the good house
by Douglas Messerli
Stacey
Levine Susan Moneymaker, Large and
Small: A Ten-minute Play (Brooklyn, New York: Belladonna Books, 2007)
The “excitable” Moneymaker
family—middle-aged Uncle, Aunt, Mother, and Father—begin and end their minutes
on stage discussing and observing their young niece and daughter, Susan. Each
member of this family is slightly disappointed in Susan, particularly since she
has not yet found a husband; yet, as all doting families believe, she is
beautiful and smart, a “magnificent girl,” a student at “the top of her class.”
She could become a veterinary or lecture in physics.
While the family “enjoys” breakfast—if you
can describe their series of near-meaningless non sequiturs as joyful—they
recall events around and about Susan, including Mother’s “loss of confidence”
during her long-ago pregnancy by peering into a tub of eels. But the friendly
smile of a policeman has healed her, and now she is strong, even though she
hates the neighbors! At one moment Susan, so declares the family’s ornery
Grandfather, is fifteen, while others claim that she is much older. Indeed, the
Grandfather, the most comical figure throughout, is generally not to be
believed as he yells out several attacks upon family members: “You pack of
cretins! Get out of town!”
In their determination that Susan will
marry rich and become famous—presumably to help support them—there is something
detestable about this toasty and Tastee cake-chewing bunch, who when Susan does
show up, declare just what they’ve been up to:
mother: Susan? Oh, Susan Lynne Moneymaker! We’ve been chatting
and planning, do you know? We want so much for you,
angel.
What
began as a droll conversation, suddenly turns absurdly frightening as the
family declare that she must marry the milkman’s son, Lad, eventually throwing
the two together on the couch, where the couple seem to either fall asleep or
into death:
aunt: Everyone, everyone, look at Susan and Lad!
mother: So still. They’re like angels, aren’t they?
father: Soon their life will begin.
aunt: I say it’s sweet!
Pause.
father: Why aren’t they moving?
Pause.
aunt: Could they be dead?
Pause.
uncle: Oh-ho, give ‘em a minute, those young tigers. Their
lives’ll begin in a just a moment, I’m telling you.
Only the Grandfather, in his memory of
their life when they lived by the river, near a “brilliant house”—wherein lay
hanging bridges, birds in the windows, and rooms that slightly sway—
comprehends, so it seems, that the family has abandoned something near paradise.
“It was near our own home, all right. Close enough. But then we had to move
away, you pack of louses, and we got farther way from the good house.”
Obviously, all that is left is a group of
determined bourgeois voyeurs to which the younger folk cannot even respond. If
Susan is large in their dreams, she is made small by their selfish behavior.
Los Angeles,
January 22, 2013
*Levine has assured me that she did write a new radio play, "The Post Office." "Susan Moneymaker" was performed in Seattle.
*Levine has assured me that she did write a new radio play, "The Post Office." "Susan Moneymaker" was performed in Seattle.
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