A Girl's Guide to Chaos By Cynthia Heimel Downtown New York, the 1980s.

Cynthia contemplates her future, just after catching her ex-boyfriend and her best friend, making out in her kitchen. CYNTHIA: The realization hits me heavily, like a .44 Magnum smashing into my skull. My heart starts beating with a quick dread and my blood freezes in my veins. My stomach does backflips. The ordeal I am about to face is one of the most chilling, grisly, and macabre experiences known to woman. Dating. I will have to start dating again. Please, God, no, don't make me do it! I'll be good from now on, I promise! I'll stop feeding the dog hashish! I'll be kind, thoughtful, sober, industrious, anything. But please, God, not the ultimate torture of dating. That's why I stayed with him for so long, probably. I couldn't stand going through it all again. Sure, he might be a trifle wild and intractable, I kept telling myself, but at least someone will go to the movies with me and not try to hold my hand. Hand-holding. The WORST thing about dating. It's the most nerve-wrecking experience! Once I start holding hands, I'm afraid to stop. If I pull my hand away, will he think I'm being cold, or moody? Should I squeeze his hand and kind of wiggle my fingers around suggestively? Or is that too forward? What if my hand is clammy? A clammy hand is more offensive than bad breath or right-wing politics! A clammy hand means you're a lousy lay! Everybody knows that! And what, dear spiteful God, will I wear? JILL: Hello. Good evening. Whatever. My name is Jill. I am speaking to you directly from my subconscious mind. I do this to save time. I am a destructive person. I am not the hero of this play. I am not the hero of any play I could be in. Except a play I wrote. And even in my own play I wouldnt be the hero. It would be the tragedy of existence. And it would be a bad play. Because it would be senseless. Because whatever had gone wrong with the world wouldve gone wrong before the play even started. It would just be a whole bunch of victims. And I would just be one of them. It would just be a mess of senseless pain. I wouldnt want to see this play, much less be in it. In fact, if I wrote this play Im describing, and it was performed and afterwards someone asked: Who wrote this play? I would just look around to see who raised her hand. This is because I am a coward. Which is the root of my problem. So I am not in a play of my own. And I am not the hero. And this is not a tragedy. And this is where I would rather be. In a play whereI will fail to prevail. JAMIE: I thought that we talked about this. You don't want me to be your girlfriend. You don't want a girlfriend. You only think you do. You only think you do because it's what you've been taught is right. You know my position on this. I'm not like you. I don't feel compelled to tie a rock to my leg and jump off a cliff. It's nothing personal. You seem like a great guy. But a relationship? Why? We have everything we need, right now. Affection, conversation, sex, and the only kind of devotion that lasts: we're friends. Why would you want to trade that for a hollow sense of security? For some

kind of false guarantee? Love is brief. In a couple of months, we'll get bored with each other, and we'll drift apart. No mess, no bullshit. Look, I just don't want us to lie to ourselves, or to each other. The minute I'm your girlfriend, we stop being people to each other and start being obligations. And, I love you too much to let that happen. That Was Then By Kellie Powell Rachel remembers high school - a time in her life when her friends meant the world to her. This monologue is an amalgamation of bits of several monologues in the play. RACHEL: Now looking back on it all, it seems like I had learned everything I needed to know about life by the time I was sixteen. The problem was, I somehow forgot it all. Maybe if I could explain it to someone else; capture it all this way, and keep it folded up, filed away in a corner of my mind, I could keep from having to repeat the same mistakes. There was drama, there was conflict... but for the most part, I was incredibly happy. I was happy because I had my friends, and I had love. But high school ended, one day at a time. Months and years passed, and I grew more distant from each of my friends. Various people flew in and out of my life. I lost some friends to distance, some to circumstance. Mostly, they just drifted away from me, toward their own lives. A few of these people are still in my life, and I'm very lucky, because not everyone still has a friend who knew them when they were seventeen. It wasn't exactly knowledge I had back then. It was just the sort of nave wisdom that comes from growing up with people, having their lives become entwined in yours. And then one day, you realize that, even though in some ways, you're still connected, in another way, all the strings have been cut. I still love those people, who helped me define myself, but... it isn't the same. Everything is probably just as it should be, and yet... it can never be the way it was then.

F_r_o_m_ _August: Osage County b_y_ _T_r_a_c_y_ _L_e_t_t_s_ _ Theatre Communications Group VIOLET

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