This was an intersting one for me, because it's the first of the short pieces I've worked with so far that really went on a deeply emotional journey in the text alone, allowing even a first reading to come to life. I've tagged this entry as personal development because I was really inspired to go on to do some emotional exploration, spurred on in large part because of this piece.
We open with an adult brother and sister discussing the feelings and situation that led to the fact that, currently, their father is locked in a coal shed. A shatteringly abusive childhood is revealed, in which the family seems to have been living together out of sheer force of will rather than any real love - about as broken as it could have been to still have everyone live under one roof.
This comes out in a series of mostly dialogues between each possible pairing of the three characters, with very little 3-way conversation going on, and in the end there's a sense of very little having been resolved, except possibly the complete breakdown of what little thread of love might have been left between any of them.
The character of Elaine is very interesting to me - while her brother and father readily show their vulnerability and mean streak respectiely, she really is wound up with a lot of conflicting emotions which threaten to come out throughout the play, and which she bites down on for the most part.
Weirdly the most chilling part of the whole play is going back and looking at the dedication... to the female playwrite's dead father. Write what you know? It would explain why the character of Elaine seems to be so much more deeply scarred and developed as a character just from the writing.
The personal development aspect of this came to me while walking out for the afternoon - I found myself really paying attention to everything around me (it was a route I'd not walked before). There was a girl who looked to be 8 or 9 taking a first run around the parking lots on new inline skates - I remember that feeling of not being quite sure I could trust my balance if I wasn't moving my legs with a walking gait - and connecting that back to the memory of being pushed on the swings that's mentioned in One Good Beating.
That sense of nostalgia would be one that would really jar - and it does in the play. Her father is trying to get an admission that she'd loved him at one point... and it's not long before she points out that this monster of a dad... beat her dog to death, by the sound of it. At first I thought he meant he'd hit it with a car, but having read through a couple of times, it's almost certainly something done by his own hands.
This could be a really interesting play to work with (no real monologues in there to be extracted for auditions, but it's something I'll be keeping an eye out for re-runs of at the Traverse) because it seems like a good introduction to some very emotional acting, where the lines dictate the tone quite consicely.
This has become a rather disjointed writeup and I think that may be because my feelings about it are too - it's well written and I want to engage with it on a deeper level than just reading, but at the same time you can't really like either of the male characters, the story is about as depressing as it could be and it ends with a sense that nothing will ever be OK again. And I'm really not sure how I feel about all that, taken together.
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