Theater
Excerpt from "Killing the Boss"
(They exit. Doug tries the cell phone number again. Lights shift as Eve appears.)
EVE
Let me tell you what happened, Doug. I stopped seeing straight. My vision got poisoned. I never told you this, but when I came home from my first trip to this country, I looked at human beings in New York and I saw strange creatures. Dog owners placing so much love in dogs at the dog-walk. While over there, children in rags waving to me, smiling, on the side of the road on the way to the Royal College of Arts. Back here, the love for animals growing on our block, pet stores and pet spas opening everywhere. And when I saw these people with their dogs I couldn’t stop thinking of the kids there with no food living in stick houses. While here, people on cell phones calling perpetually with some kind of numb purpose. Couples with babies, stomachs rounded, parading new lives with me screaming to myself, ‘What about all the ones already here?’ The rats eating the shit on the sewer-less road.
DOUG
Oh, Eve.
EVE
I got focused on “There” and neglected “Here”. The students’ stories of dark hatred and of survival. Always seeing their survival in the words written down. And when I finally slowed down enough to look I saw you, surrendering to something outside your control. You gave me the very values I love so much in you. I lost them, I was the same as the dog owners, loving something else, other than you.
DOUG
What do you see now, Eve?
EVE
You. Out of reach, always a little further away. Replay at the front door. I walk to elevator. Smile. It opens at our floor. Turn. Adore you. Smile. Sound of suitcase roller. Wave.
Contributor
Catherine FillouxCATHERINE FILLOUX is an award-winning playwright who has been writing about genocide, human rights, and social justice for the past twenty years. Her plays have been produced in New York and around the world. She is the librettist for two produced operas: The Floating Box: A Story in Chinatown (CD New World Records) and Where Elephants Weep (to premiere in Cambodia later this year.) She is an alumna of New Dramatists and a co-founder of Theatre Without Borders. www.catherinefilloux.com
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
HELEN O’LEARY:
Home is a Foreign Country
By Ann McCoy
JUNE 2018 | ArtSeen
Helen O’Leary’s work, which has its formation in Irish linguistics, gives us an inspired version of an Irish art rooted in a sense of place in rural Ireland. The late nineteenth century Gaelic revival (Athbheochan na Gaeilge), advocated for a return to the Irish language, and O’Leary’s psyche is firmly planted in that tongue. O’Leary’s art originates from a life lived on a farm in rural Ireland, and a spiritual connection to that land and rural way of life. In a time when many younger Irish artists have adopted critical theory, digital technology, and international styles severed from their cultural roots, O’Leary’s work possesses a life-lived authenticity and hands-on craftsmanship that sets it apart.
Defacing the Palimpsest:
Don DeLillo, New York Antagonist
By John Domini
JUNE 2017 | Books
For much of his career, on many of his books, one of the country’s most celebrated novelists confined his bio to a single line: “Don DeLillo lives in New York.” That was it, and more recently, as I dug into connections between the man’s work and his native city, I often suspected I wasn’t offering much better.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces: Rick Prelinger’s Lost Landscapes of New York
By Shelby ShawFEB 2018 | Film
Pulled from an estimated 110 archived sources of home movies, background process plates, and ephemeral novelty films, Lost Landscapes of New York is the latest in film historian and archivist Rick Prelinger’s ongoing series of city symphonies of urban life during the 20th century.
Doug Fogelson: Anthem
By Daniel PatemanOCT 2019 | ArtSeen
Leaching the prismatic splendour from his landscapes, Doug Fogelson’s latest additions to his “Chemical Alterations” series combine the photographic with the painterly, the representational with the abstract.
