MIRIAM

Lenka Lagronová

Cast: 2 women, male and female voice, eventually another woman

A short play the size of a one-act is set in an old, neglected graveyard. Věrka has escaped here because she „has broken everything“ bringing with her pills she intends to swallow. Here she meets Mirka who has come to scythe the grass. Věrka drugged by the pills, on seeing Mirka in black and with a scythe is scared and falls down scratching her knee on an edge of a grave. Mirka invites her to her place to clean the wound. She lives in a former charnel house that she was „given“ and where she built a humble dwelling. She makes Věrka a cup of tea. During a rather ordinary conversation both women get to know each other revealing their inner world. Both are lonely, excluded. Věrka suffers from a feeling of guilt – the reason why she punishes herself, while Mirka often does not eat for years hoping that someone will feel sorry for her. Both, however, try to bear their fate bravely. Each of them has something that gives them strength: Věrka has a cassette-player with a Polish recording of religious songs; Mirka has a wardrobe full of hand-made evening gowns. Gradually they decide to die together, put on Mirka’s dresses, and get into a deep grave they have decorated with a statue of Virgin Mary that somebody had dumped out. They lie down listening to the music from Věrka’s recording and sing… The play is outstanding with its unusual fragility and simplicity. The dialogue is written in short simple replies that have their distinctive poetics with traces of black humour. The repeated motives put together an extraordinary mosaic of two female lives that are sad and yet full of hope.

  The play is available also in English and Polish translation.