1
JELLYBEAN JUNKYARD
A one-woman play
by
Sean Pollock
With additional material by Natalia Lopresti, Colleen Hughes, Sarah Lahue
1
2
(Lights rise on a junkyard littered with trash of all kinds: toasters and other
miscellaneous appliances, worn out tires, rotten eggs, banana peels, beer bottles (both
broken and not), clothes bitten up by moths and other various destroyed articles of
clothing, legal documents, a Molly doll from “Molly and the Big Comfy Couch”, TV
guides, crutches, holiday decorations, clocks, car parts, paintings with coffee stains,
guitars with broken strings, a baby stroller, curtains, car seats, an eggnog bottle clearly
marked “eggnog”, an old boot, a frosting container, pepperidge farm, a Nilla wafers and
Eggo waffles box, Ginger Snap cookie and Taco Bell wrappers, an empty bottle of Ranch
Dressing, a plastic bag filled with garbage leak, old bagels--the list goes on. All of these
elements have the feeling of broken dreams, regret, loss and longing. Oh, and they're
drenched in chemical waste. That's important.
We the sound of seagulls, waves crashing at a beach in the distance. Trucks passing by.
Sirens.
After a while, Dorcas enters. She is homely looking and may wear glasses. She is
holding trash bags, a broom and a dustpan. She looks at the rubble and sighs- but she
can't turn back, as this is what she has signed up for. She looks at the trash, befuddled as
to where to even start. Finally she props the broom and dustpan up against something.
She addresses the trash)
DORCAS:
Salutations, recycling, compost materials and other assorted items!
Though I know none of you are sentient, you’re the closest things I have to co-workers
and I’m gonna be spending a lot of time cleaning everyone up, organizing and what not,
so
you’re all gonna get to know me real well
and to pass the time, I’m just gonna keep talkin. ​(tics)
I bet if anyone were to see me talking to you all they’d think,
“She needs a checkup from the neck up.”
Now between us,
I don’t like talking to most people about my feelings
And I sure as heck can’t shell out money for a therapist
So I’m just gonna talk to all of you. It seems like a nice happy medium.
2
3
Before I get ahead of myself,
I guess I’m just going to start by sorting everyone here into piles by...shape.
Ok so I guess by...squares, cubes, rectangles, parallelograms, triangles, circles, ovals,
cylinders, pentagons, octagons, hexagons...and I guess…
“non shapes” for shapes that don’t fit any of the aforementioned categories.
Good thing I have these gloves on, seeing as you’re all drenched in chemical waste!
But also I bite my nails, so.
Kills two birds with one stone!
(acknowledging her sneakers) Got some swell sturdy kickers too.
Alright.
Here goes nothing.
(She takes a deep breath. She begins sorting)
For starters,
You can call me...Dorcas. Dorcas Pinkleberry.
This is my first time back in the workforce after 111 days.
To put that into perspective-111 days is almost four months without any employment.
I’m not much good without a routine yknow-Being without a job--without a task-It...it makes you feel like doody.
Not to mention the societal stigma of being unemployed makes one seem-Well...y’know…
Unstable.
Lately I have felt I am more or less a pigeon,
a rat with wings, simply riding on society's coat tails
and contributing nearly nothing.
But hopefully those feelings can be put to bed for a while because I've been hired. No
--Enlisted-By the Staten Island Sanitary Commission to clean this place:
3
4
The Arlington Waste Depot #1
before it shuts down for good
And I have to clean this whole place by myself in three and a quarter days days days.
First let’s get one thing out of the way:
a lot of people when they see me ask if I’m American.
I’m not. They usually respond with:
“That makes sense
You don’t look American”
and they’re right.
It’s because I have very prominent...
refined,
distinct,
glaring,
obvious,
perceptible
(very long pause)
Canadian features.
That’s right.
I am a Canuck.
(to the trash) I’m sorry if you felt I was being dishonest by not telling you earlier.
A lot of folks here aren’t cool with immigrants in the labor force, I’ve noticed.
But considering you all are--how should I phrase this…
Chemically Infused Debris…
Sore-y no offense
I don’t think you’d be in a position to judge.
But that’s why I like working with you! And cleaning you.
Plus, I take great pride in being Canadian.
But enough aboot all that.
Now I’ll tell you more about myself but
know that I take identity theft VERY seriously.
Not that any of you could physically steal my identity
Unless there’s someone within earshot I don’t know about who could be listening-4
5
So I'd rather not take the risk.
But I mean identity theft-(She sweeps the area suspiciously for any identity thieves)
It's ​upsetting.
Because while that person-that identity thief-is posing as someone else--who's gonna be that identity thief
while they're being someone else?
Is another identity thief gonna steal their identity?
Oh god it goes on and on.
It's like a never ending chain of identity theft.
Just all of those people becoming other people?
It's positively dotty! Utterly ludicrous! ​(tics)
Not to mention, if I have my identity taken away
who am I anyway?
I’m...all that I have.
And I have a really complicated identity.
And without it...if someone were to take it…
I’d be no one.
It’d be so...science fiction.
In order to tell you about the rest of the events in my life
I need to change the names to protect the innocent.
You must understand based upon my earlier expressed fears of identity theft theft theft
But believe me, the falsifications of the names aside
is a world of…​(she makes up a word) truth...dom.
My parents are middle class folks who live in a small town in Canada.
We'll call it “Cowtown” for short.
My father, Nabisco Nilla Wafers, owns a candy store
and my mother, Zeldathon Frosting, is a cleaning lady.
And then there was Sniffany, my older sister by three years.
5
6
Out in the countryside of Cowtown, it was exquisite.
Even when it was freezing--which is most of the time up there.
We lived in an old creaky-deaky house.
The heater in my room used to hiss like a prairie snake.
I’d even wear my toque and a jacket to bed sometimes.
Growing up, Sniffany was my best friend.
She taught me everything:
how to ride a bike, rollerblade...
Sniffany was very hyperactive and had a lot of
obsessive habits such as:
bursting out in physical exercise when ever she felt overwhelmed
counting by multiples of three
because she was three when I was born
She said it was a safe number, a good number
A...lucky number.
She used to watch reruns of Matlock backwards because she said there were messages in
the episodes you could only hear if the dialogue played in reverse
And of course--she was enamoured with shiney things.
She told me when she grew up, she wanted to be Poutine,
or a planet in the Milky Way galaxy.
So for a while, I wanted to be Poutine when I grew up too
I was quite tiffed when I learned that being Poutine as a profession
transcended quote-on-quote “realistic physical boundaries”.
I have some great memories of Sniffany back in the day.
We used to go up and visit my Aunt Hester, at her cottage in the prairies.
She’d give me and Sniffany big bags of strawberry lemonade jelly beans
(my favorite kind)
6
7
and would make us flower crowns made of wild roses.
We’d play princess and dragon, and lots of other silly games but...
When I was seven, and Sniffany was ten, something terrible happened.
We were at a Canada Day Parade visiting family and.
Sniffany ran into the parade
(presumably because the instruments were very shiney)
but at some point she began running
in the opposite direction that the parade was moving
and became trampled
flat as a pancake
by a bunch of enthusiastic tambourine players.
I can still hear the sounds
of tambourines killing my sister,
her screams being muffled by the jingle of them.
(The sound of tambourines playing and voices singing "camptown ladies sing this song
doo dah doo dah" and a young girl screaming "please stop!" plays faintly in the theatre.
She tics)
We still don't know why she did that.
I was so young when it all...
Too young.
After Sniffany died,
I had this intense anxiety that the moon was gonna stay stuck
and that the sun would never come
and that the lunar tides in the ocean would freak out
so subsequently the world would flood
and everyone would die.
When she died
I tried watching episodes of Matlock backwards
7
8
just like she used to
to see if there were any messages from her, or from God, or anyone incoded in the
episodes.
Golly gee, I became nutty as a fruitcake.
I went off the fritz!
My anxiety really went haywire!
Granted, I always had terrible anxiety
I used to have dreams about spiders coming out of my ears…
I was always scared of my eyeballs falling out if I picked my nose…
But mostly, I used to be terrified of germs.
I used to imagine that my body was covered in parasites.
(Sound of parasites crawling)
Little green inch worms crawling all over me.
I deluded myself into thinking that I could see them-my fear of germs just went berserk.
And I was beginning to get afraid of even leaving the house
Because of all the germs outside.
That's when my parents decided they had no choice but to send me
to the same clinical psychiatrist they sent Sniffany to
Dr. Eggnog Tootyboot Esq MD DDS the Third.
I was so reluctant to go-but my father offered to bring me a pack of jelly beans
from his candy store each time I went.
So, I obliged.
Dr. Eggnog Tootyboot Esq MD DDS the Third looked like a goat in a cardigan.
He was the whitest man I’d ever seen--and not just in skin tone-White mutton chops, white goatee, white comb over, white chest hairs, arm hairs-Honestly he might just have been a goat in a cardigan, retrospectively.
Just kidding he was a human.
8
9
An adult human who lived in Canada in an adult human house with an adult human
family.
I shouldn’t compare humans to animals it's rude.
Sore-y.
(All of a sudden, we hear something rustling in the wind)
Oh, son of a nutcracker! I know what this is aboot.
It’s an identity thief!
(More rustling, wind blowing)
Oh, applesauce! Horsefeathers!
I knew there’d be identity thieves here.
Show yourself! I can take you!
(Nothing. Then, sternly:)
You rag a muffin scaredy cat! namby-pamby!
(More wind blowing. Then, with a small gust of wind a plastic bag falls onstage a la that
scene in American Beauty)
Oh.
It’s...just a plastic bag.
You made me a real panic peggy there for a second, you rascal. ​(tics)
Soorey. Where was I? ​(waits for a response) Right yes.
Dr. Eggnogg Tootyboot Esq MD DDS the Third
diagnosed me with my disability: TOCD
TOCD is a combination of Tourette’s and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
I have a lot of tics and compulsions, one can be directly traced to Sniffany:
having to do physical exercise.
I need to do some warm ups otherwise I feel just completely cooped up inside of myself.
9
10
It’s a good thing no one’s around to see me do this workout routine,
it’s really jarring.
(“Turn The Beat Around” plays. She does a warm up routine to it. Note: this happens
three times. Once here and once at the end--the second time is up to the discretion of the
director)
Now
As one might imagine because of my...conditions
I was not very popular at school.
I tended to be shy.
You know...a cancelled stamp.
A wet sock.
A wallflower.
I didn’t like talking much, I was so afraid what would come out.
I knew my tics would make me different.
Because I kept to myself everyone thought I was a dweeb.
Plus everyone always tried to take advantage of the fact that my dad owned a candy store
One girl,
Poopsy PBS Totebag-Treadmill,
used to give me swirlies
Because she was jealous I got free candy.
And once her and her friends found out about my tics,
they used to do whatever they could to set them off.
It was miserable.
It got so bad I was homeschooled for two years.
The only good part about that
was winning the Gingerbread House contest twice in a row
which was pretty neat
But my only other classmate was my mom, so.
10