DROWNING IN A SEA OF LOVE

For Moon Experiences we are looking for incredible young writers to write and perform in short plays! These plays will be performed throughout the festivals in Leicester, Newcastle and Southampton. We asked writer, visual artist and filmmaker Lara Haworth to write a short play for us. Her piece  ’Drowning In A Sea of Love’ responds to the Moontrimony brief from Moon Experiences.

FATHER, a father. 

DAUGHTER, a daughter.

MOON, a moon. 

Characters can be played by actors of any gender. 

Music plays, fifteen seconds of each song before abruptly cutting to the next, on loop: Black Lips, Family Tree; The Dixie Cups, Going to the Chapel; The Drifters, Mexican Divorce; Joe Cuba Sextet, Bang! Bang!

Spotlight up on: FATHER, dancing downstage. He wears a morning suit, with a lurid neon flower in the buttonhole. His dance is an excruciating kind of pan-salsa, lounge step, lots of feet, arms, hips. He is smiling, a big, wide, fixed grin. He never stops moving, as if he is trying to dance himself out of something, a feeling, a place. As he dances, he calls out to people in the audience.

FATHER: Aunty, is that really you? Who invited you? I’ll never forgive you for that incident with the recycling. Dad! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! Sister! That hat is death itself. I feel strange, thanks for asking. No, but thank you, thank you, all of you, each single one of you, for being here today. What a day, what a special, special, special day… 

As FATHER talks and dances, spotlight slowly fades to a soft yellow glowing wash, revealing a large rectangular table upstage, its width almost the width of the stage. It is covered with a white cloth, and set with three chairs facing the audience, three plates, three glasses, three sets of cutlery, vases of flowers, where the flowers are strange, alien, plastic looking forms, and chunks of rock. Ghostly vapours and gases float through the window on the back wall, as if something giant is back there, breathing. Sitting at two of the chairs are DAUGHTER and MOON. DAUGHTER, wearing an enormous white wedding dress, is gazing at MOON. MOON has no choice but to stare ahead, to the audience, as MOON is an enormous circular, yellow, lunar being. MOON takes up most of the space behind the table. DAUGHTER is dwarfed by MOON. Beside DAUGHTER is a microphone on a stand, angled in to her mouth. 

DAUGHTER: clears her throat into the microphone.

FATHER, still dancing, puts his hand to his mouth, giggles.

FATHER: You’re quite right, daughter, this day isn’t all about me! 

DAUGHTER: It so often is.

FATHER: SPEECH!!! SPEECH!!! SPEECH!!! 

Cut music.

DAUGHTER: As some of you may know, the night I met MOON was also the night I sadly lost my partner.

MOON’S voice is relayed as a voiceover. The timbre of the voice is low and gravelly and powerful, like the beginning of the world, and also soft and padded, loving. 

MOON: I killed him.

DAUGHTER looks at MOON, uncertain. 

DAUGHTER: I didn’t actually know that… 

MOON: I killed him. 

FATHER is still dancing downstage.

FATHER: Well they say all weddings are a death of some sort, don’t they, take me, I’m losing my daughter, oh, how terrible, for a father to lose their baby to a MOON…

DAUGHTER: Dad.

FATHER: Oh, yes, sorry. 

Music plays, The Shirelles, Soldier Boy.

MOON: I knew he would be exiting the train station at 6.10PM, with two frozen pizza boxes and an iceberg lettuce, so I met him there. 

FATHER is thrown two frozen pizza boxes and an iceberg lettuce. Playing the part of DAUGHTER’S PARTNER, he acts out the chase between MOON and DAUGHTER’S PARTNER, using the whole auditorium, including the window and the space behind the stage. MOON never moves. 

The light onstage becomes a hard, remorseless, bright white.

MOON: And I chased him. Through the foodbank, out the back, and into the money bank, he was screaming and screaming, into the post office. He knocked over a pyramid of Doritos. Strange, the presence of these Doritos. Onto the golf course, through the ruined abbey, and out onto the market square. There was no shade. The sun lit it up like a microwave. I had him, pinned against the ground. And I drowned him in a sea of love. 

Blue and white smoke hisses onto the stage, over the prostrate body of FATHER playing DAUGHTER’S PARTNER. 

FATHER: No, no, no! Please no! Please, please, anything but this! 

Music cuts. 

FATHER jumps up, puts on his smile, and resumes dancing. 

FATHER: This isn’t a wedding! This is a murder inquiry! 

Stagehands bring on a bank of microphones to the table in front of DAUGHTER, all branded with different news organisations. BBC. CNN. ITV. FOX NEWS. RT. DAUGHTER gets out a crumpled piece of A4 paper. Her hands are shaking. 

DAUGHTER: That night, the night I met my MOON, the wind was blowing the sound of a thousand Priuses through my neighbourhood, ruffling the heads of weeds and local cats. 

MOON: After the incident in the market square, I was tired. I called an Uber. I sat in the back, sighing at the low pressure, the effort of it, the drag of this whole place, feeling sinusy. I said to the Uber driver, do you mind if I vape back here? 

DAUGHTER: I watched from my window as this silver Prius pulled up outside, and MOON got out. 

FATHER: You see, it’s a love story, really. 

Sound of canned laughter. 

DAUGHTER: And I said, do you want me to open the window?

MOON: And I said, no, I want you to open the door. 

Sound of canned cheering and whooping. 

FATHER stops dancing and comes to sit on the table, facing the audience. He is swinging his legs, like a child. 

FATHER: I’m jealous of MOON.

DAUGHTER: I opened the door, and I said, I was just thinking about you. Which is true. I think about you all the time. 

MOON: And I said, I was quite irritable that night, forgive me, Oh yeah? You’re lucky you live on a hill.

FATHER lies down on the table. 

FATHER: It’s true, she does live on a hill. 

DAUGHTER: And MOON said, before I marry you, you must understand one thing. My light doesn’t ripple, it triples. 

Lights cut to black. Three blue spotlights come up downstage. 

Music plays, Tom Waits, Better Off Without A Wife. 

DAUGHTER appears, waltzing alone, disappearing, reappearing, between the three blue pools of light.