Even More Plays From Behind the Zion Curtain

INTRODUCTION

Plan-B Theatre Company, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, has developed and produced unique and socially conscious theatre since 1991.

Plan-B champions the work of local playwrights. In fact, 63 of 84 productions in our history have been world premieres, including the four plays anthologized here.

MESA VERDE is the fifth play Plan-B has premiered by Matthew Ivan Bennett. It was one of 24 plays nominated nationwide for the American Theatre Critics Association/Steinberg Award for Best New American Play produced outside New York in 2011.

BORDERLANDS is the third play Plan-B has premiered by Eric Samuelsen. Funded by an Access to Artistic Excellence grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, it received Salt Lake City Weekly’s 2011 Arty Awards for Best Theatre Production, Best Original Play and Best Theatre Performance [Kirt Bateman as Dave McGregor].

THE THIRD CROSSING is the third play we have premiered by Debora Threedy. Funded by an Art Works grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, it is the winner of the 2010 Fratti-Newman New Political Play Contest.

THE SCARLET LETTER is the second play we have premiered by Jenifer Nii.

Please enjoy four very fine plays by four very fine Utah playwrights.

Jerry Rapier

Producing Director

Plan-B Theatre Company

MESA VERDE

By Matthew Ivan Bennett

Matthew Ivan Bennett’s MESA VERDE received its world premiere at Plan-B Theatre Company February 24-March 6, 2011. It was one of 24 plays nominated nationwide for the American Theatre Critics Association/Steinberg Award for the Best New American Play produced outside New York in 2011. The production features the following cast and creative team:

TAMARA: Christy Summerhays

TABITHA: April Fossen

GODDESS: Teresa Sanderson

Director: Cheryl Ann Cluff

Stage Manager: Jennifer Freed

Sound Designer: Cheryl Ann Cluff

Lighting Designer: Jesse Portillo

Costume Designer: Jerry Rapier

Set Designer: Randy Rasmussen

TIME

September and the remembered past.

PLACE

A kiva at Mesa Verde, Colorado and other locales imagined through the characters.

[A dimly lit stage with two women, opposite each other, humming Chopin’s Prelude Number Seven. Heads are down, eyes are closed. TABITHA wears black and gray, her left hand bandaged. TAMARA wears colors and is barefoot. The humming attracts the GODDESS. She appears out of the dark. She considers each woman, and then, joins in the humming. The GODDESS steps around them, touching them on the chest as she passes. As they’re touched, they lift their heads; but their eyes remain closed through the opening. The GODDESS turns to the audience, silencing the women. The women never hear the GODDESS directly unless she plays a character with them in a scene, each of which she begins with a sound, or gesture, or both. A note on sound: The specific pieces by Chopin mentioned in the stage directions are suggestions only, except for Prelude Number Seven.]

GODDESS: Mesa Verde. In English it means green table. The namer thought the Earth here was a table. What do you see? [To the women.] Table or desert?

TAMARA: [Outward.] They left around 1300 A.D.: their civilization collapsed. Some say it was drought, others deforestation, or war. Some say they walked into a higher plane.

GODDESS: [At TAMARA.] Was that an answer, child?

TABITHA: [Outward.] So my sister finally flies to New York last summer.

GODDESS: [At TAMARA.] You will answer.

TABITHA: We do MoMA, Lincoln Center, sushi in Soho—she’s practically destitute so I want to let her live. And she’d been a stone since the airport; I hadn’t seen her teeth. But then we’re walking through the Park and she stops. She looks down at a crack in the asphalt, a dandelion growing out of it, and she says: ‘I hope the weeds win.’ That’s how she see things—which I want to get behind, but . . .

GODDESS: [At TABITHA.] How do you see?

TAMARA: No one knows why it was left; we see what we want. Personally I hope the Ancestral Puebloans embraced change and let the collapse happen.

GODDESS: You want to see collapse?

TAMARA: I see a skyscraper and I imagine it being swallowed by wisteria. I used to dream about it. My school friends and me the sole survivors: hot-wiring Mustangs, one ghost town after another, finally finding a place the weather is still normal and living on peaches and rhubarb.

GODDESS: You want less company?

TABITHA: Oh yeah: she grabs my camera too and takes ten pictures of the dandelion in the crack.

GODDESS: [At TABITHA.] You kept them, though.

TABITHA: I kept them, though.

TAMARA: And in the dream my sister comes with me. She survives too and we build a tower of clay and sand and straw; upstairs for her, downstairs for me. Once a year we walk into the woods thinking about Mom and Dad and she cries into my hair.

TABITHA: I actually printed and framed one of the pictures.

TAMARA: They were vaporized by the blast.

GODDESS: [Outward.] Mesa Verde.

TABITHA: She’s annoyingly talented.

GODDESS: More of a question than a place; a question that once asked cannot be ignored. [Outward.] What do you see? Table or desert? Will we eat, or not? Will we live on? And if we do, will we feel alive? You have come to me, children, and you have been asked.

[The lights shift, revealing TAMARA and TABITHA inside a kiva. TAMARA is wide-eyed, reverent, running her fingers along the earthen walls; she has a water bottle. TABITHA is winded, feverish and irate. She squats and airs her shirt. Her bandaged hand throbs. The GODDESS has receded to the shadows. A moment as TAMARA seems to pray and TABITHA stares.]

TAMARA: If you want, I have a granola bar. You should eat up.

TABITHA: I’m trying not to snack.

TAMARA: Tabitha.

TABITHA: Tabitha. Lord, you sound like her.

TAMARA: Your blood sugar’s dropping.

TABITHA: I don’t want whatever puffed amaranth Alpha and Omega-3 super bar you’ve got, okay? I’ll eat at the motel. People food.

TAMARA: . . . I don’t sound like her.

TABITHA: So what is this again?

TAMARA: My favorite place. The Hopis call it a kiva.

TABITHA: Awhatta?

TAMARA: A womb.

TABITHA: A womb? Like a womb womb?

TAMARA: Symbolically.

TABITHA: Oh. Where’s the symbolic vagina?

TAMARA: See the little hole by the fire pit?

TABITHA: Ah.

TAMARA: Called a sipapu.

TABITHA: Funny.

TAMARA: Why’s that?

TABITHA: Any closer to the fire and it’d be a burning bush.

TAMARA: . . . It’s sacred.

TABITHA: So you brought me to an ancient Indian uterus.

TAMARA: Yes.

TABITHA: Are the medicine women with maracas on their way?

TAMARA: Tab, just be open.

TABITHA: I knew you had an agenda.

TAMARA: This is a power place. I feel the GODDESS here.

[quoting the Tao Te Ching.]

Listen to her voice,

Hear it echo through creation.

Without fail, she reveals her presence.

Without fail, she brings us to own perfection.

GODDESS: —By roads unexpected.

TAMARA: Can’t you feel?

GODDESS: Do not forget that.

TABITHA: I feel heat. It’s like a hundred degrees.

TAMARA: It’s like eighty. You have a fever.

TABITHA: I’m taking time off for this?

TAMARA: You can’t 24-Hour-Fitness your way through this, okay?

TABITHA: The surgery is outpatient.

TAMARA: Tabitha.

TABITHA: And there it is again. Just like her.

TAMARA: Bite me.

TABITHA: You know, it’s surprising too: I mean, you’re the one who ran away. Should be me with The Voice.

TAMARA: I didn’t run.

TABITHA: You were ‘shrooming in the desert while I was with Mom.

TAMARA: I don’t do hallucinogens.

TABITHA: You own a copy of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test with red-underlined passages.

TAMARA: I like Tom Wolfe.

TABITHA: Why are you hiding? You’re forty, Tammy, and you’re hiding. We all know, okay? Dad isn’t stupid. And he doesn’t care. If you sat down and talked . . .

TAMARA: Last time I talked to Dad it was pretty clear how full his hands are with the new and improved spawn.

TABITHA: Whatever, you weren’t forced out, Tam. I’m a part of him.

TAMARA: You eat dry turkey with him twice a year. You laugh at his lame jokes and make him tell them to everybody so you don’t actually have to talk to him: [Imitating their Dad.] ‘Have you heard the cherry joke? It’s pitiful.’

TABITHA: Oh, that’s why you never come home? The Laffy Taffy jokes?

TAMARA: Since when did you start calling Dad’s ‘home?’

TABITHA: I’m trying to be better.

TAMARA: Better?

TABITHA: If you don’t want to be that’s your—

TAMARA: He know you’re sick?

TABITHA: Yes.

TAMARA: Don’t call it ‘home.’

TABITHA: That’s what it is for me. Could be for you.

TAMARA: My home is here.

TABITHA: Right. Next door to Great Spirit.

TAMARA: Always has been.

TABITHA: Kitty-corner from Pan.

TAMARA: Cute.

TABITHA: What’re you gonna call your coven?

TAMARA: I may be the wacky Goddess-worshipper, Tab, but you’re the witch.

TABITHA: Ooo, you almost told me off.

TAMARA: [Tossing the granola bar.] Eat something.

[TAMARA breaks away. TABITHA stares at TAMARA’S back for a second, but desperate, grabs the granola bar and unwraps it. She almost takes a bite, stops.]

TABITHA: Ugh. Smells like gym shoe.

[TAMARA, hurt, says nothing. TABITHA: re-wraps the bar and puts it aside.]

TAMARA: You and Dad and Linda make fun of me like that? When you’re all together? The dumb hippie jokes?

TABITHA: We’re concerned for you.

TAMARA: That how you bond on the holidays? Comic despair for the Problem Child?

TABITHA: Tammy, you lack a permanent address, you couch surf from Seattle to Salt Lake to Flagstaff, Anchorage. We can’t call you, you have no health insurance. What if you got . . . tuberculosis?

TAMARA: I’d come here and I wouldn’t worry. I’d look for real support. Money can’t heal you.

GODDESS: [At TAMARA.] Nor can bitterness.

TAMARA: Mom’s proof of that.

TABITHA: Mom’s situation and mine is . . .

GODDESS: Denial doesn’t heal either.

TAMARA: Yeah?

TABITHA: Well, it’s not worth worrying.

TAMARA: That sounds like Mom.

TABITHA: You’re making a mountain.

TAMARA: That’s verbatim.

GODDESS: Listen to her voice . . .

[A sound or gesture from the GODDESS, she begins breathing sharply. The lights change. She is now TERI, the sisters’ mother, ten years ago—soon after TERI started chemo. TAMARA is thirty years old in this scene. Chopin Mazurka No. 2, Op. 68 plays. TAMARA turns from TABITHA and is moved mentally into the scene. TERI has an anxiety attack.]

TAMARA: [To TERI.] Mom. Breathe.

[TERI startles, sees TAMARA and takes a breath and puts on a smile.]

GODDESS: [As TERI throughout.] Hello, Kewpie.

TAMARA: What’s going on, Mom?

GODDESS: Just resting.

TAMARA: By hyperventilating?

GODDESS: I hardly got a wink last night.

TAMARA: You look scared.

GODDESS: The wonder drugs.

TAMARA: Are you scared?

GODDESS: Darling, I’ve been sick before, it’s not worth your worry. So tell me about Dalin? Dallas? What is it? Tabitha said—

TAMARA: Dana.

GODDESS: Dana?

TAMARA: Yes.

GODDESS: You’re dating a Dana?

TAMARA: A man, Mom, named Dana.

GODDESS: Oh, God, my heart skipped. What’s he do?

TAMARA: He’s a homesteader. He’s got ten acres in Alaska.

GODDESS: And?

TAMARA: He built a cabin by himself up there—a cedar shake roof, Mom; and there’s a creek, looks like mercury in the moonlight; ice caves; he built a rocket stove out of this old five-gallon bucket and cob and he bakes quick breads in it, and honey, wild honey, from bees like fifty yards away; traps squirrels, has an onion patch, catches rainwater. This man is—

GODDESS: He kills squirrels?

TAMARA: They’re an abundant resource there.

GODDESS: Squirrels aren’t a resource, they’re squirrels.

TAMARA: How is eating squirrel any different from cow?

GODDESS: Cow comes in a package. So what’s he do?

TAMARA: He doesn’t do, Mom, he is. He worked on the crab boats for ten years and saved everything and—You’re scowling.

GODDESS: No, I’m interested. What do you do together?

TAMARA: We walk. Miles. Read aloud, taking turns.

GODDESS: Read what? What do you read?

TAMARA: The Communist Manifesto.

GODDESS: Has he been to jail?

TAMARA: Why?

GODDESS: You have a history, Tamara.

TAMARA: Joe wasn’t a mass murderer, Mom, he got a month for an ounce of weed.

GODDESS: Oh, I’m forgetting: there’s the law and then there’s Tamara’s Law.

TAMARA: You say law like it’s a synonym for good.

GODDESS: Are you going to be like this forever?

TAMARA: What am I doing that’s so irresponsible?

GODDESS: You’re thirty, unemployed, and living with a boy scout.

TAMARA: I work occasionally. Sarah works. The taxes on the land are paid, we eat, what more do you want?

GODDESS: Who’s Sarah?

TAMARA: She lives with us.

GODDESS: And she supports you all?

TAMARA: We support each other.

GODDESS: I don’t like it.

TAMARA: You don’t have to.

GODDESS: You’re gonna get a wake-up, I guarantee it.

TAMARA: Better than dying doing what I’m told.

GODDESS: . . . Was that meant for me?

TAMARA: You know it was.

GODDESS: How am I doing what I’m told?

TAMARA: You want a list?

GODDESS: And here we go again.

TAMARA: You never question your doctor, you just shuffle into line at Walgreen’s.

GODDESS: I read the instructions, the warnings—

TAMARA: But you don’t connect the dots, Mom. The fertility drugs, then the estrogen. Pain medication that ‘may cause’ intestinal problems and, lo and behold, a year of pain pills and you have IBS so you start on stomach pills.

GODDESS: My doctor and I discuss the side-effects of each prescription every month, Tammy. It’s not a matter of questioning the holy sky-father of Western medicine; it’s a matter of what’s worse.

TAMARA: You could be better, Mom.

GODDESS: Indigestion or muscle pain from breakfast to dinner?

TAMARA: You could play piano again.

GODDESS: Less sleep or more anxiety?

TAMARA: And that’s why you’re as sick you are.

GODDESS: Sometimes your body betrays you.

TAMARA: The body isn’t a separate thing, Mom, it’s you. Your body is you. Your sickness is you.

GODDESS: Very good people, happy people, are sick from the cradle. Being sick on the outside doesn’t mean that we’re sick on the inside.

TAMARA: You create your own reality.

GODDESS: [beat.] You’re saying your mother is mentally ill?

TAMARA: No, I—

GODDESS: Sure sounded like it.

TAMARA: Mom, don’t, I’m saying—

GODDESS: There’s a dark cloud in me.

TAMARA: No, look: most of us think mechanistically, you know? We’ve been taught the universe is a clock.

GODDESS: Have you ever had respect for me?

TAMARA: Okay, let’s start over. I want us to know each other, really.

GODDESS: No, you want me to think the way you think.

TAMARA: Mom, you’re in this total victim consciousness.

GODDESS: And you aren’t? Nine years old, you’re whining about this evil, that evil. Poultry farms, peak oil, light pollution.