I Remember Mama by John Van Druten (1944)

SYNOPSIS

            This play is based on Kathryn Forbes’s book “Mama’s Bank Account.” It’s the story of how young Katrin becomes a writer. We meet her as a young girl and are introduced to her siblings and immigrant parents as Mama balances the family finances and follow the family through various moments through Katrin’s adolescence. Nels, the only brother, wants to go to high school and the family comes together to figure out how to afford it without going to the bank with success. We meet the aunts who are not well liked, and Mama settles the business of Aunt Trina wanting to marry the mortician without being made fun of. Next comes Great Uncle Chris, the head of the family, who everyone but Mama is a bit afraid of. Youngest girl, Dagmar is sick and needs an operation and Chris takes it as his mission as he always does with children to see her well. Dagmar is successfully operated on, but Mama must sneak into the hospital as a cleaning woman to see her.

Just after Chris passes away peacefully, the family learns that he’s spent all his money paying for medical treatments to keep others from walking with a limp like he did. Trina receives no dowry but happily marries and names her child after him. Through all this, Katrin has been learning and writing, but receives rejection after rejection and gives up on her craft until Mama intervenes. A celebrity writer that Katrin respects is in town and Mama trades her guarded recipes for the authoress to read a few of Katrin’s short stories. Not only does Mama get good feedback for Katrin, she gets the name of the authoress’s agent with instructions for Katrin to send her next work with a recommendation. Katrin finally writes what she knows instead of rephrasing the books she’s read and is paid $500 for the story. The play ends with Katrin reading the play to the family, which begins with the same lines that the play does because Katrin’s wonderful book is about Mama and the family.

 

CHARACTERS

Katrin – Blonde Norwegian-American, Small Frame to Pass as a Child/Teen

Mama – 40, Blonde Norwegian,

Papa – Little Older than 40, Blond Norwegian, Softer Accent than Mama

Dagmar – Child at appox. 8, Blonde Norwegian-American

Christine – Blonde Norwegian-American, Small Frame to Pass as a Child/Teen

Mr. Hyde – 50s, Englishman Seedy, Long-Haired

Nels – 15-19 Depending on Dress, Blond Norwegian-American

Aunt Trina – 40s, Timid, Mouse-like, Pretty, Blonde Norwegian

Aunt Sigrid – Middle Aged, Blonde Norwegian

Aunt Jenny – Middle Aged, Blonde Norwegian

Uncle Chris – Elderly, Black Norwegian (Dark Hair & Eyes with Olive Skin), Powerful, Swarthy, Strongest Norwegian Accent in Show

A Woman – (Uncle Chris’s Unliked Wife)

Mr. Thorkelson – (Aunt Trina’s Husband-to-be)

Arne – (Sigrid’s Son)

Madeline – (Katrin’s Classmate)

Dorothy Schiller – (Katrin’s Classmate Whose Father Owns a Shop)

Florence Dana Moorehead – Middle-Aged, Stout, Dressy, Good-Natured

Dr. Johnson

A Nurse

Another Nurse

Soda Clerk

Bell-Boy

 

POSSIBLE MONOLOGUES

            When Uncle Chris dies, Mama finds his ledger of how her spent his money. She reads aloud the last few names of the children he’s helped by paying their medical bills and the last name is Sigrid/’s son, Arnie. There’s a sweet moment when Mama asks permission of the family to finish the ledger the way the other children’s were, with a satisfying “Walks now.” She even goes a step further and puts that Arnie runs.

 

PERSONAL THOUGHTS

            I personally enjoyed learning about this family and their way of living. It was particularly interesting since so many characters dislike each other, while still being loyal to the family as a whole. I’m also just fond of immigrant stories since they tend to feature the America I’d like our country to be.

            There are a few scenes that feature the cat, Uncle Elizabeth, being held by Dagmar. It’s possible to do the scenes with a stuffed animal in place of a ragdoll cat. The family attempts to euthanize the cat when he’s badly injured in a street fight, but don’t use enough chloroform. Uncle Elizabeth ends up sleeping through the worst of his injures and as far as the play goes, he lives to the end.

 

 

Home by Samm-Art Williams (1978)

TW: Incest (Kissing Cousins)

 

SYNOPSIS

            We meet Cephus in the 1950s as a Black hormone addled teenager pursuing Pattie Mae. His world starts going downhill when Pattie Mae goes North for school. He would say that’s when God took his vacation to Miami. Cephus’s father and uncle die leaving him to tend the fields alone and the bills to start piling up. Then news arrives that not only has Pattie Mae decided to not return to the South, she has gotten married. Cephus is then drafted and refuses the call based on “thou shall not kill.” Cephus won’t be welcomed home as a deserter and his farm has been sold to cover his debt, so he decides to go North. It’s 1971 and he gets a job in a factory and shacks up with a cokehead lady. Discovering Cephus is an ex-con, his boss fires him and his lady leaves him. He’s offered all kinds of drugs, turning instead to alcoholism before finally deciding to return to home. The deserters are nationally forgiven and his farm has been bought with the deed in his name by none other than Pattie Mae who has since gotten divorced and has been waiting on Cephus to return so they can pick up where they left off. Cephus sees this as God’s return from Miami.

 

CHARACTERS

Cephus Miles – Young Southern farmer who moves to the North. Character is portrayed as a teenager, early 20s, 35, and 40, Black

Woman One/Pattie Mae Wells – Young Southern woman who is the girlfriend of Cephus Miles. Woman One, in addition to portraying Pattie Mae Wells, portrays several male and female characters with an age range from the teens to forty, Black

Woman Two – Portrays several male and female characters ranging in age from the teens to forty, Black

 

POTENTIAL MONOLOGUES

            Cephus spends a large portion of the show addressing the audience directly, literally monologuing. Play’s opening has Cephus addressing the rumors that have spread about him and defending himself as a Christian. There’s even a bit where he tries to call out to God like he’s on the phone with God’s secretary. Soon after he has another monologue that’s like a love letter to the earth his family cultivates. He’s got a few more monologues with similar tones throughout the play.

            A lot of the play is set up with Cephus explaining his character and his life through anecdotes. Some would make better monologues than others. There’s one about gambling on the Sabbath, his time as an assistant to a bootlegger, how Ike lost his arm from a prank, how Cephus started fooling with his cousin, how he gets his money back after lending it to a man that only speaks “Indian,” Herbert surviving a semi driving over his head, and lastly Cephus’s confusion returning to an integrated North Carolina after 20-30 years away. Loads and loads of Cephus monologues to choose from of varying qualities.

            Pattie Mae has one good monologue moment herself. It’s a comedic one about when she gets religion. Literally she feels the Holy Ghost’s presence and starts shouting only for Miss Lula to threaten her for shouting before Miss Lula got the chance to. Pattie Mae runs out of the church away from Miss Lula, but the congregation thinks it’s the Holy Ghost running through her.

 

PERSONAL THOUGHTS

            It took a moment for me to get into the swing of this play, but by the end I found a way to enjoy it. Being a Georgia native, it was easy to hear Cephus’s anecdotes as the stories told around a family reunion. We get to travel through Cephus’s life as he grows into a man and must make hard decisions. There’s a bit of a juxtaposition between the opening where Cephus declares himself a Christian man that gave his life to God and the first half of the play that’s mostly all the decidedly unchristian things that he enjoyed as a youth. I don’t think Cephus would have claimed to be pious until the draft came. He sinned, but he wasn’t a murderer. His imprisonment and the way he’s treated after his release strained his relationship with God, but it doesn’t seem like he ever stopped looking. The final line of the play is Cephus being satisfied that God finally came back home from his vacation in Miami.

 

Rapture, Blister, Burn by Gina Gionfriddo (2012)

 

TW: Lots of Alcohol, Marijuana

SYNOPSIS

   Catherine returns to her hometown after her mother, Alice’s, heart attack and catches up with old friends that she called in a drunken haze before her arrival. The friends are Gwen, her old grad school roommate, and Don, her grad school boyfriend, that got together while she was studying in London. This is their first time speaking since. Gwen and Don get Catherine a teaching job at Don’s university and for the summer Catherine teaches a two-person course with students Gwen and Avery, the babysitter Gwen fired for showing up with a black eye. The three of them dissect various parts of second wave feminism with very different perspectives. Catherine chose her career and she wishes she had a family to fall back on now that her mother’s health is declining, Gwen chose to be a homemaker and wishes she had finished her degree so she wouldn’t have to rely on Don who’s barely providing for them as a dean, and Avery doesn’t initially respect either woman’s struggles. Catherine and Don continue to spend more time together since Gwen has to stay home with the kids and romance reblooms. The three of them eventually agree to switch for the rest of the summer with Gwen staying in Cathy’s old apartment and enrolling in summer courses. After time Don and Gwen want their old lives back while Catherine fights it. In the end Alice convinces Catherine to return to New York and Avery chooses to go with her. The final lines are that the two women are free from mid-century gender-roles, but it’s implied that freedom guarantees choices, and that those choices each have their own set of consequences, good and bad.

 

CHARACTER BREAKDOWN

    Catherine Croll, early 40s, described as Attractive, non WASP

    Alice Croll, 70s

    Avery Willard, 21

    Gwen Harper, early 40s, described as a WASP

    Don Harper, early 40s, non WASP

 

POTENTIAL MONOLOGUES

    Avery has two nice moments that could be monologues despite them technically being broken up with short interjections from Catherine. The first has her defending slasher films which her decidedly anti-feminist since young working and/or promiscious women were often tortured throughout the film. Avery talks about how before slasher films there was no "final girl." The girl that goes against her gender role, suffers, yet survives with or without the help of a man that comes to save her.

    The other potential monologue of Avery's comes later in the play when Catherine struggles with how to hold onto Don when their affair starts to unravel. She's tried having no expectations and she's tried pushing him to great expectations, but neither works. At this point in the play Gwen has enrolled in a New York graduate summer class and wants to drop out because she's the oldest person in the class. Don thought he could rise to Catherine's level but realizes he'll never actually write his book or be comfortable among Catherine's accomplished intellectual friends. It's realizing that neither of them actually had the willpower to do the things that they've convinced themselves they regretted that makes Don and Gwen long for their mediocre lives and dysfunctional marriage. Avery advises Catherine with an anecdote from her personal life. Whenever her family watches the Olympics she says that if she'd only kept up figure skating that it could've been her winning the gold medal and all her family agrees even  though it's not true. There's something about mediocrity that makes it more bearable when you think you had the potential to be great. 

PERSONAL THOUGHTS

    Feminism is believed to be a lot of things and only some of them are true. I think this play does well in recognizing that one of the core principles of feminism is that there is no one way to be a woman. We can find fulfillment as career women and homemakers both and neither is more or less correct than the other as long as we have the choice. Rapture, Blister, Burn goes a step further. Either way and any way in between also leaves room for disappointment and it's possible to be fulfilled in one area and be discontent in an other. I don't think there's a way around that until we achieve immortality and can take every path that life offers.

    In reality we only have so much potential and the amount differs from person to person as much as our varied aptitudes do. I don't think that any of these characters were meant to be unlikable. Alice never really got the chance try a different path while Gwen and Don tried it and realized they didn't actually want it. It's okay to settle for a "mediocre" life, not all of us get to choose our struggles after all. I think that if Catherine had gotten to spend more time with Don she would have eventually realized that he wasn't the answer to her desperation, in fact, she starts to in the final few pages. She talks about how the love her mother has for her is irreplaceable. Her mother cared about her in a way that a spouse nor child could be expected to replicate. Avery, the youngest, has yet to choose a path to stick to and I think that's a silver lining to the questions the play proposes. The new generation, our third wave feminists, have so many more options than our predecessors had and in that there is freedom.