Play and Review Excerpts

“Sally Nemeth belongs to one of the contemporary theatre’s endangered species – writers capable of sculpting large themes from ever-diminishing resources.”

Financial Times, London

Holy Days

published by Broadway Play Publishing

Rosie

There was a time I recall when things was beginning to come green all around. My daffodils come up early. Then it snowed – not heavy, but enough to make me certain they’d gone. And I went out to cut the flowers that already opened. If I couldn’t have daffodils out front of the house, I’d sure have them all over inside. Anyway, I went out with my shears and all of them had opened – they was sitting in snow and they was open as you please. I started cutting at them, and it seemed I’d brought in armfuls and there was still more to cut. Almost like they was opening before my eyes. Opening and growing all around me. I didn’t have but one or two pitchers, so I left them be and went back inside to put the ones I’d cut in water. I swear I’d brought in enough to cover the table, but all it came out to be was barely a pitcher full. Well, I went back out to cut more, but there weren’t no more to cut. I’d just seen them out there – dozens of yellow flowers in the snow – now there weren’t none. And the stems and leaves was all black – not like they’d frozen, but dry – dry as a bone.

“If a poem is a form of dense evocational shorthand, Sally Nemeth’s Holy Days is a stage poem. It is uncommonly affecting – an elegy for the lost souls in the dying plains of Kansas, 1936, who clung to their blighted homesteads like bees to the poisoned hive… There is not much plot. What there is, is simple and stirring… Is there a play in this? There is. Amazingly. A majestic and gripping one. There is beauty and wisdom in this little piece.“

Los Angeles Times

Mill Fire

in the anthology Womenswork, published by Applause Books

Sunny

Listen to that. Listen to that rain. Off and on like that. All day. At that house catty-corner there was a kid sitting on the porch playing “Swanee River” over and over on his harmonica. Badly. Over and over. Rain pouring over the eaves like a curtain. And this kid. Probably driving his mama crazy so she sent him outside to drive the rest of us nuts. And there’s Bo asleep upstairs. “Swanee River” over and over. Banging into my head. Thinking Bo’s gonna wake up. That’s gonna wake him up. I pull my coat over my head and start across the street to talk to this boy’s mama. I don’t know these people. They’re new on the street. They don’t know most folks in the neighborhood work swing shifts. I need to tell them. I need to represent my community. Today I am civic minded. I get over to the porch and I look at this kid. His eyes are way too far apart. His mouth is funny. He smiles. So big. Hollers “MamaMamaCompanyMama!” And now I don’t know what to say. What can I say? Your idiot child is making me crazy? I got down on my knees and that child threw his arms around me and I held on. Held on so the ground wouldn’t open up underneath me. His mama come to the door and I said to her, “He’s a wonderful boy.” And she said, “Yes, he is.”

“It’s a straightforward enough story, but Nemeth tells it in a way that stunningly recapitulates the crazy-quilt patterns of memory. Creating a collage of time, sensation, inner thought and overt action, she twists the past and the present so that the intensity of pleasure, pain and loss becomes truly excruciating. And in the process, she reminds us of how ephemeral life is, and how crucially important each minute should be, though, of course, never can be.”

Chicago Sun-Times

Water Play

in the anthology Facing Forward, published by Broadway Play Publishing

Jack

There is something in each and every one of us that fears the water – that fears the weather. I’ve seen — we’ve all seen rational adults screaming for help while standing in water three feet deep. We are the beasts who do not naturally swim. It is a learned skill. Something we lost with our dewclaws. Something we lost as the continents drifted. They say that Continental Drift is caused by the shifting plates of the earth’s crust, and that that crust sits atop molten rock. But to you and me, Continental Drift says that we are afloat. It is the water we see that divides us, and the water that must have pushed the continents apart, rushing in to take what lowland it could. We could see it in action — whole parts of Africa being reclaimed to the sea. Fresh rivers turning brackish overnight. Marine beasts moving steadily inland where herds of land animals once grazed. Those land animals moving steadily inland and overgrazing already crowded grasslands. Famine, stampede, an upset of the ecosystem. An upset caused by water and by weather. Forces so large it takes the pull of the moon, the orbit of the earth around the sun to have any effect on them. It is no wonder that we fear these things. Standing on the coastline of a continent and watching a storm blow in is a humbling sight. Facing a storm on the open sea even more so — tankers the size of cities being torn apart by the forces of nature. When the waters began to creep up on the coastlines many years ago, people raised their homes onto stilts and vowed to stay. There are those who want to face that power daily — to perch on hits edge and face it. And they are the first to go, and maybe that is why they stay. Inland, through radical engineering and water management, we have stayed relatively dry. But the inland waters are on the rise, and the forces that can only be controlled by the pull of other heavenly bodies will prevail. And we are the beasts who do not naturally swim.

“Amidst the ominousness, Nemeth’s eco-dreamscape holds out hope, if fantastic and revolutionary. In the end, a desperate Jack relents to nature’s new world order: drowning himself, he learns to breathe water.”

The Village Voice, New York

Sally’s Shorts – An Evening of Short Plays for Women

published by Dramatists Play Service

Excerpt from Living In This World

Millie

I was attracted to this place, I think, by the charged air. By the hum of the high voltage wires. On dry days, the air crackles with static, my skin crawls, and I am overcome by uneasiness. But I know what it is – the uneasiness. I know it’s the ionized air – nothing more. And there is great comfort in that. The wires originate at a hydroelectric plant hundreds of miles away. The plant is housed in the walls of a great dam – a wonder of the world built long ago by workers who came from all corners of the nation. It was said the dam would never stand – that it would crack and buckle with time, sending a wall of water to destroy the towns below. But it stands – long after those who built it are dust. It stands alone, deserted – turbines and generators still cranking out power. Automatic valves releasing water after heavy rains. It stands unmanned, and sends its current out along the wires to towns and cities no longer on the maps. Sometimes, on those days when it is especially still and dry, and my skin jumps with static, the wires hum with a music as vast as a clear night sky, and as human as a mother singing her baby to sleep. It is a music full of longing and a music with no regrets. If you’re very quiet, you might hear it too.

“Avoiding the cheap ironies and facile reversals so characteristic of the form, forsaking even narrative and characterization, she creates instead a kind of oblique poetry, glimpses of psyche, moments of pure feeling.”

The Village Voice, New York