Calm Down Mother
By Megan TerryCalm Down Mother is a "transformation play" in which three female actors play multiple roles. A word or a physical gesture serves as the hinge for instantaneous transition from one scene to the next. Here, they become a mother and two daughters washing dishes at a tenement sink. They are having a fight about birth control.
SUE
See, I got enough eggs in me for thirty years, see. That's one a month for thirty years. Twelve times thirty is - 360 eggs. Three hundred and sixty possibilities. Three hundred and sixty babies could be born out of my womb. So, if I don't produce each and every one of them, which is a mathematical impossibility, should I go to hell for that?
So what should I do? Pray and moan on beans? So what should I do, catch eggs and save them in a test tube? And I'm only one bearer of the eggs. You're nineteen. You got a whole year's eggs on me, still. So if God sees fit to flush them down the pipe every month if they don't meet up with an electric male shock, then who the hell are these priests and all to scream about pills and controls? Tell me that! Who the hell are they? They want to save my eggs till they can get around to making them into babies? They can line up and screw in the test tubes. Yeah! That's a sight. They're welcome.
And you two! You sit there in church every Sunday, kneeling and mumbling and believing all that crap that those men tell you, and they don't even know what the hell they're talking about. And I'll be you don't know what I'm talking about. Because I'm the only one in this whole carton of eggs that's got any brains. And I'm taking my pills and I ain't kneeling on any beans or babies' brains to make up for it!
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