The CTR Anthology

by Alan Filewod

  Colby: Now don’t you go worrying about that, Linda.

  Linda: How am I supposed to “not worry”? I’m a human being, not a machine. A minute ago you said I was responsible for all this trouble you’re in.

  Colby: I know you were angry, that you felt I failed you, but Linda … I …

  Linda: Listen to me. I am trying to help you. You’re got to come back to reality. Get a lawyer. Defend yourself. Let the case run its course. They might even let you go.

  Colby: They have to let me go, Linda.

  Linda: You’re not above the law, Mr Colby.

  Colby: I’m innocent. What crime have I committed?

  Linda: You stole something.

  Colby: I never stole anything in my life.

  Linda: Look, I was born with a gift, OK? I can use my music to touch people, and I’ve spent my life learning how to use that gift. When I stand in front of a crowd, or one of my songs is played on the radio, well, I help everybody share feelings … sometimes feelings about love. That’s what a performer does. When you snatch that feeling out of the air and say, “This belongs to me,” well, you’re a thief. You’re stealing something from everybody I’m trying to share those feelings with.

  Colby: No, Linda. Our love exists on a higher plane. It’s more pure and meaningful than anything they’ll ever understand. Maybe … maybe they’ll drag us down forever, but I know our love …

  Linda: Stop it, Mr Colby. Just stop it. (pause) You are in love with something that doesn’t exist.

  (Colby shakes his head.)

  Colby: Linda, you exist.

  Linda: I’m a married woman. I have two children and I’m very happy …

  Colby: Come on Linda, you know those children are symbolic. You know they are …

  Linda: My children are not symbols! They are flesh and blood and I love them and I am terrified when I hear you talk about them like that!

  Colby: Why are you pretending to be afraid of me?

  Linda: I am afraid of you! You make me afraid to walk down the street! You make me afraid to meet people after a show? (pause) You make me afraid to sing.

  Colby: You’re not being fair, Linda.

  Linda: Fair? You come in here and talk about me and my family as if we’re all some kind of projection. We aren’t. We are real. We have feelings.

  Colby: I HAVE FEELINGS TOO! (pause) I … I’m sorry … I didn’t mean to …

  Linda: I know you have feelings, Jacob. That’s why I’m here.

  Colby: I love you, Linda.

  Linda: Look, Jacob … if you really love me, then you’ve got to believe me when I tell you the truth.

  Colby: I will.

  Linda: Well the truth is: I do not love you, Jacob Colby … I’m sorry you got hurt.

  (There is a pause. Lights fade on Linda, leaving Colby alone, sitting in a spot. As he speaks Linda stands and very slowly walks away, back up the stairs to the upstage platform. Underscoring begins, an intro to “You Needed Me.”)

  Colby: My heart can’t be broken any more. It really is over. The thing is, she’s just not the same girl I fell in love with. And that’s sad. The saddest truth of the whole affair, cause … they change her in the end. She just got too big to touch the ground. And her heart, her heart just flew away. Still she’s really not to blame. It’s hard to keep your perspective when you’ve been up so high for so long. After a while nothing looks real anymore. There’s nothing you can dig your fist into like a clod of farm dirt.

  No real sounds or smells … just light … and clouds … and way down below … maybe a glimpse of a … a checkerboard of land where there’s some little man working. Everything drowned in distance, and the whoosh of the jetstream. A little thing like love … it can disappear.

  (Linda begins to sing “You Needed Me,” she stands in a spotlight high above Colby, and he looks up at her as she sings the song, full of love, distance, and a promise she will never leave. Slowly Colby packs up his briefcase and leaves, the way he entered the theatre, through the crowd. Linda finishes the song. Lights fade to black.)

  THE END

  A Woman from the Sea

  Cindy Cowan

  Cindy Cowan lives with her family in the small Inuit community of Pangnirtung, Baffin Island, where she works as an adult educator for Arctic College. She has been an active member of the Mulgrave Road Co-op Theatre in Nova Scotia for over ten years, working as an actor and playwright. In addition to writing A Woman from the Sea, she has completed three other plays. The most recent, Honey and White Blood, was produced by the National Arts Centre in 1989.

  PHOTO CREDIT: KENT NASON

  A Woman from the Sea was first produced by the Mulgrave Road Co-op Theatre on 18 February 1986, in the Guysborough Masonic Hall, Guys-borough, Nova Scotia.

  PRODUCTION

  Director / Joanna Mercer

  Sets and Costumes / Gillian McCulloch

  Music and Soundscape / Bob Atkinson, Kurt Hagen

  Stage Manager / Gary Vermier

  CAST

  Wanda Graham / Almira

  John Dartt / George

  Mary-Colin Chisholm / Sedna

  A Woman from the Sea was developed with the assistance of the Canada Council, the Nova Scotia Department of Culture, Recreation and Fitness, and the Banff Playwrights’ Colony. It was also workshopped by the Mulgrave Road Co-op Theatre in May 1985. Most importantly the author is grateful to Johanna Mercer, Wanda Graham, John Dartt, Mary-Colin Chisholm, Gillian McCulloch, and Ed McKenna for their vision, patience, and faith in this play.

  PLAYWRIGHT’s NOTES

  When my daughter Meghan was born, the first emotion I experienced, after relief, was that of utter astonishment. Lying on the table, between my shaking legs, was a living human being. This was power. Real power! Like wind and water and fire. What had this to do with those frothy, baby doll maternity clothes? Why didn’t women look like Amazons when they were pregnant? Why had I never seen a pregnant woman swagger? Why hadn’t I?

  Then, from the introduction to Germaine Greer’s Sex and Destiny, came the words … “madness … living inside a body … a body that creates life but cannot control the fate of that creation.”

  As I lifted my eyes to the sea that forever surrounds me in Nova Scotia I started to hear a story. One of destruction and birth and the endurance and power of women’s love. A love which must be far greater than the megatons of destruction released by a single nuclear explosion. And riding the crests and troughs were the women of Greenham Common. They waved. And I tried to wave back.

  Cindy Cowan

  SET AND SOUND

  The real time is afternoon and evening, in February 1986, at a deserted fish shack on a cliff overlooking Chedabucto Bay in northeastern Nova Scotia. However, there is another time and place, that of the Floating Island, which exists simultaneously to the physical reality of the beach, cliff, and shack.

  The only requirement of the set is that it encompass these realities and allow the characters to remain on stage at all times. In the original production there was a downstage-right sand dune which secretly held Sedna’s props, ie., the kimono, the tea-tray, the combat helmets, etc.

  When a character is not actually involved in a scene, she or he remains onstage and continues to underscore the local scene with business: George looks through his binoculars, Almira sleeps, Sedna waits or drinks from her wineskin, does yoga, and at times seems to be simply a seal basking in the sun.

  George can occupy different space and time to Sedna and Almira. He doesn’t hear what Almira hears, nor does he see or hear Sedna except for the exchange at the end of scene 8. Sedna appears to George either as a rotting seal corpse or an old woman, as at the top of the play.

  The sound and music were written as a fourth character: the environment. They are also the greater expression of Sedna’s being. In the original production musical themes were written for all the characters which underscored their “realities” or emotional turmoil. Sedna had many themes but they were all encompassed by one ov
erall sound quality which I called Sound of the Sea/Music.

  The booms are menacing and disturbing. They are both the approaching presence of Sedna and the disintegration of Almira’s grasp on reality. George hears only one boom, that at the end of scene 8.

  The poem used in scenes 9 and 10 is by George Barlow and is entitled “The Soul.”

  Love is the moving energy of life. It is both blindly erotic and deeply personal, a passionate, prideful, powerful caring for oneself and others. It is the law of the goddess and the essence of magic.

  –Starhawk, The Spiritual dance

  PROLOGUE

  The repetitive cries of the gulls fade to the sound of the sea.

  As the lights come up, a beach strewn with large white bones is revealed. The bleached ribs and vertebrae are ghostly against the blues and greys and pinks of a North Atlantic winter’s day.

  There is also a fish shack which appears to be balanced on an outcropping of rock.

  And crouched on the beach is Sedna. She is a Selkie, a creature who is capable of being both a woman and a seal. Sedna and the actress playing her may transform at will from woman to seal by slipping in and out of her seal tail which is detachable at the waist. On Sedna’s upper body she wears a coat. The glory she once possessed as a goddess of the sea is reflected in the coat’s remaining tatters and skins. Worn with the tail it reinforces the transformation to a seal. Worn alone, it gives the impression of someone regal having fallen in the gutter. Finally, Sedna wears a head-dress that serves as a seal mask when she lowers her head as she does now.

  Sedna is on the beach in her human form. Her hands, which are swaddled in torn black bandages, gently caress her seal body as she holds it in her lap.

  After some time Sedna lifts to her lips a conch shell. From it is emitted one long, sweet note, a lament, recalling a distant memory of the first sounds ever heard. Setting down the conch the sound repeats itself at Sedna’s bidding.

  Sedna: Caw!! Caw!! (Her cries to the birds echo on the empty beach. Returning her attention to the seal tail, she stops, alert and animalistic.)

  (A loud boom.)

  Sedna: They’re here! (Sound of human voices.) It took you long enough! (Sedna freezes, gazing out to sea.)

  (George and Almira enter.

  The most notable thing about Almira, other than her wild and unruly hair, is the dark sunglasses she wears. George is appealingly “60s” with long hair, a beard, and wire-rimmed glasses. He begins the ritual of unpacking from his knapsack a notebook, an eversharp, toilet paper, and a pair of high-powered binoculars. Almira stands thunderstruck holding a grocery bag and her purse.)

  Sedna: (hastily hiding her tail) Company at last.

  Almira: A fish shack?

  George: I knew you’d love it as soon as you saw it!

  Almira: It’s full of feathers and mouse droppings. George, this place hasn’t been lived in for years …

  George: (exiting to the outside) Look at the view! (Again the boom)

  Sedna: (whispering) Allmmiiraaa?

  (Almira stops)

  Sedna: (waving) Almira!

  (Almira turns toward the call, straining to identify where it is coming from.)

  Sedna: (raising a wineskin) … To you, Almira. A toast! Death to our best friend.

  (The sounds of the sea / music rise as Sedna wraps an old shawl around her head and huddles down onto the beach. Above her is George on a rock watching through the binoculars.)

  ACT ONE

  SCENE ONE

  George: Hellooo! (He slowly lowers the binoculars and descends to the beach.)

  Sedna: Not from around here?

  George: No. We’re spending the day in the old fish store up top there.

  Sedna: Murdoch. Mr and Mrs?

  George: Right!

  Sedna: Hhhmm.

  (Silence.)

  George: Do you know anyone with a boat I might borrow?

  Sedna: My father. He was a fisherman.

  George: I’d just putter in along the shore.

  Sedna: No tellin’ what a person might find.

  George: You ever see anything unusual out in the bay?

  Sedna: My father he saw somethin’. Lifted its head right out of the water and waved. (Turning, she looks directly into George’s face.) Waved … Last time he ever set foot in a boat on that bay! (Pause) I guess I can’t help you.

  George: Thanks anyway.

  Sedna: Ahuh.

  George: See you …

  Sedna: Ahuh.

  (Sounds of the sea. Sedna enters her sealskins.)

  SCENE TWO

  George: Almira!!

  Almira: (startled) Oh! (Surprised.) It’s you!

  George: You were expecting someone else.

  Almira: No. It’s just …

  George: What?

  Almira: I was dreaming, I guess. You were gone a long time.

  George: I met this fantastic old woman down on the beach. Look, you can see her. (George has a look.) She’s gone … But listen to this. I was right. This is the place. Her father saw something out in that bay. The story is something waved at him. What do you suppose he saw!

  Almira: Something out of a bottle of Hermits.

  George: I believe her.

  Almira: A monster from the sea?

  George: It could have been a Hood seal! There hasn’t been a confirmed sighting of one of those babies this far south since 1953. What a coup! You wouldn’t have caught me rowing away.

  Almira: Even after it waved at you?

  George: (lying on the cot) Hah! I bet that old guy never did set foot on water again. (Almira has picked up the binoculars and stares out to sea.)

  George: If there is a big mother of a sea tusker out there I want to meet it. (Pause. He watches Almira.) What are you staring at?

  Almira: Fog.

  George: Fine friggin’ weather for a holiday.

  Almira: I like the fog. (Soft.) Death to our best friends.

  George: Been out sealing?

  Almira: No.

  George: That’s from an old sealing song.

  “Talking of death brings me in mind

  O’ a toast which seemed tae be unkind.

  But an explanation makes amends,

  ’Twas only, Death to our best friends.”

  Almira: I’ve never heard it before.

  George: You must have.

  Almira: I haven’t.

  George: You wouldn’t know the words.

  Almira: I don’t.

  George: Almira! You’re giving me the creeps.

  Almira: The song just popped into my head!

  George: Why are you acting so weird?

  Almira: (finally lowering the glasses) I’m sick to death of seals.

  George: Let’s do something normal!

  Almira: What?

  George: Let’s eat. I am starving!

  Almira: In the brown paper bag.

  George: (searching) … Today is going to be good for us.

  Almira: Under the cot.

  George: This place is great! Am I right? (Almira turns away, removing her hiking boots.) Right! (Horrified) This isn’t food.

  Almira: What is it?

  George: I can’t eat junk.

  Almira: I can.

  George: (wailing) I can’t eat this. Chips, popcorn, fritos. Pink popcorn?

  Almira: Chemicals stay down. Anything else … (She mimes vomiting.)

  George: (eating a chip) It’s so unhealthy.

  Almira: Who cares?

  (The boom. Sedna sits up listening.)

  Almira: (listening) What’s the point in being healthy?

  George: Discipline!

  Almira: Superman.

  George: Combat discipline. To fight the enemy. Stroke, angina, coronary, high blood pressure, enlarged prostate lurk around every corner.

  Almira: You’ll make a pretty corpse.

  George: (imitating Almira) Running is joy! Pure joy!!

  Almira: You can run for the both of us. (Watching George she enj
oys letting him continue running.) Oh stop it, George. I’m exhausted just looking at you.

  George: Come on. Get your shoes on. We’ll go for a run together.

  Almira: I didn’t bring them.

  George: You didn’t bring them! You’ll gain weight.

  Almira: It doesn’t matter, George.

  George: Your heart rate.

  Almira: It doesn’t matter, George.

  George: It doesn’t matter?!

  Almira: Trust me, George. You used to trust me.

  George: I trust you. Or I used to trust you. Junk food? No jogging?

  (Pause.)

  Almira: When I was running all I could hear was my own heartbeat.

  George: There’s nothing wrong with that! It’s the blood circulating in the brain. It’s normal.

  Almira: It got too loud.

  George: Your heartbeat got too loud?

  Almira: I got too attached to my heartbeat.

  George: That’s crazy!

  Almira: I was afraid it might stop.

  George: Don’t be so emotional!

  Almira: I am not emotional!

  (Silence)

  George: (realizing his mistake) Wrong. Wrong. We’re going to take things calmly.

  Almira: You just said that because I’m a woman and because I’m … (Almira stops.)

  George: What’s got into you lately?

  Almira: You. (Pause.) Nothing. That’s what I like about the fog. The simplicity of nothingness.

  George: This isn’t like you.

  Almira: (curious) What am I like?

  George: Melodramatic!

  (Almira tosses to George a stack of postcards with seal pups on them.)

  Almira: There’s melodrama. These stupid postcards you brought down here. Look at the itsy, bitsy seal pups …

  George: If you want someone to listen, grab them where it hurts. (Almira reaches out for George’s groin.)

  George: Hey! don’t attack me!

  Almira: I’m not attacking you.

  George: You’re attacking my work.

  Almira: Your work?

  George: No. Your work! I’m not a fund-raiser. You’re the suit-and-tie lobbyist. I’d much rather be out on the ice floes.