VOIR, DEAR: One-Act Play


SYNOPSIS:

This short play is about justice, judgment, language and the family. A septuagenarian father in NY City and his grown daughter in Chicago speak on the phone about the father’s jury duty. Portions of the conversation involve a private word substitution game. In the course of explaining why and how he got out of serving on a trial, the father recounts a near mugging from the past and describes two other people in the jury pool, a CSI gofer and a Russian immigrant. After they hang up, his dead wife’s ghost briefly appears.


SAMPLE:

Scene 1:

Father and daughter in mid-phone conversation. Daughter sits in a rocking chair with a cup of tea on a side table. On her lap is a cat, presently asleep. Father sits at the table in his kitchenette, playing with a pencil. As the conversation proceeds, she can thumb through a magazine, push the cat off her lap, play with it (if it doesn’t run offstage), etc., and he can get up and go open the refrigerator, taste something, look at a bottle of wine and decide not to open it, etc.

Daughter: So … what else? … Weren’t you supposed to start your juvenile delinquency today?

Father: Yesterday. Jury duty, I’m already finished. Ding, dong, the wash is done.

Daughter: Witch is dead.

Father: Time off for general … uh …bullshit.

Daughter: Good behavior. Go on, please. Time Out?

Father: Granted. Funny you should have played that one, because I met two J.D.’s today, one of whom may actually have been a juvenile delinquent.

Daughter: Hmm, good. Tell me more.

Father: I got called to a panel this morning, a veritable dog.

Daughter: Voir dire. Dad! Remember? Time out?

Father: Oops, sorry.
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