The Family Dream, A Play
MARTIN, brother of Helen
HELEN, a poet
QUINN, musician and magic woman, friend of the family
MARTHA, the family's "genius" firstborn, dead, a ghost
CHORUS of MONKEYS, three of them
CHORUS of PARROTS, three of them
[The environment on the stage is sleepy but also alive with dreams. Orange and purple and pink cloud shapes slowly sweep right and left but go nowhere. They stay in place. Sitting on chairs of gold are three monkeys and three parrots. The monkeys in their row of chairs occupy the left of the stage and the row of big parrots takes up the right. The parrots perch as if alert in the dream while the monkeys conversely slouch and nod off. In the center of the stage, pushed toward the back, is a light blue chapel surrounded by the colorful clouds. You can see into the chapel from all sides. Bells and a triangle ding a queer unmusical call to prayer as if there's a mass about to start. Quinn comes on the stage from the right, stepping out from behind the row of parrots, working the triangle. She has on a peach spring dress. She derives fun and laughter from dinging the triangle. Martin and Helen, brother and sister, then come out from the left, touching a monkey or two with their free hands, waking them up or not completely, and with their other hands above their heads, they ring bells, also getting pleasure from the whole thing. Martin is in a purple gown (like a muumuu or whatever), and Helen has on pink shorts and a black top. All three congregate in the center before the chapel. They ring and ding their instruments for a minute and then stop, still laughing all the while before they almost get sad or something. The parrots don't change at all during this intro. They are alert but still like statues. But the monkeys seem irritable, two waking and one nodding deeper into sleep. And then conversation begins.]
QUINN: I thought about this the whole day when I was working. I didn't think we'd have any time for music, but I knew that at night one of us would dream. We'd come here and bring Martha, just the thought of her, like how we thought of her studying when we'd go down to the river and carry on.
MARTIN: We at least can think Martha up! Here at this chapel in the woods we all remember, we make up our own sort of prayer for her. Thinking of her, before and after her death, we gather here for music before we skip down to that river with her, if only in a dream. She could never go in life because she was the family's only star, the brains hovering over her textbooks, testing every chemical hypothesis or working on animals, monkeys and parrots, pigs and cats. She loved her pets, and we too were her pets though she was not allowed to play with us. You two were monkeys and I was a bird, or maybe it was the other way around. We never knew what she thought about us. And mom and dad never demanded that we do anything special. They still don't care to explore what talents we have.
HELEN: Martha is not dead! Stop the dead beat. Ring and ding anew, for she comes. We have our music and poetry, though the poetry part kills me. I can't think in it. Outside of our dream, in their dream or reality, our parents still have Martha studying shit all day and night. I see her ghost nose deep in a textbook, and she doesn't touch her cereal when I'm in the dining room with her and them at breakfast or lunch. Mom and dad are cold as freezy pops to me but they are complacent because their favorite ghost daughter still burns bright like a bulb perfect for reading or examining some element of biology. Then later, I see Martha's ghost in a different light when I come here to this long funky dream that ends in a river race.
CHORUS of MONKEYS [waking up, any one of the three could say this; the other two look around crazily]: We know
she is not dead because we saw her in the dream.
She played with us.
Wasn't it perfect having her there?
HELEN: Like a knife gone into us, this feeling of being alone underneath someone great, whose fingers are careful, though dead, because some of those she loved dreamed for her--dreamed her to death, and she couldn't find a simple space in which to dream her own thing. The river never ran over her fingers and feet, and she never fished or joined in our laughter, but I believe she loved us. I wrote this poem for her.
Sister,
come like a big boat for the parrots and monkeys
to row
going downriver
to the sea eventually.
And never leave us.
Science is fine
but distance yourself from it.
I don't care about it myself.
I want peace,
to be with you,
and so do Martin and Quinn.
Our parents have that dream
of you--the perfect scientist,
like a moon, white and bright,
that does something subtle
but important to the waves at night.
Ours for you is different . . . .
But what is yours? Are we in it?
MARTIN: I can see why you are depressed--I am too--and how the poems hurt you. Here each cloud in this dream is waving its poison. This chapel is our only space. It's open like awake eyes. I see her coming to us. Play the music again! [Fast ringing and dinging of bells and triangle; it gets cut off by the parrots that start up.]
CHORUS of PARROTS [they speak in unison but you are able to make out the words]: Now the sister
steps out of death
and in the dream,
her hands are swans over the water.
She died of her own discovered poison.
She brought down the curtain on the poison dream.
But what is the family dream?
That of the kids or the parents? That of herself? The curtain lifting or falling?
MARTHA [coming on the stage green and ghastly in a white smart lab coat]: The reason I still want to be with you: the clues are not in the animal skulls, nor in the blood, nor in the experiments, though I do all the work they expect of me . . . . I run simply back to you when my eyes shut. I died of the poison inside and outside the dream. Whose it was I have no idea. And you know what I want to be? A swan, to go down that river I heard you all laugh about. Bring me!
HELEN: You always loved us . . . didn't you, Martha? Here is my second poem:
Of a circus, the dead monkeys and parrots, cackling, carrying on and handling
the ropes and tricks, because the masters are watching and finding us perfectly stupid
but animate enough to keep around,
and the flying light,
and being alive all the time,
and making fine clay things and songs in the garage . . . . We weren't asked to experiment with flame,
so we made our own foray into . . . .
And being friendly with the forbidden, hidden sister in the morning, at breakfast, of this cold
family dream . . . the parents like vines entangling the one kept away from the others,
and how about that? Is not that wonderful, and are not we wonderful?
Big stretching dream, all the ones sharing it, getting it mixed up and deferred and choked in clouds.
QUINN: Start the music for her. Here, Martha, play the thing you never played with us. [She hands Martha the triangle.]
MARTHA [playing and reciting]: The land is mellow on the way to the river, and great are the trees,
fantastic is the walk away from home, and making ready the boat and stuff for fishing. But, mom--
MARTIN: Don't consider mom and dad while singing down the river in the calm with us,
or they will drag you by the hair out of this dream and back into their poison one.
HELEN: It was not poison. We were jealous, remember? We wanted that damned love and pressure put on us too, didn't we?
MARTHA: You guys did not want that. Trust me, trust me--better to be monkeys and parrots. I was the worst animal. I was just the brain locked away in a lab and I was fingers and mind working on lonely shit in science, and I never went down the river of the dream with my own lovely brother and sister and friend, so alienated.
CHORUS of PARROTS: Now, sister,
don't mistake the river
or this church tonight for change,
the music clouds out everything
except the family dream which is too large
but has no shape.
MARTHA: Not to look back at any bird I worked on. Achieving some things, I also messed up. I ring this triangle before the morning comes again when I won't be here but with mom and dad in the dining room. They'll smile, remember their version of me, all that I did not as important to them as what I still could have done.
QUINN: Ring and ding. Stretch into the music and ignore. Sing free now, not locked up in the past of all the things you tried in forced experiment when you were made lonely as hell.
HELEN: I wake up to you again, Martha, when I bang senselessly these bells to find another poem. You are like a stone I skip across the river, seeing all the bounces, trying to make sense of you and wishing I were you.
MARTIN: You don't want to be her. What other poems do you have? Because now my brain is a moon over the waves but I can't move them.
CHORUS of MONKEYS: Neither she nor he has the brains for another poem tonight.
The depression is fine and we are happy to be sleeping. [One goes back to sleep.]
Don't you simply want to enter a maze and have corn staring you in the face.
Would not that be happy?
MARTHA: I am sure it would, mutants,
but I love my family. It was not anything about any of you when I poisoned myself.
I had to get out of the old thing. I had a good experiment with pigs, it was going well.
I was finding hair-related shit out for humans . . . and I looked at the girl
pig . . . and I knew you were all at the river having a massive great time,
and mom and dad had me locked into a fucking bloodbath with pigs, doing the science dance.
HELEN: Well, I was dancing in my head when I dreamed because my poems
were shit and I wanted to be you . . . . I thought if I had a share of your poison
I would X myself out and maybe X out Martin and Quinn.
QUINN: So when we are by this chapel we know we are with killers we love.
The right kind of black magic, the sciences of POETRY and BIOLOGY (equally misleading) . . . and your mom and dad still rope everything off
and keep their dream running over rocks like a river.
MARTIN: Do your next poem. Quick! Or I will shoot us up.
HELEN: Ha. You don't have a gun or a knife. Just bells and they don't bash. I'll sing a no-poem, a broken flag house and a quiet lane,
and the good times will show up
on our way to the river
if the sun doesn't come up first before we get Martha in the boat or make a boat of her.
[She starts the last poem by ringing her bells.]
A fallen tree we cut into a boat
and we got in and loved life
but we worried because we could not enjoy it.
She was not with us.
She was at home
because they kept her there.
She kept herself there
because she kept quiet and worked.
MARTHA: O I went with you anyway each time I cut into a pig. There was a river of blood and microscopically you were all there rowing and laughing, and I cried over it like rain and it flooded the river of blood though I don't think it actually did. I just sort of disappeared into my mind and hands. Was the pig even squealing? I could smell the dinner mom and dad were making. I wondered if you caught any fish. I looked at my bottles and closed my eyes.
[LIGHTS GO OUT, or a curtain drops.]
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