Buckle up, Buttercups.
If you have never watched one of George F. Walker’s plays, well, gosh, I don’t know. You’ve been sleeping under bridge or maybe a rock. But you are in luck. Walker’s latest play, Alone on a Bridge, will be syndicated on Esoterica’s website. That’s right. The. Entire. Play.
A little bit about George F. Walker, one of Canada’s most prolific and popular playwrights: He began his theatre career in the early 1970s and has written more than 30 plays. He also created screenplays for several award-winning Canadian television series (Due South, The Newsroom, This is Wonderland to name few.) Part Kafka, part Lewis Carroll, Walker’s distinctive, gritty, fast-paced tragicomedies illuminate and satirize the selfishness, greed, and aggression of contemporary urban culture.
His new play, Alone on the Bridge, follows Stacey, an abandoned teenage mother of two, Rudy, a crooked cop, Raven, a social worker, and Kyle, Rudy’s troubled son as they converge in the big city, their stories becoming inextricably intertwined as they search for justice, redemption and just a little peace.
Here’s a taste of what’s to come or read it in full on Esoterica.
STACEY ALL ALONE
I knew a man
My father knew
He lived nearby
Went to a church
Nearby
And a bar
In town where
He went most nights
And left most mornings
Staggering to his truck
To sleep it off
To forget who he was
Which was nothing
Not inside.
Not where it mattered
He had a good guy charm
For the other guys
But people who knew
Knew
He wasn’t to be trusted
Let alone liked
Just a drunk
Worse than most
With a failed farm
Still failing
And a failed marriage
And wife in hiding
And a son
Who feared him
And his son.
Had a friend
A girl
Who just dropped by
Where’s Jamie
In the barn
Doing what
She should’ve asked
But didn’t and
So failure of a man would show her
But that was wrong
It sounded wrong
But instead of running
Running away fast
She went there
Into the barn
And got raped
Don’t tell your dad
Don’t tell the church
Don’t tell the town
Don’t tell my son
Don’t tell him please
He cried
He begged
Don’t tell my son
So sorry
But someone did. Someone had to.
And the son cried too Not for the girl
For himself For the shame
The father’s son
PEGGY ALL ALONE
PEGGY
My daughter’s gone. Gone with her two young children and her useless husband. A neighbour saw them on the side of a road. Hitchhiking.
Hitchhiking with two small children. That’s crazy. After some family quarrel. Some harsh words. Some threats. Sure no one likes to hear that. Hear those accusations she was throwing around. Sure there was anger about that. But to just yank those young children away from their home. And to go where? This is so wrong. There’s gotta be something badly wrong with her.
Something about how her mind’s working isn’t right.
RUDY ALL ALONE
RUDY
It was late. On my way home after a really shitty day. Interviewed 4 liars. One after the other giving me nothing but bullshit. And I treated everyone of them with respect. Honest to Christ. I never once raised my voice. I just explained why we needed to get whoever did those crimes off the street. I mean these kids being killed weren’t much more than babies. And neither were these guys. White. Black. Asian. All just staring at me maintaining that fucking stupid code. Okay it’s what keeps you alive. But it’s also what keeps you locked in that dumb fucking life. They all know who we’re after. How about doing something positive for once. Yeah okay, I was carrying all that in my head when I turned the corner and saw that bus. Uniforms everywhere. Weapons out. A perimeter set up to block traffic, and inside that bus there’s just this one guy, holding a weapon of some kind, a few terrified passengers and the bus driver. So I get out of my car. Not to do anything. Just to help out if I can. I show a uniform my I.D. And move closer to the bus to take in the situation a bit better. And then right there at the open door to the bus I see the problem right away. There’s two young uniforms with weapons out pretty much begging the guy in the bus to drop the thing he has in his hand. I can’t see clearly what it is. The only thing I can see clearly is how fucked up the young uniforms are.
Both of them dripping sweat. Their voices like a couple of scared nine year olds. Barely in control of themselves. Which I was just about to tell them when the guy in the bus turns and starts towards the passengers huddled at the back. One of which was a young woman with a child on her lap. So I unholster and enter the bus. And yell at the guy to fucking stop. He does.
Then he turns and starts back towards me. And yeah, he’s carrying a knife. A large knife which I tell him to drop. I tell him real clearly to drop the knife and get down on his knees. But he just keeps coming. He never stops. And when he’s about five feet away, I shoot him. I don’t shoot to wound. I shoot to kill like I was trained to. So that’s why he’s lying dead on the floor of the bus, AND that’s the first time I take in that he’s Black. I mean the first time it registered. Before that I was just dealing with the situation. What he was holding and that he was a threat to the hostages. Not what he looked like. Not even how I have sometimes dealt with people who look like that in the past. Which wasn’t always great I’ll admit. And for sure I didn’t take in if the poor bastard was mentally all there or not. They tried to make a connection between what happened on that bus and some of my past… encounters with Blacks. Most of them from nearly ten years ago.
Those accusations were mostly bullshit. But I took counselling, and I learned. And even if I sometimes did or do have racial thoughts, that doesn’t make me a racist. And it doesn’t have anything to do with what that black guy did to get himself killed. It’s complicated. I’ll admit that. My thinking about the whole situation with Blacks is really fucking complicated. I mean because I’m a cop. And cops see things. Anyway like I said, those gang bangers I was interviewing weren’t all Black. And the ones that were got treated the same as the Asian and White guys did. And that’s with total respect. Even though they’re low life hoods who do nothing with their lives except cause harm.
That’s just a fact that has nothing to do with that guy on the bus needing to be put down.