Excerpt of In a Corner (formatted for online viewing)

From near the end 

​

​

(This play bounces back and forth between past and present. The DRINKING MAN is the REPORTER several years later, reflecting on his interview of PEG.)

 

PEG

You can’t dismiss it like that. What Jesus did wasn’t a reason to be complacent. It was a challenge! Where was God when my son was kidnapped? You don’t think those words haunt me every day? Where was the spirit that was supposed to protect him? All these questions! Sometimes I think if there’s a God— Imagine, a God of Love watching all this. Watching my son be—(She breaks off.) And I think—it’s the only thing I can think—that God is sitting in a corner of the universe weeping—

​

DRINKING MAN

Weeping for the mothers who cover their babies’ bodies with their own when liquid fire falls from the sky. Weeping for the war-weary girl in Beirut who attempted suicide—twice. Weeping for the victims of Hiroshima, of Dresden, of Aushwitz, of Sarajevo, of the crusades, of witch-burning, of the pogroms, of Bopal, of Dunblane, of Baghdad, of Katrina, of Maria, of secret wars. For the little faces who see terror burning on their skin. Weeps and cannot be consoled. Weeps.

​

PEG

Should I have kept him in a glass jar? You can put a lightening bug in a jar, but— Don’t you know? Don’t you know how they beat their wings against the jar?

​

REPORTER

Maybe that takes more power.

​

PEG

What?

​

REPORTER

Free will. Letting creation make the mistakes that threaten to—

​

PEG

Destroy it.

​

DRINKING MAN

Or save it.

​

(…continued…)

​

​