Steven Simoncic
Dramatic
APRIL, mid-30s
APRIL has convinced her husband CZAR to move into a gentrifying neighborhood in the heart of Chicago’s deep West Side. The neighborhood has proven to be dangerous. This monologue is her self-audit of how she got here and why she made this choice. It is delivered to the audience.
APRIL I am invisible. Been invisible all my life. When I was a kid, I could go days, weeks, without being seen. Dirty-brown dishwater hair and flat-ironed features wrapped in bad posture and functional shoes. A “B student” with a “B cup” from a sanitized suburb whose most extraordinary feat was a perfect-attendance plaque and a Charlie Hustle Award at basketball camp. An upper-middle-class, middle-of-the-bell-curve, too-quiet-to-be-tragic, too-boring-to-be-bulimic, forgettable flavor with an academic-alcoholic dad and a trophy-wife mom. So I tried to make myself be seen. From slut, to goth, to punk, to priss, to princess, to yogi. I hijacked identities and wore personalities like Catholic schoolgirl skirts. Until they had to see me—incomplete and stereotypical, silly and pathetic—like a dreamcatcher on a dashboard or a tattoo of the word “hubris” on the small of your back. Search and destroy, damn the torpedoes, cut your forearm with a kitchen knife and blow away a coffee-stained guidance counselor . . . be seen, be obscene, be witnessed, be intervened . . . until one day an ordinary man makes an extraordinary effort to make you feel smart and pretty. Enjoy being seen through his eyes. Stop sleeping with his friends and start sleeping with him. Get bored, get routine, get for granted, get honest about the fact that you never stopped being invisible . . . until a little stick turns blue and forty-six chromosomes turn you inside out for the whole world to see . . . Transform. Transcend. With your thick hair and your swollen ankles—your bloody gums and your linea nigra—until who you are is no longer what you were. A tangible, fragile, dirty-brown dishwater B-student, B-cup . . . mommy . . . something singular and specific, authentic and committed . . . drunk with responsibility and dripping with identity. Find a house that looks nothing like the one you grew up in. Force the issue. Fake the answer. Convince an ordinary man who makes an extraordinary effort that you are right . . . even if you aren’t sure. Because . . . for once . . . you need a place to be seen.