Tomatoes!

As I’m reading my students’ plays for Experimental Playwriting course at SNL-Depaul University, I’m noticing a tremendous progress on their use of technique, structure and creativity. Students were expected to learn from multi-disciplined play texts, screenings, discussions and exercises. Most of them had never written a play, nor read or seen one. The explosion of their creativity through the course was astonishing! Now their plays are amazingly skillful!
In one of in-class writing exercises I asked them to write a direct-address monologue that uses the audience as a specific person or persons. Kevin’s monologue is one of the good ones!


"Tomatoes"
By Kevin Evanski

Louis:
"When, I came through the yard; I could see someone pulled them from the vines. It looked like someone took a hacksaw to them. Trampled around in there like it was a sand box. Well, my garden is no beach, and I know who it was that was in there to. She is always drooling over the tomatoes. She just couldn’t wait, probably wanted to use them for that stinky sauce I smell cooking all the time.

My tomatoes used for sauce, Huh! I won the first prize for quality tomatoes in the quality tomato championship. She did not know I am from the quality tomato capital. And, she uses my tomatoes for her stinky, garlicky, onion sauce. My tomatoes are for eating fresh, not boiled down into garlicky onion sauce. I know it was her, I seen the footprints, tiny ones.

Maybe I will put those crappy plum tomatoes out there; see how she likes that, for her precious sauce. She didn’t even have the decency to wait until they were fully ripe. I can hear her now, “Louis’s tomatoes aren’t all that good”. Anyone who is worth there salt in tomato growing knows that you have to wait until they are fully ripened. I can smell that repulsive sauce from across the street. I don’t want any of her crappy sauce.

What does she know, she better keep her dam hands off my tomatoes.

Like I have time to grow tomatoes for the whole neighborhood… What a joke, I just don’t have the time or the room to grow all these tomatoes. She comes, takes my tomatoes, and then starts bragging about them to the whole neighborhood, I can’t have all these people wanting my tomatoes.

I asked her for some of her onions last season, NO she said.

She offered me squash, I don’t like squash. I needed onions.

You think that she would invite me over for sauce, nope. Never invited me over for sauce. Who wants that stinking sauce anyway, I don’t want that sauce. I wouldn’t have gone if she did ask me. She just better stay out of my garden. NO! NO onions for me. One little onion I asked her for, one stinking little onion, and she said no. But now, but now she is after my tomatoes, sneaking in here. I should go out there and pull all the tomatoes right now.

Oh, there they are, I see her and her stinking garlic sauce-eating friends. Hey! Keep your dam hands off my tomatoes."
17 November 2009