By BILL C. DAVIS - aka GLISERMAN
Watch Mark Molero's Interview with Bill C. Davis about "Spine"! In Connecticut I took care of a woman’s horse because she wasn't able to give the horse enough attention. Her youngest child – a son – was terminally ill. She would come over from time to time to take a break – visit her horse and talk about the surreal journey she found herself in. She took the visitation of a cruel universe with a stoned, beatific stoicism. She doted on the details of her son’s ordeal – white blood cell counts – morphine drip - catheter – the entire picture could never be absorbed so it had to be framed.
A week after her 11-year-old-son died she told me, without shedding
a tear, the story of the last night. Essentially, everyone in
the family – her husband and two other children - went to their
rooms to wait it out. She tried to get them out of their rooms
to say something to him. The boy couldn’t speak but he could hear.
I created this play based in part on that evening. Shortly after
I wrote the first draft of the play, my sister, the youngest in
our family, was diagnosed with cancer.
I directed the play twice. At the center of the house is simply a headboard which is the gravitational pull of the boy. The literal presence of the boy or a bed even is not necessary. The reconstitution of the family is the point. The mother and her spine as well as the distance between each family member’s room and the headboard is the journey the play and the actors have to take.
Spine a full-length one-act play – no intermission.
It’s a detailed study on what happens when something powerful
usurps the center of a family. His spine was collapsing and as
his collapsed hers emerged as she struggled to get each family
member to say something to the boy before he died. Spine
is the story of a mother who delivers her youngest child to a
premature end and the rest of her family to a necessary beginning.
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