about the (re)making project

Please feel free to take the plays from this project and use them freely as a resource for your own work: that is to say, don't just make some cuts or rewrite a few passages or re-arrange them or put in a few texts that you like better, but pillage the plays as I have pillaged the structures and contents of the plays of Euripides and Brecht and stuff out of Soap Opera Digest and the evening news and the internet, and build your own, entirely new, piece--and then, please, put your own name to the work that results.
But, if you would like to perform the plays essentially or substantially as I have composed them, they are protected by copyright in the versions you read here, and you need to clear performance rights. For professional performance rights, contact Thomas Pearson of International Creative Management at tpearson@icmtalent.com or 212-556-56600. For amateur performance rights, contact Libby Edwards at charlesmeeplays@yahoo.com.
- Charles Mee

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A Perfect Wedding

by C H A R L E S L . M E E





Music.

Brahms's St. Anthony's Chorale
from Variations on a Theme by Haydn.

Or it could be J.S. Bach's Sleepers, Awake! from Cantata 140.

In any case:
a summer mansion of many rooms
(remember the Song of Songs:
"my love is a mansion of many rooms.")


The Prologue

At the end of the music,
Meridee enters, talking.

She is with her sister Tessa
and her brother Jonathan.

Among the three of them
they are carrying a white wedding dress,
shoes, and veil.

MERIDEE
Oh!
This is the perfect place for a wedding

TESSA
if you have to get married at all,
although, for the life of me
I don't see why anyone ever does any more.
What could be the point?

MERIDEE
Love would be the point, Tessa: love.

TESSA
Oh, right, love, right.
Because you can't love someone unless you marry them.

MERIDEE
And commitment.

TESSA
Commitment. Right.
Why not just a handshake then
and say, OK, it's a deal?
Why make a thing out of it with a crowd of people
you wish you never had to even talk to?

MERIDEE
It's not as though I don't know
that everyone thinks marriage is an old fashioned
sort of thing

JONATHAN
and pointless

TESSA
and pointless
and people have priests and rabbis get up at a wedding
and say all sorts of things
that no one believes any more

JONATHAN
so that a bride and groom start out in life
with their whole marriage,
the whole center of their lives from then on,
based on things they think are a total lie

TESSA
so that
how can they expect to stay together
if they've been such total hypocrites
at what they believe is the most solemn
beginning moment of their lives

JONATHAN
and so or else
they try to write their own vows
and they end up saying all these things
about growing together
and respecting one another
and letting one another's
trees be free to grow

TESSA
and they never say till death do us part any more
so it seems they're not promising
much of anything to anyone these days

MERIDEE
still
there are people who still want to love each other
and be together
and not just halfway,
not just keeping one foot out on the river bank
ready to say at any moment
ok, forget it,
I guess we grew apart
save yourself, I'm out of here
but they want to say
no, I'm going all the way with you
I'm here with you forever
I want to make this commitment to you
people still want to do this
because
no matter what we've seen in our lifetimes
this is still a universal human desire
the desire for love forever
and people still want to give themselves to that
and notice it
and mark it with a special occasion
so that when they die
it doesn't seem like the most important thing in their lives
was--what?--having their appendix out?
because everyone made such a big deal about that?
and love IS an important thing
it may be a necessary thing even
for the world to go on

[Tessa and Jonathan can't believe
Meridee goes on and on]

and so, the wedding guests are there
because when people make this promise to one another
it's a happy occasion
and the most important one
and people like to share it.

TESSA
And leave town before the misery begins.


Act I

[The family comes out of the walls talking:
Maria, carrying an armful of white linens,
who speaks with a trace of an Italian accent
and her lover Francois, carrying a half-dozen champagne glasses.]