Lost Empires
a play of memory
The Characters
OLD GRACE A woman of almost one hundred years; gaunt, but filled with energetic humor.
AGATHA A striking woman in her mid-forties, a regal countenance and a formal propriety resting over a passionate and anguished soul.
YOUNG GRACE A 17-year old girl who seems more mature than her years. Precocious, musical and romantic. Agatha’s daughter.
BERNADETTE Thirty-five; Irish. A once wild-spirited woman who has given up on the world. Grace’s personal maid. Nicknamed “Bernie.”
PATRICK Thirty-three. Agatha’s younger husband. Remarkably handsome; a rogue charmer and professional idler.
CASTING: 4 females (90s, 40s, 30s, late teens); one male (30s).
PRODUCTION REQUIREMENTS:
Two-tiered surreal unit set, with Indian parlour room (1914) & floating nursing home room in the Bronx (1996).
At the end of a century . . .
Old Grace sits in a floating nursing home room, recollecting a family tragedy she caused at the beginning of the century. Slipping in and out of sense, her story collides on the stage below with what actually happened all those years ago in the wilds of India. Traveling with her maid Bernadette, Young Grace escapes an unhappy marriage to visit her flamboyant and ironic mother, Agatha, near the Taj Majal, where she has journeyed to salve her own wounded heart.
When a man in disguise shows up on their Indian doorstep unannounced, the tragedy that the elder Grace will remonstrate herself for over eighty years later begins to unfold — except her young eyes fail to see the very adult machinations actually fueling that fateful tragedy. Will forgiveness come to Grace years later, as sour truth invades bitter memory?
This fantastical and poetic examination of memory, age and youth flickers between past and present, illuminating the differences between what we think happens, and what really happens in life.