|
SHINING SEA |
|
HOW TO ORDER A READING COPY OF SHINING SEA |
|
Send me an email with the following information. Please provide ALL information requested below. 1. Your full name and your organization (theater company, school or other group). If you are a high school or college student, please include your teacher/professor's name. 2. A snail mail address and phone number for your organization. 3. When and where the production would be, and the number of performances. 4. Will admission be charged? 5. When do you expect to make a decision about using my play? 6. Can you receive attachments as PDF files? If so, you can read the full text for free on your computer. If you can't, I can mail you a copy of the play. There will be a small fee assessed to cover postage and copying. 7. Please tell me how you found me and my work (I'm listed on certain websites, and it's always good to know, for both them and me, whether they're effective). 8. A statement that you understand that production of my work requires the payment of a royalty. See the note about royalties on the Plays for Production page. |
|
SYNOPSIS |
|
PAC, VIOLET and CANDY squeegee car windows for their daily bread and live on the streets of a New York City that is being torn apart as two mayors fight it out for control after a disputed election. Candy, the patriarch of this makeshift family, comes back with the missing part for their television (which he guards like a child). He turns it on, and they see the SECOND MAYOR, the “people’s mayor,” issue a call for her supporters to fight. Part-time hustler Pac, obsessed with both his pet rats and making his way to the Pacific Ocean, tells Candy and Violet, Candy’s “wife” who wants nothing more than to marry Candy for real and live in a nice clean little house, that he has discovered an abandoned Winnebago: it’s their opportunity to get to California. But it turns out that the Second Mayor is a fugitive, and the First Mayor’s forces have sealed off New York until they find her. In the meantime, Candy seduces both Pac and Violet, playing one against the other over and over again. As the city descends into anarchy and riots, the order of the day becomes finding gas for the Winnebago before the parking authority, running amok as the First Mayor’s deputies, finds it and tows it, or before the fires that have started burning across the city reach them. As conditions deteriorate, Candy, Pac and Violet seem trapped in their own little battles, but when Pac’s rats die, seemingly at Violet’s hands, Pac breaks free, taking the Winnebago. Candy tears up Violet’s precious wedding invitations, telling Violet that there never will be a wedding. The TV turns itself on, and as Candy and Violet descend in their own personal darkness, the First Mayor reassures them, over the television, that she’ll do whatever it takesincluding the scorching the entire landscapeto capture and punish the fugitive Second Mayor and restore their beautiful city. |
| CAST OF CHARACTERS |
|
PAC, male, nineteen and existing in a place between street smart and naïve, probably gay
VIOLET, thirty to fortysomething and, at least in her mind, fallen from some height
SECOND MAYOR OF NEW YORK CITY, female and every bit a street fighter from Brooklyn |
| A GLIMMER OF SHINING SEA |