Meet Girl.

The birthdate of my new play would have to have been May 9th, when my three year old self took over and wrote Dramatis Personæ. It had been conceived earlier, and there had been quite a bit of pre-natal development. And then...

Ummm... let's just leave off the extended metaphor right there.

So, meet Girl. She is narrating the new play. Here's the opening. This is a voiceover narration.

Stage location (probably to be conveyed by just a few details and sound): Two beaches, half a world apart. A woman and a man are at opposite ends of the stage, staring off into the surf. The sounds of the ocean.

Girl

(Voiceover)

Once upon a time, there was a little girl. People thought she was a strange little girl because she seemed to talk to herself. She wasn’t really, of course. She was talking to her dolls. Paper dolls. The paper dolls had stories and the little girl had to tell them. In the stories, the paper dolls would go to far far away places. They would live in far far away places.

The little girl would take the paper dolls everywhere—the playground and the park and the beach. At the beach, the little girl would sit, and face the ocean, with her paper dolls all lined in a row next to her. And all together, they would watch the ocean. Watch the waves. And listen. Listen for stories about paper dolls who lived where the water ended. On the other side.

One day a paper doll, the newest and the prettiest, got caught up in the wind and landed in the waves. The little girl begged her mother to save the pretty doll, but her mother knew the truth. The doll had melted into the water and disappeared.

What the girl didn’t know, couldn’t know, was that on the other side of the world there was a boy. He did not play with paper dolls, of course, because boys do not do such things. The boy on the other side of the world told no such stories, but he made things with his hands—always something in his hands, something made to race or climb or float or fly. Especially airplanes. Airplanes made of paper. Such toys tell no tales. They don’t live long enough. For paper airplanes are made to fly out into the surf, as fast and far as possible, then glide into the waves and be gone.

Paper, it seems, is not made to cross the ocean.