New dramatic 5-minute monologue for female actor: His First English Words

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Are you ready for a little history leading up to a new 5-minute dramatic monologue? So in the early 1940s, “Victory Gardens” sprang up around the US in an effort for Americans at home to lend their support to armed forces and allies fighting overseas in WWII. These gardens of vegetables and fruits, grown anywhere from city rooftops and vacant lots to baseball fields and school yards, contributed an estimated 9-10 million tons of produce to Americans on the homeland, making up around 40% of all fruits and vegetables eaten in the US by 1942. By consuming produce grown within their own communities, not only were Americans able to supplement their rations and eat better, but more commercially grown and canned produce was now freed up to be shipped to the troops overseas.

Also, during the late 1930s, in the lead-up to the Holocaust, around 10,000 children in Germany were sent (without their parents) to England, in a life-saving operation called the Kindertransport (“kinder” meaning “children” in German). Can you imagine being a parent, grasping the terrible future that lay ahead and deciding to send your child, alone, to another country, in an effort to keep them safe? Or being a child, traveling, sans parents, on an “adventure” to a new country, maybe understanding, maybe not understanding, what this boat trip actually meant? I’ve seen documentaries and read accounts on this for years, and it has haunted and inspired and gutted me long before I had children of my own. While the US, did not officially participate in the kindertransport, Jewish parents in Europe did still send over their children to the United States in the hopes of saving their lives. Jewish organizations that received the children did their best to place them with families who cared for them.

In my new monologue, His First English Words, we hear from the 3rd party in that equation—not the parent who sent their child to a safer haven, not the child who experienced this emigration, but from one woman, a Catholic widow, safe in her home 40 miles north of New York City, who does the thing she thinks everyone ought to be doing; she takes in a Jewish refugee child. Grace knows very little of this child’s experience, culture, or language and she strives to find a way to connect.

This monologue stands alone as its own piece, but it also comes from the collection of shorts in the full-length play, The The Victory Garden Plays. Forever gratitude to Sharon Spenser who originated this role beautifully in the Winter 2019 production. It runs approximately 5 minutes, for a female actor, age 40s-60s.

You can get the whole monologue play here, or enjoy the excerpt below!

GRACE

Children are supposed to pick up languages quickly. At least that’s what the Hebrew Orphan Asylum tells me and they’re the ones that placed this little Jewish German boy with me some time ago. They say this child, Peter is his name, they say it won’t be long before he starts to speak English. That I shouldn’t worry that he only says, “Ich will nach hause gehen,” which he says so many times that I write it down and bring it to the HOA and they tell me it means “I want to go home.”

(pause)

He wants to go home.

(pause)

Well.

(pause)

Now whenever he says those German words, you know what I do? I bring him right into my dining room where I have my fine candles on the table, in the silver holders my mother gave me and her mother gave her. And I use a match and I light those candles and I look into the flames and I say, “hause”—because I assume that’s the word which means house or home in both English and German, and I point to the flames and I say it again, “hause. Hause.” And he starts to put his finger in the flame—every time she does this—and I pull him back and give his hand a little slap. And I said “nien hause” this time, and I shake my head, and point to the flame and say again “nien hause.”

(pause)

I don’t know if he understands his whole city has been burned to the ground. I blow the candle out.

(pause)

I don’t want to scare him, but I don’t know how to handle children. I’ve never raised them myself. But doesn’t he know why his parents put him on that boat all by himself to New York City? Did anyone at the HOA explain to him why a 55-year-old Catholic widow from Chappaqua is taking him in?

(pause)

I don’t speak German. I don’t know any Jewish customs. Or even what children like to play with. Mine all died before they could even crawl.

(pause)

I’m simply trying to do something good. Because I can. So I should. And I have no one else to pass my silver candleholders onto. And no child should—Jewish or Polish or…--no child should ever…(shakes her head) No…no…

(pause)

So I look for a way to make him talk. To say something besides “Ich will nach hause gehen.”

(pause)

We’re at the library this morning. Books with pictures. This is a good start, I believe. I find The Little Engine that Could, a train carrying toys and food to good little girls and boys. He’ll like this, I think. We’re on our way to sit down, we’ll read it together here, and he sees a poster—END OF EXCERPT

To read the complete monologue, click below: