UP AND DOWN by
UP AND DOWN is about love, loss and life. It is about a situation that is occurs every day but almost never written about.
Prior to the action of the play, Earl’s partner Marjoram was standing on the top of a rickety step ladder to reach a high shelf in their kitchen. She falls and hits her head badly and now is in the hospital. This linear play explores multiple planes of reality, including...
Prior to the action of the play, Earl’s partner Marjoram was standing on the top of a rickety step ladder to reach a high shelf in their kitchen. She falls and hits her head badly and now is in the hospital. This linear play explores multiple planes of reality, including...
UP AND DOWN is about love, loss and life. It is about a situation that is occurs every day but almost never written about.
Prior to the action of the play, Earl’s partner Marjoram was standing on the top of a rickety step ladder to reach a high shelf in their kitchen. She falls and hits her head badly and now is in the hospital. This linear play explores multiple planes of reality, including that of delightful Marjoram who is active though in a coma. Earl visits her every day covering his desperate hope that this is the day Marjoram will awaken. Indeed Marjoram is “awake”, sharing with us the wild, often beautiful worlds she inhabits. All the while Earl and Nurse Narella tend to her lying motionless, even when Marjoram is actually in the space. Marjoram, like Earl, is on an upward, or is it downward?, journey.
We experience Earl’s careening emotions, often to comic affect and always with a deep humanity that underpins the play. He takes solace in listening to an "oldies" station on the radio. Call it the power of love, call it the brief coalescence of Marjoram’s “circuitry”, late in the play, Earl and Marjoram share a powerful moment truly together in the same reality – having been so close yet so far over the time.
Near the very end of the play, that terrible decision must be made about continuing her life support. Throughout the play, the superb Narella, cares for Marjoram in important ways and guides a sometimes unhinged Earl back to the reality of his life and time.
Prior to the action of the play, Earl’s partner Marjoram was standing on the top of a rickety step ladder to reach a high shelf in their kitchen. She falls and hits her head badly and now is in the hospital. This linear play explores multiple planes of reality, including that of delightful Marjoram who is active though in a coma. Earl visits her every day covering his desperate hope that this is the day Marjoram will awaken. Indeed Marjoram is “awake”, sharing with us the wild, often beautiful worlds she inhabits. All the while Earl and Nurse Narella tend to her lying motionless, even when Marjoram is actually in the space. Marjoram, like Earl, is on an upward, or is it downward?, journey.
We experience Earl’s careening emotions, often to comic affect and always with a deep humanity that underpins the play. He takes solace in listening to an "oldies" station on the radio. Call it the power of love, call it the brief coalescence of Marjoram’s “circuitry”, late in the play, Earl and Marjoram share a powerful moment truly together in the same reality – having been so close yet so far over the time.
Near the very end of the play, that terrible decision must be made about continuing her life support. Throughout the play, the superb Narella, cares for Marjoram in important ways and guides a sometimes unhinged Earl back to the reality of his life and time.