"Self-Portrait in One Act" excerpted from Year of the Dog, copyright 2020 by Deborah Paredez, BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org
Self-Portrait in One Act
DRAMATIS PERSONAE:
EVERETT ALVAREZ, falls from the sky and breaks the surface of the gulf, first American aviator POW captured in Vietnam, brother to Delia
DELIA ALVAREZ, cast in the role of dutiful, patriotic, mourning sister but keeps breaking character
NARRATOR, sister and daughter and poet who prefers theatre that breaks the fourth wall
NARRATOR’S BROTHER, breaks his femur on the playing field
NARRATOR’S FATHER, breaks in his combat boots
ANTIGONE, breaks with the state and buries her brother
FRANKIE GAYE, breaks the airwaves with his voice as an Army radio-telephone operator (RTO), breaks the news about the war in letters home to his brother, Marvin
MARVIN GAYE, breaks out in song
POET-CHORUS, breaks into soliloquies by Lucille Clifton, Stanley Kunitz, and Adrienne Rich
SCENE 1: A GULF
Enter EVERETT, shot down from the flak-blackened August sky into the Gulf of Tonkin.
When his captors pull him from the water, his first response is to break into Spanish.
EVERETT: Don’t ask me why I did that. It seemed like a good idea.
Enter NARRATOR, FRANKIE, DELIA, and POET-CHORUS across the gulf.
NARRATOR: Theatre teaches me to speak out in superstitious code, as in
“The Scottish Play” or “Break a Leg!”
FRANKIE: The Army teaches me to speak out in code, like when you
want to get through with your emergency message and
there’s too much radio traffic, you say, “BREAK, BREAK.”
POET-CHORUS: In a murderous time / the heart breaks and breaks / and lives
by breaking.
NARRATOR: In Spanish, the word for brotherhood is hermanidad. The
word for sisterhood is hermanidad. It’s the same word.
DELIA: The mentality that calls Vietnamese ‘gooks’ is the same
mentality that calls brown people ‘spics.’ It’s the same battle.
SCENE 2: A CLEARING
Enter FRANKIE and NARRATOR carrying the body of the NARRATOR’S BROTHER
who has broken his femur on the playing field.
Enter ANTIGONE, falling from her nest with a broken wing, nestling in near the
NARRATOR’S BROTHER.
ANTIGONE: I am daughter and sister to Oedipus, and my name means
“in place of one’s parents.”
NARRATOR: Unlike my brother, I’ve never broken a bone but I have
broken my word.
FRANKIE: The RTO alphabet teaches me another way to spell the
words I know.
ANTIGONE: I confess to knowing the word of the law and breaking it
anyway.
FRANKIE: Bravo Romeo Oscar Tango Hotel Echo Romeo OVER
Enter Marvin and Delia, en hermanidad.
MARVIN: What’s going on?
DELIA: I have learned another way to spell “Tonkin:” T / On / Kin.
NARRATOR: My brother is young and spared.
DELIA: The war went beyond just my brother.
MARVIN: Picket lines (sister), Picket signs (sister)
NARRATOR: My brother’s spare parts.
FRANKIE: Sierra India Sierra Tango Echo Romeo OVER
DELIA: COPY
FRANKIE: Sierra India Sierra Tango Echo Romeo OVER
MARVIN: What’s happening, brother? What’s happening, brother?
NARRATOR’S
BROTHER: My part is spare.
FRANKIE: OUT
Exit FRANKIE carrying NARRATOR’S BROTHER on his back.
Sound of radio static.
NARRATOR: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will al-
ways cleave me.
ANTIGONE: I told my sister I had no use for her words. I’d done the
deed, breaking open the earth and gathering the sticks and
stones to cover our brother’s grave.
Sound of dead air.
Enter POET-CHORUS, breaking the silence.
POET-CHORUS: break, October, speak, / …thrust / your tongue against mine,
break / day
NARRATOR: I hang blackout curtains in the bedroom, which makes it
hard to see daybreak.
SCENE 3: THE HOMEWRECK
Enter NARRATOR’S FATHER in civilian clothes and EVERETT, returning after eight
years of captivity. They begin to slow dance together following the rhythm of a reporter’s
voice over the radiowaves.
VOICE OF
REPORTER: Just before you came home, your sister, Delia, said, “All hell
might break loose” when you find out about her antiwar
activity. What happened when you did find out about it?
Enter NARRATOR, DELIA, and POET-CHORUS, out of time.
NARRATOR: In “The Scottish Play,” the king and queen cannot rid them-
selves of the blood on their hands.
POET-CHORUS: It is all blood and breaking, / blood and breaking
NARRATOR: My father was young and spared.
EVERETT: Well, first of all, all hell did not break loose.
NARRATOR’S
FATHER: I came home in time to escort my sister to her senior prom.
EVERETT and NARRATOR’S FATHER dance together offstage.
Enter DELIA who begins a slow dance with NARRATOR to the sounds of MARVIN’s
song, “What’s Going On?”
DELIA: Everett will return when Vietnamese children will be able to
look at the sky and clouds—
NARRATOR: If the breaking of character is particularly serious, it is called
“corpsing.”
DELIA: and not fear that a bomb will drop that will burn and tear
their bodies—
The sound of Marvin’s voice rises as the women continue their dirge-dance.
MARVIN voice: Brother brother brother, there’s far too many of you dying.
FIN
"Self-Portrait in One Act" excerpted from Year of the Dog, copyright 2020 by Deborah Paredez, BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org
Deborah Paredez is a poet and interdisciplinary performance scholar whose lectures and publications examine black and Latinx popular culture, poetry of war and witness, feminist elegy, cultural memory, and the role of divas in American culture. She is the author of the award-winning critical study, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory (Duke 2009) and of the poetry collections, This Side of Skin (Wings Press 2002) and Year of the Dog (BOA 2020). Her poetry and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, National Public Radio, Boston Review, Poetry, Feminist Studies, and elsewhere.
Her research and writing have been supported by the Hedgebrook Center for Women Writers, the American Association of University Women, and the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation. She received her PhD in Interdisciplinary Theatre and Performance at Northwestern University and her BA in English at Trinity University.
Born and raised in San Antonio, she has lived on both coasts, endured a handful of Chicago winters, and taught American poetry in Paris, while remaining rooted in her Tejana love of Selena and the Spurs. She currently lives with her husband, historian Frank Guridy, and their daughter in New York City, where she is a professor of creative writing and ethnic studies at Columbia University and the Co-Founder of CantoMundo, a national organization for Latinx poets.
