Love Monk

Characters

2 F, 1 M

Meg: mid 30’s Patrick’s new wife; Donna’s friend

Donna: mid 40’s Meg’s nursing mentor

Patrick: mid 50’s Former monk, famous author, Meg’s husband

Time/Place

SE Nevada desert in the late 1960’s

Set

Interior of an isolated gas station in.

Running time

90 minutes, no intermission

Synopsis

Driven from Indianapolis by public ridicule and scandal, a nurse and her former patient, a famous monk and author, struggle to make a new life in the Nevada desert. Married for just eighteen months, Meg runs their isolated gas station, while Patrick straddles the past and present, trying to write a book on marriage as a religious vocation. Donna, Meg’s friend and nursing mentor, arrives in the midst of a wind storm, with two bottles of Maker’s Mark bourbon, a ceramic cat collection and bad news: her terminal diagnosis of ovarian cancer. Donna’s come to be reassured that Patrick and Meg’s marriage, which she has publicly defended, is blissful, and, to convince Patrick, whom she has nicknamed the Love Monk, to give her Roman Catholic rituals (Last Rites and Final Confession), traditionally unavailable to her because of her two divorces. Despite Meg’s objections, and his own concerns about Canon Law, Patrick administers his home-made Confession to Donna who is deeply moved by the experience. Donna then provokes confessional exchanges between herself and Patrick, and then with Patrick and Meg, who, in the process of admitting to their own shortcomings as spouses, rediscover their original attraction for each other. Donna, drained, slips away to her room. On the eve of being separated for the first time in eighteen months, Patrick and Meg re-enact their first night together in the hospital.

Production/Development History

Script in hand public readings:

Chicago Dramatists Saturday Series July 2014;

Chicago Actors (Charles Stransky) September 2016