logo

32 Pairs of Gloves

Character

Willa:
female, early 60s. She wears a rather provocative short-skirted ensemble and very bright red lipstick, lots of it. Willa is a major media “life-style” personality, currently in eclipse.

Setting

A long row of old mismatched chests of drawers, different heights and styles, each painted a different color of blue. There is also a scattering of seven old wooden chairs, also shades of blue.

Production history

  • Staged reading at the Throckmorton Theater, Mill Valley, CA, staring Amy Resnick

The Story

This comic monologueoffers an intimate evening with Willa, the one-time media darling, the food and design maven, the single-named boldface personality, who rose, conquered, and then fell. Her Emmy-award winning conversation-and-self-empowerment program has been cancelled. Her failed marriage has been luridly chronicled by the sensation-seeking tabloid press. Alone and humiliated, she has descended into a solitary life of alcohol, weed, and pain-filled memories. Always very funny, yet equally poignant, the play follows Willa’s disintegration and collapse. Stripped of her carefully constructed persona, Willa reaches out to all of us who are her fans—she loves us and needs us, and we love her and need her too.

Download full play here

The Dialogue

Willa

We cannot hide. This is the issue. We cannot escape and I tried to deny this fact, and I lived in a dream world of bourgeois mindlessness, repotting my plants, stenciling grape vine tendrils around my windows and doors, and then the Summerfield affair… the incriminating photos…  the tax fraud allegations…  the sensationalist media’s venomous examination of every aspect of my life, including the weight gain, the weight loss, the weight gain, the liposuction, the chin lift, the brow lift, the breast enhancement, the horrifying loss of my hair following an ill-advised attempt to create shimmering highlights with allegedly non-toxic, made-in-China bleaching agents.

It caused me a great deal of anguish…and it caused my mother, now deceased, a great deal of anguish…[she tears up, fights back the tears, then…] You would have liked my mother…lovely woman. Pisces. Lovely. Kind. Anorexic. Quietly, tastefully alcoholic. Divorced at an early age from my father, the claims adjuster, leaving her alone, every night alone, drinking, watching TV shows with wild animals, the predators, the prey, the lame, the malnourished…[She tears up again] I’m sorry, please forgive me…