10 Golden Questions

The Mineola Twins – Jack Culbertson

Script Discovery - 10 Golden Questions

How do I get to know this play? Read it several times. Have a group reading of the play in which you just listen to it out loud. Cast the show in your head with several different groups of people when you are rereading it so you get different versions of the same scenes. Look up odd references or references, names, and locations that you don’t understand in the script. Read several different versions of the play. Read different plays by the same playwright. I’m watching movies from the three different time period and noting the style of acting. I also took notes on the ideas that I got during audition from the experienced actors even if I didn’t cast them. I have collaged in the past and found it helpful, especially in getting the tone and feel of a piece out in image. I haven’t done it on this one just because I don’t have anymore magazines lying around.

What are the most compelling Images? Myra removes a bag of weed from a Mister Potato Head. Myna bent over several soda shop stools. The decaying faces of high school children. Myrna praying to a painting of Ronald Reagan. The shriveled remains of Jim the bank teller. The Count from Sesame Street laughing as lightening strikes. Two sisters holding each other while the apocalypse, the only moment that they will ever allow themselves to be sisters. Myrna’s silhouette stabbing Myna’s silhouette. Roses burst from her head. Orderlies dance with an insane woman. Giant manila bag of cash.

Movie Image Reference. Dream portions: Eyes Wide Shut. Buffy Season four finale. Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. Arkham Asylum (Graphic Novel). The 50's portion: Rebel
Without a Cause. Picnic. No Country for Old Men. Reefer Madness (1938). 1969: Midnight Cowboy. Fritz the Cat. Bonnie and Clyde. 1989: The Fisher King. Wall Street. Angels in America.

Breaking the Script Down: This has been done in my copy of the script. Also the play is broken down into scenes already which helps. Each scene generally follows Freitag’s Pyramid as does the over all play. I’m starting out blocking each scene by two or three beats and then rerunning it after six or so.

Given Circumstances:

Mineola Rhode Island. 1950's. Great Neck Rhode Island 1969. Nassau Valley Rhode Island 1989. New York 1969/1989.

Myrna and Myra are twins that are completely opposite. Myrna has very large breasts while Myra does not. Both have sons, but each son is more like their aunt than their mother. There parents are not mentioned.

Jim is engaged to Myrna. Myra sleeps with him. She is a slut. Jim works at a Ford (1950) then at a bank (1969). Because of Jim cheating on her Myrna goes to the asylum for a bit. Myra and her mom signed her in.

Myrna works at a radio show and with conservatives. Myra works at planned parenthood. Myrna tries to blow-up planned parenthood. She succeeds.

Both sisters have nightmares about each other. They both share thoughts and phrases. Both dream about the apocalypse.

Both show lesbian tendencies, but only Myra is open and happily lives with Sarah.

Myrna is a radical conservative. Myra is a radical liberal. Both are feminists.

Environment:

Dream 1: A sleek red hell in a museum of badly painted portraits of people from Myra’s past. It melts into the shadows as she flees to the womb from the apocalypse.

Scene 1 Diner: A soft warm soda shop with an old person smell and coke bottles. A jukebox plays bad music with girls in poodle skirts dancing around it. Stools cluster around the bar area that’s never dirty and glitter shines on.

Scene 2 Motel: The real side of the 1950's. Beat poetry is stuck in mouse holes keeping the rats out. Clothes with spunk make a carpet of sin on the floor. Mismatched sheets with floral designs are crumpled up around sad wasted youth. A crappy portrait of a cabin in the woods hangs off center above a side table with a beat up bible in its empty stomach.

Scene 3 Bank: A desk with pamphlets, a collection of fake smiles and long numbers, sits off to the side. Rope vines from pole to pole leading people to a mighty shrunken God of American money. A man in a new suit and a once proud mustache. A portrait of the bank president, a dick among dicks. Anger is just unfermented irony.

Dream 2: A Saint-Saens ballet. A virgin cloth soiled in whores blood. A twisted laugh that spins the floor of checks, black and white. Blue flowers climb out of desert sand and God light pours into your eyes from stone smiling teeth, a vengeance achieved. Red and Blue.

Scene 4 NY Flat: Midnight Cowboy with a couple more bucks. Pot and coke and speed. A bong made out of an apple half eaten. A mattress with rusty springs and a Mister Potato Head with a bag of weed up it asshole. Spiders that eat small children. Windows with newspaper over them. A fire in a room that never stops burning. A couple that rape and fight and cut and look through holes to see the lives of people worse than them, but most importantly, two people far to stoned to see any of this going on around them.

Scene 5 Radio Hall: Gillian sized marble floors with Reagan God portrait shining on in American hearts, an eternal reminder of the “American Dream” and a stairway to heaven. A new couch with uncomfortable cushions and a glass table, forever smugless. Copies of unread political magazines dance onto of it. Silhouette cardboard cut outs yell poetry and gospel into the minds of topless conservative rebels through a microphone patched into Satan’s pubic hair. Obviously a ginger and always smiling.

Scene 6 Parking lot: Lawerance of Arabia. A long empty land marked with exaggerated white lines. Perfect little boxes for perfect little boxes to park and perfect little boxes to step out of.

Dream 3: The Womb, a dirty glowing line shows down the middle. A used condom, a sock, a nail in the right hand of Christ by Judas’s betrayal, but less expensive. A soft bed. Just out of reach of the monsters, the end, the shriveled lifelessness that comes as the credits role. No, a bed with a soft comforter, both cotton and two warm arms just like her own lacking breasts, but the otherwise perfectly symmetrical body to it’s near mirror double holding each other as 2012 cuts through our world. Only then does the nail come out and the sisters live happily.

Character Breakdown:

Jim: He has a mind a fear of being stuck in the world he was shown by his father and friends at the mail room. A desperate boy who longs to be a man in the late 60's. this is why he goes to Myra, but the society that has borrowed into his mind has filled him with catholic guilt. He then becomes a banker. Why cheat on Myrna. He does love her. It is because he fears that he will be stuck in a situation that he is not ready for yet and like so many men is makes a desperate grasp at escapism by sleeping Myra. He doesn’t do it for sex. He knows he will get caught and his engagement with Myrna will be over.

Sarah: Life partner to Myra. She is the most level headed person in the play. She has a family, a developing career, problems, and lives the late eighties as typically as everyone else does. She will not exhibit any one the lesbian stereotypes that may occur earlier in the shoe because her personality doesn’t not support that kind of behavior. In any other play Sarah would be terribly boring, but in this play she plays comically off of the absurdity of the rest of the over the top characters.

Ben: He will one day grow up to be a strong, stubborn asshole with a wife that matters very little to him with sons that have reverted back to the men of the fifties in mind set of male bravado. He is overly smart for someone so short sighted. He does however love his mothers but resentment has caused him to be such an asshole. To make this character work for the show I will have to have him come on very strong in the first 1989 scene. Very similar in strength and over the top Republican like his aunt and then as the scene plays on he shrinks back as he sees just how insane his aunt is..

Ken: He, in any other play, would be the main character. He is a young ambitious boy who is born into a family that doesn’t instant his rebellious and forward thinking ways. He wants to escape the small town and go off to be somebody. Unfortunately for this play he is more of a plot device to get this rolling for the second half of the show. To counter this I’m really going to have to play up the relationship between him and his aunt as well as the humor that is inherent in the scene.

Myra: Built to pick at the norm and all that she sees as wrong. She is embarrassed to know that her sister is the prototype for all things perfect. She is ambitious and desperate to escape being a regular person. She is the reactor to Myrna after the first two scenes. She is slightly more sensible, but only barely.

Myrna: She wants what she’s told to want. She is the good twin for the first two scenes and after that she becomes the bad lesbian. She drives the show by antagonizing Myra. She has the most obvious arc as a character. She goes from being perfect to losing everything. Then going mad to being redeemed. He sister is the vessel for this to happen.

Climax: This is all of Scene 6 for the most part. Myrna brings the bomb to end the work of her sister. She then finds out that her sister might be in the building. There is the theme that runs throughout the show that only when there is a nuclear apocalypse then will they become close again. This actually happens symbolically through the bomb almost killing them all and Myra tries to save Myrna from the building. What I like about the play is that it doesn’t just show the two sisters hugging at the end and apologizing for years of being bitches, but rather that they both are slightly remorseful. That’s more believable and a much more satisfying kind of hope (For me.)

Conflict: To be honest this is normally something I like to find out during the rehearsal process as it gives me little bursts of excitement when I do find them. I’m also pretty good at detecting subtext as I’ve lived my entire life around people that never actually say what they mean. I just assume that there are two meanings to everything someone says.

What does it mean: You can do this play two different ways. The first is the political way where you highlight the treatment and mind sets of women throughout the thirty-year span. The other is the relationship of the sisters. The second is a harder thing to pull off. It is also more interesting to me. I always want to up the difficulty level with each new project. Also, I think that if played correctly, by down playing the political side of things, you awesome that the audience is smart enough to make the right decision about women’s right. There is no persuasion going on. You are simply calling those people who disagree with women’s rights stupid by not even arguing with them about it. Paula was writing plays when women were still getting crap, especially for being lesbians. If the audience (Especially this audience) hasn’t changed their minds by now then the frankly are stupid and need to feel that way. For the rest of the audience this is a relationship piece between family members.