The Cycle Plays - Annex materials

A young girl is abducted from her bedroom and eventually murdered, leaving her father not only to grieve for her memory but to see her transfigured in the limelight of the press. She is violated—neither her home, nor her body, nor her mind is safe from intrusion--but is too powerful simply to subside after death; she must first learn to be dead, and turns the tables on her captor. “An old woman with a cane, she commands angels,” who strip and bind him as he sleeps. Later, she confronts him in hell; later still, she will go to heaven.

A demon play is traditionally hectic, and Pretty is no exception: it narrates both the act of violence and the process by which a crime, and especially the public response to it, morphs its participants into symbols. An innocent girl who played games and had sleepovers with friends is “complicated into a fouled net of natural signifiers,” and the world of this play is likewise dense with signs to be decoded or absorbed. A bee rides the perpetrator and his victim, a worm is a snake, birds hatch yellow jackets, and a rat does a drunken dance with beetles.

At long last, what started as a nightmare comes to feel more like a dream, and as the father says at the beginning of the play, “Dreaming is dressing a wound.” The beloved is saved, and the witnesses, too, are healed.

synopsis by Edith Reisner Newton