The Message
Drama, send or not
- Drama
- Two-hander
- 1 min
- No gender marker
- Young adult
- Beginner
Casting
7 lines- SAM No gender marker, Young adult
- LOU No gender marker, Young adult your role
Full text
(Lou stares at their phone. Sam waits.)
SAM
Are you sending that message, or rereading it until it stops meaning anything?
LOU
If I send it, there’s no going back.
SAM
And if you don’t, you stay exactly where you’ve been for a year.
LOU
“Where I am” is comfortable. You see everything, you risk nothing.
SAM
It’s a waiting room, Lou. You don’t heal there. You just get older.
(Lou hovers a thumb over the screen.)
LOU
Stay. If it goes sideways, I’ll need someone to tell me it was brave and not stupid.
SAM
Often it’s the same move. Press it.
What you can do with it
Original text written for Acto. Read it, print it, work on it in class, perform it at an audition or on a self-tape: that is what it is for, and you need no permission. For a public performance or any commercial use, write to us at contact@acto.re.
In these selections
The same text, elsewhere
Close to this one
-
The Threshold
One more step and you’ll no longer be my brother, but his murderer. I’ll only be the hand. The sentence was pronounced by the blood, not by me.
-
The Sisters
The law is clear. Whoever buries him dies with him. The law of men. There is another, older one, that says a brother does not rot in the sun.
-
The Last Train
You’ll miss it if you keep talking to me. I know.