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    Autumn Sweet: A Play
    Autumn Sweet: A Play
    Autumn Sweet: A Play
    Ebook240 pages1 hour

    Autumn Sweet: A Play

    By Frank Catalano

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    About this ebook

    Veronica Colletti is a world famous painter living in Paris, whose creative juices have gone dry. She's come home to Long Island after many years to bury her mother and her demons. Upon her return, she comes face to face with her past, her abusive father and ultimately herself. Review: "A Brilliant Autumn" RJ Wong - 5 Stars Renown painter Veronica Coletti returns to her childhood Long Island home to relive a pivotal moment in her adolescent life and confront the person who threatened the development of her budding talent - her own father. This is a dark, searing portrait of a family spinning apart with the relationship between a cruel and brooding father and his sensitive, artistically gifted daughter at its center. With his cast of all-too-human characters, Frank Catalano has written a brilliant drama filled with incident, heartbreak, tears, laughter and even a touch of the supernatural. Single Setting Five Characters (Two adult female – 30’s – 40’s) (Two adult males – (30’s – 50’s) (one male child pre teen)
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLexington Avenue Press
    Release dateJun 1, 2011
    ISBN9781625172266
    Autumn Sweet: A Play

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      Book preview

      Autumn Sweet - Frank Catalano

      ACT I

      VERONICA

      Long Island will always be my home. It’s the place my heart goes when I dream. Especially, in the autumn. Pastures of goldenrod and air smelling sweet of wood burning fireplaces. It takes my back to when I was a child… cut out paper oak leaves I made at school… stuck together… paste on my hands and under my gloves… smelling like a wet dog in a glue patch.

      And home is the place we return to bury our dead… and recount the living. To be with family… that circle linked by blood and fire… reopen old wounds and inflict new with amazing precision.

      (Beat)

      My mother has passed away and I have come back home to honor her… and to remember.

      (Lights fade with the rhythm of the train and the voice of an old CONDUCTOR rattling out the names of the stops.)

      CONDUCTOR (VO)

      New Hyde Park, Mineola, Westbury, Hicksville, Plainview.

      (Beat)

      New Hyde Park, next stop!

      (Black out)

      MARY

      Veronica is that you?

      VERONICA

      No Mom, the Four Seasons are here in your kitchen!

      MARY

      Don’t get smart with me young lady.

      (MARY COLLETTI – (40’s) looking much older than her years comes down the stairs wearing a bathrobe buttoned high and rigged for battle. She stops at the base of the stairs to open the window above it – letting in the light and a gentle breeze as she takes a breath.)

      MARY

      There! Nice fresh air. I love the morning air… so sweet. Especially Sunday morning.

      VERONICA

      Right. Sunday definitely smells sweeter than Monday.

      (Mary comes down the stairs into the kitchen.)

      MARY

      I got a comedian for a daughter… whataya deaf? Lower this radio.

      (Mary lowers the volume of the radio as Veronica holds up and admires her painting.)

      VERONICA

      What do you think?

      MARY

      Very nice… now put it way before your father sees it.

      VERONICA

      I’m calling it Autumn Sweet. It’s for my application to the Sorbonne Art School in Paris! Mr. Riley, my art teacher, says I stand a good chance of getting a scholarship there.

      MARY

      Your father doesn’t like paint in the house.

      VERONICA

      Okay, already!

      (Veronica begins to clean up as Mary fills the coffee pot with water.)

      MARY

      You want scrambled eggs?

      VERONICA

      Again? We have any bagels?

      MARY

      We’re Italian… what’s with the bagels?

      (Veronica shrugs her shoulders.)

      Check the refrigerator.

      (Veronica opens the refrigerator, takes a bag of bagels out and hands them to Mary. A moment later she goes back to thinking about her painting.)

      VERONICA

      Just think, studying art in Paris!

      MARY

      Boy you got your head in the clouds this morning.

      (Beat)

      VERONICA

      You need help toasting that?

      MARY

      Why do I look like I don’t know how to use a toaster?

      (Veronica removes a handful of paint tubes off the kitchen table, and then makes a quick correction to her painting.)

      VERONICA

      I just don’t want them burnt.

      (Looking at her work.)

      When you were my age… did you like school?

      MARY

      I don’t know… I just went.

      (Beat)

      Let’s go already… let’s clean up that table before your father gets up.

      VERONICA

      I heard you the first time.

      MARY

      …and since you’re up, can you get the cream cheese?

      VERONICA

      Up? I’m sitting.

      (She gets the cream cheese.)

      Ya’know, I love going to school and learning new things… and most of all, I love painting.

      MARY

      Someday you’ll get married and have a family of your own. Then, you’ll think less about painting and more about putting food on the table. I made it to seventh grade.

      VERONICA

      Why only seventh grade?

      MARY

      I had to work… my mother pulled me out of school so I could get a job.

      VERONICA

      What did you do?

      MARY

      I got a job at a luggage factory in Jersey gluing the satin linings on the insides of luggage. We needed the money to live… we were poor and it was the depression.

      VERONICA

      Hey ma… it’s 1963 and the last time I checked, the depression was over. Why do I still have to work at Dad’s store everyday selling produce after school?

      MARY

      It’s our business and your father needs you.

      VERONICA

      Can’t he just hire someone to help?

      MARY

      We don’t want strangers to know our business.

      VERONICA

      What are we the Rockefellers? What business do we have? It’s a produce store not a corporation.

      (Beat.)

      I’d like to be able to stay after school once in a while. Maybe join a club.

      MARY

      Club? What club?

      VERONICA

      The Brush and Canvas Club. It’s a club for painters and this Friday, after school, they’re having a representative from the Sorbonne School there. That’s an art school in Paris and Mr. Riley knows him really well and maybe if I could meet him he might know who I am when I send in my application.

      MARY

      Hey, slow down here… one minute you want to be in a club and now you’re going to Paris. What kind of club is this Brush and Canvas?

      VERONICA

      I told you, it’s a club for painters.

      MARY

      Painters?

      VERONICA

      Bingo! Now you got it.

      MARY

      You want to paint eh?

      VERONICA

      That’s what I been sayin… don’t you listen to me when I talk.

      MARY

      Sure I listen. Why don’t you paint our upstairs bathroom? Blue would be nice.

      (Beat.)

      By the time your father gets around to doing it I could grow a beard.

      VERONICA

      Mama, it’s not that kind of painting.

      MARY

      I knew that. I was just making a joke. What I can’t make a joke?

      (Beat.)

      So you want to go to some school in Paris and when you grow up be like one of those beatniks in Greenwich Village? They all think they’re painters.

      VERONICA

      Right, it’s my life’s dream to be a beatnik.

      (Beat.)

      I’ll grow a beard instead of you and paint the bathroom… if you let me go to the Brush and Canvas meeting.

      MARY

      Now look who’s the comedian! Just eat your bagel.

      VERONICA

      Come on, Mom, you talk to Dad. Tell him I want to go to the meeting.

      MARY

      I don’t think it’s a good idea now. Thanksgiving is next week and the store will be busy. Can’t you go another time?

      VERONICA

      No, I can’t. Besides there’ll always be a reason why I can’t go. Now it’s Thanksgiving and after that… Christmas and maybe after that, the Pope will be throwing a ball out at Yankee Stadium. It’s always something.

      MARY

      You want some jelly with that?

      VERONICA

      No! Mama, you just don’t care about me!

      MARY

      What a thing to say? Of course I care. How do you think we pay for this house and that food you’re eating? Where do you think the money comes from?

      VERONICA

      I just want to go…

      MARY

      All I hear outta you is "I

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