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Una donna sola - A Lone Woman
(synopsis by Michael DeLeo)

Note: in this monologue by Franca Rame, five actresses perform different aspects of Maria's personality.

The play begins with a lone woman dancing in her home to the music playing on the radio. She is just about to start ironing when she glances out the window and notices a woman that lives in the building across from her. They greet one another and the lone woman lowers the volume so as to speak with her neighbor. The woman explains that the music keeps her company and then changes the subject to her children of which she has two. Aside from her immediate family, the lone woman mentions that her husband s brother, who has a bad habit of touching” all the women that pass him by, also lives in the house. As a result of a bad car accident, her brother-in-law is in a cast that covers his entire body with the exception of his hand (that he uses far too often). The lone woman complains about how sometimes he also touches her and looks at his pornographic magazines far too often.

At this point, the telephone rings: it is the porcone telefonico” (the dirty guy that calls). Furious, the woman screams at him and hangs up. Upon the second ring of the telephone, she immediately answers with a string of insults only to find that the voice on the other end of the line is her husband s. Her husband, who is indebted to a creditor, proceeds to accuse her of having left the house, even though she had answered the house telephone. After this conversation, the woman realizes that a man in the building across the street is watching her. In the process of covering her chest from the eyes of this guardone” (Peeping Tom), she burns herself with her iron. Then she explains that she will not call the police, convinced that it would be she that would be denounced for obscene acts in a private place.

While the lone woman speaks to the lady across the way about her suicide attempt three months ago, she is interrupted: first by the brother-in-law, then by the ring of the telephone. The husband, on the telephone, tells her to pretend to not be at home when the creditor comes. The woman becomes angry and then confides in her new neighbor. She confesses with a certain embarrassment that she has never had an orgasm with her husband. The woman feels used by her husband and, after a description of the night of her marriage, she returns to the story of the boy for whose love she attempted to kill herself. The husband had hired this boy to teach English to his wife; the boy, however, fell in love with her. The woman quit seeing him, but upon his mother s request, she went to find him at his house to ease the suffering she had caused him. After personally seeing his suffering, the lone woman, Maria, whose name we finally learn at this point in the monologue, made love with him that day and in the days that followed. Then, however, the day came when her husband arrived at the boy s house and discovered their affair. Distraught, Maria cut the veins in her wrist, but her husband brought her to the hospital and she survived. From then on, the husband always locks her up in the house.

The phone rings again and it is the boy who says that he is about to come over and open the door. Maria, thus, thinks that the boy is the person that arrives at the door. Instead, it is the creditor to whom she should not have to speak. As a consequence, she is forced to lie to him and the creditor leaves to call the police. Then there is much confusion: the husband arrives at the door, the porcone telefonico” calls her, the cousin attacks her, and the boy blocks the crack of the door with his arm and refuses to leave. The phone rings again and Maria discovers that her husband has impregnated a seventeen year-old girl. After this revelation, Maria burns the eyes of the brother-in-law with boiling-hot baby cereal, and then burns the hand of the boy with boiling water. At the end, Maria, in despair, pushes the brother-in-law and his little carriage down the stairs, she shoots at the guardone” with a rifle, and then, calm thanks to the advice of her neighbor, awaits her husband s return home with the rifle pointed at the front door.