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Locke, lost
LOCKE, LOST: The Lesson of the Italians is an homage to the brilliant Ruth Draper and her gem The Italian Lesson.
If you have never heard Ruth Draper, rush to google her, buy her complete monologs, and listen first to The Italian Lesson which most people believe to be her best. Well, it is perfection.
I was born on the same day Ruth Draper died, December 30, but twelve years earlier. I never was lucky enough to see her onstage, although she was performing right up to the very night before she died. Sweetly, I hope, going wearily to sleep after an unforgettable performance, never waking. I hope.
"Isn't it a shame that one has to die and leave all this?" she had said only a few weeks earlier --of the bright blue sky and sea-- as she sailed across the bay to Dark Harbor.
First hearing Ruth Draper's The Italian Lesson on a pirated cassette recording, I was immediately overwhelmed by her artistry. But it was not until 2010 that I found a way to incorporate her piece into a piece of my own, which I performed before a small audience of writers. That will be the one and only performance of my version of The Italian Lesson, it seems, but I am extremely proud of the revisions I made to make the piece gender-appropriate in 2010 when same-gender marriage had been and continues to be roiling the news.
Audience responses afterwards:
"Adorable! Stupendous!! I couldn't get enough Someday, I'd like to hear Ms. Draper's version. I venture to guess that she would be pleased with what you've done."
"Absolutely delightful; you were riveting. I didn't realize the time was going by. It was funny, it was inventive, completely entertaining. Thank you so much!"
Ruth Draper improvised her monologs, never writing or recording them until shortly before she died. In her final several decades of performance, she had a repertoire of 36 pieces with 52 characters, portraying as many as six different characters in a single piece while evoking or addressing as many as 25 additional characters in a single piece.
In The Italian Lesson she plays a single character and evokes or addresses eighteen, eleven of whom she brings onto the stage with her and seven of whom she talks with on the telephone. In addition she names another seventeen.
By contrast LOCKE, LOST: The Lesson of the Italians has the actor portraying two characters while evoking or addressing seventeen, eleven of whom appear onstage and six of whom are spoken to on the telephone by either Bob The Playwright or Bob The Character. Eight people, historical or fictional, are quoted or impersonated, and another nineteen are named, honored, disparaged, or otherwise thrown into the hopper of my lost imagination.
Ten characters overlap somewhat between The Italian Lesson and LOCKE, LOST: The Lesson of the Italians. They retain the names originally selected by Ruth Draper, but their personalities are distinctly different in the two pieces.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
che la diritta via era smarrita.
Dante Alighieri, ca. 1308
MIdway along the pathway of our life
I found myself in a dark forest
because the direct way was LOST.
Ruth Draper, ca. 1920
Read the entire one-man one-act play.
Read the brochure of audience responses to LOCKE, LOST: The Lesson of the Italians.
Copyright © 2013 Robert Locke
All Rights Reserved
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