Wishing Aces

Scene: A waiting room in a train depot in the Pearl River Swamp, Louisiana.

Time: The not-too-distant present.

ACT I

SETTING: The play takes place in a train depot in the Pearl River Swamp in Louisiana: an outpost on the edge of time. The Pearl River Swamp, as its name implies, is a dreamlike marsh the color of mother-of-pearl, a pale slightly bluish gray of high brilliance. Its dense mass is filled with cattails, papyrus, Cyprus trees waist deep in water. Amid the weeds, snakes, lizards, locusts, and alligators crouch from the treachery of the sun. The waiting room of the abandoned way station is filled with signs of decay: dirt, cobwebs, bugs. The savageness of the surroundings becomes real for the audience through the reactions of the actors.

AT RISE: Ninety degrees at nine a.m. in mid-September. BEAU leads KITTEN protectively into the depot. Every now and then, SHE screams back hysterically toward her son, on the train, some hundred feet away.

KITTEN
Bunky. Get off the train. It's broken down.

BEAU
Careful, sugar.

KITTEN
Don't sugar me. (Calls) Come out here, son.

BEAU
You call this a train station? Whoa. We're on stilts in the water. Looks like a ghost town that went under the marshes. Careful, darling.

KITTEN
Don't call me darling.

BEAU
The floor's broken through.

KITTEN
Where?

BEAU
Over there. Ssh. A water moccasin.

KITTEN
That brown thing?

BEAU
A cottonmouth moccasin. It's opening its mouth. Hand me that board.

KITTEN
That filthy wood?

BEAU
Hurry. (BEAU grabs a piece of wood and smashs the snake) I got it. It's dead.
(BEAU dumps snake through the hole in the floor)

KITTEN
I hate assisting you with these lectures. You wouldn't fly.

BEAU
Awe sugar. Warm water coaxes all the animals out. Alligators float up. Crawfish tunnel over.

(Noise heard from offstage. KITTEN jumps up and crosses to the door)

BEAU (Continued) Come here.

KITTEN
My son's at the door!

(The porter pokes her head in the door.)

KITTEN
How bad is the hurricane?

HETTY
We'll know at the next stop.

Performance History

Wishing Aces is published by Rain City Projects, Seattle Playwright's Unit, selected as one of the top twenty plays in the U.S. for 1992. Commissioned for translation and a lecture in French at the Cartoucherie Theatre, Paris, July 1991 and for translation and performance in Moscow by the People's Friendship Exchange, Nov. 1992. Performed at Southern Rep, New Orleans and the Theatre du Marais, Paris, May-June 1996. Cover story of Southern Theatre Journal, Fall, 1997. Invited stage reading, The National Arts Club, 2004