. Ray was killed in Syria. Loved it there though. Loved the people. He said sometimes they carried such hatred, but he didn’t mind. Or I think he tried hard not to mind. He said that sometimes hatred was a way to keep from giving up. He said it was like tasting something bitter; you react, you spit it out. You fight it. You seek out something delicious to get rid of the bad taste. But the hatred keeps you alive.

 

CHARLIE

Some of that hatred killed him.

 

GINA

He knew that side of things, the extremists. Hell, we have hatred here, and extremists here too, don’t we? He knew the risk and he accepted it. He did something very special.

 

CHARLIE

What were his photos like?

 

GINA

Are. What are his photos like. They still live.

 

CHARLIE

Sorry.

 

GINA

The images are all young people. Children in almost every shot. His work, though…nothing you would want on your living room wall. At least not most people. He tried to capture the anger, the defiance, the resistance. The light in their eyes. Wounded young children on crutches, scowling. A little girl drinking tea from a cracked and leaky cup. There was one picture of his that got a lot of attention and won some awards: a boy standing behind a barbed-wire fence, balancing a soccer ball on the tip of his finger…

 

CHARLIE

Oh yes, I remember that picture very well. That was him?

 

GINA

It was. The picture was featured all over the place for a while—the national newspapers, cable news, the net. All that. People thought it was symbolic of the conflict in Syria.

 

CHARLIE

I remember now. I read some discussion about how the kid in the picture was touching a soccer ball with his finger, something a player is penalized for doing. Symbolism, broken rules. Some crazies claimed it was some kind of secret code.

 

GINA

That wasn’t it though. That wasn’t what made the image work.

 

CHARLIE

No?

 

GINA

It was the look on the boy’s face. Looking back at you. Waiting to see what you would do, like. Whether you would knock the ball out of his hand. Or what. Made you feel like you were right in the picture with him, and only the barbed wire keeping you apart.

 

CHARLIE

Ray was good.

 

GINA

No, he was extraordinary, and he left behind lots of other remarkable images. He put his life at risk sharing that part of the world with us.

 

CHARLIE

That was brave.

 

(Gina nods.)

 

CHARLIE (Carefully)

So….so it seems to me like you need to stick around, gather those images together, maybe create a book.

 

GINA

Oh yes. Let’s publish of a lovely book filled with images of these kids that will sit on fancy coffee tables in countries they can’t afford to visit, much less pay for the fucking book itself, and then let’s pretend that we are helping them.

CHARLIE

Okay but still…There are so many great things you can do with your life!

 

GINA

You know, when he was over there, I paid attention to news about the Middle East, but mostly just the headlines. I was afraid to read too deeply, afraid of how it would affect me, with him over there. It didn’t matter though. In reality, I was just as afraid of what I didn’t know, as I might been over what I would have learned. But I kept busy. Catering. Kept to myself a lot.

Then when his parents called to tell me he was killed, I went right to cable news and learned every detail of the whole situation, the war coverage, the factions. Saw the wreckage of a Jeep they said he had been traveling in. Something covered in a blanket. And then I just went through a lot of things I don’t want to talk about right now. But now, every bullet–riddled storefront, every starving face, every search of a bomb crater, I feel it all. The concrete dust, the broken glass, the bloody blankets. The cries of pain, the angry shouts, the screaming, the shooting—I just want it to stop, but it all just gets worse and worse. This storm of hatred and violence raging everywhere. And then I walk past some outdoor restaurant, umbrellas over the tables, everyone happy and laughing and completely oblivious, and I just start to cry. I feel like we’re all on a cruise boat sailing through a sea of corpses, and no one wants to look out the portholes.

 

CHARLIE

There have always been corpses in the ocean.

 

GINA

I don’t care about history! I care about now! And tomorrow!

 

CHARLIE

And yet here you are, throwing your tomorrows away!

 

GINA

I’m getting the fuck out of the way! I can’t even pull myself out of the rubble. I can’t.

 

(Pause)

 

He sat in that chair in my dream.

 

CHARLIE

This is wrong. You should leave. Go home and live. Ray would not want you to do this.

 

GINA

You don’t know Ray! You don’t know me! You don’t know what I’ve been through! And you! Here you are: visiting your husband’s grave in the middle of the night. You shouldn’t be here either! You tell me to leave? Why don’t you leave?

 

(Charlie looks around the graveyard, thinking. Finally she speaks.)

 

CHARLIE

I have to be here.

 

GINA

Why, because you love your husband, that stops you from leaving?

 

CHARLIE

I can’t leave.

 

GINA

Why not?

 

(Charlie stares back at her. Gina studies her.)

 

GINA

Oh.

 

(Charlie nods.)

 

GINA

You don’t look dead.

 

CHARLIE

Yeah, I know I’m supposed to be all rotting bones and flesh, but this isn’t Halloween.

 

GINA

How long have you been here?

 

CHARLIE

Not long. Heart attack a few months ago. It was a surprise, but at least it was quick.

 

GINA

What’s it like to be dead?

 

CHARLIE

I can’t tell you.

 

GINA

You can’t tell me?

 

CHARLIE

No. Sorry. I can’t.

 

GINA

Yet here you are now, I see you. Isn’t that proof of something?

 

CHARLIE

Oh, in the morning you’ll think maybe I was just another dream. Or maybe think that I’m not really a ghost. It’s enough for me to be here now and exist only in your imagination in the morning.

 

GINA

Did Ray send you?

 

(Charlie is silent.)

 

GINA

Do you know Ray? Over there?

 

CHARLIE

(Charlie is silent.)

 

GINA

Can you get a message to him?

 

CHARLIE

I’m sorry.

 

GINA

Can’t you even tell me if he is happy?

 

CHARLIE

I can’t. I know how you feel, but I can’t.

 

GINA

You know how I feel, but you can’t? This is just cruel bullshit.

 

CHARLIE

I can tell you this: Ray wants you to live.

 

GINA

Who the hell are you? What the hell are you? Finally, I finally reconnect with this man I love, and you come along. What are you trying to do? You act so nice, but you just step in the way of Ray and me. You’re like the barbed wire in that picture.

 

CHARLIE

Sorry, I…

 

GINA

I don’t believe you. I’m not listening to you. I’m listening to Ray. Ray brought me here. And Ray has the answer!

 

CHARLIE

To what?

 

GINA

I want to know if he really, truly was committed to me. To be my lover for the rest of our lives. Married or not. Oh, sometimes he would say ‘I love you’, give me a little smile. But a grand, heartfelt, soul to soul I love you…

It all affected him, what he saw over there. He would come home unsettled and kind of…remote. He would come out of it for a while and things would be wonderful for a time, and I didn’t want to spoil them again by talking about marriage. Then he would go off on assignment again. Well one day when he was gone, I began asking myself why the hell I was waiting for some signal from him. My life too. I needed to confront him on the issue. It felt like I just wanted to…take a hammer to the whole relationship, whack on it, see if it could withstand the blows. For a long time, though, I was just too afraid to pick up the hammer, afraid of swinging too hard. Finally, I steeled myself to talk to him when he returned Stateside and accept whatever happened. But he was killed before he returned.

 

(Pause.)

 

CHARLIE

Listen, let me say this for a moment, and I really mean this: it’s a gift that you can feel these things so deeply.

 

GINA

Oh, yes! Nothing like the feeling of barbed wire!

 

CHARLIE

Your pain is telling you to find a way to a better place, a better world, the world you crave so badly. That world needs you. Needs people like you.

 

GINA

Then why does it keep trying to tear us all into little pieces! Why is the world chewing up so many of us right now? There is so much spite in the air! It stings! It stings all of us! So what am I supposed to do: plant a tree? Recycle my water bottles? Run a fucking marathon?

 

CHARLIE

I like all those things.

 

GINA

Diddly-squat.

 

CHARLIE

Well, if the marathon raises money for a good cause, and you get healthy running, that sounds good.

 

(Gina stares back at her.)

 

CHARLIE

….or, if you put together the book of Ray’s images and send all the profits to some place over there that can help some of those kids.

 

GINA

That’s not going to go far with those kids.

 

CHARLIE

Even if you just make a difference for one kid! It only takes one!

 

GINA

Oh, God, here come the cliches! “It only takes one!” Let’s squeeze this whole situation, this whole fucking world, everything, into little teeny sound bites!

 

CHARLIE

Yeah, it sucks that we speak in snippets sometimes! I hear you! Sometimes it feels like we are sitting in separate rooms talking to each other through holes in the wall. But…that phrase…it contains so much. “It only takes one.” It carries a…magnificence. One life saved. One life nurtured. One person turned away from something terrible.

 

GINA

Like suicide.

 

CHARLIE

Yes! To throw away a life is a horrible mistake!

 

GINA

That’s what you’re trying to do, isn’t it? Save someone’s life. Save my life.

 

CHARLIE

Well, yes, but…

 

GINA

This is what this is all about. Not about me. Not Ray. You. You have your own little mission here and it’s all about you. You’re trying to earn some celestial brownie points somehow. You…no, wait. You said yourself that you can’t leave here.

 

CHARLIE

Yes…

 

GINA

You’re stuck because…you failed.

 

CHARLIE

Failed my husband.

 

GINA

No. Not at all. Someone else. You. You failed yourself.

 

CHARLIE

Me?

 

GINA

I think you fell into the same dark crater that I’ve been inhabiting, and you didn’t make it out. That’s why you’re here. You gave up, you threw away your own life. And now, somehow, you’re stuck in this weird spiritual limbo haunting your husband’s grave, hoping to save yourself by saving me.

 

CHARLIE

Listen…

 

GINA

Tell me it’s not true.

 

CHARLIE

You don’t…

 

GINA

Don’t bullshit me! I don’t want lies or slogans or some fucking greeting card version of reality. Tell me what really happened to you after Mark died. The truth.

 

(Pause.)

 

CHARLIE

Okay. The truth.

 

(Charlie considers. Looks at the stone angel, thinks. Turns to Gina)

 

CHARLIE

But first let me ask you something.

 

GINA

Okay.

 

CHARLIE

When you kissed the stone angel. What did it feel like? The truth.

 

GINA (thinks about it.)

Cold. Kind of gritty. I felt a little silly. And…disappointed.

 

CHARLIE

A cold kiss.

 

GINA

So?

 

CHARLIE

I wasn’t there when Mark died. He fought the cancer for a long time, and then one day he just decided to let go of life and gave up. He never said so, but I saw the change. He ate very little and lost a lot of weight. He stopped looking like himself. He would drift away in our conversations, saying things that I didn’t understand. It was like he was looking for something I didn’t have. I tried to bring him back. I kept trying to think of things to say to him to help keep him in the fight. Oh, I came up with some things that might have helped. The problem was, I thought them all up after he died. And I’ve rehearsed them over and over in my head ever since. At the time though, I couldn’t think of a way to bring him back. I just went…blank.

 

GINA

Doesn’t matter. Don’t waste your time with that crap.

 

CHARLIE

What?

 

GINA

He made up his mind to let go. I think he knew it was hopeless and wanted it all to end sooner. Save you both the pain. I think he got there before you did, that’s all.

(Charlie looks at Gina and is silent for a moment.)

 

CHARLIE

Anyway. One day I couldn’t stand it anymore. I left. Left him with a nurse. Stayed away for two days. Went for long walks in the woods. Afraid to go back. Secretly hoping he’d be gone when I returned. And he was. Took his own life with sleeping pills. So, I wasn’t there when he died, and I didn’t get to kiss him goodbye till…after. And when I did, at the funeral home, it was a cold kiss. I knew then, and I know now, that it wasn’t a kiss to invite me to join him. It was the closing of an iron door, the eternal barrier. A kiss that sent me back among the living. And so I went on, and lived.

 

GINA

Wow. One little kiss and your life is healed. The great circle of life.

 

CHARLIE

Oh, no! No! My life wasn’t some great circle! It twisted and turned and sometimes cracked like a whip. I felt abandoned after the kiss. The coldness of his lips. It stayed with me. I lived in that crater for a long, long time afterwards. Far longer than I thought I should have to. It was like a bear had climbed into my backseat and all I could do was keep driving.

After a time, over a year, really, feelings began to roil up inside of me. Anger especially. Rage at wasting my life in grief. At the unfinished conversations. At Death for scorching me. Then one night when I was out here visiting Mark, I just screamed up at the sky. “You’ve taken away my lover, my best friend, my partner. You’ve taken away the man who really listened to me, the guy who first brought me to that grove of white birches down by the river.

But you’re not getting the rest of me. Not yet. You don’t get to take away my time with my family and friends. You don’t get to take the home we made together. You don’t get my sourdough bread, or my folk music or my herb garden. You don’t get to take away the things that make me laugh. You don’t get to take my memories of Mark, and you damn well don’t get the white birches.”

So I lived on. For a time. And it was kind of like some of the things that felt so bitter in the crater kind of…fermented into things that were bittersweet, or even…fun. Worked for some good causes too, work that helped me to heal.

So, no. No suicide. No giving up. (Smiling) Instead I went out and found someone to teach me to Scooba dive.

So you’re right. I do very much want you to live for my own reasons. I do feel like I failed my husband and I don’t want to fail again. I so very much want to help keep someone alive, and you happen step into the leading role. So I have an agenda here. But I think Ray is on my side. I think Ray was telling you that living in a graveyard is cold. It’s gritty and hard, I think Ray was telling you to move on. Look.

 

(Charlie points to the stone angel’s face.)

 

CHARLIE

I bet that’s not his face.

 

GINA

No, it isn’t.

 

CHARLIE

What do you know. He sent you to kiss another man.

 

GINA

Then he didn’t love me? Is that the answer?

 

CHARLIE

Of course he loved you! But his love wasn’t about what he wanted for himself. It was about what he wanted for you. I think he loved you but he was so afraid to marry you and maybe leave you a widow. And now he sent you to a stone angel, and the angel delivered his message. A kiss to tell you that you were very and truly loved. But a cold kiss, so you can face the fact that death does not kiss back. So you can turn away to live the life he wished for you.

 

(Charlie pauses to let it sink in.)

 

CHARLIE

And here’s a question for you. Those pictures Ray took. Did he ever take pictures of dead children?

 

GINA

God, no.

 

CHARLIE

Thought not. He took pictures of “the light in their eyes” you said. Anger. Puzzlement. Life.

 

(Pause.)

 

GINA

You know what I want? A can of blue paint. Blue paint the color of the sea. The color that protects us from demons, like they say, because demons can’t cross the water. I would paint myself all over. And I wouldn’t leave any gaps for these… fangs to tear at my soul.

 

CHARLIE

I think we need the scars sometimes. I just wish the bites weren’t so damn deep.

 

(Pause.)

 

CHARLIE

Look.

 

(Charlie points at the moon. Gina looks up at it.)

 

GINA

Full.

 

CHARLIE

Look at that face.

 

GINA

Bright.

 

CHARLIE

I think savoring beauty is a kind of rebellion.

 

(They look at the moon together. Gina stirs.)

 

GINA

Thanks for what you tried to do tonight. I’m going back to my place. To think. For now. That’s all I can say. Now forget about me. Don’t worry about me. Go…rest. Thanks. Sleep.

 

(Gina exits.)

 

CHARLIE (quietly, after she’s gone)

Boo.

 

(Charlie walks over to her husband’s grave.)

 

CHARLIE

I hope I did the right thing.

 

(Charlie stares at the grave.)

 

CHARLIE

She was right about you, though. I had to let you go.

 

(Charlie takes car keys from her pocket.)

 

CHARLIE

And she’s right about me too, I need to go home and get some sleep. Working at the Food Bank tomorrow.

 

(Charlie turns to the stone angel.)

 

CHARLIE (to angel)

And what are you doing here anyway, hiding in a graveyard? Kind of late to help these people, don’t you think? Go make yourself useful somewhere.

 

(Charlie exits the cemetery.)

 

CURTAIN

 

 

 

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