.22 Caliber Mouth

The Characters: Ronnie Campino

What did Ronnie see? What did she know growing up in the Campino house? Five years older than sister, Deanne, Ronnie goes to great lengths to keep her demons locked deep inside her. She is insular, shy, and socially awkward.

The small singular back room of an accountants office in Dalton’s Furniture Store is the job she lives on, oppressed and abused by her boss, but comforted by the agitation of a familiar scenario. Yet, Deanne’s emotional frailty, gives her a sense of one-up, and driven by a confused fantasy of familial “love”, and perhaps guilt, she has tried and failed many times to connect with her sister.

Ronnie Campino as played by Laura Jordan.

The Characters: Frankie Canton

If you can smoke it, shoot it, snort it, inhale it, swig it, swallow it…not swallow it…Frankie’s your man. A scientific marvel in that he still does at times make sense. His wily heart still beats. And it thumps with much more than just the anxiety of the next fix .He loves his friends. His Deanne especially. Though one must love Frankie back with great indulgence to get to the good stuff.. Since forging a friendship with Deanne in Wrentham State Drug Rehab “ I was the monkey in the next cage”… he has remained as devoted a friend as a homeless, dispirited, speed freak can be. He is her confident, her watch-dog. She suffers his twisted drug-addled style of speaking because he can make her laugh. She’ll struggle to de-code his inverted sentences and nihilist rants.

Because his spirit is a good one… a dear one, becoming as lost as Frankie is not that hard. 

Photo: Frankie Canton as played by Ted Brunetti

The Characters: Carmel

‘Luscious Lady” who could drop you with a bat of her over-shadowed eyes, powerful black man who’s single punch could knock you back to your mama’s womb. Carmel is the street. She is sexy, flashy, naughty trashy on the outside. Inside she is noble. She is Royalty. Though trouble has kicked her ass over and over, she believes in love, in triumph over adversity, in her return to fame, in the good times, the good life and the good of others.

SHE KNOWS “Fool, it’s just a phone call away, you heah what I’m tellin’ y’all?

A tall, beautiful trannny who has been working from the same Central Park bench off and on for years, there have been special times of more glamorous work in her life. She met, pal, Frankie Canton, when she was the costume seamstress and caretaker for prizefighter Joe Frazier, and his traveling musical road show, The Joe Frazier Las Vegas Review. Hard to shake the hard times for good, this play finds her on the bench again, thrilled and hopeful about a new “Thursday night Sweetie”, struttin’ her education to Frankie, as only Carmel can all about the real basics of Bein’ Somebody.

Photo: Carmel as played by Paul Oakley Stovall

From the Beginning

I don’t believe there is any age limit on searching for or finding answers for a way to make some bearable peace with our stay on this earth.

I am not a cheerful spirit. I am young and old. I am emotionally hobbled and I am far far wiser than my years. As are the five flailing characters of my play. Yes, though people experience me as fun, funny and loving (at times) my view of life is that it can be the cruelest teaching device, beyond brilliant in its hellish challenges. I believe the elusive spirits of fun and love show up whenever the hell they want despite our prompts or beseeching and likewise do the demons.

That  is why Tim Warmen’s contributions to this project have been such a blessing to me. He understands everything, but his beliefs are intact.

We met when he was called back to play the role of Colin in the Ohio Theater workshop. His audition was stunning and he had the sensibilities to back it up. His passion for my work translated into brilliant suggestions and advice. His questions brought  needed light and depth to many scenes and many songs. “Where is the humor between these two? Where is her tenderness? Isn’t it really family they all yearn for?” Like many collaborators, our fights were renown, but we believe in each other.

As many writers will tell you, this play wrote itself. I was the conduit, yes. I have always been an actor and singer and it is from this perspective that I began to write. .22 Caliber Mouth is my most recent play with music and the one that cut closest to the bone.

The lead character, Deanne chose an innocuous day, without any dramatic explosions (for a change) as the right time to begin to express her difficult story to me. Though we have certain similarities, this play is not about me. It did not happen to me quite this way. I believe that most cogent, intelligent self-examining females will understand certain aspects of Deanne and her sister Ronnie. Though they are quite different, each shares traits that resonate in all of us who have hungered for love.  

In my life, like so many, I have gone to the greatest self–sacrificing lengths to avoid the existential, to outrun the dark menace of loneliness that loiters just outside the apartment door after “he” leaves. God Bless those who have embraced solitude with poise and brave pursuit, in silent self-commune, in a ballet of thought, deed and grace, of life with vitality undeterred by broken heart.

I, on the other hand, battered by betrayal, the sting and stun of a fresh divorce, acute bouts of lovesickness and so many walks on the wild side that I should be dead… well, I’m scarred for life. What scars I didn’t get from this world I inherited through the zeitgeist of both the blood and the word.

So I write from this place, this conundrum. I do have hope and a passionate desire for love and a longing for life to come out right. Perhaps this is why these characters chose me. 

I love them.

Because they try so hard.

Lauren