Play a Day: Abigail, For Now

Jackie Martin

For Friday, I read Abigail, For Now by Jackie Martin and listed at New Play Exchange.

Last night I had a dream that I was in a public library, trying to produce my half-hour radio program for broadcast on the local station. And I was trying to sit at a crowded table, full of nerds. That's how I thought of them, in my dream.

There was one guy in particular who was railing against the system in a voice we once would have refered to as "adenoidal" and I had just had it and was trying to extract my bookbag from my chair which next to his chair, because he had an entire lack of spatial awareness and I wasn't able to sit at the table in the first place, regardless.

As I stalked away, with my bag, heading over to the recording equipment I thought to myself , "Ugh! Nerds!"

I mean, I was a nerd, myself, which in those days was different than it is today. I think. I played RPGs, had a passing interest in the occult, noodled with computers (back when only nerds would own one) and listened to Genesis. And yet, I didn't go all in, I tried to pass as straight, and yes, I would disown one of my colleagues if I there was social pressure to do so.

I was on the fringes of one circle of dorks, guys who perhaps I had spent one twenty-four hour period playing a single, unending game of "Risk" with. One of our members shot himself when we were juniors. I mourned in shame, because we were friends/not-friends. We had spent good times togther. I had mocked him behind his back.

My daughter was just making new friends as a freshman when one of them she sat with at lunch also died by suicide. As a parent, the terror, worrying that your child might be removing themselves from reality, losing hope for their own future, it's real. It is unspoken. Until it must be spoken.

Playwright Jackie Martin has crafted an unsettling fable of a teenage girl who has come to believe in a reality everyone knows to be false. Her parents are sympathetic, they are real. There are no simple answers, there is no ah-ha moment when some dark secret is made evident, we are left in the dark to wonder, as they do, what has happened to Abigail?

It is a metaphor for being adolescent, to literally evolve into a new beign, with the same thoughts and memories of the child whose form is being shed. And also for what it is like, as a parent, to feel helpless in the face of inevitable change.

The ending, too, is a metaphor. Or is it?

Who should I read tomorrow?