Play #90 - Halfway by Emily Schwend
Melissa is visiting her sister Kat in the kitchen of the halfway house where she has just started living. Not a lot of information is given: it seems that Kat was in jail, she is now in AA or NA, she has a young daughter named Hailey who is now living with Melissa, and their mother is in physical therapy. It's a brief but heavy conversation in which Kat expresses her sincere hopes that she is going to make things work, find a job, get back on her feet, pay Melissa and Peter (their brother? Melissa's husband?) back, and get custody of Hailey. Melissa is hesitant in all of the conversation, not wanting to run away down a path of false hopes. And their conversation is left very open - who knows where things will go from here?
I found that I had a lot of questions coming out of this little play. What is Peter's relationship to the women? Is their mother's physical therapy at all related to why Kat was in jail? I'm not sure whether these details are important or not, but I did feel like I was missing out. Maybe that was sort of the point - that this was just a tiny little window into a tiny little moment for these women. They know about their past, so maybe it's not important that we do. We just get to be silent witnesses for this one moment. I don't know. But it could be an okay scene for young actors.
Melissa is visiting her sister Kat in the kitchen of the halfway house where she has just started living. Not a lot of information is given: it seems that Kat was in jail, she is now in AA or NA, she has a young daughter named Hailey who is now living with Melissa, and their mother is in physical therapy. It's a brief but heavy conversation in which Kat expresses her sincere hopes that she is going to make things work, find a job, get back on her feet, pay Melissa and Peter (their brother? Melissa's husband?) back, and get custody of Hailey. Melissa is hesitant in all of the conversation, not wanting to run away down a path of false hopes. And their conversation is left very open - who knows where things will go from here?
I found that I had a lot of questions coming out of this little play. What is Peter's relationship to the women? Is their mother's physical therapy at all related to why Kat was in jail? I'm not sure whether these details are important or not, but I did feel like I was missing out. Maybe that was sort of the point - that this was just a tiny little window into a tiny little moment for these women. They know about their past, so maybe it's not important that we do. We just get to be silent witnesses for this one moment. I don't know. But it could be an okay scene for young actors.
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