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The White Trash Grail Play
A comdey in two acts by Allyson Currin
2 women, 3 men (multiple role-playing)

Synopsis:
Diana's grandfather Duck is convinced that all of the voices of his dead ancestors reside in his favorite shiny glass globe. So when he loses it in the City, Diana has no choice but to go on a journey to find it. She embarks upon a post-modern Quest to retrieve it in a nightmarish urban landscape, peopled with fairy-tale figures, sidekicks, bureaucrats, and a scholar who is furious that she doesn't even seem to understand her own monomyth!

GRANDMA
I won't die young. It says so on my hand. A gypsy from the Dixie Classic Fair told me that when I was fifteen. I had to cross her forehead with an Indian Head nickel to get the right kind of reading. She said I would travel the world, marry three handsome men and die in my bed.

DIANA
The Indian Head nickel was worth more than the prophecy, obviously. Grandma never left Virginia, Duck was her only husband, and she dropped dead in the fourth aisle of the Pak-a-Sak in Fork's Neck. But Duck didn't cry too hard.

Duck appears in a spotlight.

DUCK (wiping his eyes)
Don't matter. She'll just be sitting in the Globe, with Mama and all of 'em.

DIANA
Duck had this globe...

DUCK
They're all in there.

DIANA
It was bought by his great-great-such-and-such at the World's Fair of eighteen-something-and-whatever and Duck ended up with it.

DUCK
It's an Heirloom.

DIANA
It was a globe. It didn't DO anything, you didn't shake it up and get snow, it was just this glass ball.

DUCK
It is a Globe. Your grandma lives on the bottom.

DIANA
Well, Duck was always a little off, but he got it into his head that this globe held all his ancestors and their stories, and if he listened they would tell him those stories in their own voices.

DUCK
If you listen hard enough, you can hear straight back to Ireland!

DIANA
Well, now, that was just nuts, because we Doogans had been in these parts of Virginia since the 1780's.

DUCK (speaking in a woman's thick Irish brogue)
Oh, me wee, wee bairn, dead of the cholera lo those many years ago! Ach, and where is the priest but at the pub?

DIANA
When he talked to the Globe you couldn't reason with him.

DUCK (new personality, strident Confederate soldier)
Eat iron, ya Yankee bastards!

Diana pauses while Duck enjoys re-creating his Civil War artillery sounds and the screams of the wounded.

DUCK
Pyew! Pyew! Pyew! Pyew! Du-du-du-du-du-du-du-!!!!!!!!!
Doctor! Doctor, don't cut it off! Be brave, young warrior.
No, no, no, no, NOOOOOOOOOOOO!
KAAAA-BOOOOOOOOOOM!

DIANA
You get the idea.

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