The Silence of a One-Act Play

Now, I don’t want to say I’m a lazy playwright, but I once wrote a one-act play about Helen Keller. She just sat in a chair and said nothing because, well, she was blind, deaf, and mute. Some called it avant-garde. Others called it offensive. I called it finished.

It was during a short-lived period in my life when I fancied myself a man of the theater. I had seen a local production of Death of a Salesman and left the auditorium thinking, “I can do that. Probably faster.”

That’s how it started–with ambition, delusion, and a pad of yellow legal paper.

Now, I should explain that my knowledge of Helen Keller was limited to what I’d picked up from a seventh-grade film strip and a vague memory of someone spelling W-A-T-E-R into her hand. Still, inspiration struck like lightning—or maybe more like a flickering fluorescent bulb.

In my mind, this was going to be a profound piece of silent reflection. Deep. Poetic. A meditation on communication and isolation.

The audience would sit in still reverence while Helen sat motionless in a rocking chair, wrapped in a shawl, occasionally turning her head to face a light source that she couldn’t see. The play was fifteen minutes long and titled She Breathes.

My friend Larry—who once played a tree in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and thinks that qualifies him as a dramaturg—read the script and said, “This is either brilliant or the worst thing I’ve ever read.”

That’s the sort of confidence boost you need when you’re thinking about charging five dollars at the door of a community center. We staged it on a Tuesday evening because Tuesday seemed like the kind of day expectations are already low.

The audience consisted of eleven people, three of whom thought they were at a parent-teacher meeting. The rest were just there for the free cookies.

When the curtain–well, sheet–opened, Helen, already seated—portrayed by my friend Sheryl, who I forgot was allergic to wool. She spent the first three minutes of the play trying not to scratch and the last twelve doing it anyway.

The silence in the room was not reverent. It was confused. A baby cried. A man coughed loud enough to knock the dust off the fake ficus by the stage door.

Afterward, someone asked if it was supposed to be a comedy. I said no, but I was open to rebranding.

That night, as I carried the rocking chair back to my garage and helped Sheryl ice her hives, I realized I might not be Tennessee Williams after all. I might not even be Tennessee from accounting.

But here’s the thing–there’s a kind of beauty in doing something completely absurd and seeing it through anyway. Sure, it bombed. But for one glorious evening, I was a playwright, and the world, or at least eleven people in folding chairs, saw my vision.

Of course, I haven’t written another play since. Although, I did start one about a mime stuck in a soundproof box.

No one could hear him scream. But that’s a story for another day.