Talking Blues: Two One-Acts by Cecilia Fairchild

About the Project

We live in the present, it seems like – but the past comes on us like a tide, seeping and spreading until we are married to it again, living it again. These plays are about the way memory fuses itself to us, no matter how far we think we’ve come.

In Family Tradition, Joan has come all the way to a big, messy apartment in L.A. – and still her bones ring with her long-gone childhood in an Oklahoma single-wide. She stays up all night arguing with her dead father about what’s true and what isn’t, what’s good and what’s evil, and what ought to stay buried. Cockroaches and vodka, the wind on the plains and the smell of pine pitch. And there’s a secret, and there’s God, and maybe there’s redemption if they can find it.

In Best of My Love, a pair of ex-lovers meet again at a funeral after a decade-old divorce. There are shreds we hold to when love turns bad – the sweet taste of certain lips on the mouth of a bottle of whiskey, the feel of sweat on the back of a particular neck. These things never leave us; they stick, and other things stick to them too. Florence and Tyler are haunted by the ways they have loved and hated, by the ways their shared past seems to have changed in the years they’ve been apart, and by the pieces of each other they’ve never been able to loosen their grasp on.