Fennie and Essie - The Confession - One-Page Play - No kids, No Dog

I'm off for a week. The only dog and kids I am with are my own and so I am amusing myself with stories of FENNIE and ESSIE that may one day make it into my advanced acting high school class (oh! I made a link to my blog about kids). Meanwhile, Fennie and Essie are coming alive in my head and while these are not even finished one-page plays - they are an example of what happens to a playwright when the characters take over and talk to her. If I'm not being ordered around by kids, I'm being ordered around by fictional characters.

THE CONFESSION

ESSIE: Artistic actress, maybe a writer?

FENNIE: Commercial actress, not a writer

PLACE: Their studio apartment

TIME: Today, very, very late at night


AT RISE it is about 2 a.m. Essie is furiously typing and deleting on her laptop.

FENNIE: Essie! Go to bed! Or type quietly! You're keeping me awake.

ESSIE: I'm almost there - I can't stop… if I stop it's all over. The play will never get written. Your faith in me will be for naught! I will be exposed for the leech that I am claiming to write a play for us while you go off and sell your soul chemical candies!

FENNIE: Is it really going well?

ESSIE: Better than the five words I chugged out today.

FENNIE: Let me see. "Maria spies Angelina who is busy …. busy …" What? What are you doing?

ESSIE: I DON'T KNOW! I might as well tell you - you're going to figure it out - I can't write!

FENNIE: Evelyn Esley who wrote the definitive play of last year, who was up for a Pulitzer Prize and has had the play translated into twenty languages so far - can't write? Don't go overboard. You're just experiencing writer's block!

ESSIE: You don't understand! When I wrote that play - I was like this - all the time - five words a day was huge for me! People were paying me - all this money to come up with something - something that could be used in the University - something that showed I was worth their faith in me - but I can't write dialogue - so I kept adding in all these stage directions. Stage directions after stage directions with a character occasionally saying a pointed "Oh!" here and there and finally someone from the University insisted on reading it and declared it brilliant. I am "The Mistress of the Deconstructing Play Movement" only I don't know what I'm deconstructing.

FENNIE: You can't write?

ESSIE: Not a word.

FENNIE: Our plans - to dazzle the world with your new play -

ESSIE: Not going to happen. My royalties from that first play will have to sustain me forever.

FENNIE: Essie? I cry really well. On cue. One tear or buckets. And I laugh like a hyena and belch and sneeze. I have a lot of talents. Start writing stage directions. Just stage directions. Let's turn this new "de-constructing play" movement on its head. I'm going to get noticed in this town if I have to cry while tap dancing with a dog!

(There is a slow sound of typing which picks up as the lights fade to black.)