Ruined

Thoughts after attending the play Ruined by Lynn Nottage:

Monologues….powerful, deeply moving, grabbing my insides and making me breathless. Each woman separate, defined, powerful. Every word twisted through my synapses killing me over and over again. I need to read those monologues…see them and see how she did that…that’s what I need to do….

Moments…not easily defined…each prior to monologues though…each like a pivot on which the play spun into a new definition…a new perspective of the old that was too new to be old…as each character sharpened….I remember silences…pauses that shook the stage…like when mama listened to the professor profess his love …before she launched into a metaphor about emptiness that for the life of me I can’t remember and wish I did…

I was drawn into the play…forcefully…no lulling here…no pretensions…and all I had a chance to wonder was would I get out alive…the specifics of the stories were not explained nor were they needed…the characters and how they survived now, or not, held the story together with a steel wire that cut deep.