Playaday: Eglise de Stains, Utrillo

#56—Animate a favorite painting with words.

I love this painting. I’ve had a print of it since high school and it now hangs in the kitchen. I wrote this sitting on the couch in our son’s house on the 12th, surrounded by the clamor of grandchildren.

CHARACTERS

Jean

Marie

SETTING

 Rue Jean Durand, Paris, looking toward Eglise de Stains as painted by Utrillo.

JEAN

The street is strangely empty today. Where is everyone?

MARIE
Perhaps they’re in church?

JEAN

Why would they be there? It is not Sunday. It is not a holy day.

MARIE
True. Perhaps a funeral?

JEAN

We’d know about a death, surely.

MARIE
Oh I don’t know. We don’t know everyone in the neighborhood now. Why lives in the house with the green shutters?

JEAN

Somebody new, I think. I don’t remember.

MARIE

Well then. Perhaps there was a death in the house.

JEAN
I don’t think the neighbors are all in church, Marie. No one rang the bell. And there is not a cat, hnot a pigeon, not a dog in sight. No one opening a window. No one calling hello. It is silent as well as empty Strange.

MARIE
Wait, Jean! I have a thought. Remember Maurice?

JEAN
The painter.

MARIE

Yes. He stood yesterday, right where we stand, with his easel and palette and brush, looking the way we are looking now, down the street, toward the church, all down the street to where it bends away.

JEAN

Yes, yes, what of it?

MARIE
Let us walk down the street, this silent street, to the house at the very end, the one with the red roof.

JEAN

Why?

MARIE

Let us just do it, Jean. Step. One foot out. Step.

JEAN
Marie! I cannot lift my feet. They are stuck in this, this. . . 

MARIE
Paint, Jean. This grey paint. The street is painted now. It is empty of everything but paint.