The Lesser Wars
by Diane Glancy
- Characters
- Narrator
- Coytoe Girl
- Coytoe Boy
- Setting/Summary
- This is a play about language and imagination. An interdisciplinary world that walks the border between script and poem. A play of words that bend into one another in a new genre of short script or long poem. The compression and immediacy of a half act. A walking between two worlds or genres in which the setting is pure imagery.
The theme is multicultural. There are different ways of seeing. There are other worlds and Coyote Girl and Coyote Boy bring one of these worlds into being. The oral tradition of the Narrator. A dance of imagery, a visual and literal walk-the-border-between. A making of language where dreams dance with masks from the next world. I think it is the realm of the subconscious.
Coyote Girl is trying to climb to the roof where the men are. Away from her mother in the kitchen who dies from baking bread. The drama moves in and out of time. The narrator like an interlocutor. Coyote Girl lives a lot in imagination. She is left behind when her brother and father go to town. They have the pwer to drive and leave the farm. They try to use fear to keep her at home. A story of Coyote Girl growing up with incest, isolation, and a longing for escape. A surreal effect of a comic strip. An experiment with language. “Deadie. They said of mommie.” The girl takes the place of her own mother and father. Native American mythology in the form of the grandmother/owl story to incorporate myth in drama. Silence and sound of experimental theater. Not motive or movement in chronological order with message and theme but the sharing of experience without thought of the usual structure of the play. Her search for escape and not finding any except in the idea of it.
Synopsis written by the author.
