​Play Excerpt: Cast of Characters

Tony – A poet in his twenties
Jerry – Tony’s uncle
Phaedra – Tony’s stepmother, in her thirties
Nona – Phaedra’s middle-aged maid
Alisha  – Tony’s fiancé
Teddy – Tony’s father and Phaedra’s husband
Tony’s mother – A voice from the shadows
Fishwives – Figures in shadows

Time
Indefinite

Setting: A second story room with a window overlooking the night sea. The set is not realistic, possibly employing columns and a blue marble floor. A fire is burning in a suggestion of a fireplace. The type of room is unspecified and is furnished by only a chair, a very small desk, and a full-length mirror.

Tony: How tempestuous it is!
Wave upon wave of agitation
It must be Phaedra

Jerry: Let’s both hope not
You’ve poetry to write
And I’ve these figures

Tony: My father brought her from over that rippling shadow, Uncle
From that savage place…in a primal dark
Listen, Uncle, to the bellowing of Poseidon’s bull
Will Phaedra come up here?
The sea snorts and storms, tosses it head
in the cape work of wind

Jerry Bad dreams again?

Tony: (Mutters, composing, testing the words as hecomposes a poem)
It’s one o’clock
Darkness seeps into muscle and bone
The wiild sea surges in paddocks of rock

Jerry: You are disturbed, Tony
by your stepmother’s walks?

Tony: Night after night
She is predatory, Uncle
(Lightning flashes)
Have you seen how she looks at me? Eyes boring, black as death, and grave?

Jerry: She longs for her own country
Who wouldn’t?
Left alone here, in the compound
With you and me and her lying nursemaid, a terrible woman

Tony: Often, Phaedra pauses beneath this
window, listening
What does she mean by it?

Jerry: How should I know?
I’m a bachelor,
And do your father’s books

Tony: Sometimes I dream of my father
And Phaedra in their bedroom by the sea
in failing light
She combing and braiding her long black hair

(Tony shuts eyes)