Holding Her Alive
"You smell of chocolate...so much blood... Don't close your eyes, baby. You mustn't close your eyes... You close your eyes, you'll never come back." The script is available here in Word, see link below. Holding Her Alive is also available in a One Act Play Depot collection of four short plays, Mothers and Daughters.
Synopsis:
A son visits his mother in the hospital. What follows is a kind of dance. One of them is dying. But which one?
Set:
Bare stage or, at the very most, something suggesting a hospital room.
Cast:
MOTHER - older, in a hospital gown
SON - younger, in a business suit.
Some notes on presentation:
All speech is voiceover. Ideally, the two actors doing the voicing are present, and speaking into stand-up mikes. Practically, they could be pre-recorded, and mixed with the music. Some kind of amplification should be used. There can be two dancers. Or the actors can dance to pre-recorded voices. It's flexible.
Suggested music should be mellow, contemplative. Enough to underscore movement, not enough to overwhelm.
Production History:
Holding Her Alive was first given a staged reading at the Sanctuary for the Arts, Columbus, with Ellen Nickles and Nick Lingnofski. Kathy Burkman directed. It premiered in March 2024 at AKI Studio in Toronto.