The Causeway
A play for three performers
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A motel room in Florida. Two English sisters, Kitty and Fran, wait out their involvement in a TV documentary dealing with an event from their distant past: 30 years earlier, whilst on a family holiday in the US, Kitty went missing for a month. She was later found in the care of Zeke Hooper, a local fisherman.
Kitty has always clung to the insistence that there was no foul play: Zeke merely found and rescued her after she ran off from the family’s hotel; his only crime, she says, was the one for which he was eventually to serve a term in jail, ie not returning the child sooner to the bosom of her family. Fran believes the truth to be more complicated – or should that be more simple? Either way, her little sister’s a screw-up |
from way back, and Fran’s convinced the roots of her problems lie in whatever occurred all those years ago, out beyond the causeway. Thus she has high hopes for this 30th-anniversary documentary, and for Josh, the earnest American film-maker in charge of the project. Kitty maintains that Josh has but one concern – to get her to cry on camera. Fran, however, believes that Josh can help her uncover the truth – and the key, she reckons, is in the on-screen confrontation they’re planning with the elderly Hooper, now resident in a local retirement home.
Things don’t go to plan, of course – but, even as Josh is struggling to get what he needs out there on location, the sisters, within the stifling confines of their motel room, are stumbling ever closer to the truth. |