red sumac

SCENE A

The screen darkens and the manikins, one by one, begin to glow as if their wicks were lit. Music begins, a hammer dulcimer. An image appears onscreen with a woman’s face seen close- up in profile before a stone surface that is quilted with lichen in B&W. Her face is drawn with a deep, lonely pensiveness, as if she had just now been weeping. Her name is LILY-ANNE. Her manikin glows alone in the dark, the dulcimer quiets.

LILY-ANNE (in voice-over)

          Listen, father, hear me!
          I come to you free of guile:
          our well-kept lawns
          have ta'en it, but your night
          still darkens these sunlit woods

The house re-materializes over which LILY- ANNE is superimposed and semi-transparent; she and the lichened stone now take on color.

CHORUS

(The four are crowded into the real window stage right dimly lit; each speaks one line)

          A journey of so few miles
          and yet the depths remain
          unsounded,
          a well of eyes into which
          a father should not have fallen . . .

—MUSIC CONTINUES—the dulcimer

LILY-ANNE

          I do the chores,
          I clean the windows, scour pots and pans,
          sweep the cobwebs 'way,
          a reward of little more than keeping
          my idleness at bay

          For you spilt my dreams
          as though a chalice
          were overturned:
          I am become the desert
          thy treading footsteps left

          O find them, mirror,
          lips that tremble, arms to hold
          another's warmth:
          return my once-bright eyes to me
          that Fate has rendered glaucous!

          How often after an early snow
          had laid its silent feathers
          upon these rounding hills
          I was the girl the woods saw kneeling
          to leave the deer fall apples

—MUSIC STOPS—

          When the tale at last
          had found your ears, ma mère,
          your face became a Janus
          as you closed the eyes of one
          while the other's, sightless, opened

All the while the face of LILY-ANNE has been seen in profile, unmoving. Now it turns forward.

—MUSIC BEGINS—

LILY-ANNE

          After I buried you both
          the old house grew cold and still
          without your presences:
          could Irony's branch
          have grown sharper thorns?

—MUSIC STOPS—on “thorns”

LILY-ANNE turns in profile as before. The light enhances her aging beauty, her sadness. As the image dissolves, a blur of letters on the marble comes into view.

CHORUS

          You flower now, old man,
          in the fragrance of your lilacs
          when you had so many years
          to bloom along the paths
          of a daughter's dancing days . . .

LILY-ANNE’s image fades to darkness, the CHORUS, her manikin also: glow of the other four manikins, etc.

Begin Scene B