Photo by Thuanny Gantuss from Pexels
PLACE
A room of quieting colors and soothing art (including several pictures of rivers) with a row of chairs facing a single chair (its back to the audience).
CHARACTERS
SAM, female, a leader of a few words.
ANNE, female.
BLAKE, female.
CAROLE, female.
DAWN, female.
ERIC, male.
MALE VOICE (offstage).
SCENE 1
Darkness.
MALE VOICE (Offstage)
I’m sorry: It pisses me off…. It just pisses me off.
You go to work, every day, and all you do is just sit there? and listen?
SAM (Offstage)
Ninety percent listen. One hundred percent believe.
MALE VOICE (Offstage)
You don’t do a thing? What the Hell good does that do?
SAM (Offstage)
There are four corners. We work at one of them.
Ours is to listen, and believe, and support, and start the healing process.
I can’t do everything.
Others are professionals who help best with the healing, once it’s started.
MALE VOICE (Offstage)
But what about the perverts? What about them? And their new victims.
You don’t do anything to stop them?
SAM (Offstage)
I do what I can do. I’m only one person.
And at River Bank we don’t go after catching criminals. That’s not our job.
MALE VOICE (Offstage)
So … do you ever see any healing?
SAM (Offstage)
Some go on to counseling. But, no, I don’t ever see it.
MALE VOICE (Offstage)
How can you just sit there, and not feel … feel … feel so goddamn mad at it all?
SAM (Offstage)
I feel mad. But that’s not my place.
I have to support their feelings, not my own.
MALE VOICE (Offstage)
You’re a wimp….
Against molestation and incest, what’s been done to the girls, rage is the only surgery.
We’re supposed to protect our children from evil. At all costs.
I could cut the bastards’ nuts off myself.
That would be my river bank to healing.
SAM (Offstage)
That would heal?
MALE VOICE (Offstage)
If you could have a fake I.D. and go anywhere you wanted in people’s minds, where would you go?
SAM (Offstage)
Where would I go? I’d go listen to those who come to talk. And help them.
MALE VOICE (Offstage)
And what crime does that stop? What child does that protect? Tell me.
SAM (Offstage)
Women need healing.
MALE VOICE (Offstage)
And men need action.…
I’ll tell you where I’d go: I’d go into the fuckers’ minds.
Weed them out before they could molest. And castrate them. Yes, castrate them.
Hang their balls out on the internet for every would-be pedophile to see.
Loud and clear. That would stop it.
What you do doesn’t do any good at all.
SAM (Offstage)
What I can do is listen and understand.
Someone else will have to witness my visions and annihilate them.