LIVE HERE GO HOME
 a play in two acts by Anne de Mare

Unproduced
[workshop at The Juilliard School, 2001]
[reading at Roadworks Productions (Chicago, IL), 2000]
[reading at The Ontological Theater, 1998]
[reading at The Ground Floor Theatre Lab, 1996]

Recommended in The LMDA Script Exchange, Spring 1999.

read a section of the play
 Character Breakdown (5 men, 3 women)
  • CLYDE - we are in his house.
  • USEFUL - his lovely wife of many years.
  • THE WALKING GIRL - a young girl with a wandering soul and lead feet.
  • THE DAMNED MAN - an unfortunate soul who doesn't know who he is.
  • MRS. KATZENHEIMER - an ancient and beautiful creature.
  • THE HANDY MAN - a blunt instrument.
  • THE VISITORS - four men who look the same and are not what they seem.
  • LEO - a small old man in patent leather shoes.


    •  Playwright's Statement About The Play

     It's a disturbing time in the house at the end of the road. Dead cats are dropping from the sky with a vengeance and without a reason why. The contents of the house are breaking down at an alarming rate. A series of mysterious visitors appear at the door, wanting to get a little too intimate with it all. And then there's the man who pops up from the hole in the floor. He tries to fix the toaster.

    This play has grown out of the odd emotional landscape of my childhood home, where a series of illicit love affairs, unexplained breakdowns, and bewildering disappearances were constantly pitted against my own unbearable sense of belonging. This is the first truly personal play I have written and with it I want to ask a simple human question - exactly how deeply can we feel in the wrong direction?

    I 've written the story of a family that breaks, and of the five people who find themselves suddenly separate. Hinged on a stylized physical reality, I have worked to define a distinct psychological territory inside of this house, one with its own peculiar senses of humor and of doom, and have found voices in these characters for the terrifying questions of identity and attachment which have haunted the memory of my early childhood. Within the stylistic and symbolic elements of the existing script I am striving to make the thick emotional reality of this family impossibly real. LIVE HERE GO HOME is a story about devotion, betrayal, and the unpredictable consequences of gravity. It is a play about the urgent need to define ourselves through each other, and what happens when the bottom of belonging finally drops out.

    To me, LIVE HERE GO HOME remains a play about emotional survival. Not the dramatic kind which occurs after catastrophe, but the more elusive kind which struggles along after everyday human tragedies that don't have a name. I've often been asked what the dead cats mean, why there is a pit in the middle of the stage, who Mrs. Katzenheimer really is. I don't exactly know. The unfathomable can creep up on us unawares and create within us a kind of twisted logic as natural as breathing underwater in a dream. It is this all-too-familiar skewing of logic that I marvel at in life and work to re-create in my plays. If there were a simple moral to this story, it would probably go something like this... when the dead cats decide to drop from the sky, you had better find some way to deal with it.

    Running Time: 90 minutes.

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    © copyright 2000 by Anne Catherine de Mare