New Monologues by Chelsea Peluso
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Chelsea Peluso is an incredibly talented playwright who has written a brilliant play about teenagers trapped in the state mental health system. Like We Wasn't People was first presented by Love Creek Productions at the Producers Club in New York City earlier this year. The main character, Jane, is fifteen years old at the start of the play. Despite being violent and sometimes manipulative, Jane is an engaging character in a great deal of pain. She wound up in foster care after her mother's boyfriend abused her. Below is an excerpt from one of the two monologues now featured on the database. In this scene, Jane is talking to her mother's answering machine in the middle of the night from the hospital pay phone.
JANE:
Mom! Mom, I know it's late, but... pick up, please? Mom? Okay, you're probably sleeping for work. Okay. I'll just tell you over the phone. I'll just explain it. Yeah. I dreamt, I dreamt about her. The girl... they must have told you. She was dead, dead like when she died. Slumped in a corner, naked, full of... full of holes. Bloody holes, all over her body, with needles sticking out of them. But her face, the eyes were open, and she looked at me like she saw right through me. So I called to her, I said "Angela, it's Jane" and suddenly her face was full of metal. All these piercings, more than the nose rings and ear holes she already had, appeared out of nowhere, blood trickling down her face... her eyes were sharp, angry, and I heard this low grumbling, almost like that sound a cat makes when it's about to hiss. Then I felt mist around my neck, and I knew, suddenly I knew, my head was... it was gone! I looked down and my body was... leaking! These little rotten holes were worming into me, the needles inching into my body...
 
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