Index to Idioms: A Performance Novel
Comedy/Drama for solo performer
Based on a list of English language idioms brought home by her school-aged son, a woman decides to tell the story of her invisible, indelible life using the idioms as chapter headings. Index to Idioms: A Performance Novel is a love song to the body, a series of looks at the female body in pleasure, in illness, in youth, in middle age, and in the singular utility of motherhood. A series of poetic and humorous monologues in which quotidian events are marked with the tenderness of a life lived under the mantle of mortality, Index is a series of emotional snapshots that show a profound respect for the tiny points of evolution in her own spirit and those of her children. Her daughter realizing she’s going to die someday while the Mother is peeing; the son apologizing to a piece of salmon for eating by reminding the fish that, in becoming part of the boy’s body it can live on through him. A sense of joy and triumph pervades this one-woman performance novel.
Cast Requirements
1 woman
Set Description
A bench, a screen upstage for projections.
Press
“Densely written with a novelist’s sense of detail, these bittersweet episodes zero in on the small but significant epiphanies that stand out like signposts in a woman’s life. Each of [Margolin’s] beautifully observed snapshots of the life of a suburban mother begins with the kind of teasing line that makes you want to know more.”
—New York Times
Production and Development History
Productions: Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN; Culture Project, New York, NY; University of Texas at Austin; Kean University, NJ; Wells College, MA.