Beside Myself Excerpt
BESIDE MYSELF
by Jennifer Wynne Webber
This play features 2 characters, Hally & Wade, and is set on a small sailboat in a Vancouver marina.
It is divided into four sections: 1. Observations; 2. Hypothesis; 3. Experiments; 4. Conclusions
Characters:
Halcyone (Hally)
A woman in her mid-thirties; intelligent, athletic; a force to be reckoned with; a physicist; Wade's widow
Wade / Wally/ Hannah
A man in his mid to late thirties; philosophical with a wry sense of humour
about him; he is calmly, most definitely - although casually - alive in all
his actions; when silent, he always appears able to speak and interact normally;
he is not at all ghostlike
Excerpt from the beginning of Part 2: Hypothesis.
2. Hypothesis
(We see Hally, sporting a sailor hat and painting a new name onto the hull of her sailboat. To do this without the ship being in dry-dock, she is leaning over the side painting the letters upside down.
The "B" from "Braveheart"
looks vaguely like a "K." The rest of the letters are less definite.
It's all a bit of a mess. Wade walks over to sit on the edge of the pier.
He watches her for several moments before speaking.)
WADE: Things look brighter, don't they? In the morning.
HALLY: You always say that - and a fat lot of good it does the night before. The night before, that kind of information is useless.
WADE: That's why I'm saying it to you now. Not last night.
HALLY: Well, thank you. Yes. Things look so much brighter. How could I have failed to see it before? All that brightness. The photons bombarding the eye. It's blinding, really.
WADE: Fine. I can't change how you choose to see things.
HALLY: Ha! How I choose to see things? You're unbelievable sometimes, you really are. Anyway, I won't respond to that. I simply will not respond. Ah. You don't expect me to. I should have expected that. It was just another observation. Like things looking brighter in the morning. But, you know, I really don't need helpful perspectives like those. Not just at the moment.
WADE: I could go.
HALLY: Clever games, this morning. But not so fast. I think I'm on to you. You're not going anywhere. Not until I say so. Not until I'm ready.
WADE: I was just testing the waters. Just looking around.
HALLY: That's better. Much better. I think I am starting to understand. Just looking. You were just looking at how things are brighter in the morning. I'm just looking at you standing on a dock, fit and alive on a sunny Saturday morning. Perception.
WADE: Waves --
(Wade cups water in his hand, then splatters raindrops on the hull of Hally's boat.)
WADE: -- and particles. Depending on how you choose to look at all that bright light.
HALLY: Physics is my field, remember? Not yours.
WADE: Marriage taught me a lot.
HALLY: Funny, I still can't build a cabinet. And I sure as hell couldn't paint one from the looks of it.
WADE: Guess I wasn't as good a teacher as you were.
HALLY: But you haven't come back to teach me carpentry.
WADE: Right you are.
HALLY: You haven't come back.
WADE: The quickest in the class. Always.
HALLY: That depends on how you look at it.
WADE: Ah, you do want to play. Observation alters reality; I remember you telling me that.
HALLY: Close. How we choose to observe light seems to affect how it travels.
WADE: I stand corrected. Yes, I can see it all clearly now.
HALLY: Really? Your current perspective no doubt gives you an unfair advantage. But since you're seeing so clearly now, I could use your help. An impartial third eye. Take a good look now. What do you think? Not bad for an amateur, is it?
WADE: Is it supposed to be a Cyrillic alphabet? Planning to sail to Russia?
HALLY: Quit your smirking. I figured a highly florid, flowing and complicated script was the only chance I had of reshaping these letters. I know, I know. I could have just painted over everything and started afresh, but there's a little too much of that going around lately, don't you think? Impetuous bursts into new frontiers. I thought this time I should work with what I had - reshape the letters that were there. And now - well I'm in too deep now. The only thing to do is to keep pushing on, keep painting.
WADE: You could still hire someone. I'm sure there are boat painting professionals aplenty in the phone book.
HALLY: Ah, but it's too late now. One more dab - and yes, I'm all done. See? This is as clear as the calligraphy on this ship is going to get. It's as clear as it needs to be anyway. Anyone could read that as Kingfisher. Okay, okay. If they stopped to think about it they could.
WADE: If they squinted.
HALLY: I think I like it to be somewhat enigmatic anyway.
WADE: The one 'i' there looks a bit funny.
HALLY: Well, it used to be the 'h.' I thought it had come a long way, actually. Just like Halcyone here - yours truly. A modern variation on an ancient theme. I'm a Kingfisher now - or so the legend goes.
WADE: I thought you had to drown first. To come back to life as a Kingfisher.
Hally eyes him for a moment, then daubs a little more white paint onto the former 'h.'
HALLY: Okay. Now I'm done.
WADE: Time for a break?
HALLY: Most definitely. In just a minute. There's all this to -
WADE: Always a job to do, isn't there?
HALLY: It'll just take a minute. So -- are you going to just sit there or give me a hand?
WADE: You were doing so well on your own.
HALLY: Don't remind me.
(Hally wipes off a paint brush as she steps onto the dock to inspect her work from a distance. She then sits down to survey her calligraphy job with Wade. For a moment or two, they sit quietly, before they suddenly laugh out loud at her paint job.)
HALLY: Look at us. Here we are. A sailboat. Deck shoes. Sunhats -- well, me anyway. We're right out of an RSP ad, aren't we? The joys of a Registered Retirement Savings Plan. It's just that we're supposed to be 65. Or no. No, I guess the target early retirement age is, what, 60 now? 55?
WADE: Yeah. Probably even 50.
HALLY: Okay, 50 it is. So we're 50 in this ad, and our kids -
WADE: Kids?
HALLY: We have to have kids in this scenario because commercials like that always give you kids. So anyway, we're 50 and we're on our sailboat and our kids are coming for a sail with us later this afternoon. And let's see, they're both - yeah, two, why not? Boy and girl. They're both grown up and married now themselves. And they're good looking -
WADE: And they're blonde. They're always blonde in this kind of ad.
HALLY: Okay, despite us, they're probably both very blonde -- and they're well dressed in urban style sailor wear. Also deck shoes. And they're coming by later, maybe with our grandchildren, and we're all going for a little sail over to English Bay before we go home to our big, expensive, paid-for house where we will continue to enjoy our early-retirement in perfect contentment. Thanks to all the mutual funds we got around to buying in this scenario. And by now we've truly earned all this relentless leisure since I've long since discovered an entirely new way to look at the photon as it relates to superstring theory and won the Nobel Prize. You, of course, by now you're - what?
WADE: Oh, I'm still a carpenter. But maybe I restore Grandfather clocks in this ad. As a hobby.
HALLY: Oh, lovely. Perfect image. Time marching on. It gives the ad a certain weight, a certain timeworn wisdom.
WADE: And I'm very calm and content -- and I always have the time to happily explain my hobby to our grandchildren whenever we're not on the boat.
HALLY: This is getting to be a long ad.
WADE: Oh, it's all quick cuts. Hardly takes any time to show all this. Time being relative, after all.
HALLY: You're just a walking physics text these days.
WADE: You taught me everything I know.
HALLY: Now, that doesn't sound like the Wade I know and love. Such deference. What's happening here?
WADE: About physics. You taught me everything I know about physics. Don't get carried away.
HALLY: Well, I wondered.
WADE: A crack in the universe.
HALLY: There you go with that universe talk again. And you were always trying to pull me back to earth before. So much has changed.
WADE: Yeah, suddenly I can fix Grandfather clocks.
HALLY: Suddenly I'm alone.
WADE: Except for --
HALLY: Suddenly I've got to rewrite that RSP ad. I should call them up to demand a few new images of joyful retirement for when you don't have kids and certainly not grandkids and you've lost your husband and you're alone on the boat. Something more along the lines of: "At last! You've earned it. Time To Read." That sort of thing.
WADE: Hally? Hally, we should clean those brushes.
HALLY: We? You're offering to help? With clean up?
WADE: If you need it.
HALLY: Paradise may exist after all.
WADE: [wryly] If you're a believer.
HALLY: Listen, I believe this: there's no reason we couldn't have had all of it. The whole RSP ad. Okay, maybe not the Nobel Prize - but the boat, the life, the children. It wasn't too late. Even just you and me, together, out here on the coast, in reality, instead of - instead of this. Whatever this is.
WADE: Parallel universe?
HALLY: Sorry, Number One, let's not go there. I warned you about getting all your physics knowledge from Star Trek.
(click here for images from the Red Wagon Word Co-op production)