The name of my play and the state I’m in..

I’m halfway through a new play about the waystation between life and death. It’s not the Catholic purgatory I learned about in parochial school and hoped never to visit, but another place, a liminal space that exists after the soul leaves the body but before it travels to its ultimate destination. The setting is a small public park in autumn, nothing more than a large tree, a couple of benches, and a stage strewn with leaves. The image came to me one day and wouldn’t leave me alone, even though I resisted it; I did not want to write about this topic. I had other ideas, plenty of them. But the image of a park floating in the “bardo” persisted until I gave in and started to write.

Almost immediately a woman in her 70s appeared on the bench, wearing an old hippie dress and combat boots and drinking from a flask. Who was she? All I knew is that she’d been there for years, ten in total, and that the only other person in the park was a disheveled groundskeeper who grew a pair of dirty angel wings as I sketched him in dialogue. The third character tumbled onto the stage soon after, a woman in her 50s who had just fallen off a cliff in Iceland (??) and died, although she did not know it. The first woman – her name is Mabel – spoke to the second one, Louise, as if she’d been expecting her. Then I realized they were mother and daughter. Ah! Now what?

I’ve got a mother and daughter who need to understand something about each other, about themselves, before they can leave through the gates of the strange little park. The groundskeeper/angel knows what it is, and is there to help them – but only if they ask for it. Until then, all he can do is rake the leaves (and cause weather events that catapult them back to memories of their past.) It’s good that the groundskeeper knows what Mabel and Louise need to face, because I don’t, not yet. I’m at the stage of sensing and listening, like feeling my way through a darkened, cluttered room in a strange house looking for the light switch. This is the most exciting and also the most uncertain, even frightening part of the process. I have a feeling I’m digging for something I both want and don’t want to see, want and don’t want to know. But the want is stronger.

And so I keep feeling my way.